I tugged on my grandfather’s trousers. “How come the black horse doesn’t have anybody on it?” My question hung unanswered within my grandparents’ living room. Usually full of joy and revelry during the Thanksgiving weekend, it was now as solemn and subdued as the funeral procession playing out on their tiny black and white TV.

“Why does the black horse only have those empty boots on its back like that? Whose sword’s on its side? He’s way prettier than Mrs. Clegg’s horse. How’d he get so—”

Mom’s tap on my shoulder accompanied by her shushing ended my inquiries. “Not so many questions Cody. Just watch.”

A second later, my PaPa, the man I admired more than any other, a man who, at fifty-nine years of age could drive an eighteen-wheeler two days straight with no sleep, was kneeling beside me with his arm around my waist. He held me tight whispering into my ear.

“First off, Mrs. Clegg’s horse is a mule. This horse is a thoroughbred named Black Jack. In the wagon in front of him is a coffin, or casket as some call it, and in it is our president. Black Jack’s following it to show he’s no longer with us.”

“Whatcha mean? Is he dead?”

“Yes, Cody. He is.”

“He sure must’ve been liked a bunch. There’s a lot of people there.”

I looked into his eyes. I’d never seen him cry before but there it was, a tiny tear finding its way down through his gray stubbled beard.

I turned back to the TV and the image of a little boy standing beside a lady in a black dress with a black hat and see-through lacy black cloth over her face. Even with the cloth I could sense her sadness. As Black Jack passed in front of them, a line of soldiers saluted the flag-draped coffin that proceeded him. The little boy raised his hand to his forehead, fidgeting as he waited to lower it along with the men in uniform. Responding to a sudden urgency to do the same, I lifted my chin and followed with a salute of my own, holding it as the room filled with the sniffling and muted weeping of family and friends who had gathered to pay respect to our deceased President Kennedy.

My mother stroked my hair. “Why don’t you go outside and play with your brother?”

The word “outside” instantly had me squirming free of my grandfather’s embrace. I bounded through the house, into the kitchen and out the back door shedding the gloom as I ran out into my grandparents’ backyard. It was on this magical plot of land where my brother and I spent six of our most formative years, the years where every minute was an hour long, every find of a new leaf or bug was a major scientific discovery, and every flicker of mica in a piece of gravel was a gold rush in the making.

Situated on the fringes of the small southern town of Burlington, North Carolina, our block was one of the biggest in the county mainly because we shared half of it with our K-12 school. Next to the school, was the first of five houses that occupied the other half. It was the home of a choppy, sandy blonde-haired girl named Mary Libowskenstein. A tenth grader like my brother, she was as rough and tumble as any of the boys favoring overalls or jeans to dresses and preferring to be called Mary Lib rather than burdening anyone with a mouthful of Libowskenstein. What she lacked in femininity, she made up with an infectious positive attitude, the type mom usually pointed Drew to when thoughts of our father turned him blue.

In her backyard was a small mossy stone koi pond. Chained next to it was a fearsome beast with a disagreeable disposition. Bullet, a perpetually snarling black mutt, was Ms. Libowskenstein’s deterrent to any unlawful pond dipping.

Next to Mary Lib’s was my grandparents’ house where Drew and I lived for six years while my mother went off to become something called an anesthetist, a tongue twister of a job that I always substituted by simply saying she put people to sleep. For all those years she would drive six hours in a tin can ’56 Chevy to spend every other weekend with us, and every other Sunday evening I’d ring the front porch chimes as she headed out the driveway back to school. Her time away, however, didn’t come close to PaPa’s absences. As a long-haul trucker, he would be gone two to three weeks at a time leaving a dark cloud over my brother for the first couple of days. I was only three when my father was killed, so my memories of him were faint, but for Drew, they were ever present. During these trips I had him to look to while he had no one.

