Free Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) by Robert W Walker Page A

days had taken its toll. He laid back, wondering if he should not get right up, shower, go into the city for breakfast and see if there was anything he could do. In addition to helping out with locating the body, or bodies, in the Spoon, he still wished to learn if anything new had developed in the Timmy Meyers search. Instead, he laid back, closed his eyes, and allowed the warmth and softness of the big bed to engulf him. He fell back into a slumber.
    Stroud's mind drifted through the major periods of his life. Until he was eleven he lived with his parents who were very well off, his father being a physician and his mother being a computer engineer. They'd died in a tragic accident while he was left unharmed physically. The emotional difficulties he faced were helped by the love and devotion his grandfather had shown him. When he became old enough to be on his own, he began college at Northwestern University, quickly changing to the University of Chicago, most anxious to become an archeologist. However, with the growing hostilities in Vietnam, he felt duty bound to join the armed forces and so his education was interrupted. It would take him all these years later to finish what he had started, thanks in large part to the plate in his head and something deep within that told him he was only good enough to perform to someone else's orders--a sergeant's orders. So, he'd enrolled in the police academy, barely keeping track of his grandfather and never coming home.
    It had been a period of aloneness and loss. Stroud began to feel the old man's aloneness and loss now, too.
    Stroud Manse had the same, empty feel to it: the feeling of aloneness. The old place was dismal, oppressive, and Stroud wondered if he shouldn't simply put it on the market, take the best offer and sever ties for good and all, in order to start fresh.
    Maybe it was a dream, or some hallucination brought on by his damaged head. Or maybe something literally came out of the woodwork.
    Stroud had lain back just to close his eyes for a moment, still pondering how the TV had come on, and now wondering how it had gone off. He recalled no time when he had actually gotten out of bed or fished about for the remote to do either. Then his eyes locked on a shape, the stretched, taffy-pulled form of a humanlike creature in the wood grain of the oaken door across the room. It looked like a half man, half praying mantis until this image began to move.
    He watched the image in the wood, knowing full well that if a man stared long enough at an object all sorts of bizarre tricks of the mind might visit him. Still, he stared and stared, unable to remove his eyes from the coalescing stick man who seemed to be trying to fight his way from the wood he'd become embedded in.
    The haunted manse, so full of bizarre objects and memories, was, at this moment, outdoing itself.
    Stroud threw his legs over the edge of the bed and in his underwear stepped toward the door tentatively, one hand extended to the milky, moving image before him. It could not pull free of the wood, but it sent out messages, not in a voice but through his brain, saying, “Leave this place. Leave this place.”
    “Who ... what are you?” Stroud asked in a choking voice.
    “Leave ... before it is too late ... leave.”
    Stroud turned to see himself still asleep in bed when suddenly he was shaken by the rattling ring of the telephone. The noise and the start instantly put him back together again, and he found himself rousing from sleep and the solid door still just a door. In its grain, if he worked hard at it, he could, however, see the faint outline of the image that had spoken to him in his dream. Unable to make head or tail of it, he grabbed for the phone and at the same time saw that indeed, somehow, the TV had been shut off.
    “Sheriff Briggs, here!”
    Stroud's ear was hurt by the man's loud voice. “Oh, yes, Sheriff...”
    “Good news, Doctor Stroud! Good news!”
    “Indeed?”
    “The Meyers boy? He's