Chapter 1

I'm not doing a prelude like I usually do. This chapter is really rough and I'd appreciate any comments you could make.

The Sun was shining and children were disappearing. Neither of these things was particularly common in Richford, Virginia, but for some reason, they had been happening a lot lately. Most often, thick clouds, black with rain, hovered ominously over the scattered buildings of the town. People practically sprinted about during rare moments of spotty sunshine to mow grass or trim hedges.  As for the children, well, there’s not much to say about the subject.

Oliver Reed was an orphaned boy, and he was pretty much just what you would imagine a poor orphaned boy to be. He didn’t stay in an orphanage, for he was terrified of other people. Even before his parent’s death some odd years before, he had secluded himself from the world. A tragic case, his parents had feared for him. He was small for his true age (which Oliver had almost completely forgotten) but his miniaturized and cunning features seemed to exude adolescence.

Oliver stepped outside his house (which was not really a house, but a strange and disorderly mess of wood arranged in the middle-most branches of a sturdy oak tree) and breathed a sigh of exhaustion. His home looked out a small yet comfortable clearing in the middle of the woods by the town. A sparrow landed on one of the branches near him.

“Good morning,” he said to the scrawny bird as of it could understand him. The bird chirped merrily then flew off to join the others who were resting in a thick patch of dandelions.

Oliver often talked to the animals, and they had, in turn, grown accustomed to his occupation of the tree. Sometimes he found dead mice or some other small animal waiting for him at the base of the oak. Oliver looked overhead towards the sun and decided that it was hardly past midday. He had plenty of time before his friends at school were awarded recess.

   As Oliver dressed in some nicer clothes, he thought about the times when he went to school. It hadn’t been since his parent’s death, but he still knew the basics: the Earth was round, humans breathe oxygen, and math altogether was pointless. He could read well enough and didn’t have the rough accent of a common tree dweller.

Reed headed off towards the town, eventually emerging from the tree line of thick shrubs covered in crimson berries and prickly branches and trees with limbs that drooped low in the unusual heat. Oliver had to be very careful not to rip up his best clothes, as there would be no getting new ones. He emerged, unscathed, and walked towards the library.

 

The librarian looked up from a learn-Spanish book to witness a young boy enter through the double doors. The boy seemed average in every way, from his medium height to his medium build. His clothes were clean enough, but his face was dirty and his hair unkempt. For some odd reason, a leaf stuck out from his jet black bangs. As the librarian watched, the boy swatted the leaf out and vanished among the book cases.

The librarian had seen Oliver before; not only at the library but wandering about the town at all hours of the day. Didn’t he go to school? Why was he always dirty? The librarian sighed. It wasn’t his place to snoop around some child’s business. That was a parent’s job. The librarian rubbed his nose and returned to proper conjugations.

Oliver picked out three books and cast them onto the check-out counter. The librarian broke out of a daze long enough to scan the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Thief Lord, and the Golden Compass.

Oliver brought the books back to his tree house and arranged them neatly on one of the piles of books scattered around the room.

After his parent’s death, he had scoured his home and brought what he could to the tree house; books like novels and plays, canned food, an air mattress and a couple hundred batteries. Men had come to his house in search of him, but Oliver had disappeared long enough for his identity to become forgotten. He had relatives, sure, but none that he knew well enough to feel safe. He had grown used to the librarian, a few of the school children, and one of the adults who left him food too old to sell out behind the grocery store. It wasn’t exactly the high life, but it kept him full and happy.

A few hours went by. Oliver spent them reading the first few chapters in the Thief Lord but then closed the book, peered cautiously at the sun, and once again went off into town, this time wearing less noble clothes.   

 

“Have you seen an orphan boy with dark hair around here?”

The question seemed simple enough, but the librarian was having a terrible moral dilemma. The men before him looked rich. Not in color, but their clothes looked expensive, their hair was trimmed in the absolute neatest of ways. They looked as if they were headed off to some lavish event.

These men didn’t live in the town, clearly. The librarian couldn’t imagine where they had come from. Hollywood, perhaps. Either that or they were part of some mob, and in there laid the librarian’s moral dilemma. What if they out to capture this orphan? He had certainly heard of the recent kidnappings up north, but had never thought much of it. He read in the newspaper that a child living in an abandoned shack in the next town had been seen being carried into a black van. The librarian craned his neck to see if there was indeed a black van sitting in the street outside, but one of the men got in his face and whispered, “Well, have you seen him?”

“Umm, maybe . . .” said the librarian nervously. “There was a dark haired boy in here earlier, but I don’t think he’s an orphan.”

The man positioned his face an inch from the librarian’s. “What’s his name and what does he look like?”

The librarian quickly informed the men of strange Oliver Reed who had found his way into the library just hours before.

“Do you know where he lives?”

“No, but you could probably ask some of the kids, I think school lets out around now.”

The men hadn’t waited for the librarian to finish his sentence. They exited and took a left beyond the librarian’s view. He sighed. Why had he gotten involved?

