Lonely Dragon: In Pursuit of Truth

By Danielle E. Kullman

“For every act, there is room for error. Every move leaves a trail, and every trail has one mistake. The first time, we missed it. This is our second chance...”

Narrated by the villain, Lonely Dragon is a gripping horror novel that tells the story of a man set free from prison after serving twenty years for a crime he did not commit. Eric Gemmer is convicted of the gruesome murder of his high school sweetheart, Kate Skyler, and is sentenced to life in prison. However, after serving twenty years, he is released when new evidence comes to light. Determined to find the real killer, Eric sets out to discover the mystery surrounding Kate’s last hours. His quest leads him down a dangerous path, because the real killer is lurking and attempting to cover his tracks, and those who believe Eric is guilty will stop at nothing to make him pay for Kate’s murder. Haunted by Kate’s ghost, and the ghost of the samurai whose sword Kate was murdered with, Eric will stop at nothing to undercover the truth, a quest which may lead him to his own death.

Lonely Dragon is a haunting tale of murder and the quest for truth, set in Sleeper, Missouri.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brighton Publishing LLC
• Release date: Feb 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781621834380

Danielle E. Kullman

Danielle Erin Kullman lives in Fort Worth, Texas. She graduated from the University of North Texas summa cum laude with a Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Applied Behavior Analysis with a minor in Mathematics at the age of nineteen. She has always loved reading and writing, and took many advanced elective literature courses. She has been writing creatively since the age of twelve. From a very young age she enjoyed George Lucas’s Star Wars films and Jane Austen’s novels. Along with her favorite pastime, writing, she enjoys spending time with her family, going to the theatre, and taking long walks with her dogs. She holds a commission with the US Air Force. Her favorite authors include: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Michael Oondatje, John Grisham, Stephen King, and Richard Bach.

Book preview

Lonely Dragon

In Pursuit of Truth

Danielle E. Kullman

Brighton Publishing LLC

435 N. Harris Drive

Mesa, AZ 85203

www.BrightonPublishing.com

Copyright © 2016

ISBN: 978-1-62183-438-0

eBook

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Cover Design: Tom Rodriguez

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All the characters in this book are fictitious and the creation of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Though I go alone; like to a lonely dragon, that his fen makes feared and talked of more than seen…will or exceed the common or be caught….

~Coriolanus Act IV Scene 1

Dedication

For my mom. Love you to the moon and back.

Map of Sleeper, MO. (image courtesy google maps)

Chapter One

I am nothing. In a moment, I feel myself being plunged into infinity, and I suddenly realize that I am nothing. Not anymore. I have no feet to stand on, no hands with which to touch, no voice with which to scream.

And I want to scream.

There is nothing around above or beneath me but pure empty space, and I feel myself colliding a million times with all the things that still live. I cannot exist. I have ceased. But how can I feel? Even if feeling itself is something then this existence I belong in must be, in fact, something. And so here I am hurling through the nothingness of time. I am separate from time now. I have lived a million lifetimes, and there is still eternal blackness in every one of them.

I try desperately to move, to stop it—to return. But return to what? What existed before this? Nothing? Has it always been this, and I am just now realizing there should have been something more?

No, there was more. I could hear. I could see. I could feel. I could run. That happened. That all happened, but it was a fleck—a miniscule dot of existence that now stretches into vacuous space. There was pain. I know none of that now. That is all ended for me. The memory of pain is ended. However, there was happiness as well, and that also ended.

So while I am freed of all oppression of time and thought, I can’t feel my own happiness in my mind. The pictures of the memories flash in a jumble. I can’t see myself except from afar. I can’t say who I was. But since I am nothing now, it does not matter. I don’t know what I was, or what I am now.

But I want it back.

Whatever sliver of light existed in this total lack of terrestrial things, that’s what I want back—what I must have back. I can’t see how to go on without it. It was not pleasant, but it was more than this is. I want to taste it again, but how can I get back? I cannot do this, I cannot twist in the infinite darkness of lack of space and time forever. I must be drawn somehow. I don’t know how I can think of this, but I can. I can reason like anybody else clinging to the rock of reality amidst the abyss.

Laura.

She still feels me in the moments of what time used to be. So I return to her. Because she thinks of me so acutely, I can be there.

I return, though it wrenches me to do it, like squeezing something hard into such a small place so much smaller that it scrapes the edges. I have to return. I cannot endure this nothing to which I seem now to have been condemned.

