Excerpt: The Suffering

For a long time Michael Trent had vowed never to return to his old hometown of Adam’s Corner. When all he remembered from that place sent shivers down his spine and sparked memories so horrific he wondered why he’d never been institutionalised, he understood the reasons why he could never return.
For fifteen years he had lived in New York, making his name in the advertising business. He had a great apartment in the Upper East Side, spent most of his time going to lavish cocktail parties to meet clients old and new, and he had his pick of the women that he met in the bars and clubs he frequented. He had it made, and there was no way he wanted to lose everything he’d spent his adult life building up.
His life wasn’t as ideal as it looked from the outside though. The memories kept waking him up in the middle of the night, screaming and sweating. As he sat in the crumpled blankets, waiting for the images to disappear, he would take one of the bottles of whiskey he kept underneath his bed to the chair by the TV and he would drink himself into oblivion. It gave him a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, but little more. Had he been asked whether or not he was an alcoholic, he would agreed whole-heartedly. But when his heart was thumping in his chest, and his sMichaelach was knotted with the fear of the past, the only comfort came from good old Jack Daniels. Boy, he could do wonderful things to a man.
The memories came to him when he wasn’t asleep too. Sometimes, when he was particularly bored or tired, the images would pass in front of his eyes and in black and red, and no matter how much he tried to rid himself of them, they always remained, as though someone had etched them onto his brain with acid, indelible and eternal.
Somewhere deep inside he knew something would pull him back to his old town, back to his old life. It came when he was least expecting it – an article in the New York Times caught his eye, the headline screaming out to him and every other reader out there, demanding perusal.

TWO MORE DEAD IN TOWN OF HORROR.

Two people have been found dead this week in Adam’s Corner, the town in which, fifteen years ago, was the scene of a brutal series of killings that shocked America and ended thirteen lives. The killer was never caught, even after a massive FBI investigation, and for many months afterwards paranoia ran rampant in the town. Now it seems that something new is happening in the small town, and those who said that it was cursed all those years ago may just have been right. The two victims, Stanley Walker, 33, and Vanessa Graves, 14, were found dead within just days of each other. The police have as yet revealed no information on how they were killed, but we can only imagine. Is the killer of fifteen years ago back? Or has a new serial killer taken up residence in the small town?