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69 INCHES OF STEEL
REBECCA STEINBECK
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Copyright ©2013 Rebecca Steinbeck
Published worldwide by Burning Hearts Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by copyright law.
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To the man who gave me my name.
CHAPTER ONE
Jonathon shifted the silver BMW he was driving into fifth gear and pressed his foot hard against the accelerator. The engine roared and the car powered around the bend, hugging the bitumen like it were a long-lost lover. The man who had scared millions with his novels about ghosts and ghoulies paid scant attention to the hundred foot drop several yards to his right. After all, he was used to living on the edge and most times that edge stood between him and a hell of a lot more than a hundred foot drop.
The road straightened ahead of him. He kept his foot flat to the floor and the BMW motored along the road at over a hundred miles an hour. The adrenalin washed over his body like a breathtaking wave of energy. His heart pounded like a drum inside his chest. He was alive. And he was free.
He passed a sign on the side of the road that read WELCOME TO BELLINGEN: POPULATION 3001. He often wondered when he saw that sign who that one was. Were they happy or sad? Loved or loathed? Overworked and underpaid, perhaps? And would they climb to the top of the tower and start blowing people away if they were handed a rifle and a dozen bullets, just like the girl the Boomtown Rats wrote about in the song, I Don’t Like Mondays? He took his foot off the accelerator and pressed it gently to the brake. The BMW slowed to about forty miles an hour as he passed the first house whose address was officially a Bellingen one. It was an old house with two bedrooms and a small yard. It was occupied by an elderly man whose wife had died there of a heart attack several years earlier. His only son had begged him to move on, to leave it all behind and not be held back from living the rest of his life by the memories of a lost love, but the old man would have none of it. He had lived in that house for fifty years and his wife had died there. Come Hell or high water, so would he.
Jonathon eased the BMW to the side of the road in front of another two bedroom house. Bellingen was full of them because no one could afford back when to build anything bigger or better. Jonathon was glad of a talent that allowed him not only a BMW, but a five bedroom mansion overlooking the beach that he paid a princely sum for and was worth twice as much now as then instead of one of these tiny cottages that were pretty if nothing else, but in all reality were really nothing much else.
He climbed out of the car with his overnight bag in tow and went to the front door of the house. It was worn by the sun and the house itself needed a good coat of paint. He had offered any number of times to do it but each time had been knocked back. He knew the people of Bellingen liked to keep things in their natural state which most likely explained why every time he came here he felt as though he was travelling back in time. But he did love it, even if it wasn’t much. He knocked on the door and a middle-aged woman with greying hair answered. She looked at Jonathon and smiled. “Welcome home, son.”
Jonathon wrapped his arms around his mother and hugged her tight. It had been several months since he had last seen her - she had made a rare visit to his mansion - and they had much to catch up on. They went inside and closed the door behind them. The pretty young thing that had watched Jonathon from the house on the other side of the road closed the drapes and went back to helping her mother cook dinner for her father and brother who would soon be home from work.
CHAPTER TWO
Jonathon went to the bathroom and washed up while his mother made a pot of tea. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw a man who was twenty-seven years old and counting. He had dark hair and was clean shaven. The light above the mirror shone brightly into his deep blue eyes and they sizzled like steaming pools of water. He was good-looking, and he knew it. He was also good at what he did, and he knew that too. If he ever forgot, he had a list of girls as long as the road between his house and his mother’s to remind him of the former and a publisher who was willing to do anything for him to remind him of the latter. But as good as he was at what he did and how he looked, God be damned at what he was and what he had been made to do, the son of a drunkard who had been made to live his father’s life, and he hated his father for not having the guts to ever be more than what he was, a man who had the world at his feet but instead of embracing it chose to stomp all over it. But then, to ever be more than what we are we must first admit to what we are and all too often our lives are so bad we just couldn’t be bothered because it’s much easier to live a shitty life than admit to living one. The silver lining of that very dark cloud though, a dark cloud full of venom and alcohol-fuelled violence, was a career that had seen him become successful beyond his wildest imagination. Money poured out of every book he wrote and every story too. His life had become as rich and fast as his car and he loved it. His father on the other hand was killed instantly several months before his son’s first sale when the car he was driving drifted onto the wrong side of the road and collided head-on with another car. Jonathon hated his father more for killing the other driver than he did for killing himself and while he didn’t regret hating him, he did miss him. He was, after all, his father’s son, and the son had succeeded where the father had failed and he so wanted him to see it.