She is trapped in the back of the green SUV, still. It is cold, very cold. She is shaking—the light fairy wisps of blond hair now caked with blood as they drift around her face. Her turquoise top, with elegant swirls of green leaves, is now torn and also stained with blood. The seat belt is tightened so that she can’t get free. She moves her head, wincing as she does, to look at where I am. But she doesn’t see me. She is looking at the upside down world of snow outside the windows of the green SUV.

She flips her head again. It is more painful this time. I see her wince in pain. She shifts forward. She is trying to see the man in the front seat. She cannot see but I can, so I move forward to view what she wanted to see.

The man in the front seat is most certainly dead. The front of his forehead is split open, with gray brain showing through and a fine river of blood running off his slick hair to drip onto the roof of the SUV. The nose split off, and the bloodied eyes stare out in the distance. His head is at an odd angle, and shards of metal and glass poke out of his chest. The airbag did not deploy. The green SUV was old, so its airbag did not go off. Now the man who used to be David Raskam is dead.

Laura tries again to look but still can’t. The seat belt keeps her in place. She then sees the blood running down the sides of the SUV, the amount of blood pooled on the floor, and the twisted hands that hang. She sees that the airbags have not gone off. She leans back as she realizes that David Raskam must be dead and that she is truly alone here, or so she thinks.

She does not know that I am still here.

She does not know that when the other car hit us, I did not end like she thought I would have—like I thought I would have. Like we all think we will. We don’t know that it’s a bizarre trick, this thing we call time and life. That there is something else out there, quivering on the surface, waiting to be realized when we are freed from our existence.

So we are trapped here, she and I, or I return to space. For the first time in the thing that is not a life, I am frightened. I do not want to return to the nothingness of dark that my existence has become, but Laura is fading. She has lost blood. It is growing cold in the SUV. However, to close her eyes means death, and so she tries to fight it. I can’t watch her like this. I have nothing with which to touch her, nothing with which to cut the seat belt that will trap her in her own icy death. For me it came quickly. For her it will be slow.

I release her and feel myself again transported back to the infinity that my world is. Again, I am in nothing, drifting purely. It would have been contentment if my mind didn’t still work. Maybe that was what was odd about it; maybe my mind should have been taken like every other part of me, but it wasn’t. The part of David Raskam that thought and felt still floated in some sort of space.

Eric Gemmer.

He didn’t think of me before, but now he does as he drives down the quiet road to the quieter town of Sleeper, Missouri. He feels me in the wind as it blows through the pine trees, sending whispers of snow through it. So I return to him.

He is sitting in the passenger seat of the silver Prius looking at the snow piled on the side of the road. The snow is dirty and black, from the dirt and the plows and the salt. The car whips past quickly—too quickly to truly feel the trees and listen to their whisper. Eric’s mother is driving. They bump over the tracks at the turn onto Innsbruck Road. He continues to look at the trees. I wonder if he thinks about that day I dared him to climb them and if that is why he is bringing me back.

You’ve grown up here and you don’t even know how to climb trees? I scoffed arrogantly.

It wasn’t as though I could climb them. He did, though, stubbornly, pulling himself up seven, eight, ten feet in the air, only to fall and break his leg. I did feel bad about that later.

I look over at Eric’s mother. She is older than I remembered. Of course she would be. I have not seen her in twenty years. She has more gray hairs streaking her brown hair than she had in the summer of 1997, but she wears the same string of colorful glass beads around her neck and the same sea-green coat that used to hang by the door of their old house. Underneath it all, she wears a tasteless Christmas sweater. Mrs. Gemmer. She was never built to be anything but a mother and wife, and her clumpy mascara and the tire of fat around her waist show it.

Your father is sorry he couldn’t come today, but he’ll be there when we get back, she says, hesitantly, in her Minnesota accent. Minnie-SOOTa. That was how she said it, all the ooos. She was just a country girl. When Eric and I would come back from running, faces flush and shirts sticking to our backs with sweat, she would give us lemonade and cookies, always instructing us to wash our hands before we ate. However much I searched in the years since, I could never find lemonade to compare. Having never noted the bottle, I did not know what brand it was; she always served it from a clear glass pitcher full of ice. How I wished I could feel again so I could taste that sickly sweetness in my mouth. How I wished I could go back to when I was young, and we were all so innocent and pure.

