My Darkest Rose

Chapter One

Dear Reader, thank you so much for stopping to check out my story! I welcome any and all feedback and am happy to check out your work as well!

Love to you,

Frieda

Rose in Repose

Jack was afraid of the characters he created, because sometimes they weren't just images on a page or paint on a canvas. Sometimes monsters were real.

He knew this because he'd seen them. They lived in natural, dark places, like the shadows of old trees and the depths of lakes. They weren't just in his head. At least, he was pretty sure they weren't.

The events of his childhood seemed to conspire to feed what his doctor called an "overactive imagination." As a boy, Jack didn't have imaginary friends- he had monsters who stalked him. He wasn't afraid of the dark- he feared what lived in the dark and things that watched from the shadows.

Jack grew up in a small, southern Indiana town named Tacoma. His home, a small cottage in the woods built by his great-grandfather, was situated inside a one thousand acre nature preserve called Moonwood, near a lake said to be the deepest in the Midwest.

Moonwood was littered with sinkholes (hence its name), the largest being the lake just a few steps from the back of the home he shared with his mother and sister. His father, an archeologist, had drowned trying to measure the depth of the lake when Jack was just a baby.

He was never able to accurately map the lake, which included caves that stretched throughout the forest like dark veins that fed the root systems of hundreds of trees: enormous Sycamores, black-leaved Maples, Beech trees with years of initials carved in their smooth sides, and Oaks with tangled limbs that zigged and zagged like broken bones throughout the canopy.

But their idyllic 80-acre property became a living nightmare for Jack when at ten, he began seeing a mysterious shadow-creature in the forest. To try and understand what he was seeing, his mother asked him to draw a picture. The more he drew, the less he saw it in real life. So drawing became more than a hobby, it was a compulsion- a survival technique he employed through the darkest days of his life. And there were many dark days ahead.

For a long time, it seemed to work. But when Jack was fourteen, his mother went out for a swim and never came back. He found her body days later floating in the lake. They said she drowned, but to Jack it looked as if she'd been mauled by something. There were deep cuts all over her body, like bites.

His sister, Fauna, then twenty-one, had already moved away to art school in Chicago, leaving Jack alone in the house during his senior year.

But Jack wasn't alone for long. Soon he met Rose, and his entire life changed. He stopped being so afraid all the time. He fell in love. Until one night, the creature from the forest came for her too. It dragged her into the lake where...he couldn't bear to think of what happened once she was in the water. It wasn't as if anyone believed him anyway.

They never found her body.

At eighteen, he left Tacoma and the people there who called him a murderer, for the solitude of the city, closing himself in a Chicago studio apartment and turning his life to art. At first, it was just to keep the monster away and himself sane. In time, Fauna insisted he allow her to share his drawings with some of her colleagues and within a few months he was designing characters for video games, movies, and book covers.