They by J. F. Gonzalez Page B

enough.
    But writing Those Inside seemed to trigger an untapped well. The week after it sold, he got an idea for a batch of short horror fiction. He was knee deep in writing the third novel for his trilogy, he’d just landed the CD ROM gigs, and life was on the upswing. He’d plugged on, fighting the good fight.
    Those Inside had not only triggered an untapped well, it also drained him. The dreams came more regularly, which puzzled him. Writing about the things that bothered him usually purged those demons, but instead the dreams were coming more and more frequently. He began attending his AA meetings more regularly, actually volunteering for things at his local AA chapter, something he’d never done. The dreams kept coming, growing worse in their repulsiveness, and it was then that he began to slip.
    He began smoking pot again.
    Hemp had always served as a good escape vehicle in the past and it proved to be more so now. And with California’s new medicinal marijuana law on the books, he liked to tell himself that he had a legitimate claim for his use of it. He tried to get to the bottom of the dreams through therapy, but he was making no headway there. He’d started smoking pot again one night after dropping some work off at the home of the man that owned the CD ROM company. “You look beat,” Jeff Townsend had said that night. “Something wrong?”
    “Haven’t been getting any sleep,” Frank had said. The dreams had been keeping him up and Mark was hitting his terrible two’s, which made it worse. “I’m really stressed out.”
    Jeff had already fired up a joint and handed it to him. “Have a hit. Sit down. Relax a little bit.”
    And he did. He didn’t even think about the consequences of what falling off the wagon would do to him. He took two hits off the joint and it hit him immediately. He felt relaxed and at ease; more relaxed than he felt in a long time.
    He’d bought a dime bag of pot from Jeff that night and took it up again. He did not slip further down the ladder of Schedule 1 drugs like he feared he would. Pot was all he did. As a medicinal tool, it worked wonders. It relaxed him, made him calm, more at ease.
    Naturally, Brandy was worried about his descent back into drug use, but when he displayed no signs of going back to the harder stuff, or alcohol, she relaxed a little but kept a wary eye on him. What she was worried about were the memories being unearthed in his therapy sessions, which he resumed late last summer.
    The first time he told her about the memories he’d buried so long ago, memories he never even knew he had , he’d wept in her arms in utter fear.
    The therapy sessions had continued, unearthing long buried horrors of his past.
    He’d found out his mother had been involved.
    In early fall he realized he wanted to find out exactly what had happened to him. But most importantly, he wanted to find out what had happened to his father.
    Two years before, a man named Mike Peterson had called Frank out of the blue. Mike claimed to be a friend of his father’s. At the time, the only thing Frank knew about his father was that he’d left his mother when he was three. He’d barely remembered the man. He’d talked to Mike on the phone and told him that he had no idea where his father was and had no desire to know, thank you very much, and he was doing just fine without daddy-o around. Mike had been pleasant enough and had told Frank that if he ever wanted to talk about his father, if he ever wanted to talk about anything , to call him. He’d left Frank his phone number and that was it.
    When the long buried memories of his past life came bubbling forth in his therapy sessions, his past life before he’d tried to deaden it with massive quantities of drugs, he’d called Mike Peterson.
    He’d met with Mike that weekend at a restaurant in Orange County. Mike confirmed that the memories that were flooding back weren’t simply planted or suggested by his therapist. After Mike filled in