because i love Halloween.....

i've written a book.  it's quite dark and i love it.  it's the dark side of the moon that is me.  my Dragon loved being my proofreader.  he kept begging for the next chapter.

well, in honor of him, and of Halloween, here is the first paragraph and the last two of one of the chapters.  i hope you enjoy.  and then i hope it keeps you up at night.  just for while.




As soon as he realized he was losing his mind, and quite possibly his life, it seemed ironically apropos to Ryan that he would lose it all in the cemetery of an insane asylum though he wasn’t sure if he was technically still in the cemetery any longer.  He thought about what constituted sanity; whether or not the realization of one's predicament was a criteria, and then those thoughts segued for him into wondering if anyone would ever find his body.


Late that summer workers eventually came again to work on the asylum committee’s memorial to their long dead patients.  Their stash of clean granite stones for etching was still at the bottom of the hill off to the side, still under the tree.  It was down in the oldest part of the cemetery and in an area that none of the workers really liked.  It gave them all the creeps.  The air was different down there; it was different all over the cemetery, but it was truly stifling down there.  It felt like no breath of a breeze had ever blown across that part.  One of the men had just finished mowing the grass and the silence after the mower was deafening.  Two of the other workmen were sitting in the shade to take a break after taking three of the stones off the pallet for names to be engraved on them.  Drinking from bottles of water, both the men froze listening.  The man who’d mowed walked up to join them and was hushed by the other two.  Tilting their heads they looked off into the woods.  Sunlight tried to work its way through the heavy summer foliage causing a riot of shadow, light green, darker green, and the deep brown of the tree trunks.  They men listened and all three heard it this time.  A cell phone was ringing not too far off in the woods.  It stopped suddenly and they heard a voice say, “Ryan, it’s your mother again.  What should I tell her?”
 

And then the giggling started.