Free Rhayven House by Frank Bittinger Page B

steadfast rule of never napping and curl up on the sofa for an hour or maybe three. If he didn't tell anybody, nobody would know.
         He did lie down on the couch and cover up with a not-from-an-animal fleece throw.
                 
    ~ ~ ~
     
         Ian fingered his ear in his sleep once, and then again, before jolting awake. The tickling sensation sure felt for all the world like someone had been gently blowing in his ear. Looking around as he sat up, he tossed the throw across the back of the sofa. Nobody was in the immediate vicinity. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and yawned wide. Nobody in the living room with him at all.
         Hell, there shouldn't be anybody in the damned house except for me, he thought as he got up and walked out of the living room.
         And there wasn't. Ian walked through the entire house to make sure—twice.
         Outside, the sun had begun to rise quietly over the horizon. Ian heard the birds singing their morning chorus and he briefly thought about lying back down for another couple hours, but the sensation of someone gently blowing into his ear hadn't left him. He was reticent about closing his eyes and being in a vulnerable state; he told himself he was overly dramatizing the situation, letting the stuff Jeff told him color his impression.
         “More a remnant of a weird dream than a phantom breath,” he muttered aloud as he tried to stifle another yawn. “Channel all the odd thoughts into a bestseller.”
         Apparently, the opening night jitters carried over into the day, but nature won out. Overdosing on caffeine wasn't the solution. Instead, Ian decided to take a dive—lay off the soda and spend the day on the sofa, vegging out to classic horror flicks and TV shows. There were a whole lot of worse ways to waste a day.
                 
    ~ ~ ~
     
         He ended up fading in and out for the remainder of the morning and into the afternoon. Forcing himself off the sofa, he figured he'd run less risk of napping if he was up and mobile. Napping tended to ruin his chances of sleeping when it was bedtime and he didn't want to tempt Fate and run the risk of another sleepless night.
         A walk up the mountainside sounded good. He hadn't been walking since the day he discovered the house hiding down in the valley back in June; it was now the end of September. So he exchanged the boxer shorts that were his usual night wear and pulled on a pair of jeans, and then went in search of a pair of hiking boots. Adrenaline was the body's version of caffeine; releasing endorphins would wake him up and pull him out of the funk he felt like he was beginning to sink into. Fresh air usually cleared his head and aided him in sorting out the myriad story ideas always floating around in his mind.
         Fall foliage in its full glory spanned the whole mountainside and spread down into the valley. From his view, it was a wide and far reaching ocean of red, orange, and yellow.
         Hiking around the mountainside, even without his beloved dog Alex, soothed Ian's nerves much better than Xanax ever could. There was something to be said for the sense of serenity one achieved by simply getting outside and exploring nature.
         All the thinking about ghosts and the Borghese family from a century ago go might have freaked him out a little more than he'd care to admit out loud to anyone, but it also got his synapses firing and all kinds of ideas for his books came flooding into his brain. Initially an unholy maelstrom, they'd begun to separate and he started to make more sense of them and get the feeling for which idea might work for which story.
         He got metaphorically lost in the woods and, after a couple hours, found himself down by the Gold Church, wondering if he'd been subconsciously summoned since he hadn't even been thinking of it.
         “Knock it off,” he muttered.
         Reaching into his pocket, he located his