Forever Mine

I don't think about it as much as I did when I was a kid. It is there. It will always be there. I try to forget it. I cannot escape its darkness. It engulfs me and frightens me. When I enter the darkness I feel the pain. I can see the horror. I can smell death. I can feel the blood wash over me. I can see what once was human turn pure evil and take with it precious life.

That was twenty-four years ago.

It feels like yesterday.

I have lost a lot in my life without regaining a one.

Until now...

The darkness has returned.

2

It was 1980, a long and rainy summer in Eden Valley, California which was not completely unusual. I was in the fourth grade and my older brother Jack was in the eighth grade. My mother was always at home tending to our every need. My father was a cop.

I remember the night it first came to me. The darkness was awakened.

It was a Saturday night, mom and my brother and I had just returned home from a night of bowling. Dad was working as he did every night (or so it seemed.)

He and his partner, Chris Valdez, were on patrol. They were stopping by for dinner. Mom was upset about what Celeste McClure had said about the black eye I had. It was a whopper of a shiner. My father had been known in the years before to have a bad temper. He was also known to strike his children and his wife. That had stopped years before. The gossip and label had always stuck on dad. In a way I was sorry about that. He was after all a good man.

The shiner, despite the popular belief, did not come from my father.

Nor did it come from my brother and it certainly did not come from my mother. She was one of the most, if not the most, passive people on the planet.

Our family home, Halloran House, was built in the mid-1800's and sat a top a long ago abandoned gold mine. My ancestors had dug so deep in this mine that the locals called it the Forever mine. As this is how far the caverns seemed to reach. In all honesty no one was certain on the depth of the mine. There was even one local legend that said the mine was a passageway to hell.

The mine was forbidden to enter. It had not seen a visitor in nearly forty years.

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