Urban Legend 1 Dream Master: Urban Legend, #1

By Kit Crumb

One reporter's investigation into the strange and the unexplained.

• Language: English
• Publisher: lost lodge press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386550570

Book preview

Urban Legend:The Dream Master

By

Kit Crumb

Urban Legend

©2016 by Kit Crumb

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems without written permission of the publisher.

Lost Lodge Press

2305 Ashland street

Ashland, Oregon 97520

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kitcrumb.com

cover design by Book Savvy Studio

To Chris

Prologue

The 45 floors of the Legend building located in Portland, Oregon are 3 stories above the Wells Fargo sky scraper, making it the tallest structure in the state. William Jennings Legend established Legend Publishing in 1909 as a small tabloid bearing his name, Urban Legend. By 1999 Legend had become the largest Publisher in the world and one of the first traditional publishers to adapt digital technologies. At one time it also dominated the print world in the form of newspapers and magazines. When these were replaced by e-zines and on line news services Legend blended with the trend liquidating its magazine and newspaper holdings except for Urban Legend. He also changed the nature of the tabloid from sensational news to stories based on investigations of the supernatural, a personal interest of his.

This is where I come in. My name is Whilamena Sloan though my friends call me Billy. I graduated from Washington State with a degree in Journalism. I was fishing around my home state of Oregon for any kind of employment that would sustain me until I found my niche and to my dismay was hired by a team of pseudo paranormal investigators financed by the University of Oregon. I mention my dismay at being hired by the group because I don’t believe in that shit. Quickly reaching maximum saturation with their Voodoo science I flexed my Journalistic muscle and wrote a scathing letter debunking the work and thanks to a slow news day the Oregonian printed my expose on the front page. Not long after, I found myself  employed by the Urban Legend  for both my journalistic ability and skeptic attitude about things that go bump in the night.

My first assignment had been to visit a town that claimed it had rained frogs. Turned out it had been polliwogs. I interviewed a very excited Mayor and then went straight to a meteorologist who explained it all away as the evaporation process. I’m still recuperating from my last story where I was investigating a case of mind control.

Chapter One

I sat at the computer in my super long T-shirt and nothing else. Jerry was still in bed snoozing. I pulled up the Urban Legend website, entered my employee code and watched as my assignment page materialized. I suppressed a groan so as not to wake Jerry. Don’t get me wrong, I like Jerry enough to take him to bed. But he’s a bit clingy and I have neither the itch nor the inclination to start any kind of relationship beyond casual. Not to mention that my assignments often take me out of the little town of Mossbrae where I live for days and weeks at a time.

Where the hell was the town of Neskowin? Population five thousand. I scrolled down to the assignment.

Sometimes it’s is so cryptic I have to call my Editor, Layton Ratkey for details. My last assignment had come from Legend himself. He was concerned about a claim of mind control that he feared could lead to industrial espionage. There is nothing special about Ratkey except when he creates the assignments they usually contain a lot of information unlike the one’s I get from Mr. Legend. So I was relieved to find a synopsis that included contacts, names and phone numbers.

Apparently a letter had come in to the legend office addressed to Mr. Legend but intercepted by Editor Ratkey. It contained the signatures of twelve women. They all claimed to have had unwanted sexual encounters with the town minister. I stopped reading and turned in my chair to look at Jerry who was now snoring. What the hell was an unwanted sexual encounter? Seemed to me that someone wasn’t paying attention. I turned back wondering what Ratkey saw as the attracting factor for the Urban Legend.

I couldn’t have guessed. The minister was coming to them in their dreams. Without finishing the synopsis I scrolled down where I usually found pictures if there were any. Bingo.

Had the minister looked like a Tab Hunter or a young Clint Eastwood a dream encounter would make sense. But he looked to be about eighty. Bulbous nose, balding and it was difficult to be sure from the picture but his eyes didn’t line up, definitely nothing to write home about. This made me wonder what the owners of the signatures on the letter looked like.

I scrolled back to the synopsis and read further. All the woman were single except for two.  There was no description of the nature of the unwanted sex. I paused and tried to remember the last time I dreamed about sex. Generally I remember my dreams but I had no memory of a dream about sex.

Wow, these were recurring dreams and always the same. Not a lot of details. I guess that was to be expected in an open letter.

First things first, I needed to find out if what these women claimed was possible. I pushed back from the computer stood and looked over at Jerry who was beginning to stir. I needed to get out of the room before he woke so I gathered a stack of clothes and padded down the hall to the bathroom, locked the door and stepped into the shower.

I was standing at the stove frying up a couple eggs when I heard him approach. I turned spatula in hand and wished for just a heartbeat that it was a gun so I could put him out of his