12 Hours

By L .Marie Wood

The cabbie only remembers taking a break, pulling over in an alley to catch both his breath and the sunrise. His windshield shatters, and two people dash away. He tries to scream, to move, but his neck won’t turn. He can only stare at the cab's dirty ceiling. Finally, a deliveryman calls the cops. Surely, they’ll arrive soon, but we’re pinned in place right along with him as he tries to puzzle it all out.

In this second installment of the CSAP novella series, award-winning author L. Marie Wood uses her descriptive powers to bring us fully into one incident in a person's life, and hold us there, transfixed, until we see it all, crystal clear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
• Release date: Apr 19, 2024
• ISBN: 1947879650

Book preview

12Hoursweb.png

12

HOURS

L. Marie Wood

12 Hours © 2024 by L. Marie Wood

Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press

Bowie, MD

First Edition

Cover art copyright 2023 by Lynne Hansen

LynneHansenArt.com

Printed in the United States of America

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons

living or dead is unintentional.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945812

RawDogScreaming.com

Other Books by L. Marie Wood

Crescendo

The Promise Keeper

The Realm, Book 1

The Realm, Book 2: Cacophony

The Realm, Book 3: Accursed

Telecommuting

The Black Hole

About Horror: The Study and the Craft

The Open Book

The Tales of Time

Mars, the Band Man, and Sara Sue

Dedication

For SAW, BKW, and MDW – always.

September 7, 2023

A Note From the Professor

Memories are fickle things for us humans. Particular occurrences tend to sear themselves onto our brains during times of distress, such as when our favorite celebrities pass on. When larger-than-life natural disasters wipe out large swatches of humanity. When the unattainable or something previously disbelieved becomes reality. This last occurrence is the one that gives us, the staff here at the journal, our main purpose, the very reason we exist, compiling and collecting Selected Papers from the Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena: manuscript acquisition day.

The occurrence of something previously disbelieved also describes the journey through memories taken by the main character in 12 Hours by L. Marie Wood.

On this particular acquisition day, as was typical in our department—a miniscule, somber gathering of like-minded souls, kneeling or skittering among dank brick and dusty shelving in a long-forgotten corner of the university’s basement—we worked to keep the dismal, man-made lighting just bright enough to read through never-ending tomes of scholarship about every discipline imaginable.

None of us could determine how the single room managed to remain more humid than the thick air outside during the summer months, yet still grow chillier with every passing moment that we turned the newly-installed thermostat higher to provide heat the, now ornamental, lone fireplace could not give us during winter months. I never wanted our headquarters to move anywhere else, though I did seek to make our space as comfortable as possible.

These petty attributes dissipated in my glee over what we discovered that day. Make no mistake, L. Marie Wood has long been a purveyor of scholarship on various topics, academic and creative—her prolific renderings are no secret in popular culture or academia. Yes, even the prestigious University of Pittsburgh hosts an exhibit of Wood’s papers in their archives.

To think we are now building our own impressive archive of papers, and sharing the work of such esteemed scholars in our obscure little corner of higher education and research…

I digress. Scholarship surrounding Wood’s work is interdisciplinary, often focusing on the creative process, academic instruction, and the intricacies of bending and manipulating genres. My particular interest in 12 Hours, however, is in the expert way Wood delves into the human psyche utilizing minutia often taken for granted.

With the prior work of psychologists Shelley Duvall and Robert Wicklund on defining objective self-awareness as a backdrop and extrapolating through variations of studies done by neuroscientists on the inner workings of our brains during times when we believe ourselves to be in danger or expiring, Wood does in 12 Hours what Wood does best: unleash exacting psychological horror borne from commonplace occurrences.

The cabbie at the center of this story reflects on his shortcomings in an intimate way that propels authenticity borne from honest confessions. He understands his morality is fallible, even as he refuses to believe the rest of himself to be similarly fated. Wood shows us the journey his thoughts and emotions take as his fight or flight instincts work to project the happenings of his life and the outcome of his choices onto moments of lucidity while dawning reality breaks through. Ultimately, he reaches the pinnacle of self-awareness through his internal importunities imploding towards the core of his own existence rather than outward to one he wishes to punish—and that peak is represented in the most surprising of ways. Wood shows us that to know oneself is to truly be free.

I sit with my own memories of that acquisition day, the events playing as vividly as the cabbie’s in 12 Hours. Satisfaction in finally holding the insightful work. Inquisitiveness over where my annotations of it could take my own studies. Exhilaration that other scholars would now be able to immerse themselves in the depths of Wood’s investigations, shaping their own research.

If you are a student of psychology, the macabre, or simply curious about the tales L. Marie Wood weaves, please enjoy this selected paper from the Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena.

May our studies continually lead us to the uncanny, the fantastic, and the unexplainable.

Bloodshot eyes stare at me curiously, peering out of one of those ski masks that cover your whole face. It wasn’t cold enough for that kind of thing—I don’t even think I’ve ever seen one of those in the stores around here. Must have bought it online. Just black. No design, no pattern—nothing to remember. Just black. The eyes are black too. Is it a girl? A guy? I don’t know. Thin shoulders, knobby even through the jacket. Like clothes hanging off a skeleton. That’s a weird-assed thing to think of, but that’s what it seems like. I can hear myself grunting with effort, but it didn’t really sound like a grunt…at least, not the way that I sound when I grunt. But then again, how many times do I listen to myself grunting anyway? Lifting the sofa when we moved…that shit was a bitch to get in the house. I grunted then—I’m sure I did. In bed with Janet, yeah maybe, especially when she moves her hips like that, catching me the way she does, yeah for sure, but anyway, I know I’ve heard the sound of my own grunt before, so I should know the difference between that and whatever this whining, hissing, gargling thing coming out of my throat was. All I’m trying to do is pick up my arms for chrissakes, grab hold of their waist. I just wanna know if I got a girl or boy straddling me, staring at me with those ugly eyes. Hard eyes, the skin around them rugged, lined, and weathered. Not old, but still. Drugs? Maybe. Drink? Maybe that too. Hard eyes, hard life. Outside the cab, busting my window, those hard-assed eyes. Looking in as the crack splinters, flowers across the whole thing from the diamond they made at the corner.