title: The Cloud Monsters
author: Willert, Dave
description: "IS ALL THAT WE SEE OR SEEM BUT A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM?"
  (Edgar Allan Poe)
  The sleepy town of Kerchawa seemed just as old and tired as any other small town in Nebraska. But... there was something frighteningly different about it. According to the legends of the Omaha Indians who had lived there before, high in the sky above the little town lived spirits of people who were not dead. Their sole purpose was to inhabit the bodies of unsuspecting people on Earth and brazenly assume their lives in the process. They would stop at nothing. They were the cloud monsters.
  Twelve-year-old Alex Poe was just beginning his summer vacation when he watched with fascination as a cloud miraculously fell from the sky one day and instantly turned into a tall thin man from another time who was dead set on meeting him. Later that night a mysterious and enchanting young girl, unusually dressed in a nineteenth century blue and white gingham dress met him in his dreams and bade him to join her in the clouds. Her name was Annabel Lee.
  Only the richest man in town, Ebenezer Wilson knows what is truly going on. But the troubling secret he carries with him, along with the very unsavory pact he agreed to eleven years before may very well keep him from helping anyone- even himself.
  What exactly is going on in Kerchawa and why are the cloud monsters so obsessed with young Alex Poe? The exciting journey to the conclusion of the story is both a nightmare and a fantasy cleverly cloaked in reality. Read on if you dare. The answers will come. Whether or not you can handle them is the real question?