Beast A Haunted World

By D. L. Frazell

Was humanity cursed after 9/11?These are trying times for many people. Quality of life seems to be on an accelerating downward slide that began on September 11, 2001. It is as if an unknown hand were tracing downward strokes on a cosmic touchscreen.Some would say the hand would be divine. Others, demonic. Still, others would blame witchcraft and black magic. Environmentalists might define the hand as humanity's own. Scientists would rule themselves out and deny that any science could be mad. Not so fast, inventors might say. No one knows what innovations lie ahead or what unforeseen discoveries have not yet been made.Perhaps the guilty fingers are not fingers at all but the claws of a malevolent beast that haunts civilization and draws its power from a curse conjured from the bowels of the unknown.In this work of imagination, all things are possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662486166

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Beast A Haunted World

D. L. Frazell

Copyright © 2022 D. L. Frazell

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and events either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance between the characters and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-6624-8615-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8616-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Book 1

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

Book 2

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

Interlude

Book 3

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Epilogue

About the Author

Introduction

Something beyond the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center must have happened on September 11, 2001—something catastrophic. A historic hinge of fate appears to have taken a creaky turn on or about that date. No aspect of what had been regarded as normal life remained the same afterward. Civilization seems to have begun a slow degenerative slide toward a dark place.

Airline travel became an ordeal. Civility was pummeled to the mat and stomped upon. Politics turned into a savage bare-knuckle fight. Democracy, to use a presidential phrase, had a knife at its throat. Warfare became a technological nightmare, and proliferating nuclear weapons and delivery systems pushed humanity closer to annihilation. The climate turned against us. Storms became more monstrous. Floods tore apart homes and lives. Fires reached higher, burned hotter, and scorched not only forests but towns as well. Millions became refugees and flocked to the borders of countries that seemed to offer a better life but wanted no immigrants. Then came a vast pandemic that killed millions worldwide, forced us to stay inside or mask up if we went out, and made us all grow abysmally weary of it all.

What could possibly be going on here? Is a mysterious hand etching downward strokes on some cosmic touchscreen? Some would say such a hand would be divine. Others would call it demonic. Science might say it is the hand of humanity itself as nature rebels against abuse.

Reader, you are standing at one of those doors you find in horror films, the ones that open into the unknown, where no one possessed of functional faculties would ever go, but somebody always does. Follow me through this portal if you dare, but stay behind if you are afraid of the dark. Stay close to the safety of your convictions about the nature of things. Those who enter should bear in mind that all that lies ahead is imagination—nothing more.

Prologue

Jenna stood in her bedroom, only it wasn't a room anymore. It was only a floor, the same hardwood floor her mother had polished just a few days before. The roof was gone. The walls were gone. Her bed was gone. Her desk was gone. The whole house was gone, blown apart and scattered in pieces across the land, along with most of the rest of the buildings in the Florida neighborhood where she lived. A giant tornado, the biggest in the recorded history of the county, had struck at twilight only yesterday.

Jenna was playing a video game when the destruction began. It was a game so fascinating that she wasn't aware of anything but the children who were being devoured by the monsters that were everywhere and could be stopped only by Jenna's quick eyes and fingers. She had to protect the children, but she wasn't good enough to save them all, and every time a child disappeared into a monster's maw, she wanted to cry. So engrossed was she that she didn't even hear her mother calling her.

The first thing she noticed was the hair rising on her scalp. It was as if a giant vacuum cleaner was sucking at her, trying to pull the very skin off her body. Then she heard the roar and the terrible rending sounds as nails parted company with wood and boards became splinters and shreds. She threw herself to the floor and covered her head with her arms, but gravity forsook her, and she was flying. The darkness was so black that she couldn't see anything, but she felt objects glancing off her body. Luckily, nothing large dealt her a solid blow. Things scraped and whizzed past her, inflicting cuts and bruises.

She came to rest on the ground at the base of a once-tall tree that had been reduced to a six-foot stump. The wind simply deposited her there with a gentleness that must have been divine. Then it dumped a huge section of roof on top of her. Without the stump, she would have been crushed. Instead, the roof sheltered her from all the things that came showering and thumping and pounding down on it.