The one mainstay of the household and the rock of the family was our grandmother. Dubbed Gonny, by the oldest grandchild for no reason other than lacking the verbal dexterity to say Granny, she was written into her high school yearbook as the Burlington Bulldog’s “Littlest Angel,” a moniker used to address her five-foot one-inch stature but also for her staunch religious beliefs. Following her biblical teachings while adhering to the phrase spare the rod, spoil the child, she was always quick to keep my brother and me in line with a good switching, the practice of whacking our bottoms with a stiff reed from a despicable bush that lurked at the darkest corner of the house. Our love for Gonny ran deep only to falter during the times when our misconduct called for us to fetch our own switches. The death march, as my brother and I called it, required us to walk to the bush, pull off a reed switch, of at least three feet, then deliver it back for her to carry out our corporal punishment.

Calling my grandparents’ house modest was a modest exaggeration. A post-war, one-story, three-bedroom home with no air conditioning, separate cold and hot water faucets and a telephone party-line shared with Hilda Harwell and Leona Kunkle, it stood in stark contrast to the house on the other side of the driveway. Located on the corner was an opulent two-story Victorian house where my great-grandmother Maudie lived. Full of turn-of the-century manners, she was as regal in character as the great house itself. Minus her occasional habit of sniffing snuff, she was every bit the grand dame of the neighborhood even though she was confined to a wheelchair because of a stroke that left her partially paralyzed from the waist down.

Turning the corner onto Tucker Street, was the home of Mrs. Clegg, a reclusive widow who only communed with her mule, Julius, and spent every sunny day tending to her award-winning tomatoes in a garden that butted up against the back corner of our school’s baseball field.

Smack dab in the middle of our little village was a two-acre patch of earth that consisted of a one-acre open field facing another acre of pecan trees and three rows of muscadine grapevines. Except for the school, which was fenced off, a narrow one-car-wide gravel road wound its way throughout our complex connecting everything. It was on this twisty stretch of rocky highway where our imaginations transformed us into fellow truckers like PaPa. Envisioning his big rig’s trailer, we used our bikes to pull wagons carrying empty boxes of make-believe cargo from house to house. Other times we found ourselves traversing an intercoastal waterway, or sailing down an angry river in search of lost treasure in a remote jungle that most often came in the form of an unruly Magnolia bush bunched up against Mrs. Clegg’s house.

On most days, all I would need to locate my brother, or any of our neighborhood buddies, was to run out to the open field and spin around once. Within a second, either through sight or sound, I’d find them climbing trees, racing along the gravel road or playing tag, roller-bat, or any of the hundred games of pretend we devised. Today was different though. It was a crisp autumn afternoon with the sun shining bright, and the birds chirping, but no kids were to be found.

“Drew! Where are you?” I waited with no reply. “Drewww, where are youuu?”

“Not so loud,” Mary Lib’s voice came from back of the house.

I turned to find her jagged blond mop of hair sticking out from behind a partially hidden door next to the switch bush. “What’re you doing down there?”

“Come on,” she said waving me in.

Eager to be included in whatever was happening in the dungeon, our pet name for Gonny and PaPa’s root cellar, I raced toward her.

She held a finger to her lips, “You gotta be quiet, we’re conjuring.”

“What’s conjure’n?”

“Just come on in and be quiet. You’ll see.”

Halfway above ground, halfway under, the dungeon was a dark, dank cinder block room tainted with the smell of oily rags from days of PaPa working on Mack trucks and a newfangled powered lawn mower that never seemed to run right. It was where Gonny stored her crates of fruit and vegetable preserves and where PaPa kept cases of his homemade muscadine wine along with an assortment of musty old tools and discarded items from the house that just couldn’t be parted with. The only light came from a missing brick in the foundation and the cracks around a sagging door. On the brightest day a flashlight was still required to see. On other days, such as this, a day when my brother held court with one of his many spooktacular shenanigans, a candle was used.

I took one bold step in and a cautious half-step back. “What’re ya’ll doin’?”

“Just sit down squirt,” Drew said with an authoritative air.

Five years my senior, I had always looked up to my brother. With the wit and wisdom of our elders he was the centerpiece of all our juvenile exploits, usually commanding us with a cool hand and unnatural patience. Wicked smart for his age, he was especially patient with me, particularly when it came to school and learning. According to him he wasn’t about to go through life with a dufus by his side. Whether I liked it or not, or even when I wasn’t aware of it, he was also working to shape not only my vocabulary but my character. It was for these reasons that I fiercely protected our relationship.

