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Chapter One
The Beckoning

“I have you, I own you, and you can never escape.” A gravelly voice disturbed the silence, paused for a breath, then snidely whispered, “Come to me, my child. Come to me and relinquish your pathetic soul to my realm.” A flickering light from an adjoining room illuminated a shrouded figure in the doorway, but it failed to cast his shadow to the floor. As the figure dryly beckoned, his crippled hand patted his shrouded heart. “Come to me, so I can free you. Come to me, my deprived child of life.”

Announcing four o’clock in the morning, menacing gongs from a grandfather clock chimed far slower than the beating heart of a woman cowering against its vibrating glossy cabinet. As the woman fearfully watched the figure, she knew that fleeing would have been logical, but her willpower wasn’t strong enough to resist what he once provided her. However, that was in another time in her life when she needed someone to care for her, back, when her naïve innocence cried out for love.

Noticing that he had aged unkindly since they last spoke, she suddenly felt beset with guilt for casting him aside. In an attempt to rekindle their estranged love, her sweaty hand hesitantly slid beyond the edge of the darkness. Once her fingertips touched his aura, she came forward and begged his forgiveness. Unable to keep from inhaling his alluring scent of wild sunflowers, she realized that he had never forgotten her. No, he never forgot any of his special friends, but she was more than just special—she was a very important puzzle piece that would ultimately complete his future.

“Carla, I’ve missed you, have you me?” His labored lungs inhaled her sigh of awkward relief, which thankfully, rejuvenated his weather-beaten features. Hoping she saw how much he still loved her, his decayed hand brushed against her flushed face. When his eyes winked empathy to her needs, her tears moistened his emaciated fingers, and as hoped, she succumbed to his missed touch.

However, when his frayed sleeve slid across her barren shoulder, she cringed. “No, my childhood playmate, you do not have my soul, and you never shall. Be gone from my sight, for you’ll not pilfer my love again.” To escape his beguiling power, she closed her eyes, but an odor of rancid decay began suffocating her breath.

Coughing for fresh air, she opened her eyes and found herself safely tucked under her blankets. Damning the nightmare, she sought her husband’s warmth, but when she slid her hand toward him, the cool sheets instantly soured her stomach with the reality that he wasn’t there. No, he wasn’t, and just thinking of him drenched her pillow with tears because, like other loved ones, she was on the verge of losing him. However, unlike those she had already lost, there was a way of saving him.