Start Reading Summoner of Sleep by A.I. Winters…

From the Publisher: “In the isolated mountain town of Marble Woods, the townspeople harbor a dangerous secret. It’s here, away from the civilized world, that they can experiment with human genetics that have the power to alter your mind and body. When Ryder Ashling, a down-on-his-luck longtime sufferer of nightmares, discovers the town, he thinks he’s found a cure, but bears witness to their research and its terrifying, inevitable unraveling.

In exploring the disturbing crossroads of genetic manipulation and lust for youth and control of the physical, Winters’ cautionary tale of the perversion of natural order and desire will entice and rattle readers in this thought-provoking tale of terror.”

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“The story sucks you in like a tornado and whips you around with increasing speed and intensity, becoming more terrifying, more vivid, and more complex with each chapter…I think anyone who enjoys reading horror, fantasy, science fiction and the like would enjoy this book, whether an uninitiated teenager trying out horror for the first time, or a long-time Stephen King veteran.” -Liz Stillwaggon Swan, PhD, Contributing Writer for Psychology Today

“Summoner of Sleep is a riotously fast paced, thrill ride, bursting with imagination, fractured characters, and a veritable bestiary of grotesque creatures. It’s a genuinely scary and disturbing treat akin to a modern-day H.P. Lovecraft story on speed.” -Simon Paul Woodward, Author of Wearing Shadows

“Summoner of Sleep is a fascinating and thought-provoking dive into the all-too-familiar world of tampering with human genetics and the consequences of power and control. Winters successfully diverges from her well-loved YA fantasy series into a whole new genre that captivates and entertains. -Christie Stratos, Author of Anatomy of a Darkened Heart

 

Chapter One

 
Ryder
 
A figure appeared from the mist and ripped a thread from the center of his forehead. He screeched in agony, but then the end of the thread morphed into a black oozing mass. The figure squished the thick sludge in his face and laughed. Blinded, he wiped the burning slime from his face and ran. Eyes surrounded him. Thousands of eyes. Eyes like white, shining gems looking at him from above, below, and upside down. Eyes in black heads. Eyes that followed him as he flew through the emptiness. Out of breath, he peered over his shoulder at the eyes that had now transformed into clocks. Their chimes and rings echoed through the darkness. His pulse throbbed in his ears as he searched for a place to hide in the barren landscape. In an instant, the sky blackened with metal parts. Cold steel gears and sharp spokes pelted and serrated his flesh into ribbons. He choked on wallowing tears and slipped on his own blood. The clocks multiplied and descended upon him.

 

* * *
 

Ryder Ashling’s body burned like a bonfire, but he refused to let go of the quilt wrapped around him.

“Explain the meaning of this right now.” Julie’s gaze slashed back and forth as she scanned the pile of clocks tangled in the sweat-soaked bed sheets.

“I already told you. The clocks came back from my dreams with me.”

“Tell me the truth. You and I both know that there’s no way in hell clocks just appear out of thin air like that and end up in our bed in the middle of the night.”

“You think I just put them there?”

“Yes.”

“You’re crazy,” Ryder said.

“Oh, I’m the crazy one? Who’s afraid of something as stupid as a clock?”

“I told you about my nightmares before we got married. Why are you so surprised?”

“You told me you dreamed about clocks, not that they came back with you.”

“I know…I know,” Ryder said through his clenched jaw. “This has never happened to me before though. Can’t you just cut me some slack?”

“No. And you better do something about it.” Her face and throat flushed as she darted out of the bed.

“What do you want me to do?” He wiped the sweat from his brow with the quilt. “You know I’ve tried everything to stop the nightmares. Hypnosis, drugs, alcohol, sleep deprivation, meditation. All those disgusting sleeping concoctions that make me queasy. You know that nothing works.”

She crossed her arms with a scoff. “I’ve put up with your blood-curdling screams waking me up at all hours of the night. The welts, bruises, and scratches on your skin each morning. The sleepwalking. Getting phone calls at two in the morning from neighbors asking me to pick you up from their lawn. And now this. I can’t deal with this shit anymore, Ryder.” Julie strode across the bedroom.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to live in the guestroom. When you stop playing these asinine jokes on me, then I’ll come back to bed.”

“Wait. I already told you. I’m not playing a joke on you. This is real. Please believe me. You’re my wife for Christ’s sake.”

Her wicked glance shot him dead, then she slammed the door so hard their wedding picture sprung from the wall and broke.

For the next hour, Ryder’s cries echoed through the cold vaulted hallways of the Ashling house. He had cried two other times in his life. Once when his beloved beagle Bologna died, and once when his stepdad smacked him around for writing poetry. Tears poured from his eyes as he turned and stared at the mound of ticking clocks in his bed. He was too afraid to touch them, to believe they were real.

