December of the Dark Sun

By John Chaplick

When mild-mannered Duncan Evans discovers, in the basement of his bookstore in rural England, a devastating World War II secret that would change history, he becomes the target of assassins from three countries. December of the Dark Sun fills a long-existing information gap relating to the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with an intriguing adventure articulately structured to offer an unforgettable reading experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: World Castle Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Jan 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781956788389

John Chaplick

John P. Chaplick is a retired CPA and a graduate of both Wesleyan University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MBA).He has turned his business experience in the analysis of fraud, embezzlement, and money laundering into a writing career specializing in the kind of action-adventure novels which could not have been written without his background.In December of the Dark Sun, his experience has been used to achieve a long sought after objective...to draw an ordinary protagonist into an apocalyptic event that changes the protagonist’s life. His struggles fail to make him the hero of his fantasies, thereby leaving him both sympathetic and credible in the eyes of the reader.This story offers a fascinating new dimension to the Japanese 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, about which much has been written. Those materials have not offered convincing evidence as to whether the occurrence could have been predicted. December of the Dark Sun fills that information gap with an intriguing adventure articulately structured to offer an unforgettable reading experience.

Book preview

Dedications

I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to those special readers whose help and patience made December of the Dark Sun possible:

My wife, Avis Anne, who scrutinized each page of my work without complaint and maintained a calm understanding while I disappeared from view during the writing.

My two sons, Trevor and Kyle and their wonderful families, who have always encouraged me to continue writing.

My beta readers and constructive critics: Ginger King Kelly, whose experience as an accomplished actress on stage always provides a new dimension to my novels; and Susan G. Terbush, whose ability to edit a novel to perfection allows me to send a clean draft to the book’s final editor, Maxine Bringenberg.

My critique group members, whose combination of objective assessment and warm encouragement helped me to develop an engaging story: Joel Boydston, Barbara Dandro, and Wendy Samford.

My publisher, Karen Fuller, at World Castle Publishing, LLC, for taking the time to review and approve my initial submission for subsequent publishing and assembling the cover and internal acknowledgments.

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always

be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

— Winston Churchill

Important Dates and Events in December of the Dark Sun

The Curious Owl bookstore founded in 1900 by protagonist Duncan Evans’s great grandfather.

Duncan’s grandfather, Reginald Evans, 1910-1946; presided over the bookstore’s daily operations from 1931-1939; called away by Winston Churchill from 1939-1945 to serve as his assistant in London; returned to the bookstore in 1945, died in 1946.

Duncan’s grandmother, 1912-1986; Duncan’s grandmother operated the bookstore from 1946-1959 when Duncan’s father took charge of it at age twenty-four and managed it until his death in 2016.

Duncan’s father, 1935-2016.

Duncan’s mother, 1937-2012.

Duncan, 1980-current.

Duncan quit his teaching job in 2015 and began working for his father at the bookstore.

Duncan inherited the bookstore in 2016 at age thirty-six upon the death of his father.

Duncan’s father hired Melody in 2015, a year before he died.

Duncan and Melody married in 2017.

The story begins in 2019.

Chapter One

Duncan Evans had no reason to suspect his inheritance of the Curious Owl bookstore could become a death sentence. The transaction seemed harmless at the time, simply a new path in the itinerary of his life. In fact, the prospect of owning and managing the little shop promised to be a blessing, in which his love for selling books far outweighed his disdain for the accompanying financial management responsibilities. Now, the prospect of sheer literary enjoyment had already begun to morph into a life made up of a thousand little unanticipated pieces.

In search of a quiet interlude during which he could shut out thoughts of what his future might bring, Duncan sequestered himself behind the science fiction and fantasy shelves, pulled the spindled, two-page financial summary from his pocket, and glared at it. The monthly income statement’s recent losses, ugly columnar spiders, reached up to sting his pride, and a mounting sense of failure squeezed his chest again. In an effort to relieve the discomfort, Duncan took a moment to refocus on the positive aspects of his environment while he tried to imagine how a business turnaround might be possible.

