A Sample of “IN THE COMPANY OF DOGS” For Your Perusal

 

PROLOGUE
Atlantic City, N.J.

-one-

    Mary Stafford received her uninvited visitation by the unbelievably eldritch creature of strangeness and horror called The Horrorwalker… on her 35th birthday. And of course, her life will never be the same. She is changed because of the details of the physical contact with The Horrorwalker Travel Guide Tome and all that entails with that meeting… and because of the burden of carrying with her, forever, the knowledge inside the text of the Horrorwalker tale she was presented with.

-two-

    As a single woman and all, Mary spent the uneventful birthday day at work trudging through the always high mountain of paperwork on her Parkman, Jefferson & Marks Law Firm overused desk. Being an always busy attorney, and very single and childless, she had not planned on celebrating this particular birthday with anyone. Her mother, from her apartment in New York City, had already sent her the only card and present she was looking forward to getting. Her close clutch of friends had called her, one by one, during the course of the day to wish her a happy birthday.
    None of her 24 co-workers knew today was her birthday… and she preferred it that way.
    When Mary finally decided that her long end of the week day was done… and this particular weekend beckoned as a means to sleep in for two days… she packed-up her belongings, wished her boss, April, a good weekend, silently walked out of the back of the office through the service elevator and made her way to the always too dark parking deck. As scary as this cramped parking deck was, she was always assured by the fact that Marshall and his security crew paid special attention to the four cameras monitoring the cars and the activity there during the morning hours and especially during the closing hours in the evening..
    She rushed over to her vehicle, passing twelve cars, so that she could climb into her Chevy HHR, drive it to her home with minimal interaction to her co-workers and people on the roads and finally put this long Fall week behind her.
    This day was done!
    This date was October 29, 2010.
    It was suppose to be a quiet night!

-three-

    Six of Mary’s girlfriends surprised her by showing up unannounced at her apartment at 9:30 PM, all charged up on each other’s presence and ready to party. Mary had already wound down for the Friday evening. She had locked down her apartment, showered and prepared for bed… and was just about to actually crawl under the blanket… just before the doorbell rang.
    Mary thought one of her older neighbors had forgotten their key again and needed to use her phone. She rushed to the front door while pulling the two sides of her robe together… and was shocked by what she saw on the other side her apartment door.
    Out there in the hallway, when she peeked through the peephole, stood six bouncing silly giggling adult women who were waiting for her to respond.
    As she unlocked the door, Pam was the first friend to be hurried into the room by the light combined mass of the group leaning on each other. She was followed by Sarah, Bennett, Parker, Martha and Astrid. Basically as one, they sang out a hearty Happy Birthday song to their genuinely shocked friend as they placed cards and small gift wrapped boxes on the kitchen counter, 
    Seven excited women all talked at the same time to each other for a few minutes before a bit of focus was brought to the women by Parker, Mary’s oldest friend from way back in elementary school days. Parker was the oldest of the ladies, but only by two months over Mary.
    Mary constantly reminded Parker of that fact… to keep her sometimes motherly girlfriend grounded in reality.
    The next thing for the group to do, after the birthday song, was for Parker, Sarah and Astrid to rush Mary into her bedroom to assist her in morphing from sleepyhead to a sexy vixen of the Atlantic City nightclub scene. The other ladies sat on Mary’s couch, side by side, and watched about fifteen minutes of an episode of “What Not To Wear” before the four women emerged from the bedroom.
    And as usual, they all looked hot to trot… including the still head spinning Mary.
    All of the ladies gathered their things before moving back into the hallway. Mary was the last to leave… she had to lock her door. As she placed the key into the door handle lock, she was abruptly taken aback by the absurdly shocking appearance of The Horrorwalker standing inside her apartment, just on the other side of the door jamb. It was standing there, about four feet away from her, with its Horrorwalker Tome extended for her to take it.