A sharp pain ached in his gut and Ryder rushed into the bathroom and gagged into the sink, but nothing came up.

His hands struggled to grasp the medicine cabinet handle, but he rose from the depths of despair to ease it open.

What concoction will numb my pain tonight?

His gaze zipped to a little brown vial with a tag wound around the neck that read CURE.

Was this new or old? Who cares?

Ryder palmed the vial, closed the medicine cabinet, and caught a reflection of his haunted face. The Botox hadn’t done a damn thing and neither had his weight gain powder.

He sighed and examined the contents of the vial in the light, then uncorked it, and took a generous whiff.

Like an ancient diaphanous entity summoned from the past, the pungent scent burned the delicate membranes inside his nostrils. Luminous colors, exotic tastes, and mesmerizing sounds enveloped him—a merry-go-round for the senses. It was pure glory in a bottle for a fleeting second, until a bone-freezing shock swept through his shaken body.

His limps started to stiffen as if rubber coursed through his veins.

“J-julie? Help. Julie.”

His cries fell like stones into the silence of the house.

His legs were like two wooden boards which tipped him into the wall. Ryder grasped for anything he could to keep himself standing—the bathroom curtains, the shelf, the molding, but then it spread to his arms. They were stuck directly in front of him and he couldn’t move any of his joints or fingers. He plummeted to the floor as everything disappeared into darkness.
 

* * *
 
Ryder sat up and bit back a scream in the morning light. A puddle of blood surrounded him on the tile. He touched a sore spot on the back of his head and winced.

He stood and steadied himself against the cold bathroom countertop. There were no signs of welts or scratches from the clocks on his skin and he could move his joints again.

“Julie?” He stumbled about in such a state that if his wife saw him, she would accuse of being drunk—this time, not rightfully. “Julie? H-help me.”

Outside the birds chirped with cheerful melodies, taunting him.

He staggered into the bedroom, but an echo followed. He skimmed the barren room, the dusty shelves, and empty closets.

“No. You couldn’t have.” Ryder snatched a letter addressed to him on the bed. I’m leaving. I’m sorry, it read in black Sharpie. He flipped it over.

“That’s all you have to say to me? You didn’t even have the decency to sign it?”

Bitch.

He clenched his fists so tight his knuckles went white, and he threw the crumpled paper at the bed. Then he jerked back, fell against the wall, and slid to the floor like a loogie into the gutter. Tears welled and dropped down his cheeks. Now he cried for a fourth time.

“I can’t believe you left me for good.” He wallowed. Her blissful, toothy smile shot through his memory. He loved that smile. “I never thought you’d get the nerve. I gave you everything. You never had to work a day in your life. All you did was sip margaritas by the pool and go to yoga classes, you bitch.”

Earlier in the week she took him to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist had diagnosed him with chronomentrophobia—fear of clocks. It was a rare phobia, incurable, and characterized as a fear of time passing too quickly. The disappointed look on Julie’s face weighed heavy in his mind.

More tears splashed onto the floor. His head spun and he lurched back to the bathroom, knelt over the toilet, and vomited, wiping away the sweat on his face in between heaves.

He stood with a swimmy head, hunched over the sink, and cupped water in his hands beneath the running faucet. He wiped the residual water from his purple, cracked lips and turned off the tap, as he stared at his inflamed eyes in the mirror, which looked light gray rather than their usual black. The soft, tender spot underneath his ribcage ached when he inhaled.

He slammed his fist on the porcelain. “Why don’t I have normal dreams like everyone else?” His skin crawled at the engrained image of disembodied eyes following him that transformed into clocks. “You’re such a fucking disgrace. Can’t even keep your own wife.”

Ryder balled his fists. He squeezed them tighter. The thin skin burst from the pressure of his nails. Blood pooled in his palms and dripped on the tile. “Stupid dreams.” He punched the mirror. Glass shards burst in a glittery explosion.

Woozy, Ryder groped the window frame, looking half-dazed out the upstairs window. Outside his neighbor skulked about. Ryder had caught old, pudgy Claude Wick spying on him through his bathroom window on more than one occasion. He was a garrulous neighbor, and their conversations started amicably, but they always turned toward Claude’s dead wife —a person whom Ryder never met.

He glanced at the small mirror installed in a discreet location outside the window which aligned with the enormous clock in the middle of downtown.

Crap. Seven thirty. Time for work.