Yeah, right, Eric mutters as he continues to look out the window.

He was very busy this week; they couldn’t just change his flights

Mom, you and I both know he was too embarrassed to pick his convict son up from prison, Eric says, angrily, turning back to look forward as they continue to bump along the road. The trees are rising serenely on the horizon, waiting to throw their shadows across the road like a million train tracks once the sun falls sufficiently.

Stop that, she says, pulling the car to a sudden halt. So sudden, in fact, they both lurch forward in their seats. The seat belts locked just as his mother says, "You are not a convict, okay? They dropped the charges due to insufficient evidence because all the evidence was circumstantial in the first place."

Sweet Mrs. Gemmer. She is probably the only person in the state of Missouri who believes that Eric Gemmer is not guilty of the first-degree murder of his girlfriend—the only person alive, that is.

Which means that the case was dismissed. It is still on my record, which means I have not been actually declared innocent, Eric says, with a heavy sigh as though his response was well rehearsed. He has read the law one too many times.

You are and always have been innocent, she says, starting the car again with a squeak of the breaks, and now you are going to get on with your life. I brought you something. I was going to save it for when we got home, but, all things—namely, your father—considered, I think you should have it now.

What is it? Eric asks, softening a little. I look at him. He is wearing a stock bright red sweater and white-collared shirt. His Levi’s ware stiff as though brand-new. All bought by his mother in anticipation of his release, no doubt.

Look in my bag in the back, she says, focusing her eyes on the curve that turns into Ironstone Road.

Eric leans back and sorts through the faded blue backpack to find a package. It is wrapped in red-and-white, candy-cane-striped wrapping with a sorry silver bow on it.

Wordlessly, Eric tears the paper, as carelessly as a child on Christmas morn. His efforts reveal a fine wood-framed diploma that reads, The University of Phoenix Eric Gemmer Bachelor’s of Arts in Early Asian History Summa Cum Laude.

You didn’t have to do that, Mom, he says as tears fill his eyes.

It’s wonderful, Eric. I never went to college, and neither did Papa or Jamma. They would be so proud of you if they could see you now. It’s a wonderful thing, she says as she turns the car into their driveway. It is still gravel, just as I remember it. However, now it is covered with ice and snow. There is at least a foot of snow in the yard, and the trees surrounding the house hang wearily under the weight of the ice. I have another one hung up on the wall at home, but the one I gave you is for you to keep wherever you want to remind you of how special you are and how much you’ve overcome to be the person you can be. Your life is just starting Eric, and you can be anything now.

Thank you, he says and then leans over and hugs her.

I drift out of the car. I don’t need to see their reunion; instead, I see how much I can move now that Eric’s memories have freed me. Outside of the car, I see the house more clearly. It is well kept, as it always was. The fine two-story, mostly red brick building has a wraparound front porch, which is old and wooden but freshly painted. I move up the steps. I can move quite well, it seems, and Eric remembers me in every inch of this house. A red-and-brown Australian shepherd is lying on the porch, tethered by a thick chain. It sits up and barks at my approach. I am surprised. The others did not sense me. Apparently, the dog can. I move through the door, which is now painted red instead of green, and into the house. The walls do not stop me. I can simply exist here.

Little has changed inside the Gemmers’ house. A neat front sitting room welcomes me inside, uninvited as I am. The faded blue sofa faces an antique-green chair. The furniture is positioned on either side of a piano nobody knows how to play. The windows are dressed with old white-lace curtains; the floors are all dark hardwood. To the left will be the kitchen, and to the right is the hall to the master bedroom. In front of me are the gray-carpeted stairs, which lead to Eric’s room and his father’s study.

The house is decorated for Christmas, almost absurdly so. The Christmas tree is lit and covered in ornaments, shiny balls, and Hallmark figurines of cartoon characters and kittens. There is a tray of cookies sitting on the table in the sitting room in front of a poinsettia. There are little bows on all the doorknobs, and a sprig of mistletoe hangs hopefully above the doorway to the kitchen. A garland graces the banister of the curving staircase. Eric’s father is supposed to be home. His forbidden study is up the stairs, but now nothing is off limits to me. I move up the stairs, and I feel Eric’s father in the room. I enter. He too thinks of me; he thinks of everything that happened that fatal summer.

He is sitting at a roll top desk staring at something on it. The room is old; it does not look as though it