Driven

His red, black, and white Air Jordan mid-tops dug into the soft wet ground as he ran through the cold, misty, night. A thick cloud lingered just above his feet and around his ankles. There were no lights anywhere to be seen around him, he was running blind through trees that towered over his head and leaves that caused him to slip every once in awhile. He had no idea where he was, or where he was going. He couldn't remember anything. His name, his age, date of birth, where he was from, who his parents were, nothing. All he knew was that he was on the run, from what, he didn't know.
His heart pounded in his chest and head. He felt dizzy and nauseas, but he couldn't stop running. As much as he wanted to, he couldn't. He soon ran out of the soaking wet dark green and onto slippery wet black. The thick cloud of whitish-grey wet was now up around his mid-section and he found himself having a more difficult time seeing where he was running to. He stopped to catch his breath, and because he thought he had heard something or someone behind or in front of him, he wasn't sure which. Like he was sure of anything at this very moment. He wasn't.
"H...hello," he said, panting still as his body slowly recovered from his long run, "i...is anyone there?" he asked as he spun around in a slow circle, looking all around himself for any signs of other human life besides himself.
He heard a voice then that whispered something. The whisper was long, soft, and slow. The young man felt the hairs on his head and back of his neck raise slowly one by one as he slowly turned away from the direction of the forest that he was facing and to the long, seemingly endless, stretch of pavement that laid before him. When he saw no one, he let out a sigh of relief.
"Whew, that was..." he started.
He stopped though when he thought he saw someone standing down the road several miles away from him. He squinted and blinked several times to make sure he wasn't hallucinating or going crazy. When he was convinced that the person standing before him was real, he slowly started to creep towards them.
"H...hello?" the young man that had been running through the dark woods just moments ago and now stood on the barren pavement, called out to the figure that stood in the middle of it all.
As he neared it, he could now see that it was wearing a fedora hat, trench coat, pants, and shoes. It also was holding something in one of its hands that looked like a briefcase or something of the sort. The young man stopped just in front of it, almost face to face.
"Hello?" he said, reaching out with a trembling right hand for the person that stood before him.
When he touched it, there was a flash of blinding white light. The forest, darkness, pavement, and the person he had reached for all vanished right before his eyes. The young man awoke lying flat on his face in the middle of a road in pitch darkness. The road was sopping wet, as was he. He groaned and started to get up. But his head pounded so hard that it made him extremely dizzy and nauseas. He laid back in the position he had awaken in and let the headache subside. When it had, he tried once more to stand on his own two feet, again met with the splitting headache, only this time he fought through it, using the metal thing as an aid.
Once he was standing, he realized what the metal thing he had used to lift himself up of the ground had been. A guardrail. The young man looked around at where he was standing. The road was a winding one, and there were rocks piled miles and miles high, up into the pitch black that was the sky, which was dimly lit with a crescent moon and white balls of speck that were supposed to be gas that was stars. He looked up and down the road. He couldn't see either way. He wondered which way he should travel, but wondering made his head pound and ache more than it already was and so he went with his gut. He would walk in the direction he was facing-the direction of the moon.
As he walked, the young man tried desperately to remember anything. How had he arrived here? At this time and place? Why was he here? When had he arrived here? Where was 'here'? He saw a dark shadowy figure up ahead of him as he walked. He squinted and blinked and shook his head, assuming that he was dreaming or imagining things. When he had convinced himself that he was doing neither, he quickened his pace.
"Hey," he called out to the figure, "please, help me, I've been in an accident! I need to get to a hospital...." he stopped when he reached the vicinity of the dark shadowy figure. But the area where he had seen the shadowy-whatever it had been-person, he guessed, he found a dark and barren street, "What the..." the man muttered to himself as he spun around in a circle, looking for any sign or trace of the person he had just seen. Nothing.
There was a tunnel, made from the rock formation. As dark as the night was, the young man knew he had no other choice but to proceed through the tunnel. He walked to edge of the entrance of the tunnel.