For a second, Ryder was tempted to call in sick, but he hadn’t missed a single day of work since he started at the firm eight years ago, and he would be damned to let anything affect the promotion he labored so exhaustingly for. He refused for all those sixteen-hour days to go to waste; for all the nights he’d slept at the office and caught hell from Julie to be for nothing; for his rivals who threw him under the bus to reap his reward. He closed the bathroom curtains, washed, and went to the walk-in closet and changed into a suit, not bothering to spend the extra time matching his tie to his sock color.

Ryder headed down the hall, trying not to notice more missing items, and stopped at the top of the staircase. As his pale hand slid over the cool banister, the blood from his palm mingled with the wood polish and gave off a most peculiar metallic pine scent. Vomit rose in his throat and he swallowed it.

“No.”

The stairs were huge beneath his feet and the distance to the kitchen took forever. A small brown vial without a tag sat near the cookie jar on the counter. The dazzling confetti of green and gold liquids swirled with a hypnotic invitation.

“What the—?” Ryder hurried toward the vial and picked it up. “Julie? Are you messing with me?” he called and spun around, but silence met his ears. He returned his attention to the vial. “I’m not making the same mistake,” he said—about to set it down, but then his eager fingers popped the cork independently from his brain.

Euphoria followed, but only for a minute. The substance once again encased him before tendrils of panic and pain trembled through his helpless, rubberized body. The world stopped. Every cell in his body deflated.

“Noooooo,” he screamed through his constricted throat. He fell to the floor.
 

* * *
 
Ryder’s eyes flew open. The sun streamed upon him and the blue jays chattered from the garden.

He pulled himself up, stood with the aid of the kitchen countertop, and glanced out the window. His gaze darted to one of his mirrors positioned outside the kitchen window. He wouldn’t have believed it was six o’ clock in the morning had the automatic sprinklers not kicked on at their programmed time right then.

Ryder spun around. An overturned vial lay on the kitchen floor and his chest tightened.

It happened again?

All signs indicated an entire day had passed.

Three new vials now waited on the counter.

Too afraid to touch them, he studied them at a distance for comparison. They were the same size, shape, and color, had no discernible markings, and there were no indications of their origin—just the brilliance of their mesmerizing colors that swirled inside them, illuminating the little that remained of his sanity.

Ryder picked up the vials with his sleeve, threw them in an empty grocery bag, then headed to the car.
 

* * *
 
He entered the damp apothecary shop adjacent to the town’s pioneer cemetery out of breath. He slammed the door behind him, and then cringed. Vern Wick glanced up from behind the counter amidst the thick, incensed air.

Hundreds of dusty bottles lined the shelves; he could get lost for hours just examining all their strange shapes and sizes, but Ryder wasn’t interested in them today. He’d been coming to the local apothecary each week for the past two years and if anyone could help him identify the substance in his CURE bottles, it was Vern.

“Ah, Ryder. Welcome,” said the apothecarist. He rose from the chair. Although Vern never traveled, his tanned, hydrated skin made it look as if he had just returned from a vacation. Vern glanced at his watch. “I’m surprised to see you here since you’re normally at work during this time. Did I forget about an appointment?”

“No.” Ryder fixated on the watch. “Could you put that away please?”

“Oh, right. I always forget about my watch, but I didn’t know you were coming in today.” Vern fiddled with the strap and stashed it under the counter.

“Well, how did the latest blend go?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Ryder slowly dumped the vials upon the counter, his palms slick with sweat. “Are these your bottles?”

Vern squinted. “No.”

“I thought Julie might’ve purchased them from you.”

Vern shrugged.

“Then I need to know what’s in here.”

Vern’s bony fingers reached across the counter.

“Careful.” Ryder stopped his hand. “Just holding it made me open them and when I did the contents made me lose consciousness—twice.”

“I will. But I need to examine them closer.”

“Use a rag or something to hold them, okay?”

Vern’s wiry eyebrow arched, but he retrieved a handkerchief from under the counter and picked up one of the sealed vials. He held it up to the light. Just the sight of the whirling glittery world inside it made Ryder giddy, and he balled his fists before he shoved his hands deep into his pockets.

“Did you have those dreams of yours?”

“No. It’s bizarre. But now there’s a new complication. When I woke the other day there were clocks in the bed with me. I don’t know how or why.”

“Hmm.”

“I don’t know where the vials came from. They just appeared.”

“They appeared in your house?”

“Yes. One yesterday and then more after Julie le—”

The smile vanished from Vern’s face. “You don’t look well. Do you need to sit? I’d hate for my best customer to become ill in my shop.”

Unable to make eye contact or swallow the lump in his throat, Ryder said, “Please just find out what’s inside.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“How long do you think it’ll take?”

