Unhinged

IntroductionFrom the bottom of my damaged little heart, thank you for buying this book. Especially if your only familiarity with me is through the romance genre. For you, especially, I’m grateful because you’ve made the leap to expanding your mind, to opening your eyes to something new and different. I hope you’ll be rewarded in this cross-section of my short story horror writing with thrills, with scares, maybe a few laughs, but most of all, with the surprising similarity horror can have to romance. I’ll leave you to reflect on that as you start reading. Have an epiphany? Write to me at jimmyfels@g*******m and we can talk about it. Trying something new and different can be scary. Maybe as scary as some of the stories you’ll find on these pages. So I’m grateful for those of you who were willing to take a chance on me and crack this book open. From the bottom of my twisted little psyche, I also thank those of you who bought this book because you’re familiar with me as a horror writer. Hey, that’s where my roots are, going back over (gulp) a quarter of a century. I hope the stories in this book will delight you with their visions of the macabre, the paranormal, the gruesome, and oh yes, the unhinged. But I hope you too will open your mind and consider, as you read, how these stories represent not only my commitment to the dark side of the human heart, but also the side that represents light and love. For both horror and romance readers, the yin and yang of light and darkness, I believe, exists in all these stories. Happy reading. I wish you love…and nightmares. Rick R. Reed EchoesThis story was inspired by a time when I lived in the Ravenswood neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. I worked downtown, and every day, I’d take the Brown Line into work (for those of you not in the know, the Brown Line is one of several branches of the Chicago Transit Authority’s L system). And every day, we’d make our stop at Irving Park Road and I would look out the window and see a unique studio apartment almost abutting the L tracks. It was in an old building, but unlike most apartment buildings I’d see on my way downtown to work, this one had an apartment that had one wall that was made almost entirely of glass, floor to ceiling. Inside was what appeared to be a relatively small studio apartment, with a raised area where the bed would go. I had sort of a Rear Window kind of feeling when I looked in that apartment, thinking that it was really cool in an architectural sense, but also wondering, as writers do, about the people who lived there. The strange thing was, in all the times I sat in the station looking at and coveting that unique apartment, I never saw a single person within its wall. Thus, the blank canvas for this story was born. See, as a writer, I began seeing people in my mind’s eye in that apartment and even began seeing, oh yes, dead people (or at least a dead person). And thus, a story was born. What happened to the people I saw? Read on…. * * * *