"It's so dark in there." he thought.
"I wish I had a light of some kind."
But he didn't and so he knew he would have to walk slowly and carefully through. He took a step into the tunnel and heard a twig snap and he about jumped out of his skin. He knelt down and felt the ground and found the twig and tossed it off to one side. He slowly started walking again, using the wall of the tunnel as a guide. He saw a light at the end of the tunnel. It was a streetlight. He hurried through the rest of the tunnel until he was standing underneath the light, completely surrounded by it.
He heard footsteps all around him as he stood underneath the street light, but saw no one. He caught his breath as he tried to figure out what he should do next. His gut told him to keep walking straight and keep following the road. But he wondered if he really should since he had no kind of protection. His mind raced as he tried to think of what to do next. His mind became so cluttered he eventually collapsed into a heap underneath the street light.
While he was out, he had some kind of dream or vision. In it, he saw a dark shadowy figure handing him something, cradling it in both of its black shadowy hands. He reached for it, but fell short of it. He try to say something, anything at all to the dark shadowy figure and what it was holding, but the words got caught in his throat and dangled there and he choked on them. The dark shadowy figure suddenly seemed to slowly start fading away and so he started chasing after it, but it drifted further and further away.
"Chet," someone called faintly, "Chet, wake up!"
His eyes snapped open, he gasped, then bolted upright on the couch, "Ahhhh," he moaned as he rubbed his head, "how long was I out?" he asked.
"About four hours." the woman answered.
"Wait," he said, looking around the room, "who are you again? where am I? how did I get here?"
"Which question do you want me to answer first?" she asked.
He started to answer her, then looked up and saw the exact same pair of shoes from his dream sitting by the front door to the cabin he was in. He looked strangely at the girl briefly and then slowly got up from the couch and inched over to the shoes. He knelt down beside them and picked one of them up in his hands. He gasped once he was holding the shoe.
"What's wrong?" the woman asked, "Chet?"
The shoe was wet, and cold. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck slowly raise one by one, had last night really happened? had the dream really not been a dream, but an actual event? He dropped the shoe and jumped up onto his feet and spun around and looked at the woman.
"Who are you?" he said, demandingly.
"Chet," the woman said calmly as she stood and strolled across the room to him and put her hands on his arms, "you know who I am." she smiled at him as she spoke and hugged him.
He shoved her off of him, "No I don't," he said, "now who are you?"
She looked strangely at him, "Chet," she said, "it's me, Bertha, your wife?"
He exhaled, "Wife? Since when, how, where?"
She sighed, frustrated, "Since high school, four years, right here in Granite Falls, how could you not remember, how long have you been out?"
Chet shrugged, "Your guess is as good as mine." he said.
"Well," she said, "I wish I could stay here and help you work this all out, but I was late for work over an hour ago waiting for you to wake up." she said as she got up from the couch and walked over to the door where there stood a coat rack beside it and took down a black leather jacket and put it on while reaching for her car keys, which were on a small table in front of a window beside the door. She then turned and opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, turning and looking at Chet one last time before closing the door.
He got up from the couch and walked over to the window and looked out. He watched her get into the yellow jeep and rev up the engine as she started the vehicle. He then watched her back away from the cabin and then put the jeep in drive and slowly start to pull away from the cabin, down the path, until she and the jeep were out of sight.
After she had left, Chet turned back to the direction of the couch and walked over to it and sat back down. He was soaked to the bone wet, as was where he had been lying on the couch. He buried his face in his hands and then looked up at the wall that was in front of him.
"What happened to me last night," he wondered, "why can't I remember anything?"
He pulled his shirt up over his head and tossed it to one side. He happened looked to see where he had thrown the shirt, he saw the exact same pair of shoes from his dream sitting by the door he had seen Bertha walk out of just moments ago.
