The Imprinter: The Grotesque Gurglios

By B.A. Foerster

Imagine dealing with a curse that means that everything you write becomes reality; and then discover it is a talent you share with another. So are the circumstances for Jesse Hollister and his long-lost grandmother, Julia Byerly. This family curse had been passed down through the generations, spun up nearly a hundred years ago on a fateful day that began as a celebration. Witness their attempts to overcome the imprinting compulsion as they destroy the evil creature that continuously haunts them. Follow them as they bring about the downfall of the horrendous monster. Such is the fate of an Imprinter. Are they doomed, or will they succeed?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645847199

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Blue Notebook—1955

W here are we going, Mother? asked a confused, wide-eyed girl, nearly seven years old. It was the middle of the night, and her mother had in a panic grabbed Julia from her bed and quickly stuffed the little girl’s plump arms into the worn winter coat, which the child had almost outgrown.

Hush, my child, her mother softly replied. Don’t you worry a bit. We are going to take a journey to visit a special place.

Julia had a vague memory of rubbing her eyes and then obediently following her mother as she led her out the front door; there a driver and his horse-drawn wagon waited, all in the dead of night. She felt strong hands lift her to the back of the wagon, where she immediately curled up in the corner behind the bench seat. The smell of straw was rich, and the soothing whispers of her mother’s voice speaking to the driver in front lulled Julia back to sleep.

She was too young at the time, but in looking back, she realized that something tragic must have happened to compel her mother to pull her from her warm bed to flee in secrecy. The wagon trip had just been part of their travel. She also remembered boarding a boat in the early morning hours; all of it took her farther and farther from what she had always known as her home.

Where’s Papa? she had asked. And whenever she recalled that painful question, filled with so much doubt and sadness, she could never remember the answer her mother had given. Though she tried to reconstruct the response, she could never fully trust if she remembered it correctly. Not until she was much older and had asked her mother again, with a better understanding of how events could shape a life, Whatever happened to Papa?

The automatic reply was always He was ill and died. Her mother would say it with such conviction before adding, He was much older than I. He was! My…the dear man was over fifty years old when you were born.

And then the conversation would turn to her mother asking questions about school, her friends, or if she was hungry. Until Julia would stare, speechless, knowing she would never ask the question she really was thinking: Who flees in the middle of the night when a loved one dies? Eventually she gave up asking.

Now Julia Byerly stood in the doorway of her unused writing room, gazing in, a glazed look in her eyes as if she were in a daze or trance. It was a flashback to a time when an inexplicable event had her mother bring her here to the Isle of Wight. It was so strange; she wishes she could make sense of it; it was as if they were meant to disappear. Her mother had even changed the spelling of their family name: Bauerla was now written as Byerly.

It is better that way, her mother had explained. They don’t know how to say it right.

Maybe in part it was due to some anti-German sentiment at the time, but Julia instinctively thought there was another reason.

Julia woke from the fog of vague memories and spotted the notebooks stacked on the shelves, hidden in the corner in the back of the room. A yearning always built up within herself to rush in and grab a binder, maybe the blue one—the only one that still had blank sheets of paper. She wanted to fill it with the words that were tossing around in her head. It couldn’t hurt, just a few words before she begins little Julius’s laundry—the baby clothes covered with spit-up milk or stained with the ointment for his diaper rash.

The baby cried in the distance, and she turned from her longing for the blue notebook and offered a small sigh to the silent room as she closed the door. It was better that she doesn’t write anyways…terrible things happened when she wrote. She never could understand why by taking a pencil to paper she could alter things.

Rumors had drifted across the sea within the vapors of a fog that there existed another who could also imprint. Her mother had tried to keep this from her, quickly shushing any speaking of it from the occasional visitor from the old country. But she had gleaned fragments of information before her mother had known she was listening; they always brought news of the ancient man who lived in some obscure village in their distant land, isolated in his madness.

The stories would account of his rantings as he maniacally wrote in notebooks by the evening light of a single lamp. Hunched over his writings, he was surrounded by strange shadows that danced across a filthy room filled with littered clothes and piles of weathered notebooks. People in the village knew with certainty that the crazy man’s words had been the cause of the bizarre events and nighttime monsters that had haunted them.

It is a hopeless case, the visitors always told her mother. You did right by leaving!

And Julia would always stumble closer to hear more, but her mother could sense that she was near and would quickly change the subject.

She herself remembered the time she wrote of frightening creatures, and she couldn’t explain why she wrote about them, but they turned out to be these mindless beasts who exhaled water and fire, interchangeably.

They had sharp fangs and fierce claws; fearful screams filled the air when an unfortunate neighbor happened to see them. Their dragon-like scales and spidery wings were huge when extended. But it was the horrendous, hideous sounds of their raspy breathing that caused the most terror. She would then need to quickly erase the words to make the creatures disappear as she had discovered that crumpling the paper could do nothing.

The baby’s cries had become more urgent now, and Julia quickened her steps to get to him. Opening the nursery door, she saw the bundle in the crib kicking and shaking his arms and legs, trying to rid himself of the heavy blanket. She offered comforting sounds as she lifted him in her arms; his crying ceased but was replaced with the whimpering sounds of hunger.

She calmly looked upon his soft, beautiful skin, reassuring herself that she would never surrender to the same fate as the man across the sea. Though she had weakened during her brief marriage, by succumbing to frenzied writing episodes, it would never happen again. Not now. She had a baby to care for, and besides, she was so much stronger now.

She understood how difficult it was for an imprinter to subdue the words…the writing…no matter the consequences. But she, unlike the madman, had a reason to control herself, right here in her arms. She would always have to remember that, in spite of the constant temptation of the unused paper in the blue notebook and the bright, fierce words that were bouncing in her head, for if she ever did anything that would risk her losing her son, she knew she could never forgive