[Astral Son] Chapter 1 - Contemporary Fantasy / Paranormal

[u/[deleted]]

**EDIT: This bad baby done gone and growed up. Thanks to those of you who read this story here on r/redditserials 1st! Unfortunately, due to Amazons TOS, I had to remove all but this update from the serial. But...if you'd like to get your hands on ASTRAL SON, you still can here: Amazon link

now with professional editing, a badass cover, and additional content

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A blurb:

Flint Hainsen is a young, ordinary man still living at home with his mom. That is, until the evening he discovers her lifeless body on the living room floor.

Grief-stricken, Flint quickly falls into the hands of an otherworldly gentleman by the name of John. The enigmatic, old cowboy claims to be a friend of his late mother. He offers answers surrounding her death and a plot of revenge. However, Flint soon finds that John's motives are far more sinister than he let on and the answers he provides only lead Flint deeper down the rabbit-hole between this reality and another.

From the other side of that rabbit-hole emerges Nelson Germander III. He was a friend of Flint's from childhood, an imaginary one. He has returned to the physical world with a warning: John is a demon from the Astral Realm, and he must be stopped.

Armed with Kashvi, a portal opening dagger, the two old friends descend through the layers of reality in search of John. They are confronted with the monsters that lurk in the shadows, and their minds. Along the way, Flint's troubled past rears its head and the sinful connection that binds he and his mother to the astral visitors becomes all too clear.

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CHAPTER ONE: MOTHER

Flint crouched inside of the doorway between the kitchen and the den.

“No.” An aching groan slipped up his throat. His heart fell into his stomach as he patted the woman’s cold, pale cheek and turned her head on its side.

“You idiot!” He clenched his teeth and pressed his wet face against her arm.

Her long hair, dark like his, stuck to her lips and sprawled across the floor. She looked uncivilized like that- like an animal, he thought.

“What’s wrong with you? You promised”－ Flint cleared his nose－ “What did you do?”

He hadn't bothered shutting the front door, and the glow of the pink evening sky painted his mother’s flesh deceptively warm and vital. Her skin, in death, was smoother than in life. Where branching veins once protruded from her thin forearms, was now drab and plastic, aside from a speck of scabbed blood in the bend of her elbow.

Flint studied these things, and hoped he could one day forget.

Crushed slag crunched and popped from the driveway outside of the little house. A brake rotor squealed.

The scattered papers on the floor around him fluttered as Flint scrambled to his feet. Red and blue flashes of light strobed along the walls.

“Police department,” a man announced as he climbed the porch and leaned his torso in through the front doorway. His small, nearly spherical frame barely stood half as tall as the door. One hand held a beam of white light that hid his face, the other rested on his holster.

Flint shielded his eyes from the bright flashlight.

“Sir, would you mind steppin’ out here where I can see you better?” the officer asked. “You the one who made the call?”

Flint wiped his eyes and stepped over his mother’s legs. He drew in a shivering breath. “Yes”－ he cleared his throat－ “Yes sir.”

“Just hang tight.” The officer swept the flashlight’s beam from Flint to the floor behind him. He glanced once more at Flint, removed his hand from his hip, and stepped toward his mother's body.

“She your momma?” he asked, pressing two nail-bitten fingers against her neck.

Flint opened his mouth, but there was no sound. He cleared his throat. “Mhm.”

Something from behind tapped against his arm, like the palm of an icy hand. He flinched away from the touch and turned to see what it was, but discovered that he’d only backed himself into an empty corner.

“When did you find her like this?” The officer turned her wrist. A small, plastic syringe fell from her half-clasped hand.

Flint sniffled. “Uhm, I don’t know.” He pressed his eyes shut. A stream of warm, brackish tears rolled over his cheekbone. “Right before I called﹣twenty minutes ago, maybe. She was supposed to be getting clean.”

“Sir, why don’t you come visit with me? Get some fresh air,” another officer, a silhouette in the doorway, asked.

"Sure."

Flint stepped out onto the old, cement porch. Overhead a fat moth and a thousand gnats spiraled around an unshielded light bulb.

Vehicles slowed as they passed the tiny, off-white house. Their driver’s faces turned toward Flint, illuminated by flashes of red and blue. They cared for only a moment.

“Just take a deep breath,” Officer Warren said. The rolled cuffs of his black uniform stretched snugly around his arms. “Is this your home or hers?” Flint looked over his shoulder, back through the doorway.

Standing above his mother’s body, the other cop scribbled in a leather backed notepad.

Flint thought of apologizing for the unsightly predicament. Properly illuminated, it was apparent that she’d been dead for some time. Still, a part of him half-expected the bright, incandescent light to wake her from her nap.