I surveyed the room. Bunched shoulder to shoulder circling the candle, he sat crossed legged with Mary Lib, and two other kids from across the street. There was Jessie Limberg, a spunky pig-tailed red head also known as Cackles for her raucous over-the-top way of laughing. And Peeps, short for Peepers Petey, a thick-rimmed bifocaled fellow sixth grader with a split-tooth grin and fidgety nature. A year younger than me and Peeps, Cackles loved teasing him and spouted off anything that came into her little red noggin.

“Where you want me to sit?” I asked.

“Between me and Cackles,” Mary Lib said.

I immediately plopped to the dirt floor and squeezed my way in between the girls, tucking my knees into my chest to take up as little space as possible.

“So, what’s a conjure’n?” I asked.

“You promise you’re not gonna get scared are ya,” Drew said.

I looked across to Peeps and into the large, distorted orbs his thick lens created.

Cackles ripped off a squawky high-pitched laugh. “Don’t be look’n at Peeps, he always looks scared.”

Mary Lib patted me on my knee “Nothing to be afraid of Cody, we’re just summoning the dead is all.”

“What!” I said jumping to my feet.

“Would you sit back down.” Drew said sternly. “He’s the one who’s gonna be scared.”

“Who’s gonna be scared?” I said inching back to the floor fighting the urge to bolt out into the sunlight.

“The president,” Drew replied, “we’re doing a séance to bring him back.”

“Say who?”

“A sé—ance,” he said drawing out the syllables hoping to nail the definition.

It’s a ritual that brings somebody’s ghost back where you can talk to ‘em,” Cackles said.

“Why do we want to talk to him? He’s dead. He ain’t gonna want to talk.”

“Oh, he’ll have plenty to say,” Drew added.

“Peeps, do you think he’ll come back?” I asked.

“Sure, he will,” Drew said cutting in. “He’ll want to know who shot him. And we’ll tell him it was that Lee Harvey fella. Now come on, we’re gonna miss our chance. He’ll be in heaven before long and won’t want to talk to anybody. Now everybody hold hands. I’m going to say the chant once and then you guys repeat it with me.” He cleared his throat. “Here goes…President Kennedy, hear our chant, fly away buzzard, fly away crow, wherever you’re at where the cold wind blows. Come Mr. President, come.”

“I can’t remember all those words,” I said.

Cackles snickered under her breath. “What’s buzzards and crows got to do with anything?”

Drew sighed. “Gosh darn it, they’re just to get his attention is all, and Cody, you can just move your lips like you’re saying it. Now let’s do this. Start when I say go. Ready—set…”

On go I began mouthing the words as the others performed a dysfunctional harmony of Drew’s homegrown chant, wondering to myself why anybody’s ghost would come back because of those buzzards and crows.

For a long minute we sat in silence, eyes darting around the room in anticipation of the president’s apparition to appear.

“I-I don’t think…” Peeps began.

“Shush,” Drew whispered, “Give him time.”

Another minute passed as our eyes went from scanning the room to scanning each other as we waited for Drew’s next directive.

“Maybe we should do it again,” Mary Lib said.

He nodded. “Good idea. On go, okay? Ready—set…”

Another round of chanting followed with more silence and increasing skeptical glances around the room.

“One more time,” Drew said. “Ready—set…”

Unlike the other chants this one ended with a different result. With the final come a loud bang sent us all jumping out of our skins.

“Didja hear that?” Drew exclaimed.

We all sat wide-eyed, unable to answer. A moment passed as the sound of my heartbeat pounded in my ears. Then slowly it came, the sounds of dead feet dragging across the ground, like the sounds of the mummy’s walk in the horror flick we’d all gone to see the week before—the same movie I later found out Drew had got his séance idea from. Louder and louder the footfalls came—then nothing. The room fell silent once again. Only the sounds of our panicked breathing could be heard when suddenly we heard someone hollering.”

“Kids! Are you in the cellar?”

A collective sigh, part relief, part frustration, went up among us.

“Yes Gonny, we’re down here,” Drew groaned back.

“Well come on out. We’re all going over to Maudie’s for lunch.”

“Yes ma’am,” he replied half-heartedly.

