THE WHISTLE KEEPER
(Wheels of Fate)
Prologue
“What fates impose, that men must needs abide; It boots not to resist both wind and tide”
(William Shakespeare).
Celia Wallace - July 2011
‘I see strange scary shadows... please, please, can anyone help?’
This ambiguous two-sentence message had been regularly posted on every social networking website that 12years-old Celia Wallace could access.
The cyber cry for help was a clear reflection of the state of despair that its young and helpless author had reached; it was a pathetic message in a bottle tossed into the internet ocean by a desperate child who had no one to turn to.
Celia Wallace was a once upon-a-time happy child full of the exuberance of youth, who greeted every day with a bright smile that could lift the dullest winter gloom. But at the tender age of eleven, Celia had had to cope with the shock of the almost sudden loss of her mother; that however was not all, the death of her mother was a catastrophe that had carried with it as much dread as it had sorrow, it was at first the fear of losing her mind, but when she began to discount illusory hallucinations caused by trauma, the flip-side to loss of sanity became a terrifying realisation.
Celia had been seeing shadows that no one else could see, shadows which were cast by no one and no physical blockage of light. The shadows little Celia saw moved under their own volition and in directions of their own choosing.
At first they looked strangely fascinating, but as she began to discern their distinct shapes they became eerily frightening and finally utterly terrifying when she was plagued by their presence in the days preceding her mother’s death.
It was pure desperation that drove Celia to resort to posting her daily messages and praying that their ambiguity would someday attract the right reply, but in the eight long weeks of those regular postings, all that the messages had begotten were web wallies sniping with puerile jokes, and cyberspace charlatans hawking anything from bibles to tarot cards, at
irresistibly discounted prices of course.
When she cried her heart-out and told her dad that her mother’s life was in danger, he calmly reassured her that hysterectomy was a routine surgery performed hundreds of times per day, and that her mum was young and fit enough to recover in no time. And when she told him again and again that those creepy shadows were following her mother when they wheeled her out of the operating theatre, he whisked her off for immediate eye-tests.
The final insult came when all the time that her beloved mother was lying comatose in her hospital bed, and until she quietly passed away without ever regaining consciousness, Celia was screaming hysterically at everyone from senior surgeons to ward orderlies, but her loving daddy feeling hugely concerned for his little girl’s mental welfare, made arrangements for a series of mind-numbing appointments with first a trauma councillor, followed shortly afterwards by longer brain-bashing sessions with a child psychiatrist.
It took many weeks and all of her guile to convince her dad and that smug-faced shrink that she was cured of those “hallucinations” to finally get-off the therapy hook and get-on with trying to understand what the hell was happening to her, without the added irritation of the sensible sounding diagnosis of delusional hysteria.
For nine months after her mother’s death in July of 2010, Celia never saw any of those shadowy crawlers, and she even revelled in her acceptance that they might after all have been nothing more than visual hallucinations by whatever cause. Self-doubt had then strolled over hand-in-hand with relief and taken-up a comfortable tenancy in her mind, but then one day in mid-April, those comforting tenants were rudely evicted from their lodgings, and replaced by a living nightmare.
That was on a sunny and warm afternoon when Celia was walking the short distance home from school with a few of her friends. A black cab drove past them and pulled over outside a house a hundred or so yards ahead of them and a couple with a young infant disembarked, but whilst the man was settling the fare she clearly saw them...
Even in the distance, she could see that of all the shadows cast by the Taxi and its passengers, there were three darker shadows that clearly stood out from the rest, and like the ones she had seen before they were distinctly different in shape and density.
Celia gasped and stopped dead in her tracks causing her friends to do likewise. She looked deathly pale and with one hand reflexively covering her mouth she started muttering to no one in particular ‘Oh my God it’s them... oh please God no, not again...’
Her hand shook violently as she pointed, and her voice broke free from a constricted throat as it rose in volume with every syllable.
‘Oh my God... Oh my God... It’s them... Look, look, look at those shadows around the cab driver will you... something bad is gonna happen...’
Celia had been seeing sinister looking shadowy figures that seemed to have a life of their own for months before they started stalking her late mother. At first she began seeing them on television news footages during live broadcasts from scenes of accidents or disasters, and when she’d tried to point them out to her parents, their initial reaction was mildly dismissive, but then their attitude turned to that of impatient irritation whenever she became
more persistent, causing her to withdraw and keep quiet.