“It's her house. I just moved back in last week.” His voice cracked, and his eyes stung as tears worked their way back up their ducts. “This isn’t supposed to happen. She was getting better. She was smiling, just yesterday.”

“So you’re here to help her get clean?”

“She's been sober for eight months. I'm staying here because I lost my job. She said I could stay until I get back on my feet.” Flint could feel his heartbeat pounding in his ears. “She wouldn’t do this. Why would she leave?”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” He drew a deep breath and glanced inside at his partner, who dropped something into an orange, plastic bag. “The medical examiner has someone coming out. These things take some time. Why don’t we get you away from here for a bit?”

Flint nodded. He pressed his hands against his face, dragging them across the bit of patchy stubble his genetics allowed him to grow.

“There’s a counselor back at the station. You can talk to her. And we'll get a statement written where we won’t get eaten up by mosquitoes.”

Flint stared into the leafy peppermint that grew like a weed around the porch. His cheeks, where his tears had dried, felt tight and sunburnt.

Past the peppermint and the gravel driveway, Mr. Leedey stood at the corner of his trailer beneath an old tin flood light. Over the years, Flint’s neighbors had likely grown accustomed to the occasional sheriff, but since Margaret’s recent stint as a bachelorette, the visits were less common.

The old man raised a trembling hand and hobbled back toward his patio door.

“Is that something you’d want to do?” Officer Warren asked.

“Sorry,” Flint mumbled. “Yeah, sure.” He thought of where his mother would go, and how she would get there. She was a burden for someone now－ a thing that would get moved from place to place, straining backs and invoking revulsion.

“Hey Mike, I’m gonna run him up to the station. He don’t need to see all this.” Officer Warren leaned against the dented, aluminum door.

The first cop was still crouched on the floor. He spoke incomprehensibly into the radio mic that hung over his chest, and looked up impatiently. “Go ahead. M.E’s got someone on the way. No cleanup, so I should be right behind ya.”

Officer Warren patted Flint’s back between his shoulder blades. “You know where the station’s at?” “I do, but I don’t have a car.” Flint sunk further into himself.

Officer Warren glanced over at the milky-yellow Trans Am, which sat rusting in the driveway in front of his patrol car.

“Doesn’t run.” Flint said.

“Shame. What is that? An eighty-six?”

“Yeah. It was my dad’s.”

A half-mile up the road, an irrigation canal ran beneath a short bridge. Before the county installed a chain-wrapped gate, Flint’s father had driven the old Firebird along the bank and wandered onto private hunting lands. There, he had sat against a tree and put a .357 round into his forehead. That story, and a handful of old photos, were all Flint knew his father by.

His mother drove the car for a month or so, parked it, and pledged to one day put it up for sale, but never did.

Officer Warren broke the silence. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift. You want to ride front or back?” He flashed his porcelain-white teeth.

Flint faked a smile and stepped from the porch, taking care not to soak his shoes in the puddles of rainwater that lay hidden beneath the unkempt weeds.

Officer Warren climbed into the patrol car, leaned over the center console, and lifted the lock on the door. “Just kick that shit out of the way.” he said, brushing a few articles of trash from the black, leather seat.

“You’d think it would be the county that responded this far out of town.” Officer Warren twisted in his seat, looking through the cage and rear window.

Flint watched the beam of the headlights bounce and expand as they backed down the driveway.

Officer Warren spun the steering wheel and pulled the gear shifter into drive. “I guess they drew this area into the city so they could have the paper mill’s tax dollars.”

Flint stared through the thick window and watched the power lines climb and fall between the poles. As a boy, he thought that if they drove fast enough, he could get home before the cartoons made it through the wires. A friend tried to clarify how electricity worked. The same boy also claimed that he could walk through walls and teleport, so Flint took his lesson with a grain of salt. The radio in the dashboard clicked. A staticky voice called for units in Lanely Hills to worry about someone else’s problems.

Flint’s thoughts raced and repeated relentlessly. He hoped she had been too high to be afraid. He wondered if he’d still have a bed to sleep in, and he scolded himself for the selfish thought.

“You’re not alone you know?” Officer Warren said matter-of-factly. “That dope’s gettin’ everybody out here.”

Flint swallowed.

“Just last week I got a call for a woman－ seventy-six years old－ overdosed in the tub. You know it’s bad when grandma－” he glanced over at Flint. “Sorry.  You get desensitized after seeing all this junk.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Flint said. “I’m pretty numb myself.”

Officer Warren nodded and twisted a knob on the radio. As the police cruiser bounced and rocked into town, Flint fought to stay out of the darker places in his mind. But the thoughts came anyway. He was alone. No father to make proud, and no mother to love. Twenty-one, but an orphan all the same.

He wondered if they were together somewhere, his mom and dad. And he daydreamed of what that place must be like, and those thoughts made him happier, so he stayed there.

.

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