Last summer I published a thriller, FLOATERS (a nervous novella at 35,000 words). Releasing a new work on Amazon as an indie author, and getting noticed, is always a challenge (translation: understatement of the century). Amazon, literally, has more titles than there are people in Tokyo, so getting visibility is...uh...a bit tricky. I'd liken it to drowning alone in the middle of the cold, choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean---I'm clinging to an overturned rowboat (my new novel), waving my wet sock in the air (my low-budget marketing strategy) and hoping a jumbo jet (filled with cherished readers) at 35,000 feet (from hither and thither) flies overhead (above my Amazon page) and rescues (purchases my book at an insanely reasonable price for a priceless tale, for which they will be rewarded with nonstop insomnia and occasional laughter)...oh, never mind.
So I greatly appreciated the positive reviews that popped up over the months. At this time, it has a 4.9 star average. Go figure. Whoever you (insightful) folks are, I salute you!
Evidently I became a bit attached to the central characters, and their tortuous plight. I scribbled a sequel, realized it couldn't be released as a standalone without the reader knowing the back-story. So I combined both dark tales, and titled it EXIT. It still features the two main characters, Rayne Moore and Tim Crowe. What's it about? This: it's about 73,000 words.
(Psst! if you really want to 'Hit the exit," click on the cover.)
a near-future thriller?
excerpt - chapter 1
October 30, Devil's Night
Maybe it was a
Halloween stunt.
The cashier inside
the theater's box-office resembled a psychic from a traveling carnival. She sat
on a stool, not saying a word behind the window, staring at the street with
vacant concentration. Her empty eyes suggested she was a million miles away.
Tim Crowe took a
half step back on the sidewalk in the gathering gloom. Dead leaves skittered
past his sneakers. He closed his left eyelid and looked through his right eye,
his good eye. For the last week or so, his world had rotated on his right eye.
Crowe faced the
ticket booth, an oblong structure the size of a large coffin. Glass, chrome,
wood. It took a moment before the image clicked. The booth reminded him of a
coin-operated fortune-telling machine in an arcade where, behind a window, a
mechanical mystic named Zoltan or Esmeralda would stare at you with glass eyes,
and speak your fortune via a hidden record player. Or pass you a slip of paper
with your fortune written on it in language so cryptic you didn't know if you
were blessed or cursed.
Zoltan creeped him
out; here, Esmeralda had a similar effect.
She had wireless,
blue-tinted glasses, her pale skin smooth as a ceramic bowl. She wore a gold
shirt, black vest, and a turquoise scarf over her bowed head. The paisley
design suggested swirling eyes. The booth had no interior light, just a lit
candle. A shadow flickered across her face.
The sign posted on
the window read: Free Admission -
Donations Accepted.
Crowe withdrew a
ten-dollar bill from his wallet and pushed it through the ticket slot.
"Will that cover it?"
The cashier
responded by tapping the donation sign with her fingernail. Click.
Crowe couldn't
resist, and asked, "Are you a cloistered nun? I see you took a vow of
silence."
No response, but
something dark flashed in her eyes for an instant. Not anger; something else. The
vacant stare returned.
Crowe looked up at
the wide marquee: Gateway. Below the theater's name, the featured movie: Gone. The theater had been around since
the 1920s, judging by the architecture. The Gateway appeared to have recently
changed ownership. It now offered more independent and off-beat fare. Not to
mention eccentric employees, eccentric pricing.
The cashier slid a
ticket across the wooden counter.
Crowe looked
through the glass with his right eye. Coins, dollar bills, and what appeared to
be Tarot cards covered the counter. The
Gateway was a theater. And this was pure theatrics.
Crowe took the
ticket, and heard someone singing and playing guitar. He turned halfway around.
Across the street, a young woman with a glorious afro and a black hat stood on
the sidewalk beside a corner church, a faded purple bandanna tied around her
forehead, and an open guitar case by her feet. A teenage granddaughter of Jimi
Hendrix. The two exchanged a glance beneath a streetlamp. The restless shadows
of tree branches, stirred by the wind, tattooed the concrete, the dark shapes
moving back and forth. She leaned back on one heel, and strummed a familiar
song called Eye Seek You.
"Eye seek you in the morning
Eye seek you at night
Eye see you soon…"
Crowe listened as
he reached into the pocket of his green, army field jacket, fingering aside his
plastic vial of Vigamox, one of his three eye-drop drugs. As a reminder to take
his medicine, his girlfriend had taped a small picture of a mirror on the front
of the pocket, and wrote on it: medicine
cabinet. Crowe took out his cell phone, thumbing a number while looking
down the street with his good eye. Chinese restaurant, bookstore, Starbuck's,
watch repair, parking lot.
