MOONDANCERS
Book One
The Beautiful Creatures of Beverly Hills
E. Van Lowe
Moondancers
Published by EViL E Books
a division of Sweet Lorraine Productions Publishing, Inc.
Copyright © 2016 E. Van Lowe
Edited by SolaFide Publishing & Camille Pollock
Art direction by Jim Seidelman
Formatting by Polgarus Studio
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ASIN: B01BPKEPK4
ISBN:--
Library of Congress Control Number: --
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There was no decision to dive into the pool.
I did it without thinking. One moment I was standing on the edge of the gym floor, peering into the murky waters, and then, I was in.
I kicked down toward the commotion in the deep. The water was cold, even for a hot summer’s night, and I felt a shiver ripple my belly.
The weight of my water logged clothing dragged against the buoyancy of the water, preventing me from going down. I kicked harder, pointed my head like a projectile, and I finally got moving.
I didn’t see the creature, but I could feel pressure from the churn of struggle beneath me, and after a while I saw the eyes, just as I’d seen them skulking in the drain of Alan’s backyard pool. They were emerald green, and they were angry.
I swam toward the angry eyes, and my struggling friend came into view. I arrived, and latched onto the claw that was clinging to his side. The claw was hard like a conch shell. I wrapped both my hands around the pincer, and yanked on it with all my might, expelling a tiny bit of air as I did. After several moments of struggle, the claw reluctantly released, and I was able to pull Alan free.
I corralled him in my arms, spun him around and pushed him up toward the surface. He began rising slowly like a figure in an underwater dream sequence. He wasn’t swimming. There were no arm movements, no leg kicks. Still, he was rising, a foot or so every few moments, getting closer to the surface.
Swim, I thought. Swim, dammit!
Something latched onto my ankle from below.
I peered down and could see the creature in all his hideousness, pulling me into the depths of the pool. I tried to kick, but all that got me was searing pain in my right ankle. Fresh blood appeared in the water.
Mine, no doubt.
The creature continued pulling me down, trying to drown me. The pressure of the water pressed against my chest. I needed to get free. I needed to get to the surface. I needed to breathe.
Prologue
“No one of any value lives south of the Boulevard.”
That’s what a ridiculous old lady once told my father. She was looking down her nose at him at the time. Would you believe the words of an old biddy drenched in diamonds and Chantilly lace changed everything? Everything.
Dad was attending a town hall meeting, there to protest yet another hotel going up in our beloved community of Beverly Hills.
The lady, and I use the term loosely, was sent to the meeting by the company who wanted to build the hotel. She lived in our community, but she’d been compromised. The hotel people had promised her a handsome payment to disrupt the meeting—probably a bunch of coupons for the early bird special at Denny’s. They even offered her a bonus if the hotel got built.
We didn’t know any of this at the time—no one at the meeting did, and so her words pierced my father’s heart like an arrow. No man wants to be told he’s not good enough, especially when deep in his heart he believes it might be true.
Our family home, you see, is south of Wilshire Boulevard in what we insiders laughingly call the slums of Beverly Hills. We south of the boulevard dwellers don’t live in mansions, or on acres of land. Our homes don’t have maid’s quarters, or guest houses, or twelve car garages. Ours are the homes of young executives, and budding stars on their way up, or failed executives and actors who hadn’t quite hit the big time, on their way down.
Yet there’s another breed of folk who live south of the boulevard—Us, the working class, who live in overpriced, cramped homes on small lots, not because we want the distinction of claiming to live in one of America’s most affluent communities, but because our working class parents want their children to go to the best schools, and in our neck of the woods, there is no high school better than Beverly Hills High.
A public school education in Beverly Hills is equivalent to getting educated at one of the best private schools in the country. My friends and I went to school with some of the richest kids in the world. And the best part, it was all free—sort of. There’s always a price to pay.
The way my folks saw things, a Beverly Hills education was well worth the high cost of food in our community, along with living in a cramped, overpriced home.
Yet, if there was one thing our tiny working class homes had in common with the ritzy homes across Wilshire Boulevard, it was swimming pools. Beverly Hills is chockablock with swimming pools—even the slummy parts. There are nearly twenty-five hundred pools in the city of Beverly Hills. That works out to be one pool for every one and a half people. The crazy thing is, most of the pools go unused. They’re more for status, than for swimming. Go figure.
Me and my friends got good use out of the swimming pools of Beverly Hills. We swam; we swam a lot.
The summer I turned sixteen would be spent very much like the summers I turned thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, pool hopping from house to house with the guys in my crew, playing, swimming, arguing, eating Mulberry Street pizza and Carney’s hot dogs, and dreaming of what our lives would be like once we finally escaped living under our parents’ roofs.
Or, so I thought.
As it turned out, my sixteenth summer was very different from the all the summers that had come before, or after, for that matter.
That summer there would be a girl.
That summer there would be a creature.
That summer there would be an awakening.
And before the start of my junior year, there would be death.
I never saw any of it coming.