Whoever had come in that back door was coming down the stairs to the weight room, slowly. Because he moved slowly, Toby knew who it was. He’d seen him sit during practice because one of his knees had started to swell.
Matt appeared in the doorway, with a pained expression on his face. He glanced at Toby, not out of courtesy, but as if to confirm he was there. He didn’t seem curious as to why Toby was sitting at the bench press machine. Toby hated him even more for that. He was too self-absorbed to notice something very odd in another person.
“My knee is tight,” Matt said without looking at Toby. “I need to alternate cold and hot. Get me an icepack and get the whirlpool started.”
Toby was shocked at how he reacted. But he couldn’t resist. He was strong now. He laughed.
Curiosity painted Matt’s expression.
“Why don’t you get it yourself, you piece of shit!”
Matt’s face shrunk into a scowl. Toby got off the bench. He could tell by Matt’s posturing that the big kid was about to attack in some way. Toby considered their respective locations. He was less then half Matt’s size. But there was power in speed, and enough of a distance between them to pick up that speed. When Matt didn’t move immediately, neither did Toby.
Instead, Toby said, “Everything good you did this season was because of my brother. You rode him to all your glory. You were no more than an average tight end who was lucky enough to have a quarterback who could place the ball so well that it was easy for you to catch.”
What Toby said was true. He suspected that Matt knew that as well as he. And there was nothing like a previously unspoken truth being aired to bring about a high level of emotion. Matt’s face grew red. He seemed too angry to move right away. Toby took advantage of that. He darted at Matt, with a speed he had been honing in privacy on the basketball court for the past few days. He hit Matt with all he had, driving his shoulder into Matt’s chin.
Toby jumped backward. He knew if Matt got ahold of him, then speed would no longer be an issue. He doubted he was strong enough to escape Matt’s grip. Backed away from Matt, Toby saw that moving away had not been necessary at all. Matt was laid out in the doorway, out cold.
“Wow!” Toby said to himself. What had he just done? He had taken it too far. It was too soon.He should have just done the things Matt told him to do. He could have waited until he understood himself more, knew how to harness his power and knew its limits.
His worry soon faded. As he looked at the prone boy, Toby started to think of what he’d done in a new way. He had actually whipped a kid twice his size, and he had done it with ease. What more would he be able to do?
That this happened couldn’t get out. Matt might not say anything. He wouldn’t want the embarrassment of having others know a weakling had beaten him. But Toby couldn’t count on that for sure. There was still some chance Matt would talk, and then Toby would have some explaining to do. What if someone tried to put a stop to the changes? What if they stopped him from going out at night?
“No,” Toby said to his worries. “I won’t go back to the way I was.”
He pulled Matt’s body from the open doorway. Then he began to plan.
Chapter 15
Dr. Porter rushed from the trance, so he could feel safe again.
He’d called his secretary this morning and told her he was sick. She was to call all of today’s clients and reschedule them for next week. It was the first day he’d missed since he’d opened his practice. He doubted it would be the last.
Tabitha was yet another distraction he’d had to deal with. He didn’t want her around the house. He didn’t want her around at all. Because of what her subconscious contained, she was a partial record of what had happened. He doubted anyone would know how to access what he’d done in her subconscious, but he still couldn’t take that chance. In time, possibly, someone would come to understand the human psyche as he did. If they found her, they’d know what to do. He didn’t think he’d be sticking around to ward people off.
Disposing of her had been simple enough. He’d taken her to the tunnel and gave her the instruction to walk. After an hour had gone by with the same reports coming from her, he’d had her pick up speed, to actually fly through the tunnel, and she was able to. Not long after that she’d reported that she saw a light. Her outside appearance changed. She seemed to glow. She seemed, in entirety, subconscious and all, indifferent to him. She never spoke again. She just stopped breathing.
Tabitha was now in a large icebox in the basement. At least, that was where her body was. Her spirit had entered that infamous light, the one reported by survivors of near death experiences, the one dramatized on the screen and in the fiction literature. Tabitha would be missed eventually. She had friends and she had family. They’d get suspicious, and her body would be found. But Dr. Porter didn’t think that mattered. By that time, he would have made it through the tunnel. His life would no longer follow the rules of other mortals. They’d never be able to catch him.
Dr. Porter had begun working on himself after storing her body. He had been under hypnosis all night and then for most of the day. He had made necessary alterations. He no longer existed in the tunnel without his history there. He simply got himself there by separating from his history, but with the hypnotic suggestion that he’d recover his history and learning as soon as he reached the tunnel. It had taken several tries, but he’d finally been able to exist in the tunnel as a whole being. He was himself inside himself. It was like being in a lucid dream, where he could bring in anything he needed and stay as long as he wanted.
He had brought in several different tools. But, somehow, no matter what he brought in, a power drill, a bomb, or a simple knife, the floor seemed to disappear at the same rate. So he had settled on a pickaxe. With slow progress, he had chipped away. The floor gave centimeters at a time. It would yield so much and then harden. Each time, he would come out of the trance. He’d take a short catnap, which seemed to help the progress he’d made so far to consolidate.
He hadn’t noticed anything different about himself, but he doubted that he would until he made a hole through that floor. He’d mark his progress from there, and see what changes came. Then, he’d return later to do more damage.
After each nap, he had returned to the trance and to the tunnel, where he had been able to make progress again. Then, the last time he’d gone under, he had sensed it. It was nothing like his clients had reported, and he didn’t sense it normally, like a human would. It was similar to electricity but not electricity. It was like a simple knowledge. There was some other presence in his tunnel. It was not coming through the tunnel walls, but coming from ahead, and it was moving toward him at an alarming rate.
He had worked for a little while longer, but the presence proved daunting. He had looked up and down his tunnel. He had shined a light there, but could not see far ahead. It was coming. He had tried to work more but couldn’t. He had been overwhelmed by the fear.
Now he was conscious, and there was no turning back. He couldn’t undo what he’d done with his clients. He couldn’t undo the body downstairs. Besides, even with his fear, he still wanted what was on the other side of the tunnel. He’d have to work with the presence there.
***
There had been no noise. At least, there had been no noise that Janet could remember. She must have been dreaming, but she couldn’t remember a dream. There had only been a sense that something bad was in her home. But that could only be madness. She couldn’t sense things. Or could she? When her first husband had died so many years ago, hadn’t she awoken in the night? Hadn’t she sensed that something was wrong? She hadn’t seen him get out of bed. She hadn’t heard him struggle. She had only woken up and known.
Or had that not really happened? It was hard to remember. She could remember walking to the bathroom and seeing his massive body spread out on