“I’ll need to send it to the lab, so about a week or two. I don’t quite see the rush, though. What matters is that it made you sleep well. That’s been our goal this whole time, right?”

“Yeah, it’s just—” Ryder tapped his fingers on the counter. “Please call me the minute you find out, okay? It’s urgent.”

“I will.”

“You believe me, don’t you?” Ryder asked.

Vern cocked his head.

“You believe me that I have the nightmares about the clocks attaching themselves to me and ending up in my bed, don’t you?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters is you getting well,” Vern said with a wink, then gathered the vials.

“Okay then. Well, don’t forget to call me the minute you find out. I don’t care if it’s in the middle of the night. I’ll answer.”

The old man nodded. “I will.”

Ryder turned with a grin and jingled the car keys in his pocket. He stared out at the city glinting in the distance.

“Yes. I understand now,” Vern said. “It’s crystal clear.”

Ryder looked over his shoulder. “What’d you say?”

Blood was everywhere: blood gushing from Vern’s ears and mouth, blood on the counter, blood drenching his sweater, blood coating the floor.

Ryder screamed, rushed to Vern, and grabbed his arm.

“No. It hurts too much,” Vern shrieked. “Don’t touch me.”

“What’s wrong? I can’t help you if I don’t know what happened.”

Vern groaned and jetted out the door like he was on fire. He flew through the busy intersection and ran straight into the woods across the street, disappearing into the trees.

Ryder stood breathless at the threshold, his suit and hands crimson. He caught a questioning glance from a man at the bus stop.

“Hey, what did you do? Did you hurt that man?”

“Shit.” Ryder lowered his head, strode to his car, and got in.

The man yelled and ran toward his car. “Stop right there.” He waved his arms. “I’m calling the police.”

Ryder started the ignition. The man jumped and shouted in his rearview mirror, which drew even more attention, so he slammed on the gas.

The roads seemed longer and narrower on the drive home.

What did Vern mean when he said that he understood? That everything was crystal clear? Had he been talking to him or someone else? Had there always been a tree at that intersection? Was that a new deli or an old one?

Shapes and colors passed in a blur, and somehow, he made it home.

He turned off the car, exhaled, and sat in the driveway with closed eyes.

What a rotten day.

“I saw you,” a voice said.

Ryder jolted and got out of the car. “Hello?” He glanced around. Someone’s eyes were on him. Someone watched him and saw the blood splatter on his hands and clothes.

Shit. They would blame him.

He looked at one of the positioned mirrors, noting that several hours had passed, but the drive to the apothecary was only a few minutes and he hadn’t been at the shop for that long.

With shaky hands, Ryder found his house key and ran to the front door, where a bright orange paper the color of construction cones was taped over the peephole. His eyes narrowed.

I’m being evicted? But I’m rich. I always pay the mortgage on time.

Drops of perspiration slid into his eyes and burned them. Ryder tore the notice down and threw it in the bushes. The door screeched open and he stumbled inside and collapsed on the hardwood floor, his legs jelly.

A new vial sat atop a sofa cushion. His gaze darted to the coffee table. Another. Then to the stairs. Another.
 

* * *
 

For days, Ryder sat in his favorite armchair and stared out the window, sometimes going the whole day without food. Showers stopped. Shaving stopped. So did teeth brushing. It didn’t matter.

He called Julie too many times to count, but she never answered. His wedding ring became loose and fell into the heating grate. All the while, vials appeared out of nowhere, beckoning him to partake in the unknown contents within, but he refused to open any more.

They popped up inside the fridge, in cabinets, on chairs, in his bed, on top of the toilet, and sometimes jammed in the toes of his shoes. After he’d gather all the vials in a garbage bag using a broom and dustpan, he’d turn around and more would be there…waiting, multiplying. He double and triple checked all the locks and windows in his house, but always found them secure.

A week later Ryder gave up trying to gather and discard the vials. The repossession men broke down the door and took everything but his car since the title was in his former client’s name. They also left the filthy chair he refused to move from. He listened to the men joke about what a poor slob he was and make cracks about him. Didn’t they know he was someone important? They even repossessed his phone, so there was no way to contact his wife. Could he still call her that? It was a good thing that they took his phone though. He couldn’t stand listening to the voicemail from work again explaining how they had let him go and that Ernest got his promotion. The only good news was that he had saved some money in a secret bank account.

The police would remove him from the premises soon. He wouldn’t go without a fight and prayed they’d arrest him. Maybe then the vials couldn’t follow and he could rest in the solitary pleasure of a dark, cold prison cell. What a blissful fantasy.
 

 
This excerpt from Summoner of Sleep is published here courtesy of the author and should not be reproduced without permission.