Saturday, May 30, 2020

New Release Sample: CONFESSIONS OF A LOST KID

When the tour group of eight got to the second room off the restored lobby, which was the locker room, something weird happened. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who saw the green, glow-in-the-dark gas that seeped up through the cracks in the tile floor and streamed out through the vents in the rusty old locker doors. I watched those streamers swirl around for a few seconds. They turned into tentacles like an octopus, except without the suction cups, and reached across the room to us. Nobody reacted. Not even Mr. Wellington, when one of those tentacles curved around his shoulders and flicked at his coat.

I was pretty sure nothing was going to happen, because the greeny-glowing tentacles were transparent. Common sense said they were just gas. Except would gas act like that? There wasn't a breeze in the room to explain the movement if it was just gas.

One tentacle wrapped around Mr. Wellington's throat, and he choked. I opened my mouth to scream.

The tentacles vanished, just popping out of existence in silence. Mr. Wellington went on telling funny stories. The men and women who had used this locker room, during different phases of the factory's history. The different things that had been manufactured here, depending on the economy or what was needed in the rest of the country.


Nobody else seemed to have seen the tentacles, otherwise they would have said something, right? Of course, I saw them, and I didn't say anything, so how could I be sure? The freaky thing was that Mr. Wellington seemed to forget he was choking, the moment the tentacles vanished. As if he hadn't really felt them, or hadn't been choking at all.

So what had I seen, if what I saw didn't happen?

When in doubt, go to Mum and Pop. They investigated the really weird, after all.

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