"No way!" he muttered to himself as he slowly got up once more from the couch and inched over to the shoes and knelt down in front of them. He reached out for them with his hands and touched them. He gasped when he felt them.
"Wet," he exclaimed to himself, jerking his hands back away from the pair of shoes, "that must mean...." he jumped up onto his feet.
He looked around quickly, then headed for the door. He stepped out onto the porch, then down the two steps. He headed around to the back of the cabin and saw a massive enormous forest behind it.
"Could it be?" he wondered as he took a step toward the forest.
He stopped though, "Naaaah," he said, making a face and waving his hand at the forest, "it couldn't be!" he stared at the forest a little while longer, then scoffed, shook his head in disbelief, and headed back into the cabin to wait for Bertha.
As he waited, he looked around the room, still dazed and confused about what he had awaken from. He happened to look down at the coffee table then. On it, he saw; a brochure, a black journal, a brown journal, black and blue pens, and magazines and brochures. The brochures and magazines caught his attention more than the journal and so he picked them up and started looking through them.
But as Chet looked through the journal and brochures and magazines, none of it made any sense. Why had he written about Bertha the way he had? And who were the other people he had mentioned in the book? Benedict? Dorian? Harland? Harvey? Julius? And let's not forget the women mentioned; Corrine, Francesca, Imagene, Janette, and Marisol.
He continued through the journal until he came to the end, more dazed and confused than ever before. The journal made no sense what-so-ever. The people, places, and things he had apparently mentioned in the journal (assuming he had written it), to make sure it was his own handwriting and not someone else's, he found a notepad nearby on the coffee table and a pen and wrote his name on the first page of the notepad, "Chet Delaney".
"Huh," he said out loud to himself, "that's strange," he said as he scratched his head, "I didn't realize I remembered my last name." he shrugged and threw the pen down on the coffee table beside the notepad and then leaned back on the couch and sighed and stared up at the ceiling.
He soon drifted back off to sleep and found himself back in the forest in the middle of the night, surrounded once more by the thick fog that laid on the ground and made it seem like it had vanished into thin air. He saw the black shadowy figure he had seen here before and breathed a sigh of relief as he started toward it.
"Hey," he called out to it, "remember me?"
But the black shadow figure said nothing. Instead, it simply stood in the middle of the road and appeared to be staring blankly at Chet. As Chet neared it, the shadow figure turned in the opposite direction and bolted off away from him in a dead run. But before Chet could say or do anything, he was suddenly jolted awake by Bertha.
Chet gasped and shot upright on the couch, breathing heavily as if he had been running for days. He had broken out into a freezing cold sweat. He slowly sank back down on the couch and laid on his back once more and put his arm on his forehead and closed his eyes. He swallowed the enormous rock in his throat and tried to block out the image that was in his mind, not because it scared him, but because something made him uneasy about what he had seen.
"Chet," Bertha's soft sweet voice said, "are you alright?"
"I'm...fine...just a bad dream's all." he said, trying to sound convincing not just to her, but to himself as well.
"Are you sure?" she asked him as he slowly sat up.
He hesitated, "Yes." he said at last.
"Okay," she said, not fully believing him, "well, I need to go into town, would you like to come?"
"Sure." Chet said as he got up off the couch.
"Well," she said, "get dressed, I'll go get the car started. It doesn't look like it, but it's freezing out there." she got up from the couch and turned to the door and opened it and stepped outside, shutting the door behind her as she headed to start the car.
Chet looked around the room, then headed to the back of the cabin. There were two bedrooms across from each other. He walked into one of the rooms. In it, he found a desk that had a typewriter on it and a window in the wall just above it. Across the room from that was a bed and across from the bed was a closet.
"This must be my room." he thought, shaking his head as he turned and headed into the other bedroom.