Lying in pain, unmoving and unseeing, she remembered the beast. She had seen it in the woods behind her house, back when there had been a house and the trees had still stood. It was like a wolf but much bigger than any wolf she had ever read about or seen on television. Taller than she was, it had red eyes and huge teeth that dripped ooze. She felt certain it would eat her and knew it was so close, it could be upon her in only a few bounds, but she couldn't run away or scream because she was paralyzed with fear. She was just an eight-year-old girl in blue jeans and a red jacket about to become lunch for a monster like the children in her game until the beast lost interest in her and loped away.

She knew it was a dream, but it had seemed real, and with her face in the mud and the world crashing down around her, she couldn't stop thinking about it. The wind wasn't nearly as terrifying as the beast, and when the roar died away and something came shuffling toward her in the dark, she finally began to scream because she thought it might be the beast coming to get her. She kept screaming as friendly hands drew her from under the roof and carried her to a shelter where her mother was waiting. Only her mother's embrace could put an end to her screaming.

Jenna didn't tell her mom about the beast. She knew what she'd say.

Oh, sweetie, that was just a dream.

Honey, monsters are only in stories. They're not real.

Don't worry, sweetheart, we're here to keep you safe.

Stuff like that.

Even if Mom believed her, what could she do—send out a hunting party with guns and dogs? They wouldn't find anything. The beast had moved on. And somebody might get shot.

She bottled up her terror in her heart and showed her mother her placid kid face. They spent the night in the shelter, which was the gymnasium at the undamaged high school, and in the morning, they rode in a volunteer's car to salvage what they could find from the wreckage of their home.

In the bottom of what had been her closet, Jenna found something. Her clothes were all gone, but on the floor—lined up just as she had left them—were her shoes: her Reeboks, her sandals, and her hated school oxfords. Lying on top of them and possibly accounting for their survival was a box Jenna had never seen before.

She examined it carefully before touching it. It was made of metal, and it measured about nine inches by twelve inches by three inches deep—the sort of box adults keep important papers in. It was black, as such boxes ought to be, and it had hinges on one side and a clasp on the other with a push-button latch. The button had a slot for a key.

She picked up the box and looked it over for a name or identifying mark but found nothing. Inside, she thought, I will find the name of the owner—my mom maybe or some neighbor whose house was also blown apart. She pushed the button, and the box popped open. She placed it on the floor and carefully lifted the lid. Inside was a stack of paper, and there was printing on each page. She closed the box so none of the pages would blow away in the light breeze.

It's somebody's story, she thought, and it would be fun to read it. She would have to ask her mother first. She retrieved her shoes, put on the Reeboks, and slung the others around her neck so she could grasp the box with both arms. Holding it tightly, she set off in search of her mother.

Jenna found her busy talking to a man with a clipboard. They were discussing insurance. Unable to get the attention of her parent, she decided it would be okay to look at the papers. She had to so she could find out whose box it was. She went to the car they had arrived in, got into the back seat, and began to read.

For my part, I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved or manipulated,—whichever term you want to use—by our personality, as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.

Thomas A. Edison

American Magazine, 1920

Edison never referred to his device as the Telephone to the Dead; it is a name that has been given to this device by paranormal researchers. In his essays, the item he was working on was likened to a valve that would amplify the ability for the swarms [of life units] to manipulate the object so that it does not matter how slight is the effort, it will be sufficient to record whatever there is to be recorded.

ITCVoices.org, 2011

If the dead see us and care for us and hang about in the air longing to reach us, how can their eternal homelessness be a consolation to us or to them?

Valerie Martin

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, 2014

Book 1

The Narrative

1

The Blue House

Friday, September 7, 2001

Afternoon

Cypress Haven, Florida

I don't expect you to believe this account of what happened to me. You are perhaps the only reader I will ever have, and if you are sane, you're likely to dismiss it as insane. That was my reaction every time a new shock belched up from the bowels of nowhere. Yet if you follow me past this paragraph and pursue my narrative all the way to the end, while suspending your inclination to disbelieve and keeping your mind open to the possibility of unknown possibilities, I promise you will never again view the world around you in the same old way.

