Snippet 3

Chapter 3 - An Unexpected Loss - sneak preview (full book available on Amazon - kindle and paperback)

Minutes later, Jason came down with the Scrabble board game in his hands. It was a very old version, pre-owned by someone else by the looks of it, but most of the letters seemed to be there when they got it. Jason and his dad used to play this game quite frequently when he was younger; it was simple and enjoyable, but the thing that Jason found difficult about it was finding some good enough words, which were scarce in his vocabulary unfortunately. His dad was incomparably better at this game.
They played until it was nearly ten o’clock, and Jason got bored so he suggested to pack it up and call it his dad’s win (after losing four games out of six). He was putting all the stuff back into the box when, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a flicker coming from somewhere to his right "
His head turned, and yes " the flickering was still happening; what he’d thought it was, though, was nothing close to what he was seeing at that moment " was his dad’s hand fading, or was he going completely insane?
‘Dad, what’s happening to your hand? Look, look " quickly!’ Jason could see very clearly " he was not imagining it at all " something wrong was taking place; he could see less flesh of his father’s hand, it now looked as pale and see-through as a ghost’s ... and yet his dad was not one of those.
His dad looked down, and then answered calmly: ‘What’s wrong with my hand? It’s perfectly fine. Here, see "’ He held up his hand to the light, spreading his fingers out wide, and shook it in front of Jason; indeed, there was nothing happening to his hand, but for a fleeting five seconds he actually thought he could see ... well, his eyes must have been just fuzzy at that moment " his mind was playing tricks.

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Fifteen minutes later, he had got dressed and gone downstairs. He walked dozily into the living room. He looked around " his mum and dad were nowhere in here. So they must not have woken up yet, Jason thought to himself. But he walked into the kitchen and started making himself cereal. After that he went to sit over on the sofa.
An hour went by " still his parents were not up. He wondered what they could be doing, so he went upstairs into their room to check on them "
However ... their bed was empty. They couldn’t be out, could they? Jason asked himself.
But they were not outside; he couldn’t see them anywhere. No matter how hard he tried to not skip to this particular conclusion, he started getting the feeling that something was up. They would have left a note or something, at least, to let him know that they had gone out, wouldn’t they?
Jason then decided to search the other rooms. He checked the bathroom, the toilet downstairs, the utility room, and the spare room at the front of the house " inside all of them was just emptiness. And the longer Jason looked and found no-one, the more his panic had risen up inside him. His heart was pounding. Not now, he thought. Why aren’t they here? Where have they gone? He ran out the front door and started calling for them. There was no answer, and Jason ran down the pontoon and started looking for them through the trees.
‘DAD!’ he shouted into the forest. ‘MUM?’ He kept shouting but all he got back were the rustlings of leaves and birds twitching in the canopies of trees. He saw a rabbit scuttle along the ground between the trunks deep inside the forest.
He had no choice after a while but to give up looking, so he went back into the house. He desperately tried to come up with reasons why they might be out. Could be they were just in the village ... maybe they just didn’t think that he would be worried. He tried to convince himself throughout the next hour that his parents would be back soon, that there was nothing to get worried about … unless they weren’t back by the evening. The more that thought came up, the worse he was panicking. Soon he couldn’t think of anything else but wanting to see his parents.
By late afternoon, nothing had changed. He decided to go into the village and look for them there. When he asked the villagers if they’d seen either of his parents around, he realised that none of them knew at all of their whereabouts. He didn’t want to give too much away in front of them, though, so he played it as calm as possible. It worked; not one person out of the entire village became suspicious or, in fact, as worried and nervous as Jason was at that time.
He became less shocked and more confused as the day wore on. By the time he was back at home, the lake house seemed darker and scarier than he had ever experienced it before. The wind picked up outside and it was rattling the walls and windows; the hallway looked empty and ghostly. Jason was more scared to be alone in this house than to be in the village with all those people surrounding him. He felt like something was going to pop out from the side and frighten him while he was walking around the house. The only place he felt safe enough was in the living room, for he could sit on the sofa in front of the fire, and that made just enough noise to counteract the reverberating silence that was sweeping through the halls.