There was a bed and closet in the next room and nothing more. He turned and headed out of the room. He walked back into the room he believed to be his. It was almost pitch dark inside of the room, he flipped the light switch and a dim yellow light came on. Inside the room that Chet believed was his, he saw a bed and a closet, just like the other room, but there was also a desk with typewriter on top of it and a chair pushed up against it.
"No," thought to himself, "THIS is my room, it has to be!" he started over to where the typewriter was sitting on top of the desk.
Just as he neared the typewriter though to see what was on the page that was still in it, he heard Bertha call for him from the other room. He hesitated, then sighed, frustrated, and turned and hurried out of the room.
"What?" he said to her once he was back in the room he had awaken in.
"Help me with these will you?" she said as she struggled with the bags she was carrying.
"Okay." he said, feeling defeated. He turned and glanced at the room he had just been in, then turned and headed outside to start helping Bertha get the groceries out of the jeep.
After they were finished, Chet started back for the room, stopped again, this time by Bertha herself, "where are you going?" she asked him.
He stopped, his back to her, he rolled his eyes, then turned and smiled at her as if nothing was wrong, "I was just going to go back here for a minute." he said.
"Oh no you don't," she said, walking over to him, she grabbed him by his wrist, "you're going to help me first." she said as she dragged him into the kitchen.
As he helped her prepare dinner, he stopped just as they were finishing up. He felt a set of eyes somewhere nearby watching them. He shook his head and tried to ignore it. But every time he started to do something in the kitchen with Bertha, he felt he was being watched.
"Is anyone else here with us?" he asked her casually.
"No," Bertha said, "why?"
Chet shrugged, "Just curious." he said, looking down at what he was doing. He looked up and out through the window and could see the forest. He said nothing to Bertha, but waited.
After they had finished eating dinner, Chet and Bertha had a few drinks of the red wine she had bought when she had bought the groceries earlier that day. When he was convinced she had gotten drunk enough that she had passed out from it, Chet poured himself one more glass of and drank the wine. He then put the bottle in the fridge, and the glasses in the sink.
Chet opened the door to the cabin and stepped out onto the porch, then closed the door behind him. The sky was pitch black dark, only a half crescent moon that looked like a crooked smile hung in it. A cool gentle breeze swept through the area where the cabin stood. As he stood on the porch of the cabin and enjoyed the cool night air against his hot and sweaty skin, his dream suddenly flashed before his eyes and he remembered the enormous forest that towered over the cabin back behind him. His eyes snapped open and he started off of the porch and around back to where the forest was.
But as he made his way toward the forest, he heard Bertha from inside the cabin let out a blood-curdling scream. He stopped just when he reached the edge of the forest before hearing her scream, and turned and started off in a dead run back to the cabin. He swung the door open and looked around the inside of the cabin desperately.
"Bertha," he said, looking around frantically for her, he heard her shriek again, this time the screaming came from the forest, "Bertha!" he cried as he ran back out of the cabin and into the forest.
His red, black, and white Air Jordan mid-tops dug into the soft wet ground as he ran through the cold, misty, night. A thick cloud lingered just above his feet and around his ankles. Chet remembered all of this now. It was his dream, only now it was reality. Nothing was chasing him (that he knew of) he had started running through this place after her, after Bertha. He hoped and prayed as he ran through the pitch dark forest that he would find her and that she would be safe and unharmed.
His heart pounded in his chest and head. He felt dizzy and nauseas, but he couldn't stop running. As much as he wanted to, he couldn't. He soon ran out of the soaking wet dark green and onto slippery wet black. The thick cloud of whitish-grey wet was now up around his mid-section and he found himself having a more difficult time seeing where he was running to. He stopped to catch his breath, and because he thought he had heard something or someone behind or in front of him, he wasn't sure which.
"H...hello," he said, panting still as his body slowly recovered from his long run, "i...is anyone there?" he asked as he spun around in a slow circle, looking all around himself for any signs of other human life besides himself.
