Spirit Lake

An English professor, Dr. Dan Rice, is attracted to Suzanne Lacey, a fellow teacher at the college.  Sexually abused by her stepfather, she is unable to have relationships and she repeatedly rebuffs his overtures.  As a result he becomes obsessed, and as his fervor grows, he resorts to increasingly unpredictable, violent behavior.

Trapped in a hopeless marriage, he has a one-night stand with an alcoholic barmaid.  They argue, and in self-defense he strangles her and sinks her body in Spirit Lake, where according to an ancient Indian legend, bodies deposited in the Lake haunt their captors in their dreams and afterlife.

Nightly, he is visited by the barmaid, who embraces him with her moldering arms while he struggles helplessly in the depths of the Lake.

Following an encounter with the police, he has a skiing accident which lands him in the hospital where he learns he has a rare, fast-moving malignant brain tumor.  With only weeks to live, his seizures become more frequent.  In surreal dreams he fights to stay afloat, while he is tortured underwater by those he’s killed.

Suzanne, also under police scrutiny, works with Dan to devise a scheme to elude the authorities, which ends in an incomprehensible tragedy.

Unravel the mystery, as this crime drama unfolds the connection between life, and the dark depths of Spirit Lake.

BANDWAGON

A RETROSPECTIVE

Bandwagon is a retrospective on communes, one of the many phenomena that occurred during the 1960’s.  As part of the back-to-the-land movement, people moved from urban lifestyles to sustainable rural living. Bandwagon was one of these aggregations of youths and societal dropouts whose common interest was marijuana farming.

Set in the summer on a lovely lake, the tale is told by an impoverished Author, who populates his novels with characters he keeps in the basement of his tenement.  Frustrated by the characters, who enter the novel to do whatever they wish, the Author becomes a character himself to regain control.  Will he succeed in saving the commune, or will it be destroyed by the fanatical narcotics agent?

An Occurrence in Big Sur

In an unusual take on chemical warfare, a terrorist organization secretly seizes control of a major German drug company.  The terrorists force the Germans to buy the U.S. firm, Ross Pharmaceuticals, for the purpose of engaging Dr. Damon Ross, a brilliant chemist, to create a lethal drug which they intend to market in the United States.  Although he refuses, he is pressured to accept the offer by his brother Marcus, with whom he shares ownership of the company.

Damon accidentally hits a woman, Clair, while driving in the fog, causing her to go into a coma.  While caring for her in her comatose state, he falls in love with her.  When she emerges from the coma, she can see into the future.

Damon, Marcus, and Clair are held hostage by the Germans at his Big Sur Estate while Damon  attempts to create the drug in his lab.  However, he balks at fabricating the formula, and double-crosses the Germans, who are shadowed by the terrorists.  Exasperated by the time it’s taking him to make the drug, the terrorists have them transported to Germany where Damon works in the company lab under close scrutiny.

Will Clair’s visionary power save them, or will they succumb to the rage of the terrorists?  Find out in this thriller abounding with romance, sudden developments and plot twists.

The Garden at the Top of the Stairs

He slowly rounded the corner, hunched over the steering wheel with his face inches from the windshield, as if being close to the glass he could see the road better.  While they continued to drive up the face of the mountain, the fog thickened.  Darkness was falling and the precipitous cliffs lining the road became more threatening.  When he glanced at his wife in the passenger seat, the oversized RV veered and scraped the guardrail.

“Pay attention,” she shouted.  Her mouth formed a hard, flat line. 

Mort ground his teeth.  He was tired of taking care of her, but he didn’t have any choice, she was sick.  Although his wife’s Alzheimer’s was in an early stage, she wandered and often got lost.  He’d spent two hours that morning looking for her after going to the men’s room at a gas station.   They finally found her on the roof of the building.

“There’s the hotel,” he said, pointing at the swirling ubiquitous mist.   He’d just finished rounding the corner when the fog cleared to reveal a three-story inn carved into the steep mountain slope.  The structure looked more like a castle and seemed out of place.  “They don’t have hookups for the RV, so we’ll have to get a room in the hotel tonight.  I’ll get the suitcases.  You stay where you are.”