Before long Celia was seeing those same shadows on the streets and in public places following various people, and every time she tried to draw the attentions of others to them, they either couldn’t see them or wouldn’t bother looking, but then one day she saw three crawling all around the interior of old Barney’s ancient ice-cream van.
On the very next day old Barney was replaced by another driver, and the new driver informed those who asked that poor old Barney would never sell another ice-cream cone again; he’d had a heart-attack the night before and died before reaching the hospital.
A terrifying certainty had then crept into Celia’s mind; where those small shadows of misshapen humans went, death was either already there, or soon followed.
When she spotted them scurrying on long thin legs around her mother’s hospital bed, with their long arms reaching-out and touching its unwary occupant shortly before her “routine” operation, Celia couldn’t have known anything about the septicaemia that would later kill her mum, but she knew that her mother’s life was in danger, and her hysterical ranting to all and sundry went completely unheeded then, and totally misinterpreted after she and her father were finally told the worst.
She was still frozen to the spot where she stood unable to answer her friends’barrage of questions when the taxi drove off, but within seconds all questions ceased when there was a loud screeching of tyres as an out-of-control car careened out of an intersection and ploughed into the side of the taxi; momentum carried both vehicles onwards, slamming the cab hard against the corner of a brick building and burying it and its driver under tons of
collapsing brickwork.
The boy-racer driver of the culprit vehicle was too street-wise to bow to conventional wisdom and had clearly not been wearing his seat-belt. He flew head-first like a human cannonball through the windscreen of his car and collided with the same corner building, a full second before, and at a greater speed than the crashing vehicles.
It didn’t need a fertile imagination to deduce that both drivers were killed instantly on impact, but whilst Celia’s friends ran to the scene of the accident driven by youthful ghoulish curiosity, Celia ran all the way home, sobbing uncontrollably and filled with the horrors of her returning nightmare.
Telling all to her dad was way out of the question, and speaking about it with either teachers or her friends was a longer way out. Her only remaining option was Google and all of the lesser (Googlets) which usually offered answers to questions that no one else could.
The words “strange shadows” generated thousands of probabilities ranging from scientific perspectives to geriatric pop groups, but there was nothing that even remotely scratched the surface of what she sought, and that was when the idea hit her to try and find others who might have understood.
It was late morning on the first anniversary of her mother’s death when Celia and her father
returned home from visiting the last resting place of the departed Maggie Wallace, and both father and daughter were feeling downhearted and depressed.
Richard Wallace the writer and freelance journalist went straight to his home work-station at the dining table armed with his laptop, note pads and mobile phone, whilst Celia ran straight up the stairs to her bedroom and her own PC to perform her regular ritual of checking for
replies.
As soon as her desk-top came back to life, a message from one of the social networking websites pinged on screen.
‘A promising reply at last..? Please God let it be so...’
Celia’s heart was thrashing a manic drumbeat, as she read and reread the message.
‘I know about the shadows... If you see 3, email me directly... Amanda D.’
The message had been sent twenty minutes earlier, and Celia’s hands were shaking with excitement as she punched-in the right keys, praying that whoever this“Amanda D” was, she would still be sitting at her computer.
‘Hi Amanda... They appear in groups of 3, they are darker than
normal shadows, and have weird human shapes. Now it’s your turn to tell more... Celia.’
‘They are about the size of rats, have long thin arms and legs, small bodies and large heads... Now you, where or when do you see them..? Amanda D.’
‘Where there is death... Celia’
‘I think we better meet ASAP. My mobile number is 079........’
Celia’s long sigh came out of the same well of relief as her torrent of grateful tears. Her tiny shoulders had been weighted down for a long time by a secret burden that she could share with no one, but all that was about to change, a new door was opened on the oppressive enclosure she had been trapped in, a door that would take her out of her long nightmare, and an exit door that she could not wait to go through.
Little Celia had neither the wisdom nor the inclination to consider the probabilities that exit
doors were also entrances to other places...
Please follow these links for orders and free samples :
For Amazon Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Whistle-Keeper-Mike-Al-Amiry-ebook/dp/B00GLBJW4M/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394186637&sr=1-2
For all ebook formats and reading devices:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/376618
(Wheels of Fate)
Prologue
“What fates impose, that men must needs abide; It boots not to resist both wind and tide”
(William Shakespeare).