Positioned strategically on a main street in the Cotswolds, directly south of Bath and Stratford-On-Avon in southwest England, the Curious Owl sold a unique variety of titles ranging from the classics to the latest best sellers. A minor figure in the retail book industry, the little shop, in his father’s own words, makes up in authenticity whatever it might lack in size and elegance. Duncan’s awareness of the store’s reputation came as a family mandate from parents who routinely promoted it in regional advertisements.

In the quiet of the moment, Duncan allowed his thoughts to wander as far as they could go into the realm of creativity. First of all, our shop’s location is strategic enough to support whatever operating enhancements might be necessary for some kind of business revitalization. Thus, some research into the buying habits of our customers might trigger a few ideas for upgrading our marketing strategy. Then I could—

Duncan, where are you? I need you out here. We’ve customers waiting. You promised to come help me with them. The sound of his wife’s voice coming from the entrance to the stacks interrupted his musing.

I’ll be there in half an hour, Melody. I can sense your anxiety, but there are some things I have to do first, such as finding some way to address our operating deficit. During the past few months, he had come to realize his gradually mounting craving for something more exciting than selling books had not been lost on her. The where-are-you question had resurfaced more consistently in recent months.

Duncan stuffed the financial nightmare back into his hip pocket and returned to his daily pilgrimage through the stacks. He reached his long, slender hands high enough to access the upper shelf and, with deliberate tenderness, replaced a copy of The Brothers Karamazov in its proper position, as though the book’s reputation had earned it a special place. After a brief pause to glance the length of the ledge to make sure all of its occupants were present and accounted for, he withdrew a feather duster from his other pocket and swished it gently over the books within his reach. He paused to reflect on almost a century of transactions those neatly arranged shelves had witnessed and the delicate care with which the Evans family had treated their occupants.

Satisfied, he stuffed the duster into his pocket and moved to the sales floor, barely in time to stop the little boy’s hand-over-hand ascent to the top shelf of the mystery section rack.

Thank you, his panicked mother blurted out. "I was trying to find Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, and I just lost track of him."

Duncan threw the child a slight frown, nudged him toward his mother, and turned to the woman. Not a problem. I’ll get it for you. He walked to the end of the row, pulled the book down, and handed it to her. He accompanied her to the front desk without taking his eyes off the little climber, recorded the purchase, and turned to assist another mystery fan.

After an hour and five customers later, Duncan retreated into the cramped eight-by-ten nook affectionately referred to by his predecessors as the shop’s executive office. He slumped into the Chippendale chair, a fixture for almost a century, and thrust his legs under the polish-starved nineteenth-century kneehole desk, the only salient feature of which appeared to be its space-saving configuration. He allowed the faint odor of old wood, well-worn leather, and stained carpeting to drive his thoughts back into his childhood. The executive office had always been strictly off limits to everyone other than his father and grandmother. Probably the private domain of my grandfather as well prior to 1946 when the man died, he thought.

Throughout his growing years, Duncan figured the restriction must have remained the same for all of his predecessors other than those directly involved in the management of the business. He leaned forward, extracted the spindled financials from his pocket, and tossed them on the desk. He would deal with their offensive message later.

Grateful for another moment of peaceful seclusion, he laced his fingers together, rested his chin on them, and considered the choices he had made, for better or worse. Assumption of the Curious Owl’s management responsibilities, always expected of him, had come sooner than anticipated. Upon the death of his father in 2016, the little bookstore found itself at Duncan’s feet, an orphan waiting for adoption. The inheritance came days after he turned thirty-six.

Duncan, what are you doing all scrunched up in your chair? Her soft voice from the doorway came as a thankful interruption.

Just thinking. The response came out sounding like a prelude to something more specific, and she stood there as though she anticipated a follow-up. "You know, Melody, given my preference for business ownership over teaching secondary school, this transition from classroom to our bookstore made sense at the time. In fact, it came as a welcomed change. Although I did not see it right away, the prospect of a life promoting the joys of reading has failed to fulfill its initial promise under the shackles of administration. I don’t know. Perhaps I expected more excitement than peddling inventory could provide. Or simply found myself less adept at marketing than were my predecessors.

Either way, there now seem to be no choices available. To break my family chain by turning the bookshop over to an outsider would represent an unthinkable act of irresponsibility—even rebellion. In the Evans family, I guess, no one ever questioned the continued ownership and capable management of the bookshop as a matter of heritage.