One by one, we filed out with Drew bringing up the rear. On our way to Maudie’s, I looked back over my shoulder to see him eyeballing the back screen door that had slammed causing us all to nearly wet ourselves. I couldn’t be certain, but I would’ve bet a dollar to a donut it was a smile he was wearing and not a frown. If there was one thing Drew Edwards loved more than anything else, it was a good joke. A trait that would ultimately bring more than just laughs.

“Fetch the thunder stick!” said the old man, stretching his bony arm toward the pond. His splotchy, paper-thin palm unfolded a knobby finger that pointed across the shimmering surface to the silhouette of a large house hovering above the far bank.

     Mase stood frozen in front of the smokehouse squeezing his crucifix, its edges digging into his palm. He looked into the black abyss of the man’s eyes with a plea of forgiveness. There was none to be given.

    “I said fetch me the thunder,” the man roared, blood vessels bulging along his temples. He turned to an ogre of a man pacing in circles beside him. “Now!”

    Mase jumped back, dodging the massive man who had been commanded to fulfill the task. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched him disappear into the darkness while he remained toe to toe with the old man bent on an act of revenge that would have devastating consequences.

    Several breathless minutes later the ogre reappeared, huffing his way toward them and carrying a double-barreled shotgun.

    “What’re you going to do?” Mase asked.

    The man snatched the gun and hobbled to the front door.

    He moved with him. “What’re you planning?”

    “Delivering justice!” he said, pounding the entrance with the butt of the gun.

    The door swung open, revealing a small, dark, windowless room filled with a half-dozen ham shanks, plucked fowl, and other assorted meats hanging from the ceiling’s large oak beams. Cutting knives, saws, and butcher cleavers hung from the walls. With a solitary candle lighting the room, one could barely make out the black man standing with his face against the opposite wall. His shackled hands were raised above his head, attached to chains running into the ceiling trusses. From a distance, he could have been mistaken for just another side of meat about to be processed.

    The old man walked inside, slamming the door behind him.

    Mase stared into the hardwood planks. He muttered to himself, dropped the crucifix, and barged inside to find the man holding the shotgun against the back of the black man’s head.

    “Nooooo,” he yelled as he grabbed the gun.

    “By God, boy, if you don’t let—”

    “No, please—you can’t!”

    The man glared at him, his chest heaving.

    Mase pressed the gun barrel downward. “If it’s going to be done, I’m the one who has to do it.”

    The man stepped back, panting, struggling to remain stable. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

    “If justice has to be served, it has to come from me.”

    The old man gritted his teeth, holding back the urge to finish what he had set out to do. “Here!” He rammed the weapon into his chest. “Do what you have to,” he said, slamming the door behind him.

    The words echoed in Mase’s ears. Do what you have to.

>> Click here to listen to an interview with Mr. Pennington followed by a reading of the first chapter.

From out of the darkness, she awoke to another type of pain. The man in the burgundy jacket had her by the ankles and was dragging her across the gravel parking lot. She cried out for help as the jagged rocks raked across her back. The man dropped beside her, pulled out a bloody rag he had been using on his injured nose and jammed it in her mouth. When he hoisted her across his shoulder, she let out a muffled yell for help. Her head bounced against his back as the shoddy landscape of the Gator Lodge slowly gave way to dead branches and rotting foliage. Within several minutes dry land had transformed to swamp, and the man flung her to the ground. Her muted cries for help were cloaked by the thick croaking of bullfrogs in the backwaters of South Carolina, a mere hundred yards from the lodge.

     The man knelt next to her, grabbed her face with one hand, and pinched her lips together. He leaned into her ear and hissed, “You messed with the wrong—”

     A rustling from the direction of the lodge stopped him. Out of the darkness appeared the young girl from Room 10, towing behind her Zoey’s luggage with her handbag draped over the top. She pushed them next to the man in a sacrificial offering. “This is all she had.”

     “You sure?” he barked.

     “Yes, I’m sure,” she replied in a small voice.

     Grabbing the luggage, he ripped open its zipper and began pulling out its contents. One by one he threw everything into the brackish water. “Nothing. What about the bag?”

     “I-I didn’t check,” the girl said. She stole a quivering glance at Zoey that begged for forgiveness.