He heard a voice then that whispered something. The whisper was long, soft, and slow. The Chet felt the hairs on his head and back of his neck raise slowly one by one as he slowly turned away from the direction of the forest that he was facing and to the long, seemingly endless, stretch of pavement that laid before him. When he saw no one, he let out a sigh of relief.
"Whew, that was..." he started.
He stopped though when he thought he saw someone standing down the road several miles away from him. He squinted and blinked several times to make sure he wasn't hallucinating or going crazy. When he was convinced that the person standing before him was real, he slowly started to creep towards them.
"H...hello?" Chet said as he now stood on the barren pavement, and called out to the figure that stood in the middle of it all.
As he neared it, he could now see that it was wearing a fedora hat, trench coat, pants, and shoes. It also was holding something in one of its hands that looked like a briefcase or something of the sort. Chet stopped just in front of it, almost face to face.
"Hello?" he said, reaching out with a trembling right hand for the person that stood before him.
When he touched it, there was a flash of blinding white light. The forest, darkness, pavement, and the person he had reached for all vanished right before his eyes. The young man awoke lying flat on his face in the middle of a road in pitch darkness. The road was sopping wet, as was he. He groaned and started to get up. But his head pounded so hard that it made him extremely dizzy and nauseas. He laid back in the position he had awaken in and let the headache subside. When it had, he tried once more to stand on his own two feet, again met with the splitting headache, only this time he fought through it, using the metal thing as an aid.
Once he was standing, he realized what the metal thing he had used to lift himself up of the ground had been. A guardrail. The young man looked around at where he was standing. The road was a winding one, and there were rocks piled miles and miles high, up into the pitch black that was the sky, which was dimly lit with a crescent moon and white balls of speck that were supposed to be gas that was stars. He looked up and down the road. He couldn't see either way. He wondered which way he should travel, but wondering made his head pound and ache more than it already was and so he went with his gut. He would walk in the direction he was facing-the direction of the moon.
As he walked, Chet tried desperately to remember where exactly he had seen what he had been chasing run off to. He saw a dark shadowy figure up ahead of him as he walked. He squinted and blinked and shook his head, assuming that he was dreaming or imagining things. When he had convinced himself that he was doing neither, he quickened his pace.
"Hey," he called out to the figure, "please, help me, I...I need to find my wife!" he stopped when he reached the vicinity of the dark shadowy figure. But the area where he had seen the shadowy-whatever it had been-person, he guessed, he found a dark and barren street, "What the..." Chet muttered to himself as he spun around in a circle, looking for any sign or trace of the person he had just seen. Nothing.
There was a tunnel, made from the rock formation. As dark as the night was, Chet he had no other choice but to proceed through the tunnel. He walked to edge of the entrance of the tunnel.
"It's so dark in there." he thought.
"I wish I had a light of some kind."
But he didn't and so he knew he would have to walk slowly and carefully through. He took a step into the tunnel and heard a twig snap and he about jumped out of his skin. He knelt down and felt the ground and found the twig and tossed it off to one side. He slowly started walking again, using the wall of the tunnel as a guide. He saw a light at the end of the tunnel. It was a streetlight. He hurried through the rest of the tunnel until he was standing underneath the light, completely surrounded by it.
He heard footsteps all around him as he stood underneath the street light, but saw no one. He caught his breath as he tried to figure out what he should do next. His gut told him to keep walking straight and keep following the road. But he wondered if he really should since he had no kind of protection. His mind raced as he tried to think of what to do next. His mind became so cluttered he eventually collapsed into a heap underneath the street light.
While he was out, he had some kind of dream or vision. In it, he saw a dark shadowy figure handing him something, cradling it in both of its black shadowy hands. He reached for it, but fell short of it. He tried to say something, anything at all to the dark shadowy figure and what it was holding, but the words got caught in his throat and dangled there and he choked on them. The dark shadowy figure suddenly seemed to slowly start fading away and so he started chasing after it, but it drifted further and further away.
