Falling Awake

By Kristoffer Gair

Imagine waking up in a place you can’t remember, with a face you don’t recognize, and a name that may not be your own printed on a ticket in your back pocket. And of the five people you meet during the next few hours, four of them hold clues to your past, present, and two possible futures. The outcome of the encounter will determine your soul’s fate, and the only way out of the nightmare may be through falling awake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kristoffer Gair
• Release date: May 8, 2018

Kristoffer Gair

Kristoffer Gair grew up in Fraser, MI and is a graduate of Grand Valley State University. He currently lives with his husband in a suburb of Detroit.

Book preview

Falling Awake

Kristoffer Gair

My thanx to the following people for their friendship and encouragement: (in no particular order) Ralph, Kiernan Kelly, T.C. Blue, G.A. Hauser, Patricia Logan, Jeff Adkins, Jane Smith, Dorien Grey, Nichole Kuhn, Martha Davis, Patty Guerrieri, Paul Wright, Cindy Pass, Brent D. Seth, Jeff Israel, and Jay Taylor.

A HUGE thank you to Eden Winters for the editing overhaul and coaching. Charge for it already, would ya? And my apologies to Eden’s cats for keeping her up so late the night she read this story for the first time.

A second editing thank you to Susan Cormany, especially for using a green pen instead of a red one.

A third editing thank you J.P. Barnaby, who will put her foot up my bum if I don’t get started writing a second part to this.

A fourth editing thank you to Val Hughes for catching more of my embarrassing typos. Argh!

And a special thank you to Matthew Foster for allowing me to name a character after his beloved Eugie, who remains sorely missed.

For those who read the first edition of this story published under my pseudonym, Kage Alan, there have been some small changes made to this second one.

Most notably, the character of Eddie has been renamed Alex.

As long as you need light

I'll hold the sun

As long as you need stars

I'll bring the night

As long as I'm alive, I'll live for you

(As Long As by Martha Davis)

Chapter 1: Martha

He gasped. Not out of surprise, at least he didn’t think so. No. It was as if he’d been holding his breath for so long without realizing it that his body finally acted on his behalf, reminding him of the necessity of breathing. Or maybe some distant memory of having breathed before pulled air into his lungs.

Did somebody say something to him? He thought so. More than one voice too. Two maybe. A man and a woman. Her voice spoke to him longer, closer. What did she say? Something he isn’t supposed to remember. Which is fine because he didn’t.

Something shifted to his left, a darkness in the light, but what? He willed his head to turn—his body resisted, then slowly began to respond—and he attempted to investigate what had caught his attention. The shape quickly faded into the light, then another took its place, then another and another and another. They all flitted off and were replaced with something similar, but just a bit different in size and contour as to be noticeable. And there was sound, noise, all blended together. It was a cacophony of…voices? Motion of some kind? Maybe it was a combination of both.

He couldn’t make sense of the confusion and the more he tried, the more any form of certainty eluded him. He blinked once, twice, again, and realized his eyes refused to perform one of their integral functions that might actually help: focus. Slowly, ever so slowly, the dark shapes around him began to sharpen in detail, only the situation remained very much like waking from a dream and not quite being able to remember what the objects in the room were. Everything around him obviously belonged there, only associating a reason for their purpose was still a little too fuzzy.

Focus.

Yes, he should focus. The more he concentrated, the more objects he distinguished around him, and the longer he stared, the more apparent it became he was looking at people as they ambled by.

Who were they? Where was he? Why couldn’t he remember?

There were men and women of all ages, young children too, wandering past him to the left and the right. As for the light, it came from above, as if the ceiling itself was the source of the illumination. And the noise? The hustle and bustle of everyone going by, plus bits and pieces of multiple conversations, overwhelmed his ears. Nobody stood there talking to him. No man. No woman’s voice. Figments of his imagination then?

It took another minute or two before he was able to start filtering out what might be relevant and dismissing the rest as white noise, only it didn’t really help and he remained confused.

No. There was something else, just in the background…a melody. Music? Some kind, but nothing immediately identifiable. Or was it? He’d heard the motif before, only way back in some long distant time and place beyond his grasp to recall. Or had the tune only been in a dream? He couldn’t outwardly predict the chord changes before they happened, yet he wasn’t surprised when they did. How was that possible? How could something be completely foreign and yet familiar at the same time?

The whole situation felt wrong. A strange place he couldn’t remember with strangers he didn’t know and music he couldn’t identify amounted to a place where he shouldn’t be. There was a hint of familiarity to everything, but nothing about the place made him feel like he belonged. He shouldn’t be here. And yet he had no idea where he was actually supposed to be.

Breathe. It will make sense in time.

That voice again. Where had it come from? Was it his voice? He couldn’t even remember the sound of his own voice, a thought which quickly progressed to the awareness he also didn’t remember his name.

He wanted to panic. His instincts began to scream at him to panic. They begged and pleaded for him to shout out, to run, to go anywhere but where he was.

Calm yourself. Start with what you know. Look around you. What do you see?

He looked down.

I’m sitting on a chair, he spoke out loud, which he knew was a grounding technique. How he knew was a different story altogether. And, no, he didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice. "It’s attached to several other chairs in a row