A Mad Awakening

By Sasha Hibbs

The dead are meant to stay dead. Eighteen-year-old Albert Frank Young knows because he’s one of them. He had his life planned out with intentions of attending college in the fall with his brilliant girlfriend, Mary Shelley. What he didn’t plan for? Dying before his dreams were realized.

Over the course of one night, his life, and Mary’s, change forever. Mary’s brilliance quickly turns into a maddening obsession fueled by the death of Albert. Death took her mother away. She’ll be damned if death takes her boyfriend away too. In crossing the line between life and death, Mary damns them both before she realizes the realm of the living and land of the dead is an arena she has no right to meddle in.

A story of young love, the depths grieving drives the heart to, and the consequences that follow. This gothic tale proves love lives beyond the grave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evernight Teen
• Release date: Jan 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9780369504975

Book preview

Published by Evernight Teen ® at Smashwords

www.evernightteen.com

Copyright© 2022 Sasha Hibbs

ISBN: 978-0-3695-0497-5

Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

Editor: Jessica Ruth

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

For my sister, Claudette. It’s about time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I always wish I had some eloquent way of saying thank you, other than simply saying it, but somehow it works. I have so many people to thank, firstly, Pamela Leonard. You’ve been with me for every single book. I cannot imagine ever doing this without you. This partnership has nearly spanned a decade. Here’s to the next.

Evernight Teen, thank you to the entire team. Stacey, the editors, cover designer extraordinaire, Jay. I’m grateful and humbled at your belief in my work.

Mary Shelley—the eighteen-year-old woman who wrote Frankenstein over 200 years ago and revolutionized literature, paving the way for other women in this arena. Thank you for your contribution to the world. All these years later, your work is still something to behold, a true testament of a woman ahead of her time.

My darling, precious, sweet daughters—Aeliza and Ava. Everything is secondary to the best and most favorite part of my life—being your mother. You both are lights in a world full of darkness.

And finally, my husband, Tim. I’ve cried a thousand tears. Twenty-two years of marriage. We have seen and felt great love and sorrow together. You didn’t drown in my tears. You swam through them, keeping us both afloat until we could reach the shore. And then you dried them away. Thank you for loving me every day. My love for you is without end.

A MAD AWAKENING

Sasha Hibbs

Copyright © 2022

Preface

Albert

"I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel…"

~ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

My girlfriend, Mary, never understood the conflict between the mind and the heart until she resurrected me. When you die, the world bleeds away. When you’re reanimated, it’s like spilled ink but in reverse, leaving blots along the edges of your mind, gaping white holes where fog fills the void created by them.

The dead are meant to stay dead. I know because I am one of them.

When alive, I was Albert Frank Young, the pastor’s eighteen-year-old son who would begin college in the fall. I was reintroduced to Mary Shelley the summer before my death. Her parents forced her to come to my father’s church, fearing she was too involved with science and would somehow forget God. Little did they know science would bring her closer to God than my father’s church ever could.

In the Deep South, there were things to fear: whispering swamps filled with alligators, live oaks festooned with Spanish moss reaching out like the very fingers of the devil caressing you on the shoulder as you passed by, and me, the monster my girlfriend created.

Mary was brilliant, bigger than her small town and almost obsessed with science and medicine. Her parents didn’t want to force her to go to church to cure her of her curiosity, but rather to serve as a reminder that God and science can coexist. They didn’t want her to forget Him.

The summer of Mary’s mother’s death, she was forever changed. She wasn’t the girl I’d fallen for. She became even more fascinated with things better left alone. At the time, I chalked it up to part of a grieving process I had no experience with. Looking back, I can see now how wrong I was, and how that moment in Mary’s life changed her forever and, in doing so, produced the monster I am now.

Chapter One—A Moment of Reflection

Mary

"Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it."

~ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

When my mother died, I hadn’t quite perfected the formula yet, the one that could restore her to life. Her death fueled my grief and desire to stop what God should’ve never allowed. How is it natural to live and love only for those closest to us to perish? God intended for us all to go back from where we came: the earth. When my mother died, I made it my life’s goal to take them back from the dirt. To me it was a matter of justice. I couldn’t wait for divine intervention. At the time, I didn’t believe in such nonsense.

With some apprehension, my parents allowed my fascination with science and medicine to grow under their watchful eye. Their only condition was that I go to church with them every Sunday. They believed that God’s word would coalesce with the facts of science. If anything, going to church did serve one divine miracle: Albert, the preacher’s son.

Chemistry is a strange thing. Albert and I were so different. He was a lover of nature—God’s nature—a lover of literature and of the arts. He was better suited for my sister, Elizabeth. But as the saying goes—opposites attract. I couldn’t believe in things I couldn’t see with my own two eyes. But he did, and I loved him for it. In anyone else it was an eye-roll to hear about abstract concepts and profound feelings, but hearing these rantings from Albert’s lips, through a dimpled smile, I was no longer a young feminist and amateur scientist. I was simply a young girl head over heels in love. Albert possessed all the qualities I lacked in myself, and it drew me to him with a force so strong even death could not conquer my love for him.

Albert provided the shoulder to cry on when my mother died, and I suspected he turned a blind eye when my hunger for eternity became more obvious. I’ll never forget the night he died. He and my sister’s boyfriend, Victor, were driving over to see me and my sister. Albert picked Victor up at his house. I’m sure Albert’s father and Victor’s parents never imagined it would be the last night they would ever see their sons alive again. Albert’s face was nearly shattered on the left side, his body mangled, but the windshield wiper impaling his heart nearly made mine falter.

Before he died, Albert would talk fervently about art, or a book he’d just read, and I never paid much attention to what he was saying, only his passionate movements, the way the light played across his face, the expression in his eyes, and the way he would rub his fist over his heart in small circles as though to emphasize how deeply he felt, a movement I don’t think he was even aware of. But it was that movement over his heart that always held my attention. The thought of his heart not being whole, that wretched muscle he believed in more than the brain, which was superior in my mind … led me to Victor’s corpse.

It wasn’t too difficult sneaking into the funeral home, but it was difficult chiseling into Victor’s chest cavity and removing his whole heart to replace the shattered one of my boyfriend’s. I would never tell Elizabeth. I would never tell anyone. Albert was my love, my life. And God took him from me. He took Victor from Elizabeth, too. But she believed in His wisdom. I believed in my own.

And as I placed the last stitches into Albert’s face, and set the voltage on high, my heart swelled with love. Albert would be proud of me for finally allowing my heart to guide me instead of my brain.

Or so I thought.

Chapter Two—Life Before Death

Mary

"When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?"

~ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

There were two words that would haunt me for the rest of my life: ovarian cancer. I have never been so utterly cut down by two other words than those that slipped through the lips of