13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors Read Free

carry mace?”
    Mac stepped out of the shower and
started toweling off. “How would I know?”
    “ You’ve been dating for
weeks.”
    “ So have you, technically.
Get in the shower before the mace or whatever seeps into your pores
and leaves you with T-Rex arms.”
    Cam threw his clothes on the pile of
his brother’s and stepped toward the shower. As he did, Mac’s leg
shot out and connected with Cam’s. It felt sticky warm as their
calves were crushed together.
    Both boys bent down and tugged but
they couldn’t pull apart. Cam could barely process what was
happening. He looked into his twin’s eyes and recognized the
mirrored panic.
    Their legs pushed inward even further
than was possible. Cam couldn’t tell where he stopped and Mac
started. Ankle bones crushed and merged, hairy skin wrapping around
muscle. As ten toes merged into five, Cam couldn’t even tell
anything was wrong with the leg they shared.
    Cam’s mind went frantic. How could he
stop it? What was happening to them?
    The boys’ knees were drawn together
and as they tried to pull away, their hands grew sticky and bonded
together.
    The force pulling them in on each
other grew even more aggressive. Cam couldn’t even process folding
in on Mac. His sweaty body was rocked by a cold shiver even as his
tears burned like hot coals sliding down his cheeks.
    The frightened buzzing in Cam’s mind
amplified like sudden feedback.
    Fingers clawed at flesh. Cam’s or
Mac’s, neither could distinguish. Frantic screaming, fingers
pushing against skulls. Screams. Cam’s thoughts blended with Mac’s.
They fought every agonizing second as they lost the single most
important person in their lives.
    Someone rapped gently on the bathroom
door.
    “ Honey, you all right in
there?” their mother asked.
    They were incapable of speech as their
vocal cords fused into one.
    “ He’s fine,” their father
said. “Maybe he wouldn’t be like this if he socialized more. That’s
what happens when you’re an only child.”
    “ Too late now to give him a
brother or sister,” their mom said.
    Naked twins became one writhing nude
boy on his bathroom floor, crying in the fetal position.

2. AD
INFINITUM
    Scott Clark,
Scotland
     
     
     
    I write my story on and on and on and off, ad infinitum. I had a
dream the other night about a guy looking for litter in an old pool
of inflatable toys and it weirded me out. I think about this when
I’m writing but it doesn’t really go anywhere because when I was
younger I missed some important lessons. That’s why I still write
about books, so I’m told.
    My gran used to worry about
the thickness of my glasses and the way I squinted. Said I’d be a
spooky kid. Said I was destined to be a nosey parker forever, amen.
Said I was going to be one of those people; the ones who dream and watch, on and on,
ad infinitum. I dream and I watch, sure. I dream and I watch some
very dark things, especially since the new package arrived: the
black book.
    I type the words and read
the pages from sun up ’til sundown, the light leaves me and the
room is dark. A cat strolls past under the desk, his patchy fur
tickling my bare legs. A screen, a square of pitch perfect light
interrupted by tiny ramblings, a window. My fingers, illuminated
against the glare of the screen in a silent place, dance across a
keyboard and the words lie across the screen: a series of promises
and observations and suddenly the room is cooler. But then, I’ve
never written about a book like this before. Never seen pages like
this or words so savagely scored into the deep pile of age-old
pages.
    A breath tickles the inside of my
thigh. I blush. Now I’m warm, it’s stuffy, the breeze is tailored
to me alone. Something could be amiss but the words keep going down
as the cat makes another pass.
    Behind me the dark is noisy: black
like velvet, thick like molasses, insincere and not really here.
There’s few reasons to be afraid of the dark but silence is one of
them. The