Unhaunting The Hours

By Peter Sargent

It's time to climb back down the hole again. George has found his way into and out of addictions. His first love was Spectrum, the memory theiving drug that killed is mother. To escape Spectrum he found himself some religion. He drilled a hole in his skull and threaded a wire into his brain that wove his sensations together with the collective illusion known as the Abderan Cipher. George had thought he'd escaped from under the heel of the world's most powerful narcotic, only to find himself wrapped in a cult so pervasive that he lost all sense of whether he was old or young, criminal or saint. He'd lost himself down the hole. Then at last, he pulled himself up. There was no more Spectrum and no more Abdera, only mud and rain the early morning hours in which he lived. George was poor and alone, surviving from one brutal day until the next, but happy because he was free. But the past never lets you go. Around town there's a man dismembering people and leaving George's DNA behind. The police know that George, the mentally crippled ex druggie, is no killer. Not that they aren't above pinning the crimes on him. They've got to catch someone, haven't they? The police offer George a deal. The man killing others in George's name is somehow connected to the Abdera Cipher and the drug Spectrum as well. George has got to climb back down the hole again. He's got to take up his old addictions again to find the one living in his name, yet another thing out to steal away his identity. And George will do it - because he's poor, because he's powerless. And yet he is the only one who can stop the specter of horrific death, if only he is strong enough to withstand the forces that have brought him within a hair of oblivion. It is up to him to unhaunt the hours.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Sargent
• Release date: Jul 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310946776

Peter Sargent

Peter Sargent's ancestors were lamplighters, steam train engineers, architects, firemen and preachers. He has a sense for the timbre and color of urban life and industry, coupled with a taste for philosophy and its questions of human destiny. With a classical training in mathematics, Peter spends most his career writing radar processing software. His fiction, mostly of the speculative variety, is the passion of his nights and weekends. A native of Greater Boston, Peter still resides in Massachusetts with his family. If you like his work, then you might consider liking him personally. Visit Peter Sargent's author page on Facebook and get notifications of upcoming work! https://www.facebook.com/petersargentscifi http://petergsargent.blogspot.com/

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Peter Sargent

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Unhaunting The Hours

When I was a boy, I had no father and I lost my mother to a drug called Spectrum. She tried to kick it but never could. When I got into the same shit myself I managed to quit, but the cure was worse than the poison. I had to heal myself of the cure, and the consequences dogged me still. The people who pulled me out of Spectrum addiction were after me. I hadn’t seen them in a long time, but I knew they were out there.

Mom used to haul me to this Salvation Army church. A preacher called Major Tuck ran the place. Major Tuck said you go through seven or eight stages when you’re trying to quit, but the truth is more muddled to me. There’s one clear stage at the beginning, when you’re so hopped up you don’t know jack about your condition. Call that denial if you like. And there’s one clear stage at the end, when after that long slog you finally get your life in order. But in the middle, you oscillate between one extreme and another. Some days, Mom was hopeful. She told me once, I just made a few bad choices when I was young. I got myself into this, so I can get myself out. Other days, she ranted about powers beyond her control – the police, the EPA, whatever – wrecking her struggle to get free. Near the end, she’d resigned herself to believing that she was just born the way she was. Some people just have bad genes, George. Maybe Preacher was right, God’s chosen some, before they were born, as the match sticks on which the world burns. She died fifteen years ago and Major Tuck cremated her.

As for me, joy never came easy, but I had it now – whether you want to believe it or not. I stood in the back alley, trash bag hanging from one hand, shivering in the rain. The real world, seen through unobstructed eyes, was a nasty brute. But the touch of sleet and mud filled me with a euphoria I couldn’t quite explain. I’d just come down the back steps and entered the terrace, near the dumpsters. A lamp flickered and gave up. I was left in the dark, save for the windows.

Then a sudden fear washed over me – were they coming? Not the Salvation Army, but something worse that I’d gotten myself into since then. They called themselves the Abderans, and they weren’t nice to people like me. I looked down the street at the patchwork of glowing windows, which climbed four stories up brick walls and stopped at the little ones beneath the eaves. I tried to calm myself, but there was a tiny man who lived in my brain, who in my imagination looked like Major Tuck and spent his time dishing up new ways to make me believe that I wasn’t getting better and that I never would.

Then I saw a face full of blood.

I stumbled, my fingers gripping the rusty edge of the trash bin. The pictures weren’t real, but they didn’t stop charging through my brain. That’s the way it was. That’s the price you pay. So I stared at the puddles gathering by my feet and drew deep breaths. In time, the episode passed. I was happy again. I dropped the trash into the bin, and a soggy orange cat jumped out. He perched on the rim and glared at me for a moment before darting off, with a growl that told me he’d be