     The man dove his hand into the canvas opening, groping for anything of value. “Jackpot,” he said, pulling out a small purse. Without opening it, he threw it to the girl. “Hold on to this.” He plunged back in. Back and forth he ran his hand, searching the inside. “Hmm, what’s this?” he said, fingering the hidden pocket she had fashioned for the one item that meant more to her than anything else.  As he withdrew his fist, Zoey saw he held the memory stone. He turned it side to side, examining it, trying to attach some sort of worth to it. “You carry a rock?” He laughed, then turned to the girl. “You wanna make a necklace?” he said, tossing it to the side.

     In a moment of clarity, Zoey realized her only hope lay beside her. As the man continued scouring her handbag, she inched her hand outward. Through the decaying leaves and mud, her fingers found the stone and slowly closed around it. With all her remaining strength she slammed it against his temple. The man reeled backwards then popped back up like a top, throwing his leg over her torso. Looking up, all she could see was his silhouette hovering above her, moonlight glinting off his gold teeth—and then flashing across the blade the girl had sliced into Zoey’s back. Down it came, plunging through her chest and into her heart. Within seconds, she was gone.

On the night Boone and Zoey were transported to the future, Boone knocked Dag unconscious with a blow he hoped his nemesis would never wake from. If his need to be by Zoey’s side had been any less, he would have stopped to finish the job, but as he rushed to embrace his dying love, the thought of Dag recovering never crossed his mind.

Unfortunately, Dag’s senses, sluggish and hazy as they were, returned in just enough time for him to witness the miracle of the stone. Watching through the thin slits of his eyelids, he lay mesmerized as the silhouettes of the two figures at the end of the hall vanished into the ether.

Staggering to his feet, and with one shaky foot in front of the other, he slowly walked down the corridor. Bending down, he ran his pale fingers through a quarter-inch deep puddle of blood the diameter of a girl’s torso. It was warm, but there was no trace of the body from which it came. There were no long tracks of crimson for a forensic expert to measure or analyze the direction in which the body had been dragged. That didn’t matter. He knew for certain it was all from Zoey. And the two pieces of the stone she and Boone held in their hands were gone, reaffirming they were the instruments of the witch he knew her to be.

At his feet lay the remaining fragment of the stone, the remnant produced when he tried shooting the girl in the pink nightgown. She had held the stone that blocked his bullet from ending her life. Smaller than a third of the original stone, he picked it up, admiring it with a wicked smile, knowing that, with death as the catalyst to its powers, he too could be transported—to where, he did not care. All he knew was a life anywhere else was better than the hell he would be subjected to when Boss Tweed learned how he botched his one assignment.

Beyond that, he also continued hanging onto the bogus claims Zoey said the stone was able to conjure. According to her, the scalp the Indians had ripped from his skull could be restored and the powers of whoever was holding it at their time of death would be transferred to him. All he had to do was have his hand wrapped around the dying victim’s hand at the moment of their death. Suddenly his head began to throb along the temple Boone had smashed with his fist. He placed the stone against it, letting its coolness provide some temporary relief. As he rubbed the smooth side back and forth, gently massaging the side of his face, a faint moaning from down the hall emanated from the dining room. Mr. Alcott was waking to the nightmare around him.

“Shut up, you fool,” Dag yelled.

The moans persisted, rising with the muffled cries of a man who had just lost his wife in a gruesome knife attack.

“I said shut up or I’ll…” Dag suddenly crammed the stone into his pocket and rushed to the dining room, the scene where he butchered Alcott’s wife, the room in which he came so close to realizing the power of the memory stone. Still lying on the floor, strapped into the chair he had ordered him tied to, was the second piece of Dag’s morbid puzzle.

“Yessssss!” he hissed in joyous recognition of what fate had provided him. He had the stone and now he had his victim and soon—a new life, complete with the powers to be bestowed upon him just as Zoey prophesized for him.

“Alcott, my dear man, I believe I’m in need of your services,” he said, walking out to retrieve the pistol he used to kill Zoey. A moment later he was back in the room, kneeling behind him. He grabbed the back of the chair. “Here,” Dag grunted, hoisting him upright, “let’s get you ready so you can enjoy our little journey.”

Mr. Alcott squirmed, the gag in his mouth a wet slop of fabric drenched in sweat, tears, and saliva. He gurgled an inaudible plea. Dag ignored him as he prepared the components for the prescribed ritual that would send them both into the future.

