Authors: Billy Phillips,Jenny Nissenson
The Color of Fear
© 2015 by Billy Phillips. All rights reserved.
THE TOON STUDIO PRESS
Beverly Hills, CA
No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permissions, write to Toon Studio Publishing, Attention: Permissions Department, 141 S. La Peer, Beverly Hills, CA 90211
“She’s Not There” by Rod Argent, by permission of Marquis Music Co. Ltd.
Cover design by Hyun Min Lee, Hl Design
Book interior by Morgana Gallaway
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
For Marianne
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Special acknowledgment to Michael Tabb who gave me the inspiration to finally write my first book of fiction. Michael, thanks for your generous spirit, integrity, and love of craft which deeply inspired me, and for suggesting that I set this first book in Wonderland with two sisters in the “starring” role! You are an immense talent with an immense heart along with a magnetic personality to match! Thank you!
The following story is based upon actual fictitious events that took place in various graveyards around the world.
The first sighting took
place at the Kirriemuir Cemetery in Angus, Scotland, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday evening.
A second sighting occurred about two weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic—in Glendale, California, at the Forest Lawn Cemetery.
Only a few days later, a third sighting was reported at a graveyard in Berlin, Germany.
The sightings were reported on Twitter and Facebook by various witnesses who warned of peculiar occurrences taking place in their local graveyards. Some reports concerned mysterious lights seeping out of graves. Others involved an actual moving body.
Immediately following the fourth sighting—only forty-eight hours after the third—video footage began showing up on YouTube.
This was also the first time the word
zombie
was used. Apparently one of the dead and buried had become undead and unburied at the Cemetery of the Holy Doors in Florence, Italy.
The video, though dark and shaky, showed what appeared to be a body climbing up out of a gravesite and moving about the headstones by the pale light of the moon.
Most people figured the sightings were pranks. Especially when a groundskeeper at one of the graveyards reported finding clusters of what appeared to be some type of exotic chickpeas scattered on the lawns.
A few small, local newspapers, however, did report that some local cemeteries where sightings had occurred were beefing up their security.
The sightings began to gain traction when unexplainablenews.com picked up the story. Readers were intrigued.
But not one of these reporters or any one of the website’s readers had figured out that these bizarre events were not happening in arbitrary cities or at random graveyards.
A definite pattern was forming.
There was one individual, though, who was following the goings-on with compelling curiosity. One person knew exactly what was happening.
And why.
Should you Google the Kirriemuir Cemetery in Scotland and should you dig deep enough to discover the identities of the souls resting there, you’d find that J. M. Barrie, the famous writer of
Peter Pan
, is coffined and consigned to that old graveyard on a hill.
The burial ground in Berlin—the St. Matthäus Kirchhof Cemetery—happens to be the resting place of the Brothers Grimm. And Forest Lawn Cemetery in sunny Glendale, California, is the eternal home to L. Frank Baum, author of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
. The Gothic-style Cemetery of the Holy Doors in Florence, Italy, is the keeper of the bones of Carlo Collodi, the man who brought Pinocchio to life well over a century ago.
Most kids—and most adults, for that matter—associate these writers with enchanting stories of princes and princesses, puppets and pirates, and fairies and godmothers. Most don’t know that these revered authors also spun bloodcurdling tales about ghouls and ghosts and witches and phantoms and a whole other world that lies beyond the grave!
This brings us back to our most unusual and anonymous friend, who clearly sees and understands the terrible danger that lurks in extraordinary places unseen by the human eye, a danger that was prompting the living dead to rise up from the grave in search of the one person who just might be able to prevent the unthinkable.
Our friend is also looking for this one person right now, at this very moment.
She comes in colors everywhere;
She combs her hair
She’s like a rainbow
—“She’s a Rainbow,” The Rolling Stones
Caitlin Fletcher went numb
with fear when her next breath didn’t come.
I’m not breathing!
Her muscles went taut, like a tightrope.
She couldn’t catch a lungful of air
automatically
, like normal people do.
She had to
think
about it.
She had to
consciously
inhale and
willfully
exhale because her body was no longer breathing on its own. It was as if someone had jabbed a long needle through the wall of her chest and shot her lungs up with Novocain, paralyzing them. Or the part of her brain that regulated involuntary breathing had been switched off.
She began obsessively picking at a fingernail until it bled.
Her legs trembled.
What if I forget to breathe?
She started breathing faster and faster. Soon she was sucking air like a vacuum cleaner.
She became light-headed. The room spun. Brutal panic set in. She was wild-eyed. Manic. Verging on a total freak-out.
Caitlin Fletcher then dumped the contents of her brown paper lunch bag onto the dresser in her bedroom.
Container with scoop of tuna on a bed of lettuce. Bunch of red grapes. Apple-pumpkin muffin. Skittles. Energy bar. More Skittles.
She placed the empty bag securely over her mouth and nose.
And she breathed.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The paper bag was supposed to relieve these wretched, god-awful symptoms, at least according to Google.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Her heart rate had to be clocking 120.
Inhale.
Exhale.
And then—
Caitlin was so involved with her bag, breathing, and beating heart that she failed to notice that her eleven-year-old sister, Natalie, had just wandered into the bedroom. Natalie calmly and casually climbed out onto the tenth-story window ledge of their new split-level London flat on Royal Street.