It all began at a blue house. Small, square, and built of concrete blocks, it stood on a quiet street in a village called Cypress Haven, which existed purely as a refuge for people from somewhere else who fancied a leisurely place to live out their golden years with sea, sand, and sun.

I had been summoned to the blue house by a gruff caller who purported to possess a device invented by Thomas Edison but never revealed to the public. I had no illusions about the veracity of this claim, but it sounded like excellent grist for my newspaper column, Things People Do, which appeared three times a week. If you compiled all my columns into a book—something I plan to do someday—you would have a huge index of all the cranks, crackpots, weirdos, and oddballs who inhabit the Sunshine State. If you have a quirk—and who doesn't—you're likely to take up residence there sooner or later.

The caller's name was Torbert Tolliver. On the phone, he seemed a little military, barking orders as if he was my platoon sergeant or something. I knew he might be a raving loony, with nothing to say I could quote, but if he really had a piece of junk Edison threw away, I could milk him for more than one column. Florida was proud of its association with Edison. He once lived here part time, and his house became a tourist attraction. Anything new about Edison would interest lots of readers.

If I had known what I was getting into, I would have driven as far away as I could go up I-75. But instead, on that sultry, fateful Florida afternoon, I drove down a sleepy street and parked at Tolliver's address. When I stepped out of my air-conditioned car, the humid heat slapped me in the face like a steaming wet towel and my lemon-yellow polo was quickly drenched in sweat.

Nothing provoked any shudders as I walked up the cracked driveway past a dead Bermuda grass lawn choked with crispy creepers—not that I'm shudder prone. Most horror movies make me laugh. I see the humor in just about everything.

A lizard regarded me from a parched bush and flexed its colorful throat muscles as I poked the doorbell button. In response, I thought I heard a slight rustling on the other side of the bright blue door, which had a peephole with a lens about the diameter of a pencil, so I turned on my warmest engaging smile, one of my chief assets in this job. People are willing to put up with almost anything if they can be persuaded to like you.

The door opened a crack.

Mr. Tolliver? I said cheerfully. I'm Bill Lefhans. You know, the Lefhans never knows what the right one is doing, I said this with a chuckle, but the darkness behind the door issued no response. I'm a few minutes late for our appointment, but I hope that won't matter.

Apparently, it didn't. The door opened wide, and a blast of cold air took my breath away. The air-conditioning must have been cranked all the way up.

Standing in the doorway was a man who was tall, gaunt, and old. He wore an antique double-breasted suit, probably to keep warm. He peered at me with dead eyes from under a neatly combed mane of snow-white hair and a matching bristle of eyebrows. His sunken cheeks and sharp chin had been recently shaved without a nick. He might have just stepped down from a barber's chair.

Shivering in my damp shirt, I said, I promise not to tell any more jokes. May I come in or would you rather talk out here where it's warm?

His response was to lift a skeletal hand and wave me inside. The living room of the tiny house was bare walled and sparsely furnished.

You must have Thomas Edison's original air conditioner, I said, folding my arms across my chest.

Please sit down, he said in a funereal tone.

I took a seat on a straight-backed wooden chair and took out my pocket tape recorder.

Do you mind if I record this?

His eyes, like pebbles under his shadowing brow, focused on mine.

I'm at the end of the road, Mr. Lefhans, he said. I don't have much time left. It's unimportant what device you may choose to use in this interview. Soon, I will have nothing more to say about anything. Everything will be up to you.

Up to me? Weird. Uncertain how to respond, I said nothing and turned on the recorder.

I have waited too long to do this, he went on, pausing to catch his breath. He seemed exhausted by the exertion of merely talking. I should have made time to—he groped for a word—prepare you. You will be on your own, and I apologize for that. Unfortunately, it can't be helped now.

Prepare me for what? I don't get it. My lemon-yellow shirt felt like a frozen confection.

The responsibility. The burden. At my death, you will become the owner of this house and proprietor of the valve.

The what? I shivered.

The valve. It's Edison's term, and it is not really correct. It's more of a portal, like a tap on a pipeline.

