13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors Read Free Page B

comes
from my feet. A heavy muffled din like an angry pig in a sack, the
sort of noise you pray not to hear in the dark, and its right there
in front of me. A slurping noise follows soon, but I block it out
with harder tapping, my fingers crushing the little black keys like
flies. It’s there, as muffled as the grunting but more unsettling.
When you’ve decided you’re petrified, your own brain goes one step
further and tries to rationalise the terror with images and ideas.
Ideas and guesses, condemnations and fuel for the raging fire. But
they never help. Something really reeks and I think it’s the book.
Maybe something came from its pages to be dreamed and watched for
the first time in years.
    I clench my teeth and wait for it to
chew on my toes or lick my foot. I’m prepared for a cold sticky
tongue to drag up my hairy leg. I wait, but it never comes, so I
summon the courage to dart a hand over to my lamp, while furiously
hammering the letters within reach.
    Shit. I knock the lamp and
it falls noisily to the floorboards, its wire knocking loudly
against the leg table like this: tick,
tick, tick . A wire must come loose because
it flickers on and off erratically. Within seconds I have a beating
head and throbbing eyes. Moments of utter blindness are followed by
dazzling light. I’m on a bungee cord between Heaven and Hell and it
hurts so bad I’d like to stay in Purgatory. From above I must be a
pitiful sight, naked and pale shuddering in front of a lamp in a
tiny room, a big and blood-drenched volume on the nightstand beside
me.
    I chance a look at the book and
there’s a sketch of me, vague and doodled.
    A stop-motion shadow scurries over the
wall, gargling and grunting as it scampers. There’s scratching on
the boards behind me, and then something darts between my legs,
back under the desk where it makes me sick to think. I decide to
sit back in my seat and take a peak under.
    Too dark to tell. Too dark to be sure.
The table smells like old book and the walls look printed. My
clothes reek of mulch and there’s writing on my arms. The book has
disappeared now, and something rustles its gorged pages somewhere.
In the next room a man’s voice mutters as the walls ooze venom.
Everything is futile now. Yet, with the next pulse of fractured
light, I throw the chair back and make for the door, ignoring the
signs that I am dreamed and I am watched, ad infinitum.

3. BLACK
HOLES
    Erin Callahan, United
States
     
     
     
    “ MARISOL? Marisol, can you hear me?”
    Marisol didn’t realize right away that her
eyes were open. Her eyelids fluttered as she inhaled the sterile
scent of the hospital. Her pupils shrank and expanded in quick
succession, sucking up the room’s fluorescent light, struggling to
focus on the face in front of her.
    Mid-forties. White. Female.
Underfed. Overtired.
    The face frowned and Marisol heard the stuffy
click of a pen.
    “ Reflexes intact,” the face
intoned. The scritch-scritch-scritch of note taking grated on
Marisol’s ears.
    Another woman swept toward Marisol and the
doctor. Approaching retirement. Also
white. Overfed and over-caffeinated. “She’s
okay?”
    “ We’ll have to monitor her for
signs of a concussion,” the doctor said. “And I’ll send a resident
to stitch up that laceration by her eyebrow.”
    The woman breathed an exaggerated sigh of
relief. “Oh, thank god.” She leaned toward Marisol with a
freshly-bleached smile on her face. “Hello, sweetie. Do you have a
wittle headache?”
    The hospital’s antiseptic tang was replaced by
the stench of coffee breath. Marisol’s empty stomach turned. “Who
the fuck are you? And why are you talking to me like I’m a
toddler?”
    The woman bristled, her face puckering with
shock. At this moment, Marisol realized she knew only three simple
facts about herself. My name is Marisol.
I’m fifteen years old. I was in a car accident. She
blinked away fresh memories of glass shattering into the
night.
    The woman turned to the