He turned away from her to stare at the recurring stack of paperwork on the corner of his desk, pinned under a little ceramic turtle. The persistent pile changed its complexion each morning, but the accumulation never completely disappeared. He knew his daily disposition of the documents, like the temporary repairs of a shade tree mechanic, only invited the arrival of more the next day. He remembered comparing them to the unwanted reappearance of mushrooms in a garden. It all reminded him of those seemingly endless piles of student papers waiting for him to grade during his teaching days. A task he thought would be gone forever once he walked out of the classroom for the last time.

You’re worrying again about the shop’s financial statements, aren’t you? Melody rubbed his arm.

Duncan glanced upward at nothing in particular before he turned to answer the question. Yes. As if to deliberately darken my life, visions of the repugnant deficit on those sheets has punished me once more for not being the competent financial manager my father was, and my grandfather, grandmother, and great-grandfather before him. I can almost feel the ghosts of my ancestors watching me. Worse, sometimes I think I can even hear the Curious Owl’s voice softly whispering, ‘Since I’m now yours, what are you going to do to fix me?’

She forced a brittle smile, squeezed her slim five-three frame through the debris in the cramped space, slipped into the only other chair available, and patted his hand. Her faded blue skirt hugged her small, rounded hips, accentuating her sensuality. Duncan, this shop is becoming much different from what we thought it would be when your father died, and it’s making our lives worse, not better. I think it’s time for you to sell the place before it becomes so unprofitable no one would buy it. You can always go back to teaching history, or whatever, and do it at one of the secondary schools around here. Best of all, we could have a steady income. It’s not too late to have children, either. The doctor said there’s nothing wrong with us physically. He never came out with it in so many words, but he implied the pressure you feel from running this business since you quit your teaching job has been a factor in our inability to get pregnant.

Duncan closed his eyes in an effort to hide his irritation. It seemed not so much a matter of what she had said as the way she said it. As though he had failed as both a bookstore proprietor and a lover and could redeem himself only by selling the Curious Owl and going back to the world of academia. The remark struck a nerve he could sense had begun to wear thin lately. Knowing she probably had not meant it in such a manner did not help.

He leaned back in his chair and spread his arms out, palms up, in a gesture of frustration. The subject of pregnancy always made her a bit jittery. He had long since grown tired of the accusation, intended or not, suggesting their failure to reproduce might be his fault. It could be Melody’s. There was simply no way to prove anything. The offensive intangibility of it could continue to hang like a dark cloud over their heads forever.

Honey, I love this shop, I hated teaching, and I would not particularly care for doing it anywhere near our bookstore location. You know it as well as I do. The business will get better. I’m planning to do more advertising, and perhaps change our offering a bit. I’ve told you many times before, we can always adopt a child. Just give me more time.

A weak counterargument, he knew it. At the moment, however, there did not seem to be anything more decisive he could conjure up. Unable to formulate a clear concept of what kind of advertising might be more effective, he simply stared at her. The adoption idea would probably not sit any better with her now than ever before.

Her face drawn into a scowl, Melody slapped the corner of the desk and tried her best to form a glare. "No, Duncan. Nothing will get better by itself, and adoption is not the answer. Our customer list is hardly growing at all, and we have no idea why. Maybe people are not reading books anymore, I do not know. Or else we do not seem to be selling the kind of books people want to read. Perhaps the big chains are undercutting our prices. It’s anyone’s guess. All I know is we used to draw customers from everywhere within a hundred miles because of our carefully selected offerings and your father’s ability to generate a thirst for reading in everyone who came through the door. I remember he used to focus his attention on each customer’s unique personality and reading preferences rather than on the books themselves. I don’t know how many times I heard customers say, ‘If you love to read, visit the Curious Owl.’

Look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re obviously not doing whatever your ancestors did that made the Curious Owl profitable for God knows how many years until your father died. Anyway, honey, there are other towns in the Cotswolds where you could teach. Maybe you’d like Burford, or Bilbury, or even Stow-on-the-Wold. She tugged at her blouse and shrugged her shoulders. What do you think?

