Mr Blue Sky

John Darke

Description

Rebecca is thirty-five, single and working for her uncle in a chemical warehouse. The terrifying nightmares have started all over again. She cannot stop dreaming about Him. Him. An ape-like creature who saved her life as a child when she snuck off into the woods alone. In secret, they became the best of friends. But who was he?One night, disaster strikes when Rebecca's father goes hunting for Him in the woods and is tragically killed. Rebecca believes He is responsible, but the murder is pinned on someone else.Even today, after all her therapy sessions, Rebecca still insists He killed her father. For the sake of her sanity she needs to find out for sure. Was He even real? Her quest for answers takes a sinister turn, and she finally returns home to seek the truth.But what she uncovers turns out to be more horrific than any nightmare she could ever imagine.

Sujets

• Science fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 27 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789010909
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Mr Blue Sky
John Darke
Copyright © 2018 John Darke

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 978 1789010 909

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For Pat
Contents
Acknowlegement

PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
Acknowlegement
Special thanks to Brenda for being my third eye.
PREFACE
Venezuela 1920, somewhere near the Tarra river.

‘ Esmuypeligroso ! Esmuypeligroso !’ screamed the hysterical villager.
‘What’s he saying, Marcos?’ Dr Cooper demanded impatiently.
‘E’s saying eets too dangerous, Se ñ or ,’ Marcos replied.
‘We must capture one alive, Marcos; tell him we must capture one alive.’
‘But these men are not trained hunters, Se ñ or . They are poor people, from the local tribal villages. They are only doing this for the money.’ Turning to the terrified tribesman, Marcos babbled something in Spanish to him and a dispute erupted between them.
‘Marcos, we don’t have time to argue,’ Dr Cooper yelled.
It was the dead of night and in the jungle the sound of gunfire crackled all around them followed by cries of terror. Crashing out from the thickets, a young man appeared wearing a cream shirt, khaki trousers and a beige panama hat. He was clutching a Lee–Enfield rifle to his chest. ‘Cooper, they’re all around us; there’s too many of them,’ Edwards bellowed.
Upon hearing this, Marcos and the villager abruptly stopped arguing and made a run for it. Dr Cooper curled his lip at their cowardice and treachery and turned his attention back to the young man, who stood before him. Sweat streamed from the brim of his panama hat and trickled down his suntanned cheeks. ‘Edwards, we have to get them to the trap; it’s the only way.’
His voice sounding hoarse, Edwards swallowed. ‘I’ll try,’ he shouted as he disappeared back into the foliage.
Dr Cooper wiped his own sweaty brow with his cotton neck-scarf, his whole body tense with trepidation. In the dense jungle, the beastly roars continued, and the terrified tribesmen were forced to retreat.
Desperately, they popped off more panicky, random shots from their bolt-action rifles, fire flaring from their barrels but it did no good. The hunters themselves were being hunted by the towering shapes that stalked them in the shadows. The first to be attacked had his arm completely ripped from the humeral head of his shoulder, blood pumping out from the axillary artery like a fountain.
Then another man was attacked. His head was clamped by a set of thick, jagged molars that bit into his orbital cavity causing blood and vitreous humour to ooze out from his eyeball.
The huddle of men left, continued to fire off haphazard shots from their rifles as the two-legged beasts forced them back into a clearing. Suddenly, one of the beasts moved in for the kill and leapt at the nearest man but missed and disappeared into the trap that had been set for them. Boom! The jungle shook with the sound of an explosion and erupted in a blaze of red fire, the blast killing many of the beasts and sending the rest darting back through the forest. The MK2 pineapple grenade, saved only as a last resort, had finally been used.
When the air had cleared Dr Cooper, accompanied by Edwards and the last few tribesmen, began to edge closer to the trap to see what they had caught. The trap-hole they had dug was ten feet deep and had been covered by a criss-crossing of branches and sticks, topped with leaves.
‘I think we’ve got a live one, Edwards,’ Dr Cooper whooped.
Closer and closer they crept up to the hole.
‘Can you see anything?’ Dr Cooper asked.
Edwards twisted his Enfield to the side of his body so that he could squat down to have a peek.
