Fear Of Darkness
A serial novel by Joe Lake.
(So far: Julie Jones and her husband have come from Sydney to park their Winnebago at Cooee beach. Later her husband has an accident. The husband is taken to hospital and when Julie visits him she finds he has disappeared; so has the van when she returns to Cooee. When she goes to the police station, they don’t believe her. She is told to book into a motel. She goes to her room and lies down. A kidnapper demands money on the telephone, then hangs up.)
She thinks of going straight back to the police but she feels stressed and tired and her body seems unable to move. When she drops off, she is woken by a knock on the door but she ignores it. Fear grips her and she is unable to get out of bed. She dozes as the television blares all night and the small fridge makes ghostly whining and fizzing noises. When it is morning, she walks up to the police station to report the kidnapper’s phone call the previous night where she was told that her husband’s ransom was five million dollars and that he was sealed in his Winnebago as in a coffin. She knows that the police will have to take action.
When she arrives, a young policewoman writes down in great detail what has occurred and the threats the kidnappers have made.
“I’ll have to hand this over to more senior officers,” she says before she disappears from the counter through a back door.
There is a large two-way mirror covering the reception area and Julie leans her left elbow onto the counter and looks out onto Burnie’s Wilson St that buzzes with traffic. For a moment she shuts her eyes and shakes her head. She will have to see a physician for tranquilisers because a huge mountain of fear is flooding in to crush her mind. She tries to think through the last couple of days. First there was the excitement of the arrival at Cooee beach, to park the van and sit down to watch television. They had bought pizzas from a shop nearby. A little later, there came the encounter with the crazy woman in Burnie Park who wore the Obama rubber mask and then, later, in the van, the shotgun that went off after someone rocked and banged the van. The police and the ambulance came; her husband never arrived at the hospital when she checked and then the van had disappeared when she returned. Luckily she still had the Honda two-wheeled scooter to get around on. And then the phone call last night that told about a cut-off ear and the demand for money. She would have to ring her mother in Sydney to come over and help.
Just then she heard the front door of the police station open and footsteps. She was looking into the door’s reflection in the mirror. The door opened by itself. There was no one there. When she turned to actually look, two people had come through the door. They entered with broad smiles. When Julie looked back into the mirror, there was no one there. “Vampires,” she thought.
(To be continued next month.)
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