Grace and the Drawl

GRACE AND THE DRAWL

Written By

DALE CUSACK

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2010 Dale Cusack

Legal

This ebook is entirely a work of fiction, all events described are works of the author’s imagination any resemblances to persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Prologue

~Seven years earlier~

It was the day Grace died that they first came for her. It had started out as a brilliant day. The sun was shining, the wind was absent and the birds chirped happily in the trees around the edge of the frozen lake. Grace was ice skating on Lake Pearson with her brother and father. There were a few families enjoying the lake that day.

‘Look at me daddy,’ Grace called out as she whizzed along on the skates she had received from her grandparents last Christmas. She had relentlessly bugged her parents to go skating and when the lakes had finally submitted to winter’s bitter cold her parents had relented and taken Grace, and her younger brother Jason, skating.

‘Don’t go too far Grace,’ said her dad as he skated along with Jason. It was Jason’s first time on the ice and his dad had to hold his hand to stop him from falling.

It was a loud crack and a quick scream that grabbed his attention. As only a parent could, he instinctively knew something terrible had happened. Frantically scanning the lake surface for his daughter he saw nothing. He sat Jason down on the ice and skated furiously out to where he had last seen Grace.

The ice had cracked and Grace had plunged into the water. She thumped at the ice with her tiny fists. She clawed at it trying to find purchase. Yet it was so slippery she couldn’t hold on, the current carrying her away from the crack she had fallen through. Grace’s small lungs started to burn as they demanded oxygen. The burning fought its way up her chest. She could see people above her on the ice. They looked all twisted and distorted.

Grace bashed her hands against the barrier until her skin split. She tried to scream but no sound would come out. She listened but could hear nothing, nothing but the torturous beating of her own heart tearing at her eardrums, straining the veins and arteries of her body, her lungs burning inside her chest.

Grace’s father skated up and down the surface of the frozen lake frantically trying to find his daughter. He had found the hole that had swallowed her but she couldn’t be seen. He and the other parents spread out to look but they were moving away from Grace as the current dragged her down.

Why can’t he see me? Why can’t he hear me? she thought as she watched her father move out of sight. Her brain was so tired. It was so cold in here, so very, very cold. Darkness started to close in. Slowly at first, hiding all the little details surrounding her, and then, getting greedier, it started to nibble away at her vision. Soon it had devoured everything. All Grace could see was a tiny ball of light, then a pin prick, then nothing. Her mind fought it at first, it didn’t want to let go, it was too soon, much too soon. She was too young. So many experiences, tastes, sounds and sights left to see; her first kiss, her wedding day, so many memories that would never be. She couldn’t fight the urge to breath any longer, her lungs were tearing at her throat, she gulped in a mouthful of icy cold water, then another and another, retching until her lungs were full.

Then her mind accepted its fate, calmed down and told her not to fight it. Grace couldn’t feel the cold sting of the water anymore. She started to sink backwards drifting down, down, down….

The ambulance arrived within fifteen minutes. Grace’s father had found her, catching sight of the red jacket she wore through the surface of the ice. He’d smashed his way through the ice breaking his knuckles and tearing the skin. Then he dived into the lake and recovered his daughter’s body. When Grace was pulled from the water her heart wasn’t beating. The paramedics wrapped her in thermal blankets and started CPR.

At the hospital the doctors told Grace’s parents that the extreme cold had made it possible to resuscitate Grace. Her parent’s elation was short lived, however. Grace was alive again, but now in a coma.

Grace wasn’t alone in the dark depths of her coma for long, however. Something had found her. Found her alone, weak and frightened. It would visit her many, many times and each time Grace would scream and scream until her throat was raw and her lungs ached. But no one answered. No one ever came to help her.

Then one day everything changed. Shadow came.

Last night, dusk.

The large ginger cat waddled down to the end of the concrete driveway and sat facing the last of the sun’s light. He joined all the other neighbourhood cats who had gathered to watch the sunset. It was a regular occurrence for them. All over the world cats gathered in driveways and waited. The ginger cat looked over at the mottled brown male. He looked agitated, impatient. This was his first time on duty.