‘Careful, man!’ Dr Cooper warned.
Edwards placed his hands on the ground so he could steady himself, then he craned his neck over the edge of the hole as two blazing orange eyes stared back at him from the murky depths. But he still couldn’t see clearly and in the second it took for him to turn and ask for a light, the beast sprang from the pit. The last thing Edwards saw were its bulging eyes of fire and the drooling fangs of death.
CHAPTER 1
Rebecca sat bolt upright gasping for breath, her heart drumming through her chest. In the darkness her eyes pinballed around her bedroom searching for that grotesque presence she knew was there. A moment ago, it had been standing over her, bearing down, watching her with its fiery orange eyes. She could even smell its foul, fetid breath against her cheek making her want to retch. And when the thing opened its mouth it was like a festering, gaping wound with a slug-like tongue making a sickening, sloshing sound as it slithered over jagged molars that were ready to bite and tear. A slow, raspy voice penetrated the darkness, whispering her name, but how come? How could this be happening? The thing did not have a voice; it could never speak.
The nightmares, those old, recurring nightmares had started once again. Why now? Why tonight? Drenched in sweat, she switched on the bedside light and sat up. Just how many times had she tried to work out what was going on and what it all meant over the years? Wiping away her tears and sinking back into her pillow, she asked herself the same old question. Why am I still having to go through this? She thought she had put it all behind her and moved on. But tonight, she wondered if she would ever be free from the torture of not knowing the answer.
According to Richard, her latest counsellor, that thing in her dreams wasn’t real, didn’t exist. It, or Him , as she had always described the monster, the cause of all her distress was, for complex reasons, fixed in her imagination. As the therapist put it, it was the manifestation of years of pent-up anger, guilt and remorse finally coming out. It was a clear case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
‘We have to release such feelings at some point, Rebecca,’ one of her previous counsellors had told her. ‘You can’t keep on cheating the mind. All of those repressed emotions are like links of a chain. The longer you try to run away from your problems the more links you add to this chain and the heavier it will become. In your case, these troubled emotions have moulded themselves into the form of this apparition, this demon. And like that chain that keeps on getting longer and heavier, this particular form, that you have given a dream-life to, will only add to your emotional burden. It will become more and more real unless you develop the courage to confront it. As soon as you start to accept what has really happened to you in the past your demons will start to grow weaker and weaker and finally, they will vanish forever.’
But this demon was real. Rebecca howled back at the professional voices of reason that swam around in her head. As she sat alone in her bedroom, she clenched her fists and repeated to herself, ‘I know he was fucking real. I know he was fucking real.’ She gave a resigned sigh as more memories came flooding back. ‘I also know that they all thought I was crazy. None of them believed me. My mother, the police, the doctors; why couldn’t any of them accept that I was telling the truth?’
‘Of course he was real!’ she shouted at the walls. ‘I grew up with Him. He was a big part of my life. He was with me all the time. But when Dad died everyone tried to make me forget Him. Even when I told them that it was He who did it. He was the one who murdered my father, but nobody believed me. They thought I was just traumatised and making it all up. There was even a time when I was sure that some of them even suspected that I had something to do with Dad’s death because of what I was saying. But it was Him, he did it.
‘In the end, even my boyfriend turned his back on me. He thought I was crazy, they all did. I was only fifteen-years-old and I had to go through all that shit on my own. Now, the hell, the nightmares are starting again. Is he trying to punish me for abandoning Him all those years ago? Is he going to continue to haunt me forever? Of course he is,’ she answered herself. ‘Who am I kidding? Deep down I know it, these nightmares are never going to end.’
There was no point in trying to get back to sleep now, she was too shaken up. She dragged herself out of bed and looked in the dressing table mirror. There she was, Rebecca Samuels, thirty-four-years-old and