Eerie Coincidences

The past couple weeks I have been reading books written by Dean Koontz and today, I felt like I was living through them. In Phantoms, the book I am currently reading, a doctor returns with her teenage sister to her small ski village in California to find the entire town empty. An evil force killed and/or kidnapped everyone in the town. The doctor calls a neighbouring sheriff’s office and they send officers to investigate. After a quick search they set up a command post at the local sheriff’s office. While there the lights flicker, go out and the evil being manages to sneak in and drag an officer away without notice until the lights go back on. I did not do this justice at all; it is really a suspenseful read.

Anyhow, this morning a similar incident occurred to me, minus the evil force (thankfully) and the police and the setting for that matter. I was sitting on the noGO train on my way to work reading the above named book when the lights on the train flickered followed by the engine shutting down. While the engine was being worked on, the lights on the train flickered a few more times before they eventually went out completely. At 7:oo AM, the sun was still an hour or so from breaking through the darkness so nothing could be seen outside leaving everyone sitting on it vulnerable to anything lurking in the shadows. On most days this would be extremely annoying but since my mind threw the situation into the context of the book, I found it all fairly amusing and only slightly annoying. But that was not the end of the coincidences for the day.

Just before starting Phantoms, I had just finished Dragon Tears. In this book a person with supernatural powers works to cleanse the planet of undesirables by killing those who he considers a drain on the planet. At some point this evil person decides to put a hold on eliminating several victims so he can target a ‘hero cop’. The book itself was not too eerie but today when I unfolded our local newspaper, Oshawa This Week, the cover headline, ‘Hero cop rushes into burning home’, brought the book back into my mind. It did not help that events of the day had my mind thinking of some undesirables that the world would be better without. If this article appeared on any other day I likely wouldn’t have thought twice about it but given my experience this morning I can’t help but wonder if this is a case of life imitating art or if it is just a couple of eerie consequences.

To ease everyone’s curiosity, the article above described how Constable Bradley Browne of Durham Regional Police noticed smoke coming from a house while driving by and took immediate actions to ensure the safety of the residents, including running into the house to wake the residents and calling 911. He was off duty at the time.