Trinity's Children

by D. F. Scovil

Overview

As Gregory Howland embarks on a journey from Edmonton, Canada, to Trinity, an isolated mining community where he hopes to start over with his wife and three children in tow, he has no idea that their appearance will awaken a diabolical power trapped in the mine beneath the town that is focused on achieving only one goal—the destruction of the world.

The Howlands settle into an old mansion in Trinity, and Gregory begins a teaching job. Soon, however, they discover through their nightmares and other visions that their town was the scene of a series of brutal murders during the winter of 1937, followed by an earthquake that obliterated its inhabitants. As the mere presence of the Howlands seem to revive dark forces within their home, the three children realize that they are all that stand in the way of an evil presence ready to unleash its fury. Now all they have to do is to decide whether to take a stand against the monster or lead its forces in an unforgettable virtual battle.

In this riveting tale of horror, an innocent family is caught in the grips of a town with a nasty secret—a secret that will determine who will live and who will die.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475924046
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	608
File size:	710 KB

Read an Excerpt

Trinity's Children

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By D. F. Scovil

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 D. F. Scovil
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-2403-9

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Chapter One

I

Gregory Howland knew that his children were dead. In the suffocating darkness of the tent, the black terror filled him as he scrabbled for the small penlight near his sleeping bag, there where it always was. The pale beam shone unsteadily on their huddled forms, one son ghostly against the inside night. The other seemed to be staring at him, curious and grinning, eyes glowing red. His small daughter sat rigidly upright at a strange distance, clutching Bear; her mouth was formed into a scream, screaming for him. "Daddy!" He gagged, gasping for breath, and sat up, shaking feverishly. It was the same bad dream, nothing more, only that, although the scream still echoed in his memory. As he slowly got his breath back, the scream dissolved into a headache, and the temperature inside their tent told him that things were only going to get worse.

He opened the tent flap to look out on what he'd hoped would be a bright summer's morning, but he finally had to admit that Canada had sided with his wife on this one. He breathed in the cold, damp air and it dispelled the lingering fragments of his dreaming. Ever since they'd left Edmonton without her, things had gone just about as wrong as she had suggested they might, and the weather seemed particularly determined to fulfill her predictions. He should have listened to her. He hadn't had a good night's sleep since they'd left and his dreams, always similar, were getting worse.

It had started with the packing of the minivan and things going missing. Then he'd had to drive all the way back from Jasper to take care of problems that had come up with the movers. The scenic excursion to Banff via the spectacular Glacier Highway—a long deferred promise—had deteriorated into a tedium of fog and rain that had only excited his six-year old daughter Victoria because she'd never been this close to mountains before. Jace was an eighteen-year old veteran of several high school trips to the area while twelve-year old Gideon had only looked up from his game system when his father had insisted on pointing something out. The delayed schedule hadn't allowed anyone to actually climb a glacier which, as Jace had casually pointed out, was the whole point of their going by that route. Their room at the overcrowded Banff Springs Hotel was small and hot.

The prairie run across Saskatchewan and Manitoba had been a flat and endless mistake of the longest straight stretch of highway on the continent and Gregory had to eventually allow Jace a chance to drive after the fatigue had got to him beyond Regina. The skies were all-the-way grey, the summer heat hot through windows that had to be left open because the air-conditioning wasn't working, and the scenery was constantly the same if anyone cared to look. He'd been whined and wheedled into motels for the first two nights but, after they'd passed Kenora and were officially in Ontario, he'd put his foot down and insisted that they set up their camping gear in a provincial park for the night. Looking outside, he now understood why this hadn't been the best of all possible bad decisions.

He groaned as he shook the wet snow from the tent flap and then fished around under his sleeping bag for his flip-flops before gingerly stepping outside. He knew that the overnight temperature sometimes got near the freezing mark in this area, even in the middle of August, but this was ridiculous. He wished that he still believed in God so that he'd have someone to curse because muttering about global climate change, which he did believe in, didn't have the same effect. He added a few unprayer-like words as he sloshed through the melting slush to their snow-whiter white minivan and fished around for his socks and track shoes—not the ideal footwear for the occasion but better than flip-flops. He set up the Coleman burner after clearing off a portion of the camping site's picnic table and had some coffee brewed before the first rustles of awakening came from inside the tent. He tried a sip and, as Jace was poking his head out through the flap, he spat it out. The coffee wasn't bad; it was evil.

"Hey Dad-o, nice touch with the snow," Jace said, running his fingers through his long black hair and then shaking his head to allow it to find its natural style. He was thin, took after his mother in height and moved with a dancer's grace when he wanted to. His three-day lack of shaving was still unnoticeable. "So what's for breakfast?"

