J. Gabriel Gates - The Sleepwalkers

The
SLEEPWALKERS

The
SLEEPWALKERS

J. GABRIEL GATES

Health Communications, Inc.
Deerfield Beach, Florida
www.hcibooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gates, J. Gabriel.

The sleepwalkers / J. Gabriel Gates.

p. cm.

Summary: When he receives a mysterious, disturbing letter from his long-lost childhood playmate Christine, privileged and popular Caleb, celebrating his high school graduation, travels to his tiny hometown of Hudsonville, Florida, to find her, uncovering terrifying prophecies of the spirits.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7573-1588-6 (trade paper)

ISBN-10: 0-7573-1588-7 (trade paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7573-9173-6 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-7573-9173-7 (e-book)

[1. Horror stories. 2. Mystery and detective stories. 3. SupernaturalFiction.
4. FloridaFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G222Sl 2011
[Fic]dc23

2011011959

2011 J. Gabriel Gates

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

HCI, its logos, and marks are trademarks of Health Communications, Inc.

Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.

3201 S.W. 15th Street
Deerfield Beach, FL 334428190

Cover design by Larissa Hise Henoch
Interior design by Lawna Patterson Oldfield
Interior formatting by Dawn Von Strolley Grove

This book is dedicated to my mother,
Cynthia Walker, a wonderful mom,
an extraordinary teacher,
and my first reader.
Thank you.

Contents

S omething in the ruins waits.

A daydreamy, hot Southern summer, the sky above like a great blueeye. Watching. Two little girls with laughter in their smiles. Two samesmiles, giggling. They hug. They hit one another. Two sisters, and me.High, dry weeds, brown and scraping. We fight through them together.The forest behind is black liquid. Pathways through the weeds, a thousandpathways, a game of chase. Now lying amongst the long grasses,giggles give way to sighing.

Something waits.

I get up. I whisper to one of the girls. (This has happened before.)Her hair is long and straight. Eyes glitter. There are no sounds, as ifthis were a silent movie or something, but there is one word that bleedsthrough like a subliminal message: dare. Eyes glittering, this is a childishcontest of pride. I smile my dare to herI feel the smile on my face.She swallows once in fear, then giggles it away. The other sister saysnothing, watches with sad, distant eyes. Long, straight hair. Throughthe weeds again now. Shuffling, we three. Biting burrs on white socks.A little hill. We reach the top and the air stops. There it is. Edifice.Eclipsing all. Empty. A thousand windows stare through us like blindeyes, black and shattered, the lights that once waited inside them nowbetrayed to darkness. Another word bleeds through: hospital.

Their momma told them not to go.

The dare hangs all around us. Two little girls, just alike. Dirty dressesand dimples. One stands still and scratches her leg.

The other, the Dared, has half crossed the clearing already. Shespassing the swimming pond, sleeping mirror. Tiny girl, she blazesthrough the weeds on scabbed, bruised legs.

She keeps walking.

Shell show us she isnt afraid. But shes very afraid. She walks slowly.Keeps looking back. Acting brave. I look up at the too-many windows,and they gape at me like gnawing, starving maws. Suddenly, I wantto call her back. My stomach aches, I want to call her back so bad.But I dont. I watch her. She sneaks under the chain-link fence, littledared one, catches her dress as she wriggles through but tears herselffree. Crosses a patch of cracked, scarred cement; the heat waves from itdilute her for an instant; for an instant she seems almost to melt away,but she walks on, over old beer cans and fallen bricks, patches of grasspoking through the cement. Up to the stoop. Up to the door.

The back door. A black hole. Her tiny feet follow each other forward,one after another, closer and closer, and she pauses at the threshold,looks back at us. Even from so far away theres no mistaking, no denyingthe meaning in her pleading silence: Take back the dare. But shesalready there.

Then it happens, too fast to be real. The little girl next to me screams,only her breath goes in instead of out and makes the words:

Something in the ruins waits!

And in the black square of the doorway, something jerks the otherlittle girl backwards into the dark.

Forever gone.

T HE CEILING IS BLUE. His first thought is that nothing is real. Nothing is to be trusted. He pushes himself up against the headboard and stares at the knob on his closet door, waiting for the feeling to drain out of him. The knob is glass. Antique. He half expects it to move, but it does not. Nothing moves. The room is saturated in stillness. When theres no sound, no motion, its easy to see how flimsy everything is. Reality seems mushy. Liquid, almost, in this half-light. The little illumination leaking through the curtains is tinted with blue. It must be late. The clock says six oclock exactly.

The hum of the silence is disconcerting. He keeps thinking he hears something. Somehow, the sound of the non-noise has the same quality of a real sound. It sounds like... what? He cant put his finger on it, but it doesnt go away.

He gets out of bed, twists his boxers, straightening them, and walks across the rug and onto the hardwood floor. It creaks under his weight and hes grateful; it chases away the non-sound for a moment. He opens his door, steps into the hall. Here, the stagnant air is filled with the same timid light as his room. Twilight. He walks over to the stairs and leans over the rail.

Hey, whats for dinner?

No answer, except for a barely perceptible echo. He walks back up the hall. His legs hurt. Shin splints. He walks into the bathroom, blows his nose on some toilet paper, pulls on a pair of jeansthe belt is conveniently waiting in the loops from the last time he wore themand walks back down the hall, thinking about the dream. Trying not to think about it, actually, but reliving it in spite of himself. It wont leave. Even now, as hes going through the motions of life, performing all these normal actions, the fear still aches in his bones. He acts like hes ignoring it, but he cannot.

He crosses back down the hall, listening intently for some familiar soundthe chopping of vegetables for dinner, the mindless, chattering drone of the TV, the moan of the garage door as one of the parents makes an early appearance home from work. There are no sounds. The ache in his bones wont stop. He cant shake the dream. Hell, maybe hes still asleep; maybe this is just another hallway in the labyrinth of his subconscious. Maybe he woke to a world where hes the only survivor of a terrible cataclysm; maybe hes the last person left alive on earth.