I expelled a vapor cloud. Is that the Edison invention you told me about? Is it a valve of some sort? Bad luck. What could be duller than a valve?

Edison inspired it. He didn't invent it.

More bad luck. The Edison connection was looking very tenuous.

Tolliver said, Edison was a great man, a scientist. He theorized, and others listened, then constructed things to prove his theories—things like that.

His bony finger pointed. I looked. On a table in the corner was a black box, something like an old-time movie projector without reels.

What is it? It sure didn't look like a valve.

The old man cleared his throat. Edison tried to prove the existence of life after death.

With that?

He tried to create a telephone to the dead.

Maybe I was in luck after all. I was already coming up with column ideas based on the telephone to the dead. It was a sure crowd pleaser.

Does it work? I asked.

I have no idea. Perhaps somebody knows, but I do not. That object is supposed to be a replica of his device. I bought it at a flea market.

Have you tried to use it?

No.

You haven't tried? I wondered if I could talk him into letting me try.

He dashed that hope. It doesn't matter. It's a fake—hollow inside. I mentioned it because it's the kind of thing that interests fools like you.

I didn't like being called a fool, even if maybe I was one.

You're the fool who bought the thing, I said. Is there anything here that isn't fake?

The valve is not fake.

Nobody is interested in reading about a valve, especially one that wasn't invented by Edison. I'll refer you to a plumbing magazine, if I can find one.

It isn't the kind of valve you're thinking of. This one was invented by Franklin Melby.

So what?

You never heard of him?

His fame has escaped my notice.

He was your grandmother's sister's husband, your mother's uncle.

You're nuts. My mother never had an uncle.

I assure you she did.

She never mentioned it.

That doesn't mean he didn't exist.

Okay, let's say he did exist. So what?

Look, he snapped, I know what you are, a pissant scribbler who makes his living making fun of people. I assure you I am not one of your certified Florida kooks. I'm perfectly sane, and I wouldn't have anything to do with you, except you're Melby's only heir.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm here to do an interview, nothing more, and I'm not interested in inheriting anything.

You have no choice. You are his only remaining male descendant, which means this house and everything in it, including Mr. Melby's device, will soon be yours. My will is all signed and legally witnessed. Here is your copy. The law firm in the letterhead has the original.

He picked up an envelope from a small table beside him and held it out to me. I ignored it.

Now I know you're nuts, I said. You can't just require me to take your house. I don't want it. I don't want any house.

The house was built in 1953. I have modernized it and modified it to contain the valve and keep it controlled—tightly controlled. I have accomplished the task to the best of my ability for most of my lifetime, but now I'm afraid.

He paused, and I waited. I didn't comprehend what he was saying, but he had my attention.

Well, what? I said. What are you afraid of?

His eyes bored into mine.

The valve is old, he said. The metal is corroded and brittle. I see a crack forming.

So what does that mean? It's going to blow up?

Maybe.

Good. Then I won't have to worry about it.

Oh, but you will. You will. You can't let it happen for the sake of civilization.

I hate to repeat myself, but you're nuts.

His face slackened and sagged into a new, even more somber expression.

I wish I were nuts, Mr. Lefhans, but I'm not.

Well, neither am I, and I'm getting the hell out of here. I turned off the recorder and stood up.

Sit down! Tolliver roared with a force that put me right back in my chair.

He dropped the envelope he had been trying to hand me and from somewhere produced a gun. It was a small automatic, and he appeared to know how to use it.

I am a desperate man, he said. I have cancer, and I'm out of time.

He crossed his legs and sat back in his stiff-backed chair, keeping the gun steadily trained on my chest. I switched the recorder back on.

I think you're healthier than you think, Tolliver, I said. Healthy enough to serve some jail time when I get out of here and tell the sheriff you pulled a gun on me.

He smiled unpleasantly. You miss the point. My future is of no concern to me or anyone else. Yours, on the other hand, is of supreme importance to the entire world. If you doubt it, ask Flinch.

Who?

He uttered a grim little chuckle, pointed the gun at his temple, and fired.