Before Gregory could respond, Victoria, dressed in her pink princess nightie and with her Sleepy Bear stuffed toy in hand, came tumbling out, tripping over the bottom tent door flap and squealing when she found herself rolling in the snow. "It's Christmas! We need to build snow people!" The early sun danced in the golden curls of her shoulder-length hair as she bounced up and made her first snowball and it was Gideon, struggling to put on his black-framed glasses, who accidentally became the unlucky recipient of her endeavour. He did not share her enthusiasm and quickly zipped the tent closed.

"I'm not coming out until you tell her to stop and we're ready to go."

Before Gregory could respond, Jace had nimbly gone around the tent and pulled up all of the tent pegs supporting its structure until its collapsing walls were wavering on the central pole. Gideon yelled, and they could see him bumping and humping around inside until Gregory finally took charge and unzipped the flap to allow his son's indignant escape. Gideon whipped a loosely-made snowball at Jace who was innocently standing close enough to the picnic table to allow for a direct hit on the coffee pot. The rest of their disorderly decampment proceeded in a similar manner. The back of the minivan was packed with sogginess, a fact that became more apparent as the day wore on. It was proper summer again and hot by the time they pulled into the truck stop in Vermillion Bay for breakfast. The sun was finally out and radiating.

The coffee at the truck stop wasn't a great improvement but it lacked the residual coffee grounds and came with multiple refills and a pleasant smile with a touch of friendly flirtation for a family man with kids. Because of the cold start to their morning, everyone was hungry and the pancakes came with a jug of real maple syrup and a plump strawberry for Victoria. A successful frown coaxed another one for Gideon. Jace, after quickly wolfing down two platefuls and asking for a third, took out his iPhone and checked his messages. He had two.

The first was from his tentatively-almost and now former girlfriend Audrey Clemens which said that she missed him already and was thinking of him always. "Do you think about me?" There was an attachment, which he opened and stared at until Victoria tugged at his arm and asked why the girl wasn't wearing any clothes. He blushed furiously and stared out the window, hoping that his father would have the decency to ignore him. Fortunately Gideon chose that moment to spill the maple syrup.

Jace read the second message while waiting for the others outside in the parking lot. It was from Myles, the good buddy whose party Jace had missed because he'd been previously booked for a glorious cross-Canada excursion. It read: "Dude, you missed a good one. Audrey was in mourning. As a friend, I consoled her and, if it's any consolation, she screamed out your name when she came. Oops, my bad. Hope a Trinity babe takes care of your virginity." Jace deleted both message and friend and almost deleted Audrey except that he still liked the shot, the smile and the rest. And maybe she really had screamed out his name, maybe.

He got into the minivan, hunkered down into the front seat and found some soothing Nine Inch Nails to listen to on his iPhone. This insane community of Trinity that his family was moving to was rapidly vectoring into Negaverse. He'd be doing his senior year in an isolated mining town just south of the Arctic Circle where everyone was likely to be incestuously related to each other and would have no use for some city boy with citified ideas. While he waited, he slumped into a depression that was augmented by occasional glances at Audrey's deliciously naked smile.

When the others finally got back to the minivan, Gideon had a wet t-shirt that his father told him he'd have to wear because he wasn't going to unpack things in the back to get a change of clothing for him. Victoria squeezed his hand and said that it was okay because he smelled like maple syrup, and he squeezed back before getting into his seat. His hands still felt a little sticky so he put his game aside. It was going to be their longest day of driving because their father had decided that they were going to drive all the way to Trinity today, which should put them into the town at around eight at night. And, yes, maybe Jace could do some of the driving if he kept his speed down to somewhere near the posted speed limit this time.

II

The glorious sunshine of early morning faded quickly into a thick fog which ebbed into a roiling mist throughout the day. By late afternoon the sky was almost biblical with threat. When it finally let go, the bruised monolith of cloud became a downpour that erased the world beyond the thin edges of the broken road over which Gregory Howland was driving. Its intensity shocked him out of his fatigue-induced stupor but did not diminish his stubborn resolve to make it through to Trinity by nightfall.

Driving conditions were terrible and, more than once, there was a small thunk under the wheel that signalled that there was now one more dead animal on this miserable stretch of northern Canadian asphalt. He didn't deliberately try to hit them, but didn't deliberately try to miss them either. Dead things happened. A part of his mind began to obsess over what kinds of animals they might have been and also to curse the God he didn't believe in for putting them there. The killings were an unwelcomed distraction and he found himself wondering what else might be out there beyond the blinding sheets of rain. He set the windshield wipers to maximum and noted the absence of thunder or lightning behind the rain.

The tedium of his ill-planned four-day cross-Canada road trip had worn his nerves thinner than a razor's excuse for suicide, and the excess of the morning's coffee wasn't helping. He'd wanted this to be an educational voyage of national discovery—a glorious exploration of Canada's vast expanse—but the thick, grey curtains had been drawn over the sun and sky before they'd left Edmonton were back. Their camping gear reeked acridly in the enclosed space of the minivan now that the windows had to be kept closed. It was stifling, and the odour of maple syrup wasn't helping. The minivan passed a road sign that some hunter had mistaken for a deer, but there was enough left of it for him to figure out that they still had long hours to go before they got to where their grim journey would terminate in the town of Trinity. The shadowy forest enclosed the cracked two-lane highway with blank and unending sameness.