"Wait," he called out to it faintly as he started chasing after it, "stop, come back, please!"
The thing he was chasing was a floating ball of light. He followed it through the dark forest until he came out on the other side where there was another enormous black lake and mountains across it from him on the other side. The ball of light paused just above the edge of the water.
"I can't," Chet said, shaking his head, "I'm not a very strong swimmer."
The ball of light said nothing as it hovered above the water. Chet stayed, frozen with fright where he stood on the shore.
"Don't be afraid." it said to him.
"And why not?" he asked.
"Just trust me," it said, "and come here."
Chet started walking on the water, not realizing at first what he was doing. He walked on the water to the ball of light, but when the wind blew a certain way, he became frightened and began to sink. He coughed and sputtered as he swung his arms around, trying to keep from drowning. The light finished building the bridge across the lake to where it wanted him to go and helped him up onto it.
"Why did you doubt?" it asked him as he climbed back up onto the bridge the light had made and stayed on his hands and knees for several minutes, coughing and sputtering until he caught his breath.
"What the hell was that?" Chet wondered to himself out loud as he stood, still weak from almost drowning, and started once more across the lake to the other side where he was supposed to be.
When he had crossed over, he found himself at the edge of another dark woods. "Oh no," he thought to himself, "there is no way in HELL am I going through anything else of this sort!" he looked around for another alternative route, but didn't see one.
He looked up into the night sky for a moment, "How can I make it through there when I have no kind of light?" he wondered out loud, turning his attention back to the dark eerie forest.
When there came no answer, he sighed and shook his head. He started to step into the forest to start through it, until he heard dogs howling and barking somewhere off in the distance in the forest and he froze right where he stood. He heard something move from behind him and the hairs on the back of his neck slowly raised one by one. Then he heard people screaming blood-curdling screams from inside the forest and he spun back around to where he was facing it once more.
"H....hello?" he said, his voice shaking, along with his body, he had broken out in another cold sweat. His arms, legs, and feet all felt numb and heavy. He felt himself starting to panic and without thinking, he started off in a dead run through the forest again. As he ran, the dogs seemed to be growing closer and the voices further away. He tripped over a tree root that was sticking up out of the ground and went rolling down into a hole that had been covered with leaves and was a trap of some kind for animals.
Chet had an idea. He got up from the ground as fast as he could and started removing the leaves from the gigantic hole in the ground. He found his way around it without falling in himself, and waited for the dogs to come. When they did, they didn't notice the hole like he had, and fell in and were severely injured.
Chet walked over to and peered down into the hole at the dogs, and left them there. He then turned and continued walking through the forest. He saw the snow-capped mountains through the trees and knew not to go that way toward them because it would be a dead end and so he continued along the dirt path he had been following. As he walked through the forest, Chet heard a gun shot fired off in the distance behind him. He spun around and watched as a red flare went up into the air and briefly lit up the entire forest.
"Oh no!" Chet gasped, assuming the worst, he started off away from the flare gun and its flares again through the forest.
"Chet?" someone called to him from somewhere off in the direction of the flare gun shot.
But he kept running, convinced that he was going to be caught and sent to prison for the disappearance of Bertha. Meanwhile, on the other side of the forest the gun shot had come from stood a group of men and women.
"Okay we'll split up to look for him, cover more ground." Benedict said.
"Are you crazy," Dorian said hysterically, "we'll get killed!"
"Yeah," Harland chimed in, "that Chet Delaney's a nut, just like all the rest of these stupid writers that make a living off of stupid crap they make up in their brains and yet make a killing off of it!"
"We have to find him!" Corrine insisted.
"Yeah," Harland said, "and why is that?"
"For Bertha!" she pleaded.
"Bertha?" Harvey and his twin brother, Julius, both said.
"Bertha's dead, Corrine," Benedict said, "Chet killed her."
"No," Corrine shrieked, "you're lying!"
