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The Story...
It was just a simple ghost story, or so Daniel believed. It was something to frighten the children and keep
them away from the wreckage of the old steamboat where it jutted from the ice of the frozen river.
There was something under that ice... Something bad, something hungry, something cold. If ever it found you
alone on the river, it was said, the demon would pull you under the ice and gnaw your bones the whole winter long.
But Daniel never believed in ghosts and demons... Until that night on the river when he bared his chest to the
cold and dared it to reach for him. It was something he would come to regret, for the borders between this world and the next are thin in places, and Steamboat Slough was an open gate to forces older
than history itself.
The Eskimos called it Paija, the she-demon that comes on the edge of a storm and hunts for the souls of men
while they sleep. Yet Daniel soon learns that demons come in many guises, frightening and yet alluring in the primal aura of energies that are buried deep within the human psyche.
Was it only his mind playing tricks on him? Was it nothing more than his overactive imagination? The answer
would come upon him in his sleep, while other demons hunted him in his waking hours. What were they--Myths, imagination, dreams, psychology, or just the dregs of a
bad batch of home brew?
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