Prologue

Lemon Yellow

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I woke up one morning feeling as though my life had become stale.

It was the first week of August and nothing was wrong. The sun was streaming through my windows; a golden light of the most perfect and lemony clarity. My alarm clock told me that it was eight thirty and I had not so much as overslept. The wave of intense humidity that frequently accompanied eleven thirty onwards had not yet descended. There was a breeze. Birds were chirping in the trees. All was well and yet, I could not overcome a sudden wave of pressing anxiety, insisting that I be elsewhere.

Rapidly, my mind searched into the corners of my consciousness for some un-dusted friend or relation that I had not seen in quite some time. I reached for a source of neglected companionship; a situation that I might remedy in order to release this restless energy.

I could go to see my old college friend Norah in Bar Harbor for the weekend, my thoughts suggested idly. I could call up my cousin Samantha, who lived in New York, in order to to interrogate her about her forthcoming trip home for wedding season?

None of it would do, I decided. It would not happen fast enough. Before either of these plans could come to fruition, the dazzling lemon sun outside my window would have faded and set several times, taking with it the clear sense of wonder and the infinite possibilities of an eternal summer day.

I dressed, feeling as though whatever it was that I was supposed to do would find me, if only I presented myself to it for the taking. I wanted a pot of strong coffee but I settled for a reheated a mug of the old one. I smoked an illicit cigarette next to the open window, inhaling the scent of greenery and brine from the not so distant sea.

And I nine thirty, I received a phone call.

"Hello?" I said, answering on the first ring.

"Debbie?" trilled a desperate voice on the other end, amazed that I had answered my phone before noon. "What the fuck!"

I looked about, rapidly trying to consider if this this question had been rhetorical or specifically meant for me before realizing that, as a member of the recently arisen, I was every unlikely to have already rubbed anybody so queerly.

"What?" I pondered out loud, my eyes darting hopefully toward that promising yellow sunlight.

"Shit is fucked!" the voice continued, growing steadily more angry in both pace and pitch.

At that moment, my cell reception- or what little there was of it- seemed to cut out entirely and I was left questioning a silent line almost longingly.

What is it? Are you ok? These were the thoughts rattling about in my head, but most importantly I asked: What shit is so fucked?

The call had come from my cousin Samantha in New York. I hastily tried to dial her back, holding my cell phone aloft with the speaker on, bringing it as close to the window as I dared without taking the risk of accidentally dropping it some twenty feet into the grass below. I tucked my cigarette past my lip, as I had seen so many stone-cold badasses do in old movies, and promptly seared the white of my eye with smoke in my position of rigid concentration.

I heard each whirring Brrrring, counting the rings until they numbered into the dozens, knowing that she would not pick up and feeling- quite selfishly- as though I had lost the only opportunity of escaping my prison of crippling boredom.

This sense of selfishness is what I would remember the most in the days to come, not because I had been cheated of a good story, but because I was the last person to hear from Sam in what would become a growing period of radio silence.

Two days later, I received a stiff call from Samantha's boyfriend Dan, demanding somewhat accusingly to know if Sam had come to visit me. They had had an explosive fight, he said, and she was no longer speaking to him.

I told Dan that she hadn't, leaving off the 'shit's fucked' conversation just in case Sam happened to be en route, feeling almost militaristically as though, by giving away her position, I would be committing an act of betrayal of the highest order.

The moment I had signed off however, I experienced a pang of doubt. Samantha was impulsive and entirely capable of making a ten hour road trip without the assistance of others. I also knew that she had been discontented with her living situation for some time but who, I wondered, made a drive long enough to change time zones without feeling any inclination to pick up their phone in order to alleviate the pressing silence or at the very least, inform their future host of their intentions?

I tried Samantha's cell again, as I had been doing for the last several days, not expecting an answer but becoming irrationally angry anyway when my expectation was met.

Well, what the fuck? I thought angrily, ramming my thumb into the touch screen to terminate the call. What was the point of having a cell phone, when you never picked it up?

That's the funny thing about mobile devices: they are only miraculous bits of technology when a person still lives under the assumption that that reciprocation is necessary. Every time the screen lights up and the person on the other end feels as though they are required to respond, it counts as a triumph for modernity. Without participation, the myth of a connected world falls apart and a phone is no better than a rock or a paper weight.

Samantha's phone, whether by choice or by dint of some terrible outside force, was no longer a means of communication. I sensed that I was nudging a sleeping shoulder. Knocking on the door of a vacated house. No one was home and continuing to dial her number was nothing more than a mindless physical interaction with an inanimate object that I was using to make myself feel as though I was doing something productive.

On Saturday, I came home from my sad part time job to find Samantha's mother Linda sitting in my living room, looking fretful. At this point, no one had heard from Sam in six days.

On Sunday, she was reported missing.

There was going to be a blue moon in August; a second full moon in a month made even more rare by the fact that it was last blue moon I would see for two years, as my radio had taken to wildly insisting during my morning commute.

The stuff of myths and legends! A blue moon in Aquarius! My radio cried itself hoarse, warning me of the shift in perspective that was swiftly approaching on silver wings, ready to rise up out of the darkness and pull everything- the tide and myself- toward a foreign shore. I didn't need to be told. I knew that the change was coming.

Like Samantha's cell phone, which had still yet to be found, I sensed myself becoming remote and unreachable.

Somewhere in the world, cast off like a metallic rock that no longer lit up to announce the insistent knocking of strangers and loved ones, I knew that Samantha's connection to the world had been abandoned.

Steadily, little by little, I felt the change start to come over myself as well. I started to believe that whatever it was that had come for Sam had achieved it's task only to find itself stronger for its effort. I now knew, in the same way that a person can sense a presence the dark, that its shadowy face had turned on to me.

I remembered that lemon-bright light filtering in through my curtains on the day that I had woken up feeling stagnant and I realized that this had been the warning I had needed and had duly ignored.

The force that had stolen my cousin away was not satiated. I found myself believing, in the earliest hours of the morning, that it was coming for me next.

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I'll have chapter one up within the week because, lets face it, who can resist the allure of writing about menacing threats?

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