Gideon drifted between sleep and boredom since playing his game under these conditions made him car-sick. His glasses had slid down on his nose. The endless non-events of scenery broken by isolated communities had long ago become a blur of undifferentiated non-events for him. He was becoming much less happy about their move to a small mining community that no one back at his school in Edmonton, including his teacher, had ever heard of. The bullies of Strathcona Intermediate School were behind him now but he was beginning to suspect that there might be worse in Trinity. He wanted to pee but, looking at his dad's hunched shoulders, he thought he'd wait. He no longer wanted to become a teacher like his dad if it meant having to uproot and leave his good old life behind, even the bullies. He'd had friends there and he'd liked his teachers, especially the ones who thought he was smart. In Trinity people might think he was just another stupid kid.

Victoria was preoccupied with her own concerns. Shortly after passing the murdered signpost, she had gained a sudden knowledge. The small cloth doll, given to her on her sixth birthday by her mother's kind old friend from over the bridge, was named Elizabeth. No, she corrected, it was Miss Elizabeth. The child stared at the red button eyes, the bun nose, and the quizzical thread of the mouth and understood that this was a secret that she wasn't supposed to tell anyone, not even Gideon. She peered sideways at him and knew that not even her favourite brother would understand. Victoria never questioned the way she knew things like this, although they sometimes puzzled her. Right now though she was wondering why Miss Elizabeth was so afraid, and why she wouldn't talk to her. But she was happy about one thing. Miss Elizabeth was going to be her best and first friend in Trinity.

For Jace there was conflict. Somehow the classic sounds of Nine Inch Nails in the ear-buds of his iPhone were insufficient to block out the ancient jazz noodlings his father kept inflicting on them in his efforts to indoctrinate them into "real" music. Like, what was so real about dead people playing saxophones and singing scatologically? Like Gideon, he was unthrilled by the move and, as he'd casually observed to his father, the people at the last gas station had had born-again-stupid written all over them with the only thing missing being Elvis on a crucifix. Northern Ontario was waste space populated by beer-gutted morons and the closest thing he'd seen to an attractive girl was pregnant and missing some of her yellowed front teeth. His father had been silently unsympathetic to his observations.

Audrey continued to infect his mind. Being an eighteen-year old virgin was such a humiliation, and she'd had an okay face, a killer bod and didn't talk girl-stuff all the time instead of listening to him—and she thought he was cute. His mind blurred the limp dampness of external scenery into images of her enhanced body parts that, in the limbic area of his brain, were firming up nicely and losing any requirements of personal identity. He shifted in his seat to allow more physical freedom for his reveries; and the enclosing storm grew dark and close around him, brooding with strange furies.

The hard rain and wind made the driving ever more difficult and tiring and Gregory prayed to his non-existent God that none of the kids would break into his concentration, which was now a fragile web of nerves. The weather report on the radio was disturbing—something about a convergence of storms, a sinister decompression of pressure systems with gale-force winds—and the few other vehicles on the road were becoming increasingly obstructive and impassable. He was massively exhausted, excited about the chance to return to his career as a high school teacher and furious at his wife for needing time to herself and taking the train instead of being here with him.

They kept passing sudden turnoffs for communities that weren't on the map and he wondered if those places still existed down those blind, shadowy roads. There were enough of those resource-based ghost towns around here with their bleak, abandoned mineshafts into which lost souls occasionally disappeared without a trace. Others had derelict sawmills, left to rot with their lethally rusting iron blades still in place. Trinity had been such a town until gold had once again risen in value. The driving rain and wind were driving him insane.

There was a battered pick-up truck ahead of him that was ignoring his horn except to drive more slowly until the straightaways when it picked up speed and made it impossible for him to pass before the next curve—the last of which had nearly sent him into the ditch. He'd almost lost it in his rage and he'd had to slow down and take deep breaths to regain a semblance of self-control. Then, without warning, there was a jarringly awful something that cracked and thudded beneath the rear wheels of the minivan, spinning it helplessly on the liquid slurry of the road until the vehicle finally came to rest on the narrow shoulder. The jolt shook everyone awake. Whatever he'd hit was about a twenty metres behind them.

In the rear-view mirror it was a large blurry lump of something that seemed to be moving. Then not. He couldn't tell what it was or whether it was alive or even if it was something that had ever been alive. The branch of a tree, garbage, someone's dog, a beast that, if alive, could suddenly turn on him. The pick-up was nowhere in sight. He settled the minivan properly onto the gravelled roadside and ignored the questions now coming from his children. Shut-up! A quick glare. They knew better. He hated that they knew better, the implicit accusation.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Trinity's Children by D. F. Scovil Copyright © 2012 by D. F. Scovil. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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