Three rings. Then a
recorded voice, smooth as honey: "Rayne."
A declaration, an answer, and a smoky-voiced invitation—all rolled into one.
Crowe squeezed the
phone and said nothing. Several seconds passed. Before the connection died, he
said, "It's me. I've been locked up for a week, and had to get out. I
stopped at the movies. I'll be back in a couple of hours or so." After
another pause, he said, "I'm sorry for being such a pain in the ass. I
miss you."
Click.
He put the cell
phone into his pocket and withdrew the medicine. He shook the vial, uncapped
it, tilted his head back and fingered his eyelid down. The liquid drop stung
for a moment and his eye watered. He blinked several times. This daily routine
was annoying, particularly if his hand was unsteady and the dropper hit his
eyeball. Within minutes the drug would migrate from his eye socket, leaving a
bitter taste at the back of his throat.
Across the street,
the busker sang:
"…Eye see you soon
Real soon."
Tim Crowe opened a
glass door and walked alone across a faded red carpet, past a closed
refreshment counter with an empty shelf. On the wall behind the counter was a
poster of a condemned prisoner sitting in his cell with a priest, eating his
last meal—a paper bucket of movie popcorn. Tim glanced at the poster, then at
the empty popcorn machine on the counter. And where was the ticket taker?
Perhaps the donation policy precluded the need for one. The musty foyer was
filled with dim lights and vintage movie posters of Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman,
and the Mummy. He thought of Rayne as
he passed through a doorway and left the light.
Crowe sat in a dark
theater with few people on a Wednesday night. Empty seats, with their rounded
backs visible against the silver screen, suggested rows of moonlit tombstones
in a cemetery at night. On the wide screen, the opening credits rolled up on Gone. Soon he was watching a grim story
about an alternate world that almost mirrored his own.
During the movie,
his thoughts kept drifting back over the events of the last two weeks.
#
Tim Crowe began to
go blind in mid-October.
One morning a
spider suddenly appeared in his left eye. Soon another spider appeared, along
with floating dots. Floaters were common, usually benign, and would eventually
disappear. But his spiders soon morphed into a dark shade that, within a couple
of days, steadily closed over his eye from the bottom up. An inverted window shade.
Half of his field of vision disappeared. The shade continued to rise. Half
became 75% and counting. And then, presto, 90% of the eye went dark. Gone. As
if the ceiling light inside his skull were being dialed down with a dimmer
switch. The remaining 10% at the top of his eye was a blur, similar to looking
through a dirty windowpane.
A visit to a local
clinic put everything into focus: get thee into an emergency room. Or lose the
eye. You have a detached retina. Hurry.
Within an hour he had
checked into Massachusetts
General Hospital,
the Eye and Ear Clinic. A female technician in a black lab coat and black boots
stood before him in a small room and asked, "How many fingers am I holding
up?"
Crowe, sitting in a
chair, raised his head and looked through his bad eye while thinking, "Finger? That's funny, I can't see the
hand. I can't see the freaking technician."
The next day Crowe
lay under a blue plastic sheet that covered his head and torso, similar to a
burial cloth. The sheet had one small hole for his left eye. Anesthesia flowed through
a catheter in his left hand. A drug was shot into the side of his head. The
heart monitor beeped in the background. He was 28 years old—a high school substitute
teacher by day, a struggling screenwriter by night—and for the first time in
his life he got an unbidden glimpse of his own mortality. Lying on a gurney
will do it every time.
"Your retina
is like wallpaper," the ophthalmologist said. "It's peeled down. We
have to roll it back up."
Two surgeons went
to work, rolling up the wallpaper. The operation included a gas injection into
his eye, creating a bubble that pressed against the retina, keeping it flush
against the back of the eye.
He hoped that it
wasn't too late. He hoped they could save his eye.
#
Tonight, at the
Gateway Theater, random images of the hospital rolled through his head, as if a
list of credits rising and disappearing. His left eye still had the gas trapped
inside. The dark blue bubble looked like an eye within his eye, unblinking,
watching him round-the-clock. Whenever he moved his head, the bubble moved in
sync, vertically or horizontally. As the gas dissipated over time, the bubble
would diminish. The strange blue eye would finally disappear.
For two hours,
Crowe sat within the glow of the screen and watched Gone with uneven attention. Earlier events clouded his thoughts.
