The Space Between: The Space Between, #1

By Shawn D. Brink

When Hunter and his wife Nora begin to have nightmarish visions of evil and death, they feel driven to find what truth lies behind them. But the truth they find is terrifying.

 

The enemy they must face is powerful and unless defeated, will mean the end of the world as they know it. Only by standing firm and relying on each other as well as God can they achieve victory.

 

But is victory even possible? For Hunter and Nora, only time can reveal the answer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gabriel's Horn
• Release date: May 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781938990816

Shawn D. Brink

Shawn was born in Clovis New Mexico, but has lived in Nebraska since age five. He’s been writing fiction since old enough to hold a pencil, and telling stories before that. When not writing, Shawn keeps busy with his family, church, and playing the guitar. He has an undergraduate degree from Wayne State College and a graduate degree from Bellevue University.

Book preview

Chapter One

Kenneth Platt drove his old pale-blue Ford pickup down the lonely stretch of highway 35 that connected Norfolk and Wayne, Nebraska. He was going from the south, toward the north. His destination was Wayne.

He drove with that lazy sort of confidence, the kind that comes from doing a mundane task over and over so many times that it could be done without even thinking. This was the way it was with the trip between Wayne and Norfolk; a task he had done so many times he could do it with his eyes closed.

With the cruise control engaged, he hummed quietly to himself as he drove along. His fingers tapped on the steering wheel as if his hands were a practiced team of sequin-studded Rockettes doing their Vegas act for his sole entertainment. Likewise, his right foot, denied the responsibility of depressing the accelerator, tapped up and down in rhythm to the tune.

He drove through the darkness of night, humming and tapping, along the highway that resembled a giant serpent undulated in the prairie grass. He watched the road magically appear in front of him. It seemed to grow out of the darkness as his headlights brought it into view.

He glanced in his rear view mirror. Behind him, the road disappeared as quickly as it had appeared in front. It was as if the furnace-red glow of his taillights incinerated this giant serpent into ash and blackened bones.

He was alone on the road, but this was nothing unusual for that stretch of highway at that time of the evening on that day of the week.

This was a route without glamor and one Kenneth had taken so many times before that he often arrived at his destination without remembering anything about the trip. In fact, he’d been known to joke that a race of aliens routinely abducted him while he was traveling along this stretch of lonely rural highway.

On Saturdays, Sundays, and Tuesdays, Kenneth made the trip from Wayne to Norfolk and back again. He lived in Wayne, attending the state-college there, but the town of Wayne was small and lacked job opportunity. So, on the weekends he worked as a stock boy at a small discount store in Norfolk.

Compared to Wayne, Norfolk was a virtual metropolis, boasting a population of more than 20,000 souls. The potential for employment was equally boastful. This was why Kenneth did his lonely commute, at least as far as Saturdays and Sundays were concerned.

On Tuesdays however, he came to Norfolk for an altogether different reason. On that day, he came for lessons; guitar lessons to be precise.

One would think that after taking on a full-time college credit load, and a part-time job, extra lessons would only be an unwanted burden, but such was not the case for Kenneth.

He had grandiose dreams of being more than just another guy with a degree, destined for the stagnant grind of corporate life. No, Kenneth had bigger aspirations than that and it involved stardom.

Wearing ties, butt-kissing management, and working in a cube just wasn’t his thing. For him, this was plan B.

Nobody knew this was plan B except himself. He thought his parents would likely have simultaneous heart attacks if they found out he was not interested in being the college grad, middle management schmuck so many others seemed so keen to be. No, he had a plan A and that plan was to rock!

He wanted to be a rock star and often dreamed of the fame and glory that came with that lifestyle. Of course, he was not yet good enough for stardom. This was something he regretfully realized. Someday, though, he would be good enough.

Currently, he could play a few Ramones songs, which meant he knew exactly three chords. This was not sufficient to be the next American idol, but it was a start. Everybody had to start somewhere, after all. Even B.B. King had that moment when he first picked up a guitar and strummed the strings.