He made the mistake of turning his back to her, and when he was finished, she’d already gone inside the hotel.  He quickly followed, carrying the suitcases.  He scanned the lobby and at first he didn’t see her, then he noticed she’d crawled under a coffee table in front of the fireplace.  The lobby was illuminated by the fire and shadows leapt around the room like dancing phantoms.  “She’s cold, the car heater’s broken,” Mort explained to the concierge.

When he looked under the heavy oak table, he saw that she was crying.  Unfortunately, she didn’t have a cheerful form of Alzheimer’s, on the contrary, she was often sad.  “Come on, Barbara, we’re going to our room now,” Mort said gently, crawling under the table.

“I’m not going,” she said sullenly, clutching the rug beneath her.

“As you mentioned sir, she has suffered in the cold and perhaps needs a bit of warming up,” the concierge suggested.

He looked up from under the table.  The concierge was a tall, stern looking Englishman.  His high cheek bones and deep-set eyes hid his corneas from view.  It seemed to Mort that he was being sucked into the man’s dark gaze.  “That’s alright, she’s warm enough now,” he said, and turning back to his wife, he resorted to his standard fallback which worked every time.  “Burt and Rachel are here with the grand-kids.  We need to see them now.”

A smile suffused over Barbara’s lined face.  She’d been a beauty in her day and as he looked at her, he was glad his lie brought her joy.  In these moments, it seemed to him that her youthful countenance would appear for an instant, before vanishing.

“If I may suggest sir, the third floor is the most commodious and has a memorable view of the valley below.  It will be my pleasure to follow you with your bags.”

Mort was spellbound by the room which was much larger than he’d anticipated.  The fog cleared, and by the light of the full moon, he could make out tall circular gables with large curved windows.  A spiral staircase stood in the corner.  “Where do the stairs go?” he asked.

“There is another level.  In the past it was accessible by the stairs, however they have fallen into disrepair and are no longer used.”

“Is anyone up there now?”

“Hearsay has it there is a woman who is a gardener, but I’m forbidden to use the stairs, therefore I can’t confirm it.  May I assist you in any other way sir?”

Mort looked around the sumptuous room.  The furniture was from another era and looked expensive.  He worried about the price, but since their bags were already there, he thought it was too late to back out.

After his wife was asleep, unable to control his curiosity, he ventured up the stairs.  In contrast to what the concierge told him, the staircase was solid.  The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked, and when he opened it he was overwhelmed by a bouquet of olfactory sensations. He was stunned to see the most gorgeous garden he’d ever laid eyes on – there were grasses, flowers and shrubs he’d never seen before.  While he stood transfixed, a woman appeared.  At first, he was intimidated by her beauty, but as time passed he became comfortable in her presence, and together they silently enjoyed the garden surrounding them.

When they checked out the next morning, he asked about the concierge.  The young girl behind the counter didn’t know what he was talking about.  “I suppose you don’t know about the stairs either,” he said indignantly, pointing to the steps outside the office that led to the second level of the motel.  He left the office and ran up the stairs and down a walkway that had doors with numbers on them.  Children were playing in the swimming pool next to the parking lot.  His wife, who’d followed him, firmly took his arm and led him back.

When she paid for the room, she noticed that the girl at the desk had a worried expression.  “Don’t mind him,” she said as they went out the door, “he has Alzheimer’s, but he’s harmless.”

She drove their small sedan through the desert on a freeway that was as straight as an arrow.  Mort sat quietly in the passenger seat, remembering the garden at the top of the stairs.

Meet the Author

Dwight Dixon

I was born Illinois in 1949 but spent most of my early life in Seattle and Spokane. After graduation from the University of Southern California in Music and English, I studied creative writing at Brown University. I spent several years in France and Germany working as composer and pianist, composing ballet scores in Paris and for the Cologne and Heidelberg Opera houses. In New York and Los Angeles, I wrote underscore for commercials, industrial presentations, feature films (‘Perfect Strangers’ and ‘The Stuff’) and Broadway — ‘Starstruck’, an Off-Broadway play, has been continued as a successful comic book series.

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