‘Here they come,’ he whispered to himself.

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For their entertaining ways and choosing to share their lives with us, I dedicate this book to all the worlds’ cats.

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Chapter One

Grace was just like any other teenage girl. There were posters of teen idols on her bedroom walls. She worried about zits on her face, and her heart skipped a little faster whenever Grant Minke smiled at her in English class. Grace was a normal teenage girl in every way. That was until today.

‘May I be excused?’ asked Grace as she pushed her chair back from the table and started to rise.

‘You may,’ came her mother’s reply. ‘But don’t forget to take your plate up to the sink.’

Grace was already racing towards the door when her mother pulled her up. She returned to the table scooped up her dishes and deposited them on the bench, then beat a hasty exit, lest her brother find some way of weaselling out of doing the dishes. It seemed like every week he conjured up more and more imaginative ways to avoid washing up.

Usually mum would prefix the request with something like:

‘But you do a better job than him.’ Just because my brother is lazy why does that mean I have to do it? Grace thought as she skipped down to her room. Closing her bedroom door, she flopped onto her bed and emptied her school bag full of books onto the floor. She had a stack of homework, but it was a teen magazine that caught her attention. Flicking through the pages, it took only a short time for her to feel guilty about the homework she wasn’t doing, so to make herself feel better about it, she gave her room a brief tidy up. Funny how chores seemed less bothersome when the alternative was something worse.

After putting it off for almost forty five minutes Grace turned her attention to the school work. She was a reasonably solid student, due mainly to the fact that she studied hard rather than any natural ability. Her parents encouraged her and made sure she did her assignments, took an interest in how she was doing, as they did with her brother. But Jason was quite a bit younger than his sister, and not as much was expected of him yet. Their parents had always made Grace study after dinner. When she was little her father had helped her to learn to read and told her stories about the world. He had spent a little time each day making sure she had a good foundation before she was ready to start school.

‘If only my parents had shown more interest...,’ he would say with a distant look in his eye reminiscing about his own childhood.

Now, however, he would come home from work tired, not saying much, just zoning out in front of the TV. In fact lately the whole family seemed to just sit facing the idiot box, rotting their brains thought Grace as she finished her last piece of homework and dropped her books back into her satchel ready for school the next day.

Grace flicked off the light and set out to see what the rest of the family was doing. Needless to say she found them in the lounge.

‘Where’s mum?’ Grace asked her father. At first it looked like he hadn’t heard his daughter. He just sat staring at the telly.

‘Dad?’ Grace repeated. Finally her father looked up, his eyes were drooping and his face looked flaccid. He looks terrible. If working and being a grown up does this to you, I seriously don’t want it! Grace thought to herself brushing the tight flesh of her cheek as she eyed the deep wrinkles in her father’s face. How he has aged in the last few weeks. Work must be killing him. And yet his job wasn’t all that high powered, he was a marketing manager for an IT company; it wasn’t as though he was running the country.

‘Your mum’s making a hot drink, why not go and see if she needs help?’ her dad eventually managed to reply before turning his attention back to some dumb show he was watching about doctors and police. It seemed every show on TV was about doctors or detectives these days. Grace trudged down the hall into the kitchen.

‘What ya doing mum?’ she asked as she stepped into the kitchen. Grace’s mum was a kind looking middle-aged women with a figure many younger women would be envious of. She smiled up at her daughter and pointed to the fridge.

‘You’re just in time to lend a hand. Can you feed Boot? I’m not sure if there’s any food left in the refrigerator but there’s a fresh tin of cat food in the garage.’

The fridge was empty so Grace retrieved the cat food from the pantry in the garage and came back inside and opened the drawer to find the tin opener. At the sound of the lid being removed from the tin Boot came running through the cat door.

‘He must just sit out there listening for it I swear!’ said Joyce, Grace’s mum. Boot was a stray that had started hanging around a few months back. He was a large black cat with a white cravat under his chin and a placid and gentle nature. Grace’s mum wasn’t really a cat person but her dad was, so Boot was permitted to stay. It wasn’t that Joyce was