 

Oliver was sitting on one of the cobblestone walls outside the school with a small congregation of children who sometimes wished they could live as wildly as he did. They told him about their day, and he listened intently for he all but forgotten what it was like to go to school. A boy named Shane, with hair that was a deep brown came running up a small hill towards the children.

“Oliver, check this out,” he said, gasping for breath. Shane held up the newspaper and thrust it into Oliver’s face. Oliver snatched it, read the headline, and then looked up quizzically.

“What?” he asked.

“Well, did you read it?” Shane asked.

“Yeah, and . .?”

“What do you mean ‘yeah, and?’ this is really bad.” Shane’s face was scrunched in a look of the worst sort of worry. The children were all peering at the newspaper, reading it quietly to themselves.

Child Kidnappings

 

On June 22^nd, due to the recent outbreak of orphan kidnappings, government officials have placed the case in the hands of the F.B.I. and with select private investigators from around the world. It is clear from the near several hundred cases across the nation in the past several months that this event is organized, possibly by a single organization and is not the result of an outbreak of child molesters. The orphans reported missing allegedly did not belong to any orphanage, but were prowlers who lived in abandoned houses and other buildings. Because of this, it is unclear just how many orphans have been kidnapped, but officials believe their sources, taken from those who knew them before they were orphaned and/or taken, are accurate. As for the kidnappings themselves, there are no reported witnesses, suspects, or evidence that would allude to the identity of the kidnappers, their organization, or what they may be after. Speculation leads some to assume that what the kidnappers want is

Continue to page 9

 

None of the children dared disturb the momentary silence that had fallen like a curtain between the two boys.

“You’re worrying too much, Shane,” Oliver said at last. “Lighten up.”

Shane became red in the face. “Sorry I care.” He turned to storm off, pausing only for a moment as if waiting for words of apology. Oliver saw it and opened his mouth as if to speak them, but nothing came out. He hunched over and waited until Shane’s footsteps on the dry grass faded into silence. When he was gone, the babble started up again as if the awkward event had never occurred.

Shane had been a childhood friend long before any of the tragic and dark events that had transpired in Oliver’s past. He was also one of the co-builders of the tree house and sole keeper of Oliver Reed’s innermost secrets. Because of this, the boy’s less than satisfactory concern over the subject of child kidnappings put Shane in a horrible state of unease that no words could shake him out of.

Oliver felt bad as well. It wasn’t because he had forgotten Edible Plants: a Wilderness Guide that evening when he had gone to look for berries and had eaten some only because they looked somewhat succulent. Oliver Reed was just as apprehensive of people leaving his company as he was of people entering it. On more than one occasion, when he was little and his parents were alive and well, he would cry when they left and hide from them when they returned.

Now, though, he was able to control the sinking feeling he acquired in his chest when someone left him in fury or sadness �" to some degree, at least.

Oliver swallowed his pride and fear and went after Shane, for the thought of losing a friend over such a thing was unbearable to him.

 

It was troublesome. On a good day, Oliver jumped at passing cars for fear of some sinister monster like the ones from his dusty old storybooks that would come crawling out of their depths. Now, with the thought of kidnappings embedded deeply in his head, he found even the people to be hiding something. Their every secret was that they wanted him dead, or otherwise unconscious in the back of an unlabeled and windowless van heading to god knows where.

He spotted Shane, crossing the street a little ways down from where he was. Oliver called his name, and Shane turned; the look on his face slowly shifted from recognition to confusion to fear. A van came around a side street and stopped in front of him. Men in clean, dark suits stepped out of the van.

Was this a kidnapping? Whatever the reason these men were driving around in a van that seemed to oppose their own fashion could be nothing other than sinister. Oliver quickly and stealthily shot over to the building next to the street the van had just come out of, a barbershop. There was a man talking on a cell phone at the end of the street. Oliver thought about calling for help, but the man turned into the supermarket. It wasn’t as if the men had done anything to Shane, yet. Maybe they weren’t kidnappers, and besides, Shane wasn’t an orphan.

Oliver found himself pressing his body against the cool brick of the barbershop, almost trying sink into the shadows.

“What’s your name, kid?” one of the men asked. It wasn’t polite. If anything, there was a threatening touch to his deep voice.

Shane asked the men, “Why?” though he didn’t seem the least bit curious. Oliver figured Shane suspected the men of being exactly what he thought them to be: kidnappers.

“I’m asking you your name. It’s a pretty simple question, kid.”

“Why’s a pretty simple question, too,” said Shane, making a feeble attempt at being smart.

One of the men smacked Shane upside the forehead. Smart was a dumb decision.

“Kid thinks he’s funny,” the man said. They had a brief, malevolent chuckle over it then they turned back to Shane, who was finally realizing the seriousness of the situation. He clenched his fists hard, but they shook with fright.

“Look, kid,” started the man who had spoken first. “We’re not above roughing you up a bit. We just need your name, that’s all.”

But Shane knew that that couldn’t be all. He was having the same moral dilemma the librarian had had when the same men approached him. Though, this time, the one questioned was not swayed in the eviler of two directions.

