Welcome to . . .

THE UNSOLVED AN THE CONFUSED

Prologue

To whom it may concern,
I write this letter to you in the hopes that you will follow my every direction as to what to do for the next week. You will first board a plane to Arizona and walk from east to west for two miles across the Sonoran Desert until you reach a navel base camp. This is the point of no return. The officers there will give you further instructions. But you must hurry, for by the time you read this I will, surely, already be dead…
CRACK! CRACK! BOOM! My eyes flew open, sweat was dripping off my face, and I was gripping the sheets as if I was trying to rip them to shreds. I sat up and wiped a film of sweat off my forehead. It was that dream again. The one I’ve been having for the past year and a half. Even when I wasn’t asleep I would replay it over and over again in my head. The man in the candlelit room at the desk writing the letter. The weird thing was, I’ve never met the man. The even weirder thing was that I had a gut feeling that it had something to do with me. Something inside me was screaming at me to follow the letters instructions. Thats the one thing I hate about myself. I’m eaten up from head to toe with curiosity.
I try not to care, I really do. But that thing inside me screams at me. A random shiver shot down my spine like a bullet coming out of a gun. I swung my legs around and my warm feet met the cold floor. I threw on some jeans and a t-shirt and headed downstairs to make myself some breakfast.
I lived alone in a two-story apartment. Life was pretty easy going, even though jobs were a tough get. I still got by. I worked for the car wash down the street. My job was to fix any broken machinery. I was so spaced out, I just barely heard a soft knock at the door. I trudged to the door and opened it to find and empty hallway and a letter on the ground that was neatly enclosed by a blank envelope. I picked it up and brought it into the kitchen. After shoving another spoonful of Cherrios into my mouth, I opened the letter with shaky hands. I knew. Don’t think I didn’t. I took out the enclosed parchment and began to read:
To whom it may concern,…

Chapter 1

I was on the floor before I could even finish the first line. I sat there, shaking, on the cold floor. When I finally stood up, I realized that I had thrown the letter in my Cherrios. I plucked it off the bowl and dabbed it with a paper towel. My mind was scrambling. I didn’t know what to do. Then it hit me. I had to call Ricky.
Ricky Colbault has been my best friend since second grade. Maybe he could shed some light on the subject.
I looked everywhere for the phone. Under pillows, in the couch, then I found it in an old chip bag. My fingers zoomed across the keypad, dialing his number. I hit talk and pressed the phone to my ear. It rang about eight times before he finally picked up and I had to give him the usual greeting:
“Ricky! I need your help!,” I shouted into the receiver.
“Hey, , what’s shakin’,”he shouted back.
“Ricky this is important, now,” I told him,”It’s about my dream.”
“What?” he sounded nervous,”Is there more to it?”
I knew I couldn’t explain over the phone. “Just come over and I’ll show you,” I told him.
“OK, but I can’t stay long, I have to work at noon,” he sounded anxious as if in a hurry.
“It’ll only take a minute,” I assured him.
I hung up the phone and put it back on the charger. I was really having a hard time calming down so I decided to watch T.V. and wait for Ricky to get here. I plopped down, lazily, onto the couch, picked up the remote, and turned it on. I bet you’ll never guess what was on the weather channel…
“Across the U.S. there are thunderstorms and tornadoes occurring everywhere. Strangely, though, there is a path like occurrence in cloud formation linking New York to Arizona. This means that all states within the path will keep there flights open to the others including New York and Arizona…”
I stared at the T.V. in awe. I didn’t know what to do or say. I jumped when Ricky came bursting through the door. He ran into the kitchen and knocked over the Cherrios that I planned to finished. He was flailing his arms and acting like a complete lunatic screaming at the top of his lungs in one of the sixteen languages he knew. That’s basically Ricky in nutshell. I knew the only way to stop him was to throw something at him. I took a pillow from my right and whipped it at him. It hit his legs and he toppled over as if someone had cut off his legs in one clean swipe. He lay on the kitchen floor, twitching playfully. I hopped over the couch, ran over to the lifeless heap. I turned him over onto his back and pinned his arms to the ground. He kept his eyes closed but I could tell he was trying extremely hard not to smile. After a minute he slowly opened his eyes and smiled. I grabbed him by the front of the shirt with both hands,
”WHAT THE HECK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING!?!”I screamed at him. I stared into his eyes
menacingly and he just smiled back knowing that i wasn’t really going to hurt him. After I was sure he was done, I stood up and helped him to his feet. We stared at each other for a second then he broke the silence, “So what’s up,”he asked calmly. I reached over and took the letter off the counter. He plucked it out from in-between my fingers and read it. As he did, I glanced around my kitchen trying to regroup my thoughts. When he was done he looked up at me. I told him how there was a knock on the door and the letter in the blank envelope on the floor.
“Lemme see the envelope,” he said. I bent over and picked it up off the floor when I noticed it was heavy. As if there was something else inside. I tipped the envelope over above my open hand and out fell a black, brass, skeleton key with the initials, V.I.T. engraved on both sides. The top was round with the bottom half painted dark blue and the other half blood red. Both colors seemed to gleam in the late morning sunlight. There was a hole in the red half that was to big for the frayed rope that ran through it The one thing I really noticed about it, was that it was freezing cold. And no matter how long a squeezed it in my hand, it remained cold. I recognized it at once. It was the key the man in my dream wears around his neck.
“What is it?” Ricky asked.
I couldn’t answer him because by the time he finished, my face was already splattered with the spilt milk of my Cheerios…