Celia Wallace - July 2011
‘I see strange scary shadows... please, please, can anyone help?’
This ambiguous two-sentence message had been regularly posted on every social networking website that 12years-old Celia Wallace could access.
The cyber cry for help was a clear reflection of the state of despair that its young and helpless author had reached; it was a pathetic message in a bottle tossed into the internet ocean by a desperate child who had no one to turn to.
Celia Wallace was a once upon-a-time happy child full of the exuberance of youth, who greeted every day with a bright smile that could lift the dullest winter gloom. But at the tender age of eleven, Celia had had to cope with the shock of the almost sudden loss of her mother; that however was not all, the death of her mother was a catastrophe that had carried with it as much dread as it had sorrow, it was at first the fear of losing her mind, but when she began to discount illusory hallucinations caused by trauma, the flip-side to loss of sanity became a terrifying realisation.
Celia had been seeing shadows that no one else could see, shadows which were cast by no one and no physical blockage of light. The shadows little Celia saw moved under their own volition and in directions of their own choosing.
At first they looked strangely fascinating, but as she began to discern their distinct shapes they became eerily frightening and finally utterly terrifying when she was plagued by their presence in the days preceding her mother’s death.
It was pure desperation that drove Celia to resort to posting her daily messages and praying that their ambiguity would someday attract the right reply, but in the eight long weeks of those regular postings, all that the messages had begotten were web wallies sniping with puerile jokes, and cyberspace charlatans hawking anything from bibles to tarot cards, at
irresistibly discounted prices of course.
When she cried her heart-out and told her dad that her mother’s life was in danger, he calmly reassured her that hysterectomy was a routine surgery performed hundreds of times per day, and that her mum was young and fit enough to recover in no time. And when she told him again and again that those creepy shadows were following her mother when they wheeled her out of the operating theatre, he whisked her off for immediate eye-tests.
The final insult came when all the time that her beloved mother was lying comatose in her hospital bed, and until she quietly passed away without ever regaining consciousness, Celia was screaming hysterically at everyone from senior surgeons to ward orderlies, but her loving daddy feeling hugely concerned for his little girl’s mental welfare, made arrangements for a series of mind-numbing appointments with first a trauma councillor, followed shortly afterwards by longer brain-bashing sessions with a child psychiatrist.
It took many weeks and all of her guile to convince her dad and that smug-faced shrink that she was cured of those “hallucinations” to finally get-off the therapy hook and get-on with trying to understand what the hell was happening to her, without the added irritation of the sensible sounding diagnosis of delusional hysteria.
For nine months after her mother’s death in July of 2010, Celia never saw any of those shadowy crawlers, and she even revelled in her acceptance that they might after all have been nothing more than visual hallucinations by whatever cause. Self-doubt had then strolled over hand-in-hand with relief and taken-up a comfortable tenancy in her mind, but then one day in mid-April, those comforting tenants were rudely evicted from their lodgings, and replaced by a living nightmare.
That was on a sunny and warm afternoon when Celia was walking the short distance home from school with a few of her friends. A black cab drove past them and pulled over outside a house a hundred or so yards ahead of them and a couple with a young infant disembarked, but whilst the man was settling the fare she clearly saw them...
Even in the distance, she could see that of all the shadows cast by the Taxi and its passengers, there were three darker shadows that clearly stood out from the rest, and like the ones she had seen before they were distinctly different in shape and density.
Celia gasped and stopped dead in her tracks causing her friends to do likewise. She looked deathly pale and with one hand reflexively covering her mouth she started muttering to no one in particular ‘Oh my God it’s them... oh please God no, not again...’
Her hand shook violently as she pointed, and her voice broke free from a constricted throat as it rose in volume with every syllable.
‘Oh my God... Oh my God... It’s them... Look, look, look at those shadows around the cab driver will you... something bad is gonna happen...’
Celia had been seeing sinister looking shadowy figures that seemed to have a life of their own for months before they started stalking her late mother. At first she began seeing them on television news footages during live broadcasts from scenes of accidents or disasters, and when she’d tried to point them out to her parents, their initial reaction was mildly dismissive, but then their attitude turned to that of impatient irritation whenever she became
more persistent, causing her to withdraw and keep quiet.