As he rode the snake-like highway, he glanced affectionately at his passenger, the current love of his life. It was not a woman. With all his activities, he hadn’t found much time to meet women. In the passenger seat sat his guitar, a Gibson Les Paul.

He didn’t love it quite the way he would have loved a woman, yet he had been intimate with it, telling it his deepest secrets and desires through the lyrics he wrote. They were only apart when he was in class or asleep.

Actually, they were consistently apart only in class, and then only because the professors would not allow the instrument to take up a seat. He had actually been known, on occasion to sleep with it. He didn’t do this for sexual reasons. It was mostly just to creep out his roommate who objected that his hobby had sped past healthy levels long ago.

As far as his hobby being an obsession, what did his roommate know anyway? He would think on this and smirk. His roommate was a business major, destined for nothing more than days filled with cubicle life, gossip by the water fountain, and annual reviews for minuscule wage increases. That life was not for Kenneth.

The guitar’s polished white finish glistened from the pickup’s greenish dash-light as if it were winking at Kenneth, flirting with him. The flirting worked. Kenneth wished he were home right now, playing those silvery strings and pouring his heart out in song. But first, he had to get home.

He didn’t have a case for his love, not even a cheap gig-bag. He had, instead, a roll of black plastic trash bags under the truck’s passenger seat so he could avoid getting the instrument wet if it rained.

It wasn’t that he thought the guitar didn’t deserve a case. He loved it more than that. He simply couldn’t afford one on his college student, discount store stock-boy paychecks.

He’d worked more than full-time at two jobs all summer and saved every cent he could to get that instrument. After he’d purchased it, along with a second-hand Peavey Rage 108 amplifier, he had nothing left for a case.

His humming grew into words and he began to serenade his love with touching lines from his Ramones library. It was a Ramones medley, a little Teenage Lobotomy, a bit from I Wanna be Sedated, a line from We’re a Happy Family.

He stopped abruptly mid-song, an action that would probably have put off his love if she’d been anything more than pieces of fine wood, bits of precisely-formed metal and high-gloss enamel.

He stared with eyes wide open out his front windshield and unconsciously slowed the pickup to barely fifty miles an hour. Ahead of him, a bolt of lightning had torn the night sky into fragments separated by white-blue rips.

It made no sense to Kenneth. First, mere seconds ago, he’d been driving under a starry sky. There hadn’t been a cloud to be found from horizon to horizon. Second, although lightning is not unheard of in Nebraska in late September, it is not at all common.

He hadn’t heard a clap of thunder. Then again, maybe his ears never had a chance to relay the sound to his brain. Mere milliseconds after this odd phenomenon occurred, something slammed into the pickup’s front windshield so hard that it transformed it into a useless piece of junk.

The thing was like a snake without eyes and, apparently, with a head of steel. Kenneth only got the slightest of glimpses of this—this—whatever it was. He had just enough time to take his foot off the accelerator. He did not have time to brake.

As easily as the thing had penetrated the windshield, it drive itself into Kenneth’s skull. It went in through his left eye-socket, which was comparatively less solid than automotive glass. It sliced through the tissue like a knife through warm butter and entered his brain.

Kenneth didn’t scream. His lungs exhaled with a gasp, but no scream. His legs slammed back down on the accelerator and brake at the same time. His hands fell free from the steering wheel, leaving the truck to its own course, not unlike the Minnow from Gilligan’s Island. And like the Minnow, it crashed.

It crashed hard, not into a deserted island, but into a mature cottonwood that stood twenty feet from the shoulder of highway 35.

The teeth-grinding sound of compacting Detroit steel and the cracking sound of hardened Nebraska wood being split interrupted the previously peaceful darkness of the Midwestern countryside. The truck, the tree, and Kenneth were no longer separate entities, but morphed into a new dying creature of steel, wood, and flesh.

The Les Paul was not wearing its seat belt and so was ejected and thrown. It collided with the tree and instantly splintered into a thousand pieces, one piece for every dollar of Kenneth’s paychecks that had gone towards its purchase. If Kenneth had seen this horrid end to his love, he most likely would have had an instant aneurysm. Luckily for him, he was far too preoccupied with death in general and the thing in his brain specifically, to care.