“Oliver Reed.”

The name seemed so alien, even to the one it belonged to. Oliver’s heart nearly stopped in his chest. He was frozen in shock. Half from Shane using his name to protect him and half from what was about to occur. The men looked at each other quickly then grabbed Shane by the shirt collar and whatever else they could get their brawny hands on and tossed him with a sickening ease into the van. They drove off; not with the energetic squeal of tires and rush of dust into the air, as one would think, but calmly as if nothing had happened. I only served to entice the dream-like state that Oliver found himself in.

What to do now? So many thoughts burst into his head that he thought he might go deaf from them spilling out his ears. After all, this wasn’t a common situation. He had glimpsed the license plate that hailed from New York, but what sort of a hint was that? At the most, it would limit a search to one state, and at the least, the car had no reminiscent ties to the land at all. For all he knew, the van was headed to California, or someway or other it would be shipped off to another country. There were so many scenarios playing in his head that for a moment, Oliver believed he would black out. But there was no time to black out! Oliver shocked back to his senses and sprinted as fast as he could back to his home.

 Should he go to the authorities? No, his anxiety wouldn’t let him near them. Besides, they would probably think him delusional and send him off to an orphanage or mental hospital. Maybe he could hire a lovable investigator who would help him out of the goodness of his heart. The thought was idiotic. This wasn’t a story in a book, this was real life. He charged through backyards over hills and through traffic that, by some stroke of horrible luck, had avoided the previous street entirely.

 

The tree house wasn’t as Oliver thought it would be �" Ransacked and burnt to the ground. Instead it sat as peacefully as it had when he left it earlier that day. Obviously the men hadn’t much knowledge of him; otherwise they would have known he was not Shane and that he lived in a tree house less than three miles away from where they captured their imposter.

He climbed up the rope ladder and ducked down through the opening. Inside was everything as he had left it. He grabbed an old Nike satchel (that hadn’t been used since he brought all of his trinkets from his old house) and packed it with a few books, canned food, a quick change of clothes and even managed to cram a small blanket into it. He then swung it over his shoulder and left the tree house.

Oliver trudged over the grassy slopes of Virginia. He couldn’t think ahead, there was so much uncertainty it was as if he was facing a black hole. And if you didn’t think he would go to the end of the earth to save a friend who had done something so selfless for him, then you obviously didn’t know Oliver Reed.

Author's Note

I don't think there're a lot of grammar problems, but if you see one, please point it out. Any other criticism would be greatly appreciated if you have it.

Reviews

[ChristianM]

I liked this. I didn't really like the book references though. I try to stay away from them and only once have I used one. I think they take away from the original nature of the story and the authenticity. That's just me though.
Also, "learn-Spanish" book would probably work better as self help book. It just didn't sound right. Also you have some lines where the character has inner dialogue and I think these lines should be italicized. For instance "Should he go to the authorities?"
That's my two cents.
Good so far though.

[Marximilien]

I don't know if that's how American newspapers read, so correct me if I'm wrong. The summary lead should be separated from the supporting details (the support should be another paragraph.) And the title of the news is not too effective, even the summary lead because you have started it with a date that is not really significant (or is it?)

"On June 22nd, due to the recent outbreak of orphan kidnappings, government officials have placed the case in the hands of the F.B.I. and with select private investigators from around the world."

I hope you can consider reading this:

Due to the recent outbreak of orphan kidnappings, government officials have placed the case in the hands of the FBI and with select private investigators from around the world on June 22, 2010 (or whatever year).

[Jooolie]

Great start :) I couldn't think of anything that was wrong. The characters are already getting developed, the plot is starting up and the whole story is really interesting overall. Keep it up! :)

[Rory CJ Frankson]

A) I really Respect & Admire James Watts, he is a fine writer and his Crimson Knights, is awesome. B) There is no, B...

***************************************************************** All Stars ***************************
And if you didn’t think he would go to the end of the earth to save a friend who had done something so selfless for him, then you obviously didn’t know `````````````````````````````````Oliver Reed.``````````````````````````

The end creates the power, I think... as the Oliver Character builds. It created the want for more. The continuence of unfolding storytelling background, that isn't carried in the discriptive... but intimated. It was quirky in places, that created a sense of wondering at. Knowing, that reavealed answers. Would be forth coming. The ending, proves that... then.

It's worth the delving into. this experiment.... uncanny action. In endevour.
Possibilities of mysteries. Great starter.
********************************************************************** Disiples need him ********

Write On / Right On! Romon in Review. Peace

[Skelasoldier]

I really saw no major flaw, you kept the attention of the reader through the whole story, keep up the great work

[The Analog Kid]

Good so far. Nice hook. Nothing stood out as a problem here:)

[James Watts]

This was good. Reminds of Stephen King and Peter Straub's Black House, the sequel to the Talisman. I love the mystery of it and I believe this will be an awesome book.

[HorrorMaster]

Very good so far, I hope they will find the children.