The Hiders In Darkness , livre ebook

Tablo Pty Ltd - Paul Kocourek

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

271 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

A WORLD OF MONSTERS…

Bored Ronald Thorn longed for some adventure, and so joined his outgoing friend David Corey on a vacation camping trip.

But he never expected to hike his way into a strange world with a twilight sky and a pale white sun. Here, strange savage beasts made fortified cities the only safe refuge.

In all this, the last thing he expected was to meet a beautiful but endangered princess. Unfortunately for him, Ron unwittingly returned to Earth and now must somehow find his way back to that perilous world to rescue her...

Sujets

Adventure

Fiction

Action

Fantasy

Informations

Publié par	Tablo Pty Ltd
Date de parution	14 juillet 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781925993387
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Chapter One
If there were a contest for the most ordinary man in the world, Ronald Thorn felt sure he would win it. He wondered over his life. He worked a computer draftsman job, mostly on contract rather than regular hire. The pay was okay, but it often got boring. The contract jobs frequently required him to work on Sundays, so he went to church only once in a while. He felt guilty about that, but didn’t know what he could do about it. He supposed he could quit, but never felt quite motivated enough to do that.
He wished something would change, but never took the effort to make that happen. Nothing seemed to matter much, so he often spent weekends alone, unless those weekends were spent with his more adventuresome lifelong friend David Corey. Dave called him late this very night and talked excitedly about going on a camping trip to hike up Mount Washington. He invited Ron—and would not take ‘no’ for an answer—and Ron agreed, if only because it was better than spending a couple weekends alone.
“Another thing,” Dave said over the phone. “We will be leaving in four weeks. We are going to be hiking, and you are way too sedentary with that job of yours. Look, there is a Tae-Kwon-Do place that just opened around the corner. Why don’t you join them? That way, you learn to defend yourself and get some exercise too.”
It made sense. Ron was no fighter like Dave, so it couldn’t hurt to pick up some self-defense tips, and like Dave said, get some exercise. He agreed and ended the call. A big yawn cracked his jaw, reminding him tomorrow would come all too soon, and he’d have to get back to work. He hoped and prayed his boss, Mr. Johnson, would be in meetings with clients that day. Mondays were always the worst days, and after the weekends his boss just seemed to take extra pains to make Ron’s life complicated and unpleasant. Ron’s job was easiest when Mr. Johnson wasn't around to nitpick him. He shook his head and went to bed, dreading the next day. That night…
The Dream gripped him mercilessly. A lonely landscape swirled with mists as the air blew through Ronald Thorn's hair. He saw a living statue wrapped in swirling mists, a gigantic man as dark and foreboding as the land and twilight around him. He reminded Ron vaguely of the Vikings. The warrior's large hands rested on the hilt of a great sword that glitters like black diamond. The giant was invincible, but Ron shuddered, for in The Dream he knew the sword is more dangerous. Suddenly he stood alone. The mist-swirled air was cold, so cold. Ron put his hands in his pockets, trying to keep warm. Through a part in the mists he saw a cyclopean fortress. He shuddered and walked up the sharp and jagged road to the fortress's towering gate. Moss and creepers hung everywhere from the gate to the battlement, covering everything like an ancient unclean carpet. Wooden posts and support rails crumbled at his touch. The mists swam lazily, and suddenly he was inside a room in that fortress. Someone called to him, a young woman with soft eyes. His soul was smitten and enamored, intoxicated with the scent of her hair, the pleasure of her smile, and the joy of her love for him. He went toward her.
Then IT appeared, a presence of horror, terror and darkness, coming to kill—Ron gave one cry as it reached for him.
He woke sharply, reality swimming back into focus in his dark bedroom, alone. He looked down at his hands; they actually hurt from clutching his bed sheets. He raised his eyes heavenward, thankful that this demonic thing existed only in a dream. Ron breathed deep once and sagged in relief.
Except he could not relax. The Dream was still fresh, its images replaying over and over in his mind. He remembered the young woman, the pleasure of her smile and presence lingering, slowly dispelling the memory of the thing. He rolled over in the dark, looking at the alarm clock, its bright display reading "2:10 AM." He lay back in the dark and stared at the ceiling until spots played tricks on his eyes.
The Dream would not go away. He still smelled the dream land's air and saw its darksome sky. The black mountains still jutted toward the sky, hiding mysteries. The Dream called to him, and he, Ronald Thorn, could not go. How he wished he could.
But, it was only a dream.
* * *