His argument that afternoon with his girlfriend, Rayne, still echoed in his
head. He'd been in an irritable mood all week. Post-op instructions: he had to
stay face-down because of the gas. If he lay on his back, the bubble would move
away from the retina. So he slept face-down. He had put a TV on the floor and
watched it face-down. Same for the computer monitor, on the floor. He drank
with a straw. Being face-down day and night, he looked woefully depressed, the
most disconsolate man in America.
His bowed head felt as heavy as a barbell, but he shouldn't have taken it out
on Rayne.
The movie ended.
The screen
brightened. A white rectangle without sound. He could see the silhouettes of a
few heads. Then these words appeared in the middle of the screen:
COMING SOON
to a theater near you
The screen darkened
and an image emerged: the interior of a dark theater. The scene was shot in
black-and-white, except for a single red exit sign in the left corner that
offset the gloomy hues. Crowe stared, his attention focused for the first time
that night—the theater looked familiar. He watched the trailer for an upcoming
indie movie or documentary. All he could see were the legs and feet of people
on a crowded city street, as if the camera were pointed downward at a sea of
shoes. He could hear footsteps on pavement. Boot heels clicking, sneakers
squeaking. The crowd hastened their pace, started to run. Then the camera swung
upward just above the crowd, showing a quick shot of something suspended
overhead against a blue sky. Written on its surface: DR1. Then a voiceover
broke in. The weary tone suggested a soldier in a foxhole whose view of the
frontline filled him with dread.
"They are coming. They are here. Each week they
invade our world. Some say each day. They walk among us. They look like us.
Exactly like us. The invaders are coming and must be stopped. The lines are
drawn. The battle has begun."
A single word
flashed on the screen. White letters superimposed on the image of a theater
with a dark, empty screen.
EXIT
The trailer ended.
Yellow lights came on, dimly glowing in the wall sconces. In the shadows, Tim
Crowe rose from his seat. He could hear a half dozen people head up the aisle,
shoes whispering on the floor.
Something snapped
on. A bright spot in the dark caught his eye. A red light appeared in the far
left corner. The exit sign glowed for the first time. He thought of the
trailer, the dark theater, the title. He thought of the cashier, the fortune
teller in the ticket booth with the lit candle. Everything suggested Halloween,
including this part of the show. He stood on the slope of the aisle and smiled,
then descended toward the alley exit. Gravitational pull. Soon he put his hand
on the crash bar and opened the exit door, passing beneath the glowing exit
sign.
For a second, he
thought of a red traffic light. Stop.
The heavy door
clicked shut behind him.
The alley was full
dark. He took a step and felt something cold shiver through him, sensed a
change. Was it the chill air of the night? Somehow the alley looked….wrong. His
body tensed with hesitation. Perhaps he should have gone through the foyer and
the front exit. He felt foolish but was alone. He turned back and gripped the
cold, black metal door handle, but it didn't budge. Locked.
He flashed on Rayne
at the restaurant, waiting tables, and assumed she was home from work by now.
He wondered if he should go to her place again tonight or go home and why did
he feel so…lightheaded? So different?
The alley was a
tunnel of darkness beneath a starless sky, a city block running between
buildings with no sign of lights, closed garages, and a cinder block wall. Dead
leaves crunched under his heels. He moved toward the dirty glow of a flickering
white streetlight at the mouth of the alley, feeling unsteady. Dirt and sand
scraped and scratched beneath his boots. The pale streetlight loomed closer. He
needed to go to Rayne's, go home, go anywhere but here. He felt inexplicably
alone at that moment.
He stopped, pulled
out his cell phone and scanned his surroundings with his good eye. He thumbed
her number. Muscle memory. She'd be home by now, and would have gotten his
message from a couple of hours ago. He waited a second or two. Until he heard a
flat, familiar, robotic voice bleached of any humanity:
"We're sorry. The number you have reached is not in
service, or is assigned in a different area code. Please check your area code
and try again."
Whenever Tim Crowe
heard that familiar recording, it reminded him of the movie, Stepford Wives. He terminated the call,
shook his head and wondered if his thumb had gone blind along with his left
eye. He squinted in the dark and redialed. Ringing. Click. He couldn't wait to
see her. She said:
"We're sorry. The number you—"
Tim froze, aware
that someone or something was behind him, hidden in the dark. He heard—what?
Something passed right by him. Over him? Something…
"—assigned in a different area code. Please check
your area code and try again."
This time he didn't
need to look; his thumb killed the call. Muscle memory.
For a minute or so,
Tim didn't move a muscle. He peered into the dark with his good eye, listening
intently to his surrounds. Five mysterious words echoed in his head.
Please check your area code.
