his is my first novel. Being a visual artist and a creative, I had often mused about what it would be like to write a book. I knew that I had the imagination for a story but I was an abysmal student of English at Warren Township High School in Gurnee IL. Most of the time when I should have been studying in English class, I would be doodling away ignorant of the material and clueless to what the teacher was talking about. My failing grades reflected my poor attitude for the subject; thinking a person had no real need for diagraming a sentence or defining an adjective. I have always had a voracious appetite for reading though, and somehow that appetite has helped me to muddle through this whole endeavor and arrive at a finished product.

Some of my childhood friends and acquaintances who were fortunate enough to grow up and in and around Wildwood and Gages Lake Illinois in the sixties and seventies will no doubt recognize familiar names and places. Some of you will find that the despicable character which holds your moniker is not at all like you. I have used familiar names only to hasten the writing, not to sully someone’s good name or besmirch anyone’s good character.

There was a real mansion on the shores of Gages Lake which was really owned by a man named Rule and the mansion really did burn down. The fire is the impetus for my story, nothing more. The mansion is as close to reality as this book will ever get. The plot in the book which surrounds the fire is completely fictitious and should be treated as such.

The Nerroth’s store and the Mogg’s store still reside in physical form on the north side of Gages Lake and like the book, they are either abandoned or greatly changed.

Some cousins and a few friends had the pleasant experience of vacationing with my family at Spider Lake Resort in Rhinelander Wisconsin and they could probably tell you a story of their own about the resort’s charming little resident which I will not yet mention.

Those of you who are still involved with me personally will no doubt see similarities in the story to the course my recent life has taken. I feel that it is safest as a beginning writer, to write what you know.

To the young reader;

The present world is a very different place than it was as a boy growing up in northern Illinois in the sixties. Back in the day there were no personal computers, just the ones with all the blinking lights in the science-fiction movies. Real computers occupied huge climate-controlled rooms in giant corporations.

There were no smart phones, dumb phones, or cell phones of any kind. Phones were rotary dialed, meaning you put your finger into a hole and turned it. They were tethered down with spiral chords which were always too short and were always tangled.

There was no internet and no cable television. In 1968 a marvel such as a hand-held calculator would not be on the market for another two years at the cost of about $385 dollars, ( a huge amount of money at that time ).

The high-technology in the world of an eleven year old in 1968 would have been an occasional glance at a color TV. Most ordinary people at that time had black-and-white TV sets.

In my own house, we had a sheet of colored transparent plastic, ( blue at the top and green on the bottom ) which we would attach to the television during a baseball game to mimic green grass and blue sky. There were no remote controls. Arguments would break out each time someone had to get up and walk over to the TV to change the station.

There were little more than half a dozen television stations to choose from. The highlights of viewing for an eleven-year-old boy would have been Star Trek, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and the much awaited Creature Features. Saturday night was Creature Feature night. There was no such thing as a microwave oven, so you would pop some corn in your mother’s pressure cooker atop the stove and then go watch your black and white monster movie.

On girls night, you would be forced to watch one of those dopey Gidget or silly Tammy movies.

Ta-a-mmy Ta-a-mmy Tammy’s in love...yecch!! You simply had to leave the room on the girl’s television night.

The worst-case scenario was when your Grandma showed up for a couple week visit, causing Lawrence Welk and his Orchestra to take the place of Star Trek, being scheduled at the same time. There were no television recording devices yet invented to solve that Grandma problem.....

Most historians would talk about 1968 as a tumultuous year; a year of change. It was a year in which the counter-culture and anti-war movements would be at their apex. The Vietnam war was in full swing, partially fueling sit-ins by protesting college students at many of the world’s universities. Riots seemed to be everywhere in the large metropolitan areas. Police beating up hippies was the staple diet of video imagery each night on the evening news. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy would both be assassinated by June of that year.

But, for an eleven-year-old boy, these events were distant and obscure. They were events that only grown-ups paid attention to. An eleven year old boy would be more worried about whether they were a surfer or greaser, or if they were Beatles or Rolling Stones fans.