Four weeks later, Ron sat on a cool, almost cold rock on a forlorn mountainside, wondering what he was doing there. Despite the air's chill and dampness, he was breathing hard and sweating—hiking up a mountainside was hard work, fighting gravity every ponderous step of the way. He dropped his brand-new orange nylon backpack to the ground, mopped his brow, and unzipped his light jacket halfway to cool off. Looking around at the lifeless mountainside, he wondered how he had ever let David Corey talk him into coming here.
"You'll like it," Dave had told him. "It's Mt. Washington, in the White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire, highest elevation in the Northeastern United States. It'll be a great vacation!"
Some vacation! he mentally grumbled. Here I am, enjoying a hike, and Dave does it to me again. He couldn't wait for me to catch my breath, just had to hike on up ahead. This is ridiculous! Okay, so I'm out of shape. Guess it was too much to expect all those workouts with my Tae-Kwon-Do would have put me into shape this soon. After all, it's only been a few weeks since I started.
Deep green valleys lay below him, while across from him cottony clouds floated through a truly blue sky. The scenery penetrated him with beauty and grandeur. Despite his grumpy mood, he was captive to the panorama. Dave was right.
As his breathing slowed, he still continued to perspire even with his jacket only half-closed, so he opened it the rest of the way. Just then, a cold gust of wind blew and in seconds he was shivering, and had to zip up again.
The word “hypothermia” crossed his mind. Signs had been posted all around the Ranger station and all trail starting points. They warned of the danger of not being adequately dressed for the coolness of the slopes higher up, no matter how warm the weather otherwise seemed down in the valley. A mural on the wall of the Ranger station showed how clouds formed at the top of the mountain, and then came rushing down the slope as wild thunderstorms.
While he was thankful for Dave's insistence back home that he bring something really warm, it seemed he could not win: if he zipped up, he boiled; if he opened the jacket, he froze. Why had not Dave told him about dressing in several clothing layers, like how all the brochures at the Ranger station advised hikers?
The cold damp rock he had claimed as his own was, at best, an uncomfortable chair, since its chill penetrated the seat of his pants. Ron's hair tossed in the wind this way and that, and he looked around himself once again. Before him, the barren mountain slope fell away from him at his feet, the ground littered with small and large pebbles. Behind him, the rock-strewn slope rose to unseen heights. Sitting on his rock in such primal surroundings, he could easily imagine himself alone, the only man in the entire world.
Ron's thoughts returned to Dave, who by now must have been far ahead of him somewhere on the trail above. They had divided supplies between them, with him carrying Dave‘s hunting knife among other items. He shouldered his orange backpack once more, and determined to follow the trail—and Dave—to the peak.
Looking upslope, he saw a cloud, and gasped at the size of it. It seemed the size of a lake, an entire ocean, rolling slowly down the slope toward him.
Ron swallowed in apprehension. The weather report posted at the Ranger station reported a storm yesterday with 90 M.P.H. winds on the slopes, and he could easily imagine himself being swept off the slope by howling winds and pelting rain. Now he really sweated.
Big beyond belief, the slowly approaching cloud descended the slope, engulfing everything, a slow rolling avalanche. As the cloud came upon him, Ron unconsciously flinched and braced himself, then gasped in surprise. The inside of a cloud was only a cool, light wetness like a fog that rolled harmlessly around him, though it did quickly turn his surroundings into a suddenly gray world. To his relief, there was no rain, no lightning, and no thunder. He cautiously inhaled, uncertain how a cloud would taste, or whether it would have a taste at all.
However, he realized the cloud was now making the trail more difficult, if not impossible, to follow. The wisdom of those who had carved out the trail high on the slope now shone through. Instead of using paint markings like those on the trees and rocks he had passed on the lower forest slopes, the trailblazers had built and relied upon cairns of rocks. The cairns remained visible through the cloud-fog, though as little more than dim, hazy outlines. Maintaining a careful watchfulness for signs of a storm, Ron continued up the trail, following as best as he could in the semi-light as small stones clattered away from under his boots.
Some minutes later, the foggy cloud around him abruptly changed into an incredibly dense, slowly swirling mist, an even denser fog within a fog. Ron stopped in dismayed astonishment. He turned in place, looking for the trail cairns like a lost child searching for a familiar face, but saw only the swirling mists before his face, and felt their dampness on his skin and in his breath. He could not see even the ground under his feet, so he groped for a large rock to sit down on to wait out the impenetrable fog.
The rock cold and damp beneath him, he dug his boot into the ground, aimlessly digging a little trench. As he waited, he discerned something peculiar in the atmosphere. The air felt alive with an unsettling sensation that pricked at his hair and skin, a weird and irresistible feeling of swift motion even as he stayed completely still. Alarm grew in him as he thought a thunderstorm was forming, and