His lips tightened. The silent reprimand imbedded in the mute financials had managed to find its spokesperson for the fourth month in a row. Elbows on the desk again, eyes closed, he lowered his head to rest it on clenched fists, deep in his own resentment of how badly life seemed to have turned out for him. Flickering images of his past seem to be parading through his thoughts, uninvited. The teaching career had not worked out well, and his fall back option at the Curious Owl did not seem to be much of an improvement despite the personal satisfaction he derived from selling books. The unfairness of his wife’s charge hurt. He had managed the shop exactly as his predecessors ran it and, as far as he could tell, proved to be almost as capable a salesperson as his father was.

The market must have changed. Rumor had it other bookshops throughout England were experiencing similar problems, Duncan’s only failing being his inability to figure out how or why. That something needed to change became obvious. Nonetheless, turning the shop over to someone else did not seem to be an appropriate solution.

Duncan raised his head and glared at her with an air of terrible patience. He pointed a finger at her and began with a tone suggesting he might be about to address Parliament. Melody, I’ve no intention of selling out. Moreover, I’m not going back as an academician relegated to teaching the classics to kids who do not give a damn while I’m busting my tail trying to prepare them for the GSCE exam. The last thing I need is another reminder that failure to achieve my doctorate has left me no other options. Look, I think I know the people in this town well enough to be able to perk up their interest in books. By the way, neither Painswick nor any of the other towns in the Wolds has a secondary school appropriate for my skills, so let’s drop the issue. I have unfinished work to do to prepare for our Christmas season rush and only three weeks to get it done. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get started on it.

His wife fixed a stern gaze on him with eyes conveying a willingness to give up, only for now, on a problem he knew would not likely go away. Hands on her hips and soft, round chin slightly protruding, Melody squeezed her way around him. She moved toward the door with a parting summation. "Fine, but then you’d better find some time to clean out the basement. No one’s done any real organizing down there since your grandfather died, and the place is a mess. Worse, it continues to accumulate junk and is becoming a fire hazard. If this whole bookstore goes up in flames, you’ll be forced to do something else for a living." She made her exit with an audible exhale carefully orchestrated to emphasize her frustration.

Duncan closed his eyes to allow for a moment of silent reflection. Although she had dropped the argument, her dissatisfaction would probably linger until something happened one way or the other. Melody always viewed the world in black or white. Performance became either superb or unacceptable. Even if she would agree this fell somewhere in between, she would not likely give up on her insistence for a more significant solution.

* * *

Alone with his reminiscing in the quiet aftermath of their shared differences, Duncan retraced the history of his relationship with Melody. He never asked where she came from or much about the girl prior to her graduation from Durham University with a degree in literature. The pretty brunette simply showed up one day sometime after Duncan’s mother died and his father needed a sales clerk.

Like flickering shadows, recollections of their early relationship came to the surface of his thoughts. Within a month after she accepted his invitation to join the Curious Owl, Melody’s skill with customers began to reflect itself in a sharp increase in sales. Beautiful with her long dark hair, smiling brown eyes like chocolate, and slightly turned up nose, Melody showed a fierce interest in books and this, in combination with her obvious sales ability, attracted him. Their differences about bookshop management had not yet surfaced, and, comfortable with each other, they married a year-and-a-half later.

Now, her chastisement brought him face-to-face once again with all his unkept promises to clear out the stacks of historic refuse accumulated over the years in the subterranean no-man’s land his family called a basement. For reasons long since suppressed, he had convinced himself he could postpone the unpleasant task until some apocalyptic event prompted immediate action. Perhaps because cleaning up messes had never been among his preferences. Or, maybe the reluctance simply stemmed from a still-lingering childhood fear of dark places.

Eyes opened wide, Duncan stared up at the ceiling while he contemplated Melody’s prophetic warning. Storms and floods would be bad enough. A fire would be worse, especially in a bookstore. He did not even want to think about it.

After a few more moments of quiet meditation, he slapped his hands on his knees and leaped from his chair, determined to plunge into the Curious Owl’s cesspool of debris and put an end to any further mention of it. He slipped out of his white shirt and neatly pressed cotton slacks, climbed into a pair of faded blue jeans and a nearly threadbare sweatshirt, and committed himself to a full-scale assault on this dark place, which had been a repository for the Evans family’s history as far back as the records showed.