He came out of the bathroom and sat down with his mother at the dining table. Both of them sipped their tea and both of them looked at each other over the rims of their cups. Jonathon’s mother was so proud of her son and his success. She could see how happy it made him to be who he was and she knew he had worked hard for it. All those long, hard hours in front of a computer screen writing story after story, novel after novel, had paid off and in more ways than one. Not only was he a best-selling author with several number ones under his belt but he had found an outlet through which he could purge the anger and pain he had felt in his younger years at being the son of a man who had no hope and didn’t want one and who had belted the shit out of his mother on more than one occasion and soon enough he paid the ultimate price.
“Thank you for coming to visit,” she said. As long as it had been since she saw him at his mansion by the beach, it had been even longer since he had been home to Bellingen. She knew the town wasn’t good for him, as much as he loved it, and if it wasn’t for her he probably wouldn’t come back at all.
“I couldn’t not visit my favorite lady,” Jonathon said with a twinkle in his eye. He was on his way to New York to prepare for the publication of his new novel. It was a four hundred page thumper about a Lady Vampire brought back to life by a group of teenage boys and of this one he was especially proud. It was as well-written and well-told a story as any he had come up with, but this was the first time he had really confronted the truth of who he was, and he knew he had because deep down he knew he was the bogeyman who became the vampire and his audience who were scared out of their wits time and again by the stories he told were the kids who brought the vampire to life, and he returned from that confrontation with enough courage to write two thousand words every day for months on end that often came so close to home it hurt. After all that work, he was glad for a bit of down time before heading for New York, and spending a couple of days with his mother was the perfect chance to let down his guard and recharge his batteries. “Besides, I’ve got something for you. A gift to help celebrate the new book.�
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His mother smiled. “You know you didn’t have to.”
He didn’t have to, but he did. He always did. He had plenty of money and he liked to spend it, sometimes on the models that clambered to be his date to one function or another, to one movie premiere or business meeting or another, but mostly he liked to spend it on his mother. He pulled a small package out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I hope you like it.”
His mother took it. She pulled away the paper and opened the box. A tear rolled down the side of her face as she gazed upon the beauty of what was in it like a child in awe of all the pretty colors of the rainbow. She pulled the broche out of the box and held it up to the light. It glistened and sparkled like a diamond, but to Jonathon’s mother it was much more valuable than that. Indeed, it meant more than the world to her and Jonathon knew it. It belonged to her grandmother who had long passed away of cancer and she had pawned it several years ago when she had no money and he was yet to make his first sale to one of the Big Six publishers. He had watched his mother hand it over to the man behind the counter in a shop a couple of towns over and him hand over much less than what it was worth and Jonathon found out not so long ago and through the small town grapevine that he had kept it all this time. He had seen the hurt in his mother’s eyes that day so set his mind then and there on getting it back and today was the day. He went into the shop on his way to Bellingen and paid the man ten times what the man had paid his mother but he didn’t care. He cared only that his mother was happy. Besides, it was the least he could do for the woman who raised him to become the man he had.
She leaned forward and hugged her son. “Thank you, Jonathon.”
“My pleasure, Mom,” he replied. And it always was.
CHAPTER THREE
“I’m going to go for a walk if that’s okay,” Jonathon said, finishing his cup of tea.
His mother smiled. “Of course it is.” Walking was his favorite thing to do besides write, and it had been for as long as she could remember. He would walk most times with his nose in a book of one kind or another, usually a novel but sometimes a biography or a ‘how to’ book, one that he could garnish the knowledge of someone better than him at what they did and apply to his own way of doing things so that one day he would be better not so much as them but himself. Other times he would walk without one, instead enjoying the goings-on around him, many out of which he might pluck an idea or two for a story he could then write and turn into another million or two dollars. She worried about him when he did the former because one day he might not be paying attention to the car that crosses the line and hits him and then she would have to bury her son as well as her husband. “That would just break my heart,” she once told her sister who was almost as long gone as her husband. Cancer had reached out and grabbed her just as it had grabbed their grandmother who had told them it was hereditary. Her sister had believed her and she died a few years later. Jonathon’s mother did not and she was alive and kicking. Jonathon always hoped she would stay that way because he loved her and as rich as he was, no amount of money could ever bring her back.
He gave his mother a kiss and went outside without a book. He did however take his jacket. It was just as well because there was a chill in the air and soon the chill would cut to the bone. The fog would lay itself over Bellingen like a blanket as it had many times before and on more than one occasion Jonathon had hoped for, and had ultimately seen if only in his minds eye, another ghoulie or ghostie to jump out of the fog at him and inspire yet another story that would cut his readers to their bone.
He stood on the bottom step of his mother’s front porch and looked around. The sun was setting behind the hills he had travelled over to get to Bellingen and they guarded the small town from the rest of the world like a hulking giant. He had climbed those hills with his friends from school any number of times as a kid and fallen down one of them as well and he had the scars on his right leg that was broken by the fall to prove it. The bone had cut clear through his skin and the wound took sixteen stitches and three months in a cast to heal. He put on his jacket and raised the collar to protect his neck from the cold. He looked over to the house across the road. There she was again. Watching him. He smiled. She quickly closed the drapes.
