Las Verandes, California. By day, the sun shone bright on glistening sports cars cruising mildly busy streets. Stopping at stop lights long enough to breath in the salty air from the beaches and view the bright green palm trees lining every road. Sexy girls in short shorts, business jackets, and mile high heels pranced down the streets holding shopping bags, latte’s, cell phones, and dogs small enough to step on. They were the true multi-taskers of the world. From an onlooker, Las Verandes’s slow bustle looked like the place to spend a relaxing, yet busy day. But even in the sun, darkness loomed.
The nightlife of Las Verandes could have rivaled Vegas on some streets. Nightclubs glittered in the bright neon lights. Happy smiling faces with bright white teeth slurred, shimmied, and strolled from club to club. Away from all the lights, dark alleys housed more than rats. As the homeless tried to find some peace and quiet away from the noise from the clubs, gangs of boys would battle for territory rights, and soulless addicts would search for fixes. Overhead the happy and the sad, white stars twinkled against the black sky, watching lovers loving, hustlers hustling, drug dealers dealing, and people partying. From an onlooker, Las Verandes’s club hoppin’ walkways and danger-zone side streets looked like any other way of life for big cities.
But there was a difference. The darkness that loomed in the day, enhanced even more in the night. The onlookers and tourists would see a normal, American Californian city. But the people, who inhabited Las Verandes, saw much more. To them, Las Verandes was a guilty pleasure. Filled with rage, passion, revenge, and always, sex…Las Verandes had the ability to take a person’s dark and evil thoughts and manifest those thoughts from their inner mind to the surface of reality. That was the real danger of Las Verandes. The cruel reality.
As one woman, taunted by a cruel past, prepared to make love for the first time to her savior; another woman mixed potions to create a deadly serum to kill a man she did not even know. As one man plotted a death that would rival his last victim, another man prepared to meet the sexy and powerful woman who would kill his enemy. As a different woman mourned the loss of her boyfriend with pure rage, a man tiptoed up the steps of his winding staircase to see how beautiful the woman he had re-created looked.
In this story, there were two happy people who were about to become lovers. But neither of them knew that right underneath them, (in the kitchen), and a few blocks away, (in a potion-filled basement), their deaths were being planned out.
That was the problem with Las Verandes. Most of the people living there had no idea or even a fathom of an idea of what horrors would await them.
But I do.