Upon uniting truck with tree, Kenneth slammed into the dash, cracking possibly every rib in his chest, but throughout the crash, the snake-thing held tight to its prey. Kenneth continued to twitch as a light inside his head began to grow and illuminate his skull like a jack-o-lantern that had been filled with a road flare where the candle should have been.

Inside what used to be the cab of the truck, but was now nothing more than a distorted, twisted bed of Kenneth the Dead, black smoke curled from the deceased’s nose, ears, and eyes. Then the light began to fade. Kenneth went limp, and as quickly as it had entered, the killer escaped.

It retracted itself back up into the sky, as if it were a fisherman’s line and the owner of the pole had decided to re-bait the hook. It exited from view through the curiously strange black slit in the sky. Then with a second flash of lightning, the slit vanished.

The sky was as it had been, starry and cloudless. The only evidence that anything had happened lay with the wreckage and what existed within it.

Under the cottonwood, which was still showering everything under it with autumn leaves, Kenneth’s pickup hissed and vomited steam from a cracked and hemorrhaging radiator. The scene was like  a steam room from hell’s spa.

Inside the cab, Kenneth was dead, his lovely passenger was in pieces, and it seemed highly unlikely he would ever become a rock star, or even a plan B corporate slave.

EXCERPT FROM THE NORFOLK Daily Newspaper Oct 1st:

A fatal accident on Highway 35 near the Hoskins exit was found early this morning by a local farmer. Kenneth Platt, age 20, was pronounced dead at the scene. It appeared Mr. Platt lost control of his pickup and hit a tree in a head-on collision. He was going approximately 60 miles per hour at the time of the accident. Arrangements are pending. Mr. Platt was a student at Wayne State College, majoring in...

Chapter Two

"And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams, your young men shall see visions ." – Joel 2:28

I’M THE HUNDRED-YEAR-old woman in the hundred-year-old store. With my hundred-year-old eyes I guard the hundred-year-old door.

The woman who chanted these words was definitely old; wrinkled like a prune and seemingly as fragile as fine porcelain, consisting of more dust than flesh. The voice he heard must have come from her, for the voice that spoke sounded as ancient as time itself.

The point of view from which Hunter watched this woman was bizarre to say the least. He seemed to hover over her, watching from every angle at the same time. He knew he was dreaming again, or more precisely; he was having a vision. She had visited him before, but never as a mere dream, yet not in reality either. This was different. It was a vision.

Even though he floated about, observing the chanting woman, he kept coming back to her face. More specifically, her eyes attracted him.

Her eyes drew his attention on this occasion just as they had every previous occasion. They were so brown, a deep haunting brown. They reminded Hunter of rich loam extracted from the bottom of a fertile riverbed, and of a river that meanders through time year after year, cutting an ever-deeper gorge. So, too, these eyes showed a history of years upon years.

Hunter stared deeply into those ancient, wise eyes and knew she was the hundred-year-old woman.

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul and when Hunter gazed into those windows, he saw, not his own reflection, but the reflection of a door. It was bright yellow with a coal-black knob. It looked very old, at least as old as the window that reflected its image.

He concentrated hard on this reflection in her eyes when suddenly the door flung wide. A black, snake-like entity exploded from the opening.

It was coming for him! He tried to scream, but his lungs seemed stuffed with mucus. It shot at him with the speed of an arrow, but in his vision-scape, time itself seemed somehow distorted. He knew it was coming for him swiftly and yet it seemed to take so very long for it to emerge from the door.

What would happen when the arrow found its mark? Hunter felt sure he knew. It would crack open his skull as if it were some exotic nut and feast on the delicious meat inside.

The thing was now only an inch from his own eye. He tried to shut it out by forcing his eyelid down. He wanted desperately to terminate this vision of terror, but the muscles that controlled his eyelids would not respond. And all the while, the chanting continued.

I’m the hundred-year-old woman in the hundred-year-old store. With my hundred-year-old eyes I guard the hundred-year-old door.