Before long Celia was seeing those same shadows on the streets and in public places following various people, and every time she tried to draw the attentions of others to them, they either couldn’t see them or wouldn’t bother looking, but then one day she saw three crawling all around the interior of old Barney’s ancient ice-cream van.
On the very next day old Barney was replaced by another driver, and the new driver informed those who asked that poor old Barney would never sell another ice-cream cone again; he’d had a heart-attack the night before and died before reaching the hospital.
A terrifying certainty had then crept into Celia’s mind; where those small shadows of misshapen humans went, death was either already there, or soon followed.
When she spotted them scurrying on long thin legs around her mother’s hospital bed, with their long arms reaching-out and touching its unwary occupant shortly before her “routine” operation, Celia couldn’t have known anything about the septicaemia that would later kill her mum, but she knew that her mother’s life was in danger, and her hysterical ranting to all and sundry went completely unheeded then, and totally misinterpreted after she and her father were finally told the worst.
She was still frozen to the spot where she stood unable to answer her friends’barrage of questions when the taxi drove off, but within seconds all questions ceased when there was a loud screeching of tyres as an out-of-control car careened out of an intersection and ploughed into the side of the taxi; momentum carried both vehicles onwards, slamming the cab hard against the corner of a brick building and burying it and its driver under tons of
collapsing brickwork.
The boy-racer driver of the culprit vehicle was too street-wise to bow to conventional wisdom and had clearly not been wearing his seat-belt. He flew head-first like a human cannonball through the windscreen of his car and collided with the same corner building, a full second before, and at a greater speed than the crashing vehicles.
It didn’t need a fertile imagination to deduce that both drivers were killed instantly on impact, but whilst Celia’s friends ran to the scene of the accident driven by youthful ghoulish curiosity, Celia ran all the way home, sobbing uncontrollably and filled with the horrors of her returning nightmare.
Telling all to her dad was way out of the question, and speaking about it with either teachers or her friends was a longer way out. Her only remaining option was Google and all of the lesser (Googlets) which usually offered answers to questions that no one else could.
The words “strange shadows” generated thousands of probabilities ranging from scientific perspectives to geriatric pop groups, but there was nothing that even remotely scratched the surface of what she sought, and that was when the idea hit her to try and find others who might have understood.
It was late morning on the first anniversary of her mother’s death when Celia and her father
returned home from visiting the last resting place of the departed Maggie Wallace, and both father and daughter were feeling downhearted and depressed.
Richard Wallace the writer and freelance journalist went straight to his home work-station at the dining table armed with his laptop, note pads and mobile phone, whilst Celia ran straight up the stairs to her bedroom and her own PC to perform her regular ritual of checking for
replies.
As soon as her desk-top came back to life, a message from one of the social networking websites pinged on screen.
‘A promising reply at last..? Please God let it be so...’
Celia’s heart was thrashing a manic drumbeat, as she read and reread the message.
‘I know about the shadows... If you see 3, email me directly... Amanda D.’
The message had been sent twenty minutes earlier, and Celia’s hands were shaking with excitement as she punched-in the right keys, praying that whoever this“Amanda D” was, she would still be sitting at her computer.
‘Hi Amanda... They appear in groups of 3, they are darker than
normal shadows, and have weird human shapes. Now it’s your turn to tell more... Celia.’
‘They are about the size of rats, have long thin arms and legs, small bodies and large heads... Now you, where or when do you see them..? Amanda D.’
‘Where there is death... Celia’
‘I think we better meet ASAP. My mobile number is 079........’
Celia’s long sigh came out of the same well of relief as her torrent of grateful tears. Her tiny shoulders had been weighted down for a long time by a secret burden that she could share with no one, but all that was about to change, a new door was opened on the oppressive enclosure she had been trapped in, a door that would take her out of her long nightmare, and an exit door that she could not wait to go through.
Little Celia had neither the wisdom nor the inclination to consider the probabilities that exit
doors were also entrances to other places...
Please follow these links for orders and free samples :
For Amazon Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Whistle-Keeper-Mike-Al-Amiry-ebook/dp/B00GLBJW4M/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394186637&sr=1-2
For all ebook formats and reading devices:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/376618