2

Running for My Life

Friday, September 7, 2001

Cypress Haven, Florida

The bullet was small caliber, so his head didn't explode. He simply slumped off his chair and hit the floor with a sorry thump. I jumped out of my chair, knocking it backward as I scrambled out of his way. He didn't move or make a noise. He didn't even bleed much—just a trickle in front of his ear.

I should have called the cops right then, turned the whole situation over to them. Subsequent events might have been different if I had. But like a lot of other people, I had a horror of getting involved. This man's decision to kill himself right in front of me wasn't really any of my business. I didn't want to spend hours answering questions and dealing with a lot of groundless suspicions. Besides, I was in shock. Who wouldn't be?

What I did was run away. I scuttled out of the house like a scared rat and skedaddled, and I didn't slow down until I was back at the office, sitting at my desk. Then I started to shake. Maybe I was still shivering from the awful cold in that house. Or maybe I was having a delayed reaction to Tolliver's strange decision to make his last day on earth my worst day. All I'm sure of is that I shook.

I had a deadline and nothing to write. Suicide wasn't an appropriate topic for my mostly good-natured column, and I couldn't write about Tolliver without mentioning it. He wasn't a subject for me anyway. He was too strange, in a zone way beyond twilight, beyond help. There was nothing anyone could do but bury him. So why did I slink back into the office instead of striding in with my usual nonchalance? Why did I sit staring at my blank computer screen while trying to focus my rampaging thoughts? And why was I shaking?

A voice at my elbow asked, Any art with your column?

A needle up my backside couldn't have jolted me any higher out of my chair.

Hey, relax, Lefty man, said Maggie, my editor, who had slipped into my cubicle unnoticed. I gulped like a culprit with the goods in my hands. Simmer down for God's sake, she said. It's only me. What's the problem? Having trouble dealing with Florida's foolish?

Sorry, Mag. I guess I'm a little jumpy.

Jumpy? You're totally rattled. What happened with the Edison guy?

Who?

You know, the man you went to interview. The guy with the old invention.

You know about that?

Of course, I know about that. Everybody knows about that. You wrote about it in your last column.

I did? Oh, yeah. Shit, what a mistake that was.

Why? What happened?

Nothing. Nothing at all. There's no guy. No invention. No art. No column. I got nothing.

He doesn't exist? I shook my head. But you talked to him on the phone, didn't you?

I talked to somebody. Listen, Mag, can you cover for me—dig up something you've been holding for an emergency?

Sorry, man, the larder's empty.

How about something from the past—you know, a classic column?

She frowned. I'll ask George about it, but I don't think he'll buy it.

George was the boss, the managing editor.

Okay, I said. How about this? Run a little note saying I'm sick.

Sick? Too sick to write a column? Huh, maybe so. You do look sick. She walked away, then came back. We're gonna get a lot of email about this, she said. What shall I say is wrong with you? The flu or something worse? Cancer, maybe?

Shit no, not cancer. I don't know. Flu, I guess. Make something up. Hey, Mag, can I ask you something?

She gave me a look. She was in her midfifties, a good twenty years older than I, and she had a face I can best describe as comforting. I regarded her as my other mother, but if anybody ever told her that, I'd deny it vehemently.

Shoot, she said.

What would you do if somebody committed suicide right in front of you?

What kind of question is that? Oh, God. Is that what happened—the Edison guy killed himself?

I pantomimed a gun pointed at my temple.

She paused and looked a little troubled. Then she shrugged. I guess I'd do what you apparently did: Get the hell out of there and pretend nothing happened.

Yeah, that's what I did, I said.

She peered at me over her half-glasses.

Go have a drink. Take a couple of days off. I'll cover for you.

She understood why I was shaking. A loony old man had scared me out of my gourd by talking about a valve that might blow up, turning the thing over to me, and then killing himself. If George found out I was mixed up in something I should be writing about, he might tell me to take some time off, a whole lot of time off.

At that moment, a thought struck me. The envelope Tolliver had tried to give me was still on the floor near his body. I had walked out and left it there. If it contained what he had said it did, I'd be the first person contacted when the body was found. My face, no doubt, betrayed my dismay.

Stay away from the boat, Bill, Maggie said.