At precisely 6:12 a.m. the next morning, a slow steady beam of light rolled across the Stovers’ backyard, in through the kitchen, and down the hallway toward where Jason still lay asleep next to the grandfather clock. Like every other sunny morning on Lake Royale, the sun quickly flooded the Stover household, ensured by their unobstructed eastern exposure to the lake.

     When the light reached his eyes, his senses stirred for a split second, but not enough to wake him. His ordeal had taken its toll. He had tossed and turned the entire evening and was now completely out of it. It wasn’t until seven o’clock, when the grandfather clock began to chime, that he rolled over to avoid the sunlight’s increasing intensity.

     On the third chime, the first memory of the previous day’s events flashed through his groggy mind. Still half asleep, the horrific storyline began to play out. It was only a dream he thought. But with every chime of the clock a new and more vivid detail appeared, jarring him back into consciousness.

     By the time the seventh chime rang, he was wide awake. As he slowly pulled himself to his feet, he saw the pieces of what used to be a phone scattered across the room. Like a sledgehammer to the gut, the full weight of his situation hit him. He doubled over and a fresh wave of despair engulfed him. He wasn’t prepared yet to bear the burden of what had transpired, but he knew he had to gain his composure. His family needed him, and he needed them.

     After grabbing a banana and a glass of water, he headed to the living room, where the TV was still playing from the afternoon before. Just as he expected, the news was continuing to override all other programming. The first channel to catch his eyes appeared to be broadcast from the depths of hell. The entire screen was filled with billowing smoke of unknown origin. As the camera pulled back, streaks of bright red and orange could be seen snaking their way through cracked earth, spewing a blizzard of ashes and soot. Jason absent-mindedly took a bite of his banana, transfixed on the hellish scene.

     Suddenly, the camera shot changed to a reporter sitting in a news helicopter. As he struggled to be heard above the noise of the aircraft’s blades, Jason could see a small town that lay in ruin below.

     “What lies beneath us,” yelled the reporter, “is just one of many small towns up and down the Washington and Oregon coastline that have been hit by a series of earthquakes since 1 a.m. this morning.”

     As the camera zoomed out the window and to the town below, Jason could see that the red and orange streaks were actually streams of lava flowing through huge crevasses, burning through the streets and into a once-peaceful countryside. He could also see broken power lines, overturned cars, and decimated buildings. The scene made Jason’s heart ache, imagining the anguish the families of this town must feeling.

Action Packed End Time Adventure
“Rapture’s Rain by Lewis Pennington is an action-packed “end time” novel that added a different twist to your usual stories of the Rapture. I had a hard time putting this book down when I started reading it. The author did a great job of developing a storyline that was both easy to follow, yet full of twists and turns which kept me glued to the book. His detail and storytelling style made the story come alive as very believable and realistic.” – Larry B Gray (Verified Amazon Purchase Review)

Wonderful action-filled adventure
“Read this straight through. I couldn’t put it down for more than 15 minutes. Great character development and storyline without preaching too much. It gets the message across.” – Mandy Bryant (Verified Amazon Purchase Review)

I couldn’t put this book down!
“I started this book not knowing what to expect and was overwhelmed. The narration and descriptions are fabulous. The story is beautiful especially as it comes to be the definition of the title of the book. I have already recommended it to numerous people after reading it Sunday.” – A. Barnes (Verified Amazon Purchase Review)

A Must Read!!!
“This book is a must read. I could not put it down, it was so entertaining and well written. And what a great story line, its one of those books that you read and think about for the next 2 weeks! I have already bought 4 more copies for my family. Highly recommend!” – Dena Vammino (Verified Amazon Purchase Review)

Masterful novel from an expert author
“It is hard to believe that novice (but expert) author Lewis Pennington has penned his first book loosely based on the biblical Rapture. His writing is marvelous as the characters are expertly written, and at least for me, I could see and feel their emotions. His characters were so real it was like knowing them as one of your personal friends. His writing is smooth, professional and well constructed. I couldn’t stop reading as I wanted to find out what was going to happen next.” – PenMouse (Amazon Top Reviewer)

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