A Summertime Journey

of the discovery, the police reported with “high certainty” the mutilated remains were indeed the missing seventh-grader from Hillside Junior High School.
Today, authorities are backtracking on their previous claim after a dental exam of the deceased failed to match Ryan Collins’s dental records. The body has not been identified at this time, and authorities are actively investigating to determine his identity.
At this time, authorities are convinced Ryan Collins is still missing, and his case will be reclassified from a homicide to a missing person case.
Ryan Collin’s family denied an interview request at this time.

COMING SOON
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1984 When Two Worlds Collide
CHAPTER ONE
Drug Den
THE SUN MELTS INTO the Chicago skyline, and a light drizzle begins falling. The heat and sprinkling of rain only make the humidity worse, and egged-on already short tempers are shorter. Ryan is in the drug den getting ready to go out for another night of “recruiting” for Charlie. The macabre sanctuary is always dark and moldy from the lack of sunlight, and the mood from its residents and victims match, dark and rotting. Ryan and the other Psychopomps that Charlie affectionately call his grouplings have no trouble seeing in low or no light, it is one of the many perks of being a groupling, right up there with no-free-will. Usually, grouplings are weak-minded or drug-addicted vagrants duped into Sheol, Charlie’s name for the hellish alternate world that parallels ours, to live a life of servitude for Charlie with no end. They yield their mind and body to Erebus (a council of evil demons) in an unceremonious ritual of death. When someone dies in Sheol, they will be resurrected and brought back in an evolved state of dead-but not-dead. If they meet their demise in our world or Adamah as Charlie calls it, it is permanent, and their physical body will become worm bedding in the earth’s soil, and their soul will either reunite with their loved ones in paradise or suffer in an eternal kiln smoldering in pain. Their human recruits rely on the grouplings to help them navigate the interior of the building, but they still stumble and trip from the drugs affecting their equilibrium. The drug den is an abandoned brick building with three floors of ill-soaked mattresses and hypodermic needles scattered haphazardly. Nearly every inch of the walls that are still standing and the boards covering the windows are ‘tagged’ with colorful but fading gang graffiti from a time when gangs ruled this part of the town. Charlie owns this building now, and this is one of his hubs to leap from Sheol to Adamah. His grouplings work the Chicago inner-city, bringing him fresh recruits to build his forces.
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