"Enough!" Dorian cried angrily, standing in between them, "now, we can sit here and argue about what really happened to Bertha, or we can go find the bastard that killed her and get rid of him and end this!"
"You're right," she said, defeated, "we need to find him, fast, he needs serious help."
The group nodded and muttered in agreement as they started through the forest to find the writer. Meanwhile, Chet was still running blindly through the pitch dark woods away from the angry mob that pursued him with their guns with no idea where he was headed or why.
"Chet!" the voice whispered.
"Who...are...you?" he panted as he ran, glancing over his shoulder ever once in a while as he did.
"Chet," it said, "stop, please!"
"No...way...." he panted, "I'm not letting them kill me!"
Bertha's face flashed before his eyes then. He saw himself tying her up with rope and gagging her and then dragging her down to the edge of the lake. It made no sense, how could he have killed her? They had come here so she could help him get over his writer's block. Why had he killed her, if he really had?
He came to the end of the forest and found himself standing on another road. There were dim streetlights here, but he did his best to avoid them as he headed to the town up the hill. Meanwhile, the mob that was chasing him had neared the end of the forest as well, but had been met with their own problems.
The dark shadowy men held pick axes, machetes, nail bats, scythes, sickles, and other tools of the sort. They advanced slowly toward the mob, which was armed with pick axes, and attacked them. A mini war ensued and the dark shadow men that was protecting Chet were victorious.
As Chet made his way into town, he saw that it had been where the Granite Falls Annual Festival had been held just three days prior to him arriving with his wife. The more he thought about her, the worse he felt, the more he missed her and wished she was there with him. He had to find her, he just had to. She needed to be here with him to help him get over his writer's block as only she could.
"Why was I so stupid?" he wondered as he made his way through town.
He couldn't believe that he had killed her. Yes, they had fought and not gotten along at times, but he couldn't remember ever having any thoughts of wanting to kill her.
"Chet." a deep voice said suddenly.
"Who are you," he said demandingly, stopping in the middle of the street.
"Chet, listen to me, please!" it pleaded.
"What do you want with me?" he asked in the same tone.
"I want you to stop and listen to me, please!" the voice said, sternly.
He quickened his pace through town as the wind picked up and he heard and saw more dark shadowy men with their weapons. Still unarmed, he tried to run from them, only for them to grab him and drag him down onto the ground, ready to brutally massacre him for what he had done to his wife.
"No," he cried helplessly, "please, don't!"
Just as the shadow men were about to kill him for killing his wife, a bright white bolt of lighting struck down right beside him on the shadow men. The entire place was set ablaze and the shadow men let out ear-piercing screams as they burned down to the ground into what looked like oil spills.
"Chet," The Voice said, "do not move!" it commanded.
Chet stayed where he had fallen to the ground and crouched down on the ground. His hands were covering his head as if to protect himself. He looked up in the direction of where The Voice had come from.
"Listen to me," it ordered, "your relationship with your wife ended because you were no longer getting along with each other. She insisted on it ending because she knew that it was over between you and tried to leave like she knew she should. But you couldn't let go and tried to make her stay, but when she wouldn't, you guys fought until you became blinded by your anger and killed her. All of this is happening because you have been feeling guilty, but I offer you an escape."
"What?" Chet asked.
"Leave this place for good," it said, "go somewhere else and start over."
"Just like that?" Chet said, unsure.
"You will not go away from this Scot-free, but I will show you how to be forgiven for what you did." The Voice said, re-assuring.
Chet still wasn't sure about being able to just pick up and move like nothing had happened in Granite Falls, but he wanted to be free from his writer's block. He thought about what The Voice had said to him for the rest of the night. The next morning, while it was still pitch dark outside, Chet was packing up his belongings and loading it all up into the jeep.
Without looking back, Chet opened the door to the jeep, and got in. He shut the door and revved up the engine. Then, he put the jeep in drive and started driving away from the cabin to start over anew.