Fists clenched, he muttered to himself in his usual way of releasing tension. To hell with my lifelong reluctance to venture down there. Whatever apparitions might have taken up residence among all that junk could never be any worse than Melody’s abuse. The time for comfortable abstinence has now long since passed.

Chapter Two

Duncan hit the basement light switch and descended the squeaky stairwell into a place he’d been only once before, after which the frightened six-year-old made up his mind any ancient history buried in such a dark place would be best left alone. A dim light swung from the ceiling, and he remembered it casting crooked shadows of musty things warning him to go away. In a child’s way of thinking, goblins must certainly lurk in the overhead heating vents. What else could have made those noises at night?

Almost as cluttered then as now, the sunken repository revived memories of the dark sanctuary into which he had once descended a long time ago. The damp, pungent odor stung his nose again. It now seemed to arise more from the old stone walls and badly stained concrete floor than from the jumbled mess rising up before him in deliberate defiance of any reorganization plan. The light seemed to play on stacks of boxes piled up in no particular order and threw their dark silhouettes against gray walls.

The moment he set foot on the basement floor, Duncan sensed the onset of some unexplainable change about to occur in his life. This is irrational, he muttered, yet I cannot suppress an inner suspicion about this place. By God, there’s more than just a mess down here. It’s like something has been waiting for me. He ignored the moldy stench of the place and drew in a deep breath, more a reaction to this new awareness than to any need for an increase in oxygen.

After he replaced the dying light, Duncan shook his head. Damn my ancestors. They have bequeathed me a literary junk pile, and there is only one way to deal with it. He set to work marking each item as retain or discard. Old books claimed first priority. By the time he found them all, they totaled forty, of which twelve looked worthy of resurrection under some kind of last of its title category.

He elected to rank copies of historic correspondence in order of importance and box them accordingly. The longer he skimmed the yellowing documents, the more pronounced his look of despondence became. Every item not representing an empty, faceless administrative transaction seemed to shout the little bookstore’s glowing success under the capable management of his predecessors.

He shook his head. Rave reviews sent in from one end of the Cotswolds to the other; glowing records of successful book introductions and signings; special promotions followed by well-attended in-store readings; even customer parties celebrating the arrival of new first editions. None of these had ever come as rewards for his own performance. Worse, they all seemed to challenge capabilities he felt certain he could never develop. Duncan could feel his jaw clamping tight. He released the tension by shouting at the walls as if to provoke a release of the secrets they harbored during the last century. How thoughtless could my ancestors have been? At least one of them could have left me a damned operating manual for running this place. He reached to rub his tired eyes, hoping Melody had not heard the outburst.

Buy five books and get the sixth free announcements popped up here and there scattered among the special Friday discounts on outdated publications, all of which had once translated into high inventory turnover, positive cash flow, and profitable monthly income statements. Duncan now began to assume his predecessors might have purposely left no functional guidelines for the perpetuation of all the intangibles that set the Curious Owl apart as the model of what a bookstore should be. Even worse, a sudden thought hit him—any direct comparison of these colorful records with the current cash-hemorrhaging financials lying on his desk upstairs could easily become Exhibit-A in the Curious Owl’s culpable negligence case against the defendant Duncan Evans.

After five hours of labor had left him scrunched in a corner and buried in his blossoming feelings of guilt, Duncan failed to notice Melody standing behind him until she thrust the ham sandwich plate onto his lap and patted his head. He watched her loosen the ribbon she occasionally used to tie her hair back in a bun, and he could smell her clean, perfume-scented body in sharp contrast to the dank odor of the basement and his own sweatshirt and blue jeans, almost worn through at the knees from overuse.

Her delicate cheekbones flowed up to soft, rounded eyes now darkened with an uncharacteristic sadness. "Duncan, I’m sorry about what I said before. I did not mean to imply you’re not doing your best. I know you are. I love you, and I’m concerned that this shop is not doing much to brighten your life. Nor mine either. You look so glum sitting there on the floor, even more so than you did this morning when you were agonizing over those damned accounting records. Look, you have done enough for one day. Come on upstairs, eat your lunch, and spend whatever is left of the afternoon meeting customers and doing what you like best,