Chapter 2

Crack! I could literally feel my nose break.(Or, as I learned in science class, it was the cartilage that tears. Your nose doesn’t actually break.) I fell to the ground into a small pile of my own blood. I got a good taste of dirt I gasped in pain. Scott pulled me up from my shirt with amazing strength.
“Now listen up Rocket,” he said in a not so comforting tone,”If that research paper is not my hands first thing in the morning, your gonna wish you’ve never been born!”
“Gee…how original,” I said, trying, but failing, to sound braver than I felt. The only reason I said that was because I knew I really needed to sell it for the crowd we gathered.(All of the kids in my class say I’m desperate for attention. But thats totally not true. I do not draw the crowd. The crowd draws itself.)
Scott dropped me to the ground with a loud thud and I grunted for dramatic effect. He laughed with satisfactory and stepped over my, seemingly, lifeless carcass.
As soon as the small crowd depleted, I jumped up and ran home. I was a long way but, with my strength and endurance, I was able to shave off a good three or four minutes. As soon as I reached my front door I stopped cold. I jammed my hand into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone to check the time. I was supposed to be home an hour ago. Moms’ going to throw a hissy fit. I pushed the phone back into my pocket and slowly pushed opened the door. I crept into the house as quietly as my as legs could go. Its funny how much the floorboards are amplified through the whole house when you’re trying to be extra quiet.
I stumbled over the rug, knocked over some pots and pans, and I was making so much noise, I swear to God, I could have woken the dead. But despite the terrible raucous I was making, I heard no other noise in the house but the beating of my heart that was pounding in my throat. I stopped moving and listened.
Silence.
This wasn’t just any silence. This was the creepiest silence in the history of creepy silences. When I tell you there were no sounds, I’m not lying. I stood there in my kitchen for at least five minutes, as an even creepier chill was rising up my spine. I had never experienced anything like this before.
The cold. The silence.
They were growing. Some how, the cold just kept growing. Even the silence was growing. It was like someone put the greatest working earmuffs on me and shoved me in a freezer. They were both becoming unbearable. Choking me with the silence. The deep and horrifying silence was making the sound of my breathing muffled until it stopped altogether. I wasn’t breathing. But I was. I was so confused. I just shut my eyes, waiting for it to stop.
Suddenly, there was a soft knock on the door and I was flooded with warmth and and I heard the chirping of birds all in a fraction of a second. When I came back to my senses, I went to the door and opened it to find nothing. It was probably just Scott playing Ding-Dong Ditch. Then I looked down and saw a letter on the ground that was neatly enclosed by a blank envelope with nothing written on it…
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

UNTITLED

Prologue

It was another one of those dark and gloomy Sunday mornings. I could feel the light rain splatter on my face as I rode down the uncomfortably familiar road. The rust on the handle bars was slowly burning my hands.
So by now your probably wondering why a boy my age (fourteen that is) would be riding a rusty bike down a road that’s too familiar alone at five o’clock on a rainy Sunday morning. That’s because I was alone. Literally
Do you wanna meet my family? Look at my bike. Do you wanna meet who takes care of me? Look at my helmet. Oh, you wanna come over my house? Take a left a the first oak in the you see in the woods.
I hated the life I was forced to live. But, it was all just bad luck. And, it started on that day in October nine years ago. What an awful day.
So, let’s start at the very beginning of all of my terrible luck with my mother.

Mom

She was, truly, amazing. I still don’t understand why my dad would have just taken off. As soon as I could talk I would always say, “Mommy, your so pretty.” Before she could answer, tears would well up in her big brown eyes.
She had those kind of eyes. The kind that could stop your heart if she opened them too wide.
For some reason, her favorite place to be was the zoo. We went, at least, once a month. We’d start near the gate where the giraffes were. Then, go to see the monkeys and gorillas. After that we would go over to the cafe where she would always get a salad and I got a cheese covered corn dog. As soon as we finished stuffing our faces, we would go on the safari ride that would tour us all of the way around the park.
One day when we returned from the zoo (or the beginning of the end), we walked into the house and she collapsed onto the living room floor. I was five and had no idea what to do. So I just started screaming. Screaming as loud as I could so that someone would come. Lucky, Gramma, who lived right across the street, heard me and came rushing over.