Your doors were never locked at night. As a child you had a perimeter and a time-frame which ruled your world. Do not go past this point and be home for dinner. The year of 1968 for an eleven-year-old living on Gages Lake was pretty close to lake-life nirvana.

One last thing. Each year in the summer my family would travel from the suburbs of Chicago to northern Wisconsin on vacation. It was like going back in time. Sometimes it was so primitive the only thing missing was an occasional spear-killing of a dinosaur. A kid had to find his own fun which took a lot of thought; and was not always easy. Other than an occasional diversion the basic plan was fish in the morning, swim and ride sting-ray bikes during the day, and have a fire and listen to the radio at night. If you were lucky, you might even pick up Super C F L which was the station of choice in the suburbs of Chicago.

In 1968 an ounce of gold ( one coin ) was worth about thirty-nine dollars, which could almost buy you a new Schwinn Stingray bike priced at fifty-one dollars. Three one ounce gold coins would pay a month’s rent. The market price for a one ounce coin of gold while writing this book was around seventeen hundred dollars.

CHAPTER TWO
The Recurring Dream ( Present Day )

en Fisher woke as usual from a dream-troubled sleep very early on Saturday morning. It was mid June and he could hear through his open window that the birds were already up singing. The sun was just below the horizon. In an hour it would begin to light the eastern sky. Jill was still asleep beside him so he quietly climbed out of bed, not wanting to wake her. Ben could hardly remember the last time he had slept in, much less had a good night’s sleep. The dream had caused him to wake up again. How many countless nights had his sleep been ended due to it? He couldn’t remember.

Before the loss of his job, the dream only came on occasion and usually he was too busy to even think of it. The business side of his brain would take over and erase it, replacing it with the concerns of the day.

Sometimes, as he rode the train into the city, bits and pieces of it might drift back into his consciousness, but generally the dream only came to him on the nights when he was at his busiest during the day or when he had very large problems troubling him. In this way, the dream was almost always forgotten before Ben ever had a chance to think about it.

Now, with his life falling apart at the seams; when he really could use the rest, Ben was re-living the dream nearly every night. The bad thing about the dream was not so much that it was displeasing, but rather it always woke him prematurely. He had tried every form of over-the-counter sleep medications in an effort to sleep through the night, but they were of no help. He had also tried self-medicating with alcohol, but in a short while he realized that excessive drinking was only adding to his sleep problems.

He tip-toed down the stairs and zig-zagged across the living room. He was careful not to step on the sleeping twins. They had fallen asleep on the carpeted floor, having played Nintendo late into the previous night. Waking them would interrupt the only time of day which offered him any peace and quiet.

He closed the switch on the big flat-screen, and wondered to himself what would become of the boys when they had to leave this house. It was the only home they had ever known. He tried to put the thought out of his mind and focus on the task at hand which was brewing coffee.

After the loss of his job, Ben had used his all of his 401k retirement money to keep up with the house payments. Later when the money ran out, he tried to have the mortgage loan modified but the bank would not cooperate. With only five years left on his mortgage, Ben had been planning for retirement. Now it seemed that he would lose everything.

At first, he assumed that another job would be easy to get. He would be able to replenish his nest-egg over the ten good work-years left in him. Later, he realized that it was nearly impossible to find employment. After countless revisions of his resume and a forced education in the use of keywords, Ben had attracted only two interviews in three years. He sent his resume via e-mail each day in the evening and when the companies were courteous enough to answer, they always sent him the same response: “Due to the overwhelming amount of applicants, your resume may not — yada yada yada blah blah blah.” He was beginning to lose all hope of ever earning a living wage again.

Ben shuffled into the kitchen. He looked out the back window as he was spooning the coffee into the paper filter. He saw just how bad the back yard was looking. There was a sticker bush by the fire pit that was at least three feet tall. He had stopped doing any repairs on the place and maintaining the lawn was not high on his priority list now that the bank was foreclosing. He had no money left, and even if he did he had no stake in keeping the place up any longer. “Let the bank have it as it is.” he thought to himself.

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