The Awakening - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Donna Boyd  lives in a restored turn-of-the-century barn in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she is now working on her next novel. Klappentext It was supposed to be a time for healing. But it soon turned to horror. Paul and Penny Mason are spending the summer at the family lake house with their troubled! teenage daughter! Elsie! in a last-ditch effort to save their crumbling marriage. But the tension between them only thickens when they arrive at their once-idyllic summer home! a place that now feels eerily cold and darkly foreboding. It quickly becomes clear that all is not right. Penny is plagued by horrific! recurring nightmares. Paul and Elsie are surprised by the curious appearance of a sad! strange woman-a woman who purports to know them! but who calls them by names that are not their own. The mystery only deepens when they discover an antique box in the house. Inside is a photo of the woman! alive in a distant past. Who is she? And what is the source of the seeping! chilly discomfort that has suddenly settled over the family? The answer lies within Penny's disturbing dreams and Elsie's fragile emotional state-and when long-buried secrets reveal themselves! it will be the most frightening day of their lives. . . . One If a human being is the sum total of all her thoughts, memories, and experiences, then I was, for some indeterminate period of time, nothing. I did not exist. I hovered on the edge of consciousness like a breath waiting to be drawn in, a dream not quite formed into images, almost alive and not quite dead. It was not a particularly disagreeable state. Those who know nothing want for nothing, and it was good, for a time, simply not to care. And then I began to awaken. My memories of those first days are blurred and tossed together like fruit spilled from a basket; some moments, the brightest in color, stand out in particular; others are lost altogether; none are in the correct order. My eyes, so long unused to seeing, struggled to separate amorphous clouds of light into faces and objects, and did not always succeed. My ears could not quite distinguish one sound from another, and the background noise formed a rather soothing hum of almost musical cadence. I whispered the customary words, surprised at how hollow and faraway my own voice sounded. “Where am I?” A face floated into view, familiar, kind. But I could not say I recognized it. “Don’t you remember?” I sensed a disappointment when I did not answer, although the voice was carefully neutral. “Try to remember. You’ve been awake before. You’ve asked the question before. Try to remember what happened.” But the gentle winds of void were beckoning to me again, and remembering seemed entirely too much trouble. I whispered, “I want to go home” just before I drifted away again. And so it was, the same scene repeated over again, I can’t say how many times. I would awake, I would question; I would sleep, I would forget. But gradually, it seemed, I stayed awake longer, I forgot less. Memories drifted through my dreamlessness like dandelion fluff on a summer breeze. A house with a green shutter that banged in the wind. A garden and a stone frog covered in moss. The smell of baking bread. A starched doily on a cherry table. Rain on the roof. A child’s voice. Scraps of a life, bits of a woman. Particles of chaff, harmless and pretty as they danced in the sun, drifting closer and closer until I could see they weren’t chaff at all but floating moths with gossamer wings; no, not moths and not floating, but buzzing insects, darting and daring, irritating me, teasing and stinging and drawing me back to a place I didn’t want to be. I opened my eyes to the hurtful light. I kept them open. And this time I asked a different question. “What’s wrong with me?” The face was back, kind and concerned. ...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Donna Boyd
• Verlag: Ballantine
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 01.07.2003
• EAN: 9780345462350
• ISBN: 978-0-345-46235-0
• Seiten: 208
• Abmessung: 140 mm x 216 mm x 13 mm
• Thema: Belletristik > Spannung