Sharu Valley

Chapter One - The Demon in the House

If Hell were ever a real place, it would be empty, for all its devils and sinners remain here, in Sharu Valley.

Ramona "Remi" Rownd was a chaotic mess of a woman on almost any given day. It wouldn't be immature to say that wherever she went, oddities would follow. In childhood, the unexplainable festered in her household. It was never something too absurd, or too out of place to be labeled purely as "abnormal." Remi Rownd was practically an acosmist in regard to that of the supernatural and holy. However, in all her years–and especially as of late–things were beginning to change. Something about her and this town she'd grown up in was simply out of place.

Remi never liked living in a small town. She hated that everybody knew her, and she hated that she could never have a private, fresh life. Coming from a family of four, Remi only had her brother to be her real company. And even then, she and her brother were an entire decade apart.

Remi hated Sharu Valley, so the second she turned eighteen and graduated high school, she left and went to a university in a big city across the entire country to study criminal justice and law. She didn't come home for ten years after that. It was a bold move, but really, she never actually wanted to see Sharu Valley again.

However, things really do have a way of coming around to bite one in the butt, don't they?

Remi was back home again, standing with an empty heart in front of that stupid little house she'd grown up in. Its uneven, hideously aged rafters and red-tiled roof were now almost foreign to her. It was so disgustingly old, that if this house were sentient, Remi was sure it would be sighing constantly. What a miserable, sad little house.

The spring of 1984 was here, and Remi's family had gone missing just two months ago.

Remi had driven all the way from Connecticut to Deseret to find her family. She was an incredible police officer at the bountiful age of twenty-eight. She'd contacted the police department of Sharu Valley to get information on her parents and brother's case and learned it was deemed a lost cause. She was told they were dead. However, the department didn't give her any real proof of this and therefore, she decided to take up the case in her own hands. Of course, she wasn't legally a detective. She was a cop. And even if she were a detective, the law would never allow her to work on a case involving her own blood.

So that's why Remi was moving back to Sharu Valley after years of being away. She was transferring to the police department here to "start a new life by returning to her old one." In actuality, she planned to solve her family's missing case under cover from the police.

Everything about her house was the same as it had always been.

Everything except for the decaying corpse of a deer placed on the roof, just above the front door.

"Ye should prolly get rid o' that," said the old fat middle-aged man Remi had hired to help her move in. His name was Bob.

Remi couldn't remove her eyes from the near skeletal structure of the deer, wondering, how could it have possibly gotten up there in the first place?

"I'll take care of it tonight," Remi said in an attempt to brush it off. Though the deer did not have eyes, she could feel it staring at her.

"Let me help ya with that," Bob said, offering to take the box Remi was currently carrying.

"Oh, it's not that heavy, don't worry," Remi said, nearly short of breath. The man was treating the sight of this deer as normal, so Remi thought she ought to do the same.

"If ye insist," Bob shrugged, picking up a small stack of boxes from the back of his moving truck.

Remi took her first few steps up the rickety old stairs to the front door. The steps groaned under her feet. They'd likely give away if she stood on them for more than ten seconds, actually. There was a small welcome mat that was beginning to deteriorate after so many years of use. That same welcome mat had been there all this time and had been the only thing Remi had known since she took her first steps as a baby. She made a mental note to get it replaced.