An Ill Wind Cometh

So far, this book is coming along really well. Still have three chapters to write the complete rough draft on since I only have little bits of those at the present. I'm thinking next week the manuscript will go into final editing stages. Note, this excerpt is a rough draft but it is part of the upcoming book.

All of the events of the last few weeks had been building up within him. Too much, it seemed, had happened in his life recently and he felt he had reached the breaking point. It didn’t help finding all of those newspaper accounts of what happened either. When he came home he made a point of not telling Sharon what he’d found. After she went to bed he was sitting alone in the living room. He had to have some kind of release and drowning his sorrows in alcohol sounded perfect for the task.

On the way home from the museum he stopped and got a large bottle of whiskey. In the quiet of the late evening, Karl was sitting on the sofa in the living room. Displayed prominently on the coffee table, in front of him, the bottle of whisky was now about half full. He had been steadily making a dent in the contents. The cap and a tumbler that had two fingers of the brown liquid sat next to it. A quick swallow emptied the glass and he slammed it down almost hard enough to break it.

Unable to make it to the bathroom he pissed his pants where he was sitting on the sofa. Now the unpleasant odor of urine mixed with the comforting aroma of the whiskey. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead. Gazing at the bottle he considered taking another drink but the one bottle now appeared to be two of them. Ah shit! What fucking one do I choose? Reaching for the one on the left he missed completely and lost his limited sense of balance. Falling forward, his face and chest slammed on the coffee table. He snorted in disgust at himself. Turning his head to rest his ear on the table the two bottles had become one that was indistinct and blurry along with the empty glass.

Pushing himself upright he tried to grab the bottle. He was interrupted in mid-grab by a song that he could now hear. What the hell? To his surprise, along the wall was an upright piano and the keys were moving. He blinked twice in disbelief at the impossible thing. They didn’t own a piano. Figuring initially it was a player piano he noticed there was no roll of paper above the keys. There was no reason for it to be doing what it was doing. It was almost beyond all understanding.

Squinting at the strange sight he began to sober up as fear coursed through his veins. His curiosity getting the best of him, he got up from his seat. In an attempt to solve the mystery, he drew closer to the rather odd object that had materialized to investigate it further. Once he was close enough he reached out his hand to touch it. A shock was transmitted from the strange item into his being.

The walls faded slowly around him and as they disappeared he could see another room. Everything was tinted a sepia and was hazy. Bookshelves ringed the room and were filled with leather bound volumes. At a desk in the middle of the room a man wearing a charcoal colored suit and bow tie was seated. His hand gyrated across the piece of paper he was writing something on. His moustache twitched as he scribbled away. The desk and the man would have looked quite at home in museum. Laying down his pen the man turned his chair around and opened a drawer in the bureau behind him. Reaching in, he extracted a little clear glass bottle with a handwritten label that held some bluish liquid. He shook it to mix the contents a little and then slide it into the pocket of his coat.

As he got up and began to walk out of the room the song changed that was coming from the piano. The scene followed the man as he walked through the house which looked much like this one they now lived in. Then Karl realized it was the same house and who he was seeing probably was Peter Maudlin. The pictures that he had seen on the newspaper articles didn’t entirely do him justice but was close enough he thought he could recognize the man.