How To Contact The Living - Prologue

Prologue - Part 1

Please enjoy the opening to my first full-length novel, a darkly comic paranormal thriller.

Forrest Avenue was a nothing street slicing like a thin blade through the middle of a nowhere suburb. Not rich, not poor, just nowhere.

Tree-lined and barely wide enough for two cars to squeeze past each other, it was the start of a shortcut imparted to him by an in-the-know traffic cop from his station some months prior which shaved close to ten minutes off his journey home compared to the expressway, even though said shortcut was made up of a number of these narrow streets which forced him to stay well under the speed limit to allow for pets, kids and old folks popping out from behind trees and parked cars, an especially hazardous phenomenon in the evening twilight. On the radio, Elvis belted out "Suspicious Minds" and Owen Hoath thrummed his fingers along on the steering wheel to the last song of his life.

When sudden movement snagged at the corner of his eye, he slowed his car to a crawl. He turned to look but there was only a house like any of the others around it and nothing seemed amiss. He wondered why something that had likely been a pulled curtain or a closing door had caught his eye so forcefully, was about to drive on and put it down to "over-copping", what his sister called his professional paranoia, when it happened again.

A single window was set into the house's redbrick base, next to steps leading to the front door. Something had been placed inside this basement window to block the glass but a corner had been pulled back and light shone out in the dusk. By the time his eyes confirmed that what at first appeared to be a trapped bird was in fact a hand slapping against the glass, it had disappeared.

He brought the car to a complete stop as he stared at the large triangle of exposed light and waited, catching renewed movement just before the glass broke outwards.

The hand reappeared immediately, fingers now jutting out through the newly made hole. Even in the half-light and with a sizeable front lawn between him and the house, he could see that the hand was small and was ripping itself bloody on the jagged glass.

A part of him was still on his way home, looking forward to seeing his wife and to the small pleasures of a weekday evening; dinner, TV and maybe sex if one of them didn't fall asleep first. That part of him was still hoping that the mints and soap he had used liberally before leaving the station would be enough to cover any traces of his illicit lunch time cigarette. That part of him had put down whatever he was seeing to an unsupervised child in their parents' basement, one who would soon be dripping tears and blood onto the kitchen floor while a grown-up grabbed antiseptic ointment and bandages. So, he was almost surprised to find he was already pulling over to the curb, already picking up his radio handset, turning off Elvis who was trying to warn him that they were caught in a trap, can't walk out.

He radioed in and established who and where he was before requesting an additional unit to assist with a possible domestic disturbance. When the dispatcher told him a patrol car was on its way, ETA ten minutes, he responded that he would hold position in his car and keep eyes on the house. Even though he'd identified himself as a detective, he still mentioned that he was in plain clothes and driving an unmarked car because he didn't need some itchy-fingered rookie yelling threats while he tried to calm them down and pull out his badge without getting shot for his troubles.

The hand had disappeared while he was on the radio, the window now a small and unremarkable black rectangle, so someone had either turned off the basement light or replaced the covering. The other windows had the curtains or blinds drawn and he didn't detect light escaping anywhere, not even a crack around the front door. He wanted very badly to look stupid when he and his back-up knocked and bothered an already harried parent, busily bandaging their adventurous child's hand, but something inside him gnawed at that prospect with increasing ferocity.