He began to walk. The road beneath his feet was long and hard. It would lead him through the small town in which he had spent much of his youth and he would arrive at the cemetery where his father was buried. But first he would think. Walking was good for that as much as it was for the body. It gave the person doing the walking time to clear their mind so better things might enter it. That’s how it was for Jonathon. He would walk and clear his mind and things would just pop in. He didn’t know where they came from or even whose they were. He just knew that when he put them all together he came up with one best-selling horror novel after another and one short horror story that always sold for more than the last. And he loved to write them. He loved being a part of the whole process. He loved being Jonathon Steel, best-selling novelist.
The stars were dancing in the sky now, twinkling like diamonds against a backdrop of black velvet. Jonathon watched them with child-like wonder and awe. He loved the night sky. Indeed, almost as much as he loved being a best-selling novelist. He often dreamed of taking a one-way trip to the far side of the Universe, of passing planets and stars and experiencing at close quarters what others on Earth would only ever see through telescopes. He watched as a shooting star flashed across the night sky and wondered if man would ever really make that trip. He hoped they would and he hoped it would be him, but for now his imagination was the only ticket he needed and it took him wherever he wanted to go.
He stopped in front of a small café which was closed. He worked there once, making cups of coffee for people and cleaning their tables after they had left to do other things. He was eighteen at the time and even though the people that frequented the shop were sometimes snooty, shitty wannabes, he was happy for the few dollars an hour because it afforded him the newest paperback novel by Stephen King or Dean Koontz to hit the stands or the occasional visit to the pictures to see the newest movie release. Soon after that he sold his first story to a men’s magazine and nine years later he was worth about ten million dollars. He drove the latest model BMW and lived in a five bedroom mansion and not only was he now buying hardcovers and collectors’ editions instead of paperbacks but each of his novels so far had themselves been made into movies that hundreds and thousands of people went and saw and each of them had his name emblazoned across the screen: BASED ON THE NOVEL OF THE SAME NAME BY JONATHON STEEL. His only regret was that his father wasn’t alive to see it. After what his father had done, he wondered for a moment if what he really wanted was not so much to see his father again but to rub his father’s nose in it.
He continued walking, passing one memory after another, stopping briefly every now and then to dwell just that little bit more on one thing or another that reminded him of his time there. Much of it, however, reminded him of the bullies at school. They would tease him about not having much money or about the funny haircut his grandmother had given him to save his mother and father a few dollars even though their own haircuts were just as funny to Jonathon as his were to them. He just had the good manners, perhaps the good sense, to leave well enough alone and get on with doing those things he did best which was write stories. He hadn’t heard much about any of them since school ended and he always guessed it meant their lives amounted to pretty much nothing. Serves themselves right, he had always thought.
At last he arrived at the front gate of the cemetery. It was as old as the town itself and every bit as cold as the town could sometimes be. He stood underneath the sign that stretched from one gatepost to the other. It read, BELLINGEN CEMETERY, HOME TO THE LATE, GREAT CHARLES A. JOHNSON. Charles Johnson was a famous jazz musician who only ever spent the last few years of his life in Bellingen and when he died there they claimed him as his own. His widow accepted the town’s offer of an all-expenses paid
funeral which was offered on the condition he was buried in their cemetery. It was also home to Jonathon’s father. It would also be home one day to Jonathon who would go down in history as its other famous resident. One day, but not yet. Jonathon had too many more stories to tell and too much life to live and too much he wanted to do with it.
He went inside the cemetery over which hung a thick blanket of death and despair and headed straight for his father’s grave, passing along the way, as he did every time, the grave of the only person outside of his family he knew that had died. It was a guy he had gone to school with who died at eighteen years of age when the guy and a friend were driving home late one night from a party. Their car careened off the road and hit a tree, crushing the front end of the car and killing both men instantly. The really shitty thing about it was that the fathers of both men were priests who then presided over their sons’ funerals. There on a wet, wintery day stood the Father, the Son, and the Holy Shit.
When Jonathon got to his father’s grave, he saw how neglected it had been. He reached down and pulled away the weeds that covered the picture of his father, the one his mother had taken a few weeks before he died. He looked happy then. At least as happy as Jonathon remembered him to be. But he wasn’t really. It was all a façade. A ruse. Alcoholics were good at that, covering up their tracks. And his father, for the most part, was the heavyweight champion of the world.
Jonathon sat down on the edge of the grave and brushed away the leaves that had rested themselves upon the cement slab that covered the dirt that covered his father’s coffin. “I so wish you were still alive. I really wanted you to see what I’ve become.”
69 INCHES OF STEEL Page 1
