The prologue to my second book can stand alone, so I thought I'd post it to my blog for all to see. Enjoy! :)
Prologue
Mark Johnson didn’t expect death to
feel like a change in temperature. He set his briefcase down on the
mahogany desk in his spacious office, took one final swig of his
pumpkin-spice double latte, and opened up his executive-sized window.
Mark was a senior partner at Johnson, Smith & Jones, L.L.P., and
though he pulled in over $500,000 annually, he had pushed away his
late wife, Linda. Long days at the office and longer nights at Gilt
on Madison Ave. had put too much stress on their marriage. She’d
left Mark for a chemistry professor named Arnold. For
God's sake, the man didn't know a cufflink from a tie clip, and wore
a tie with short sleeves.
The divorce was decreed. Even his kids
divorced themselves from his surname, as if the whole corporation had
dissolved.
Tonight Mark meant to dissolve too. Both
his parents had expired long ago in Floridan opulence, after all, and
he had no educations of nieces or nephews to fund, no siblings to
rival. His children and ex-wife wouldn’t touch his assets, and he
hadn’t a need for them, really. What
an emptiness I have accumulated,
thought Mark as he climbed up on his window’s ledge.
Mark wanted to think wild thoughts and
have some profound connection to his time and place of death. He’d
chosen 11pm sharp, but he had no real reason for doing so. He’d
chosen his office window and the city sidewalk below for his body’s
final breath. Why? He didn’t know. It was sad, he thought, that
there was no poetry in his life.
As Mark Johnson leaned into the wind,
trying to elongate the cusp of his life, he glimpsed his destination,
and was disgusted. How had he missed this detail? Below, a wooden
awning stretched out across several storefronts. Large, striped
pedestrian crosswalk signs directed foot traffic through the narrow
tunnel. His place of death was a construction site. Mark tried to
back out of the deal, but had no leverage, and fell. His adrenal
gland surged, and he was horribly excited. The Earth rushing towards
him was magnificent, and nothing had ever felt as real as the air he
now penetrated. Tenth floor, ninth floor, eighth floor, he was almost
one with the ground. Fourth floor, third floor, second floor, and he
merged with the plywood of the construction site, shards of wood
impaling him as he liquefied on impact.
Mark felt a temperature change. He knew
from the ski trips he used to take with his family that a frigid
January sometimes felt like a sweltering July. It was all very
confusing, especially the fact that Mark was still thinking. He
opened his eyes.
Mark had entered the Haze. A buzzing
bright white light was soon replaced with humming purple rays. Mark
looked down at his blob of a body from an impossible angle, and
shrieked when he realized that his head wasn’t attached. It bobbed
up and down in space. He floated aimlessly for a time, watching the
shadows and lights shift in the distance, and then a strange suction
pulled him along. There was a glowing thread emanating from his
solar plexus, and a cat-like creature was tugging on it. His head,
though severed from his body, followed the cat as though it were
bonded to his flesh. Mark cried out and jiggled his arm, which was
still attached to his body. The cat turned around, meowed, and
pointed a paw above her.
Mark looked up and felt some part of his
being rise and separate from the bulk of his consciousness. The part
that had risen felt light and whimsical, like the first flurries of
the season. He remembered holding his newborn boys, crying and
laughing at once. The bottom part, though, was dark and heavy, slush
trampled by too many shoes. He was in a back room, screwing an
escort, stomach acid and rum sloshing up in his mouth. The cat was
pulling him down, down. And then there was an explosion of noise—the
hiss of a cat, the shriek of a wild boar, and then a two-toned voice,
saying, “Jeremy Chikalto! Apollyon’s animus!”
Mark Johnson swiveled his mushy head and
saw the cat hissing and backing away, whipping its gray and white
tail. The nearby shadows began to morph, and a large black shape
loomed towards him, polluting the Haze above it with swirls of oil.
Mark remembered all the times he had been afraid, and the memories
coalesced into a feeling of the deepest dread. His glowing cord was
drawn into the creature's terrible gravity, and Mark was being reeled
in. Mark howled as he entered the demon’s mouth, and was
incinerated in its throat. Everything was charred black. This time,
there was no mistaking the temperature.