-four-

    It was well known to her family and close friends that Mary Stafford was an ardent follower of The Horrorwalker mythology. She made it a point of life to stay away from the wild speculation websites and Horrorwalker governmental conspiracy books to focus on the official Horrorwalker Travel Guide Site and its mother site: The Horrorwalker World! Her one true desire in life, other that a good man, a good marriage and three children… was to one day meet The Horrorwalker. But, under good and safe conditions, of course!
    That time just arrived!
    And there was no panic in her game.
    Mary noticed how time seemed to change around her as she involuntarily reached for the huge tome. Everything appeared  to slow down and stop around her… except for her actions and the actions of The Horrorwalker. She knew this because she had left her large stand-up fan on. It stood about three feet behind The Horrorwalker. She could barely change the focus of her eyes… just enough to see that the blades of the fan had come to a complete stop. She filed that thought away in her memory for processing later on.
    She took the tome into her cupped hands. “Yes… it is very light, isn’t it?” She admitted to herself. She would have mused about more aspects of this absurd moment in time and life, but something unseen inside her mind, and inside her overtaken body, forced her to concentrate on The Horrorwalker actions in front of her.
    The tome opened on its own. The leather-like pages flipped through the depth of the book, like something mechanical was turning the pages with precise accuracy. Halfway through the tome’s incredible thickness, the pages stopped turning. And there before Mary Blaine Stafford was her story… and it was titled: In The Company Of Dogs!
    How much real time passed in the supernatural ether of The Horrorwalker as she read her Horrorwalker Tale? Mary could not tell. It was obvious, at least to her, that even though she could blast her way through a novel, much time would pass inside this Horrorwalker… ‘Vortex.’ She had read Steven King’s horror masterpiece, “IT’” in three days, so she could swiftly read through a story in a book if she had to.
    “How much time just passed?” She thought… as she finally handed the tome back to the Horrorwalker.
    As her perception of time returned, the huge creature of the swirling blackness, and the Horrorwalker tome, and the frightening scythe… simply, and rather unceremoniously, vanished like it had never been in her apartment.
    “How am I going to explain what I just experienced to all these party girls behind me?” Mary implored of her own mind as she extracted the key from the door and pushed it wide open back into the apartment.
    Then it hit her…it was the absence of any sound behind her! “Oh, Shit!” She thought in a sudden shock of… “Are they… OK?”
    Mary Stafford slowly turned around and felt her knees buckle in a moment of horror, and elation, as she looked into six multicolored sets of wide eyes set into six faces awash in the horror of the experience of what just actually amounted to a full-on collected encounter with The Horrorwalker!


   

-five-

    There would be no party tonight! Seven shell shocked women had the entire weekend to discuss what they had just witnessed, including Mary’s careful oration, and then the dissection by the group of women, of the frightful vampire tale The Horrorwalker just made her read.
    This is the beginning of the rest of these women’s lives. Not one of them could imagine the supernatural turns in their lives toward Horrorwalker horror the exposure to Mary’s encounter with the surreal and the absurd would bring to them over the next few months.
    Could they all individually survive what horror was to come? And would The Horrorwalker provide some type of protective aura for these women? And could Mary survive her upcoming encounter with…?
    Answers… to be told in another time.

(end of prologue)

The Horrorwalker Travel Guide Presents:

    From out of the depths of the deepest darkness of the Horrorwalker World rises eleven excerpts from the formally St. Louis police sequestered, and FBI confiscated, diaries of Abelard Burl Vieth. Beth Anderson discovered Vieth’s 6 diaries buried inside a slightly decayed coffin underneath three inches of soft earth on the farm… in the rear of the barn… that she purchased in January 2011.
    Also, inside the coffin was an odorless, chalk white human skeleton dressed in a tattered suit. There was a 12 inch long…  and 3 inches wide at the top… knife sharp tip on the bottom… wooden stake driven into the ribs where the heart would have been. The ornately patterned silk lining the inside of the coffin showed no decay.
    The coffin, the skeleton, and the diaries were all turned over to the FBI for one year as they investigated the contents and the claims made by the author of the diaries. On February 14, 2013 the diaries were released back to Beth Anderson. She was given permission to do with them as she pleased, but the government never told her of the conclusions it drew from its investigation of the contents of the books.
    And… she was never told by the local police, or the federal government, what the FBI did with the skeleton or the coffin. Nor did either law enforcement entity inform her of their take on the suspect matter written by Vieth.
    Was Abelard Burl Vieth a real life member of the evil undead? Or, was he a crackpot writer with one hell of an imagination?
    Presenting… the first of the Abelard Burl Vieth diaries:

IN THE COMPANY OF DOGS
(St. Louis, Missouri)

- one -
dogs in caves

    My name is Abelard Burl Vieth. It might as well be known right from the beginning of this diary missive that I am a 212 year old vampire. I was born in Deutschland a few years before the Kingdom of Bavaria was formed. I remember working the land on a farm along the Danube in the time when magic and monsters were beginning to bump headlong into the realities of the modern era. More and more people were embracing the notions of science and nature… and slowly moving away from the old ways of magic and mystery.
    History, for the regular person just winging what he knows from memory, can be a very tricky thing to mess around with. Bits and pieces of history… personal, domestic and world… clings to the memory cells in the brain of elders with a tenuous grip. It is very easy to mix facts from fiction. Throw in over two centuries of living the life of an undead soulless creature of the night and you have memories faded in the blackness of many dead memories.
    But, everyone has certain memories of history that clings to their recollection like glue. Everyone has certain memories that stay with them forever… providing a road for sanity to walk along. Take away that particular memory and the person very well might either fall into a pit of hell… or perhaps float along a path to heaven. My personal memory… that part of my history that keeps me from losing my grip on my never ending sanity… is my never ending love for the animals I wish I could gently grab into my arms and hold close to my wanting chest.
    That would be my love of… Dogs!
    I have shed many tears of sorrow for my accursed life. My curse burdens me with many horror caveats… the worse one -- even worse than murdering thousands of humans over the course of too much time -- is my curse in relationship to my love for dogs.
    Horror takes many forms for this cursed soul… like the memories if the death screams of the thousands of women I have drained of life from continent to continent from time through time...

Continued in the upcoming Horrorwalker Travel Guide book:

IN THE COMPANY OF DOGS!

RLJ