This Garden of Souls

By C. W. Kesting
Science Fiction, 300 pages
Cover art by Pat Evans

Imagine one day finding yourself an unwilling captive-a participant in a mysterious design where you are forced to relive your past, face your demons and defend your every thought and action. As your imprisonment slowly draws out, you gradually realize that all you thought you knew about the world was wrong. You begin to question everything and everyone.

Now imagine discovering that you may not be who-or even what-you ever thought you were.

Excerpt:

You know that feeling you get when you're certain someone's watching you? That sense of eyes on you.
Or the dread that swells in your chest when you know you've just done something that you can't undo, and you suddenly feel icy fingers gently stroking the inner surface of your ribs.

That's guilt, the pros will say.

That's bullshit, I say.

Those watching eyes, they're real. They belong to the Forms.

And that chilly tickle of fear within your chest, your belly-that's them too. It's their breath as they sigh in disappointment. It's the sweat evaporating off of their shadows.

Have you ever noticed that whenever you're alone-or think that you're alone-you almost always talk to yourself? Why do you think that is? You ask yourself should I be doing this or that? Should I have said that or this?

We question ourselves constantly because we simply don't know what else to do.

The pros call that your conscience.

Again, I call bullshit.

Children almost always have imaginary friends. Do you know why?

Well, I got news for you.  They're not imaginary.

I think the Forms are with us from birth. They are the ones that guide and teach us when we most need guidance and teaching. But, somewhere along the way, we lose our capacity to interface with them, and then that lost primitive part of us begins missing them. So, we scramble to recover that comforting sense of the magical, yet all the structure and logic and reason of our world becomes so overwhelming it eventually suffocates the fantastic.

We soon lose our faith-and then our belief in them. In doing so, we render ourselves insensitive to them.

Unreceptive.

Repellant.

And then they lose their importance-their influence over us-so that the only way they can get our attention as adults is through our narrowly perceived world. So they engineer coincidences, occurrences, accidents, ironies, déjà vu…

Synchronicities.

But, that's just what I think. I believe Albert's on board, too.