David B. Silva - The Disappeared

This eBook edition published 2011 by DarkThriller.

http://www.darkregions.com

David B. Silva 2010

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Editor and Publisher, Joe Morey

Cover and interior art 2010 by Wayne Miller

eBook Created by Stephen James Price

http://www.GenerationNextPublications.com

My sincere gratitude to Bentley Little, a fellowtraveler in this strange world of storytelling, and without whomthis novel may never have been written.

My continual appreciation and wonder to AliciaDayton, who is still willing to answer the phone no matter how manytimes I call her with silly questions.

For Dean Koontz, I wish there was more I could saythan simply thank you. For his generosity, his guidance, hisfriendship, I will forever consider myself fortunate.

For Paul F. Olson, who has never stopped being therewhen I began to feel a little too isolated from the real world.Thank you, Paul, and please, pick up a pencil and write anotherstory for us!

For Rich and Alicia, lovers of books (though theyhave a terrible habit of dog-earing the pages), fine coffee,needful dogs, and a competitive game of Shanghai Rummy.

In autumn, a leaf drops off a tree andflutters this way and that on the afternoon breeze, like abutterfly languidly strolling the currents. It touches down on theclear, calm surface of a pond. A ripple is brought forth. Theripple expands outward in a series of concentric rings. It is theserings that represent the true nature of time.

Time is not the linear propriety we havecome to believe it is. We speak of the past as something that hascome and gone and is lost except to our memories. We speak of thefuture as that which is yet to be. There are many pasts, manyfutures, each arising from the moment like ripples from a fallenleaf.

Transcending Illusions

How had it come to this?

Retreating to the safe, familiar darkness ofthe house.

Keeping the drapes drawn, day and night,summer, winter.

Wearing sunglasses in public to keep othersfrom looking in, to keep her from looking out.

Fading hopelessly into the mind-numbingdistraction of television, hours fading to days, days tomonths.

Dreaming him, missing his little-boylaughter, the sweet summer-sun smell of his hair, the mesmerizingdark brown eyes.

Giving up on him.

Such a long time now.

How had it come to this?

She didn't want to think about it.

And that was precisely the point, wasn'tit?

Someone was knocking at the door.

Teri Knight, who was lying on the couch witha damp wash cloth draped over her forehead, opened her eyes andstared at the living room ceiling, listening. The sun had gonedown. It was late evening now, seven-thirty, maybe eight. She haddrawn the drapes earlier, and turned out the lights, and now therewas a slit of brightness from the neighbor's back porch lightslipping through the sliding glass doors, through the far cornerwhere the drapes didn't quite cover, pitching a rectangular graycast across the wall next to the fireplace. In the background, shecould hear the gritty chorus of Round Here by Counting Crows. Itseemed a thousand miles away.

Teri closed her eyes again, fighting againsta headache that had come on late this morning, just before herlunch break at the post office. It had dogged her relentlessly allafternoon, through her regular postal route, through the trafficafter work, through four doses, 500 milligrams each, of ibuprofen,and there was still no sign of relief in sight. Michael would havetold her there was nothing she could do about it, that she just hadto let it run its course, as if it were a cold or the flu. Michaelwould have told her to let go of it and get on with her life. Butthen Michael was a ghost now, wasn't he? Or as close to a ghost asa man can get without dying first.

Michael.

In the distance, a crack of thunderexploded.

The music wandered away, voice to thunder,rhythm to rain, sweetly, innocently. Maybe it would be back. Maybeit wouldn't. And maybe Michael had been right. Maybe she just hadto learn to let go of it and get on with her life. Let the pastrest in peace. If only the past wasn't such a long stretch ofroad.

She didn't know where all the miles hadgone, only that somewhere along the line the miles had begun to runtogether, monotonously, an endless stretch of yellow dashes leadingthe way into the horizon. She would be forty-three in lateNovember, wife to a man who lived on the other side of the country,a man she hadn't seen in several years; mother to a son who hadgone to the park on his bicycle one day and had disappeared off theface of the earth, a ghost of a different kind.

Such a long, long stretch of road.

Another crack of thunder exploded.

Teri felt it rumble acrossthe floor beneath the couch. Just thestorm , she thought wearily. She let out aslow, deliberate breath, feeling her headache ebb and rise, thenebb again, fighting to hold on.

Just thestorm .

A flash of lightning illuminated the sky,burning white-hot into the back of her eyelids before leaving atrail of browns and grays and blacks. Teri winced and turned away.She wasn't a woman who normally gave herself to nightmares. If theywanted her, they had to come get her. Lately, that was exactly whatthey had been doing. And just now, she thought she had caught aglimpse of something that looked like a granite headstone, its faceweathered and spider-webbed with cracks, a name chiseled crudelyinto the stone, unreadable against a backdrop of muddy colors and agray-white mist rolling in from somewhere in the...

in the...

past .

Another roll of thunder.

She shuddered, and sat up again, the washcloth slipping off her forehead and dropping into her lap. Itwasn't the storm that frightened her. Storms were like out-of-staterelatives, they came and went with a vengeance, but once they hadmoved through, life soon returned to normal. It wasn't like thatwith everything. Nightmares, especially the bad ones, had a way ofcoming back for you. She tossed the wash cloth at the coffee tableand when it fell off the far side, she made no effort to pick it upagain.

Behind the roll of thunder another soundmade itself evident. It took a moment before she was able to makesense out of what she was hearing, and this time there was nomistaking the sound. It wasn't the storm. And it wasn't themusic.

Someone was knocking at the door.

When she went to investigate, Teri found ayoung woman pacing uneasily off to one side of the front porch. Shewas not a familiar face. Teri would have remembered this particularwoman, whose hair was tied back in a ponytail, revealing the moststriking eyes Teri had ever seen. They were pale blue, almostghost-like, the kind of eyes that you couldn't turn away from evenif you wanted.

The woman was not alone. Behind her, lookingrain-soaked and a bit out of sorts, stood a young boy, maybe ten oreleven. He appeared on the thin side and a bit pale, as if he hadbeen out of the sun for a good long time. His hair was long andpressed against his face by the rain. From beneath his bangs, helooked up and Teri felt an instant, tugging sense of familiarity.Her hand tightened on the doorknob.

Mrs. Knight? the womanasked.

Yes, Teri said. It wasunmistakable how much this boy looked like Gabe. All the way downto the clothes he was wearing: Levi's, a black tee-shirt, ablue-and-white wind breaker like the one she had bought at J.C.Penny's only a day or two before Gabe had disappeared. Part of awhite sock was visible through a rip in the toe of one shoe, andthough Teri didn't remember the rip, she did remember those shoes. They werea generic brand that K-Mart had quit selling a number of yearsago.