A Smudge of Gray: A Novel Read online

  The man’s mind was off in a distant world. He was lost on a planet made of a barren desert. And although his heart beat exactly sixty seconds on the planet Earth inside that room, the man was alive and walking on this desert planet, walking without thought, without consciousness, without an identity. But as the man continued on his journey, the ring of a phone clutched him and pulled him back to the planet in the Milky Way. The sound was deep, raw, intense as it bounced off the stark white walls and penetrated the body of the being inside the sterilized bed. As the sound hurled him back into that room, he opened his eyes.

  The man looked around. He had fragments of memories surging inside his brain, memories of a businessman named Trevor and a detective named Brian. As the man’s pupils dilated, he saw the device that had brought him back from that lonely planet—the phone on the bedside stand. The man motivated his muscles as he felt the twinge of the IV lines in his veins. He reached for the phone, its receiver cold as ice. As he lifted it, the ringing stopped.

  The man put the phone on his ear as the cold surrounded him. And then a voice darker, colder than anything living flowed into the man’s ear.

  “Darkness does not end with night.”

  The man hesitated. “Who is this?”

  “You didn’t finish our last contract. The woman named April still walks. I entrusted you with this task.”

  “I don’t know who you are.”

  “You know who I am. You know exactly who I am.”

  The voice surged the man’s brain, incited neurons to fire at will. The man remembered everything from his split personalities, everything about the jobs, the lives, the families he had concealed over the past ten years. And the voice made him remember beyond those ten years, beyond that pressure point.

  “Trevor…Brian…you know who this is.”

  A tear formed in the man’s eye, a tear thickened with remorse. The man in the bed looked at the color white on the ceiling. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  ###

  About the author:

  Jonathan Sturak grew up in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. He is a Penn State University graduate and holds degrees in Computer Science and Film. He currently lives in Las Vegas where he uses the energy of the city to craft stories about life and the human condition. The Place Called Home, Sturak’s essay about Eastern European heritage in Northeast Pennsylvania, was featured on Glass Cases, associate literary agent Sarah LaPolla’s pop culture blog at bigglasscases.blogspot.com. His debut thriller novel Clouded Rainbow was published in December 2009 and has over 100,000 downloads on the Amazon Kindle. Sturak keeps updated information on his website at sturak.com