The thing scraped his eye with the bony tip of its head. Hunter could feel it. It didn’t sting, not yet anyway; but psychologically, it  seared his mind as if the creature were a poker drawn from hell’s own furnace.

Hunter suspected pain was just around the corner. He looked desperately for a way out of his situation, but no solution presented itself.

He felt as if he were being tasted, sampled like a cocktail wienie in a supermarket sample display—but this was more serious than getting a toothpick skewered through him and eaten by some obese woman in a flower-print moo-moo while supermarket music played over a static-ridden speaker system.

He was sure the thing was sampling his very essence, his soul, and working up its taste-buds for the real meal to follow.

He grasped the thing with both hands and tried to force it back, but was failing. Either he had no strength in this strange world, or the creature was freakishly strong.

The feeling of it in his hands repulsed him. It felt as if it were made of evil itself. Hunter had never before known that evil could be felt through physical touch, but now he knew.

Vomit stung the back of this throat. He swallowed hard, forcing it back down.

The thing felt cold like ice and yet, at the same time, hot as if powered by the sun itself. The icy-hot sensation didn’t just influence the skin that touched it, but drove into him, into his very bones, into his very soul. It seemed to corrupt him somehow.

He put all of his weight into resisting its encroachment, into pushing it back. He hated how it made him feel to touch it, yet must not let go, not at any cost. He must not let it enter him.

The snake continued—pushing forward. Then, he did what he had always done before, both in his previous visions as well as in real life.

He began to count.

One-two-three-four-five.

On the five-count, the snake-thing disappeared, dissolving into nothingness. The chanting ceased as well. The woman vanished into thin air. The vision terminated as quickly as it had begun.

Hunter sat straight up in his bed, his eyes opened wide. A cold sweat covered him, soaking through his nightshirt and dampening his sheets.

Hunter looked around frantically, but the sadistic vision had not followed him into the world of reality. With that confirmation, he began the slow decent into relative calmness.

His pulse slowed. His breathing, which to that point had been quick and shallow, slowed to a steadier, deeper pace. His thoughts, which had become erratic and instinctive, became less those of an animal and more those of a human.

He had escaped once more.

He sighed with relief as his escape sank in. This had been the fifth night in a row the vision had come to visit him in his bed and disrupted his sleep. This vision differed from nightmares in many ways and Hunter’s analytical mind could not help but notice the key differences.

For one thing, the intensity was beyond compare. In many ways, while he was experiencing it, it felt more real than real life. And unlike dreams, the memories of the event did not seem to fade with time. If anything, they grew more acute inside his mind as the day wore on.

By afternoon, his uneasiness always started to increase because he knew night was approaching. He would have to sleep and he felt sure he would have to endure yet another visit from this old-woman apparition.

He never got used to it. Every night it seemed no less frightening than the night before. Furthermore, and strangest of all, was that he knew counting to five ended the nightmare that intertwined with the vision. Yet, he never seemed to do it until the last possible second. It wasn’t by choice that he waited until the end to terminate the vision; he simply seemed unable to stop it until the last possible moment. It was as if the vision itself dictated the rhythm and cadence of the plot.

It was all very strange to say the least, and what was worse, he knew the terror would come to him again the next night. This had been the fifth night for this odd and terrible phenomenon, which was very significant for Hunter. First, he had to count to five to end the vision: one count for every night it had come. Second, the number five had embedded itself into his life ever since he could remember. It represented a compulsion, a tick; an obsession.

His life revolved around the number five, and always had. If he was turning off a light, he had to touch the switch five times. If he was turning on his alarm clock, he had to turn the alarm off and on five times, and so on and so forth with countless other things in his life as well.

Among the worst was the obsession in relation to his car. If he had parked and was about to leave it, he had a mental checklist of items he had to go through before he could walk away. He had to check that his headlights were off. He had to check that the windows were up. He had to check that all the doors were properly shut. He needed to ensure he was evenly spaced between the yellow lines of his parking place. He had to make certain the interior light was off.

In