Child Of Echidna

By Will Farrar

Pearle was an extraordinary woman, who lived a life of isolation. Her contact with the outside world was limited to her job at Mother Moon, an occult store, and that was the way she liked it. She was an urban legend in Augusta, Ga. She was known as The Girl Who Walked With Monsters. You see, Pearle had a very unique ability. Ghosts and supernatural monsters seemed to be attracted to her. They came to her for help, or sometimes, to attack her. She never knew her real parents. So she didn't know where she came from, or how she acquired this ability or curse. She thought she was doomed to live an isolated life as a freak until Razz came into her life. This man's appearance sparks a dangerous and life threatening adventure that will lead to the discovery of her origins and her destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Will Farrar
• Release date: Jan 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781301331819

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Table of Contents

Child Of Echidna

I.

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Pearle rose from her little double bed in her tiny closet of a bedroom. She sat there for a

minute, trying to rub the sleep from her eyes. She stopped, suddenly, and looked around her

sparsely decorated room.  It was happening again. She could sense that something was close. With an exasperated sigh, she stood up,stretched her thin frame of a body, walked sideways to get around her bed in the tiny room, and began her morning routine. She ran her life through a series of routines. With parts of her life thrown into chaos, the routines kept her sane and gave her a sense of order. She showered, went into her kitchenette that was adjacent to the living room for a bowl of cereal and some coffee, and brought them to the couch, the one piece of furniture that was meant for sitting to watch the news on her nineteen inch TV. It wasn't a long walk from her tiny bedroom through her thin hallway to her bathroom, and then to the living room/kitchenette.  The mobile home was barely large enough for one person.  It was her own private cave in Thomson, Georgia.

With her condition as she liked to call it, she found it easier to live her life in isolation.

Sometimes, she wasn’t sure that the things that she saw and experienced were real, because, most

of the time, no one saw them but her. When it first began when she was a child, it scared her.  When a deceased old man who loved to amuse himself by haunting random places and people, discovered that she could see and hear him, he spent months terrorizing her before she grew tired of it and stood up to him.  Then, he broke down and told her that he was just bored and lonely.  He wanted to move on to the next life, but didn't know how.  She was only ten years old, at the time.  How would she know how to help him?  He, eventually, figured it out on his own and moved on.  There were others, as well.  There was an entire world that only she could see, and for ten year old girl, it was horrifying.

Her parents, being of those people who believed therapy was the cure to everything and less work than finding out what was really wrong with their child became worried that their daughter was developing a mental illness.  She believed that the last straw had been when a spirit had knocked her out of her chair at the dinner table.  She swore that a ghost had done it, and her parents decided that this, among other antics, was beyond an imaginary friend.  This led to years of therapy in which she learned that it was better to keep it to herself and pretend to be someone else to blend in.  It was a mask that she, still, had to wear when she visited her family. That was no easy task, at times. Ghosts and spirits weren’t the only things that haunted her.

She adjusted her glasses over her pale blue eyes and pushed her long brown hair away from her face. She could hear the beastie poking around the trailer.  There was a tapping on the walls and creaking in the floor boards like someone trying to sneak about and hide their footsteps.  She knew that wasn't the case.  Incorporeal entities weren't able to make heavy foot fall noises, in most cases. She grabbed the remote and flipped on the TV. Sometimes, it took a while for the spirit to work up the courage to contact her. Sometimes, they just passed through out of curiosity. Confronting them when they, first, arrived was not always a good idea. They tended to be a little temperamental.

Her trailer’s décor was designed for just those types of visitors. There were a few pewter

statues of goddesses and such who were supposed to protect her home, plastic unbreakable picture frames containing images of family and the few friends that she had. As it entered the living room, and she turned around to look at it, she was, once again, glad for her choice in décor. A large black humanoid shadow made of smoke floated behind the couch. She could feel the hate and anger radiating from it. This one was going to be troublesome.

She reached down in between the couch cushions and pulled out a small bottle of holy

water. She hid such tools throughout the trailer for days like this. Before she could uncork the

bottle and use it, the poltergeist knocked it out of her hand and across the room. Before she

could react, she found herself flying in the opposite direction and into the wall.  The impact knocked a few pictures to the floor and shook a couple of those goddess statues were shaken from their perches.  She looked at them on the floor and shook her head.  Some protection they were. They were just fancy paper weights. She scrambled to all fours and scurried towards the holy water, not looking in front of her, but at the spirit.

So it took her, completely, by surprise when she was halted by a pair of feet covered in

old Converse high tops. Hello, Pearle, said the shaggy haired man who was attached to the

feet. She looked up in time to see the poltergeist rush towards them. The man waved his hand as

if to shew it away, and the shadow dispersed. Then he looked down at her and smiled.

His dark hair hung down as he looked down on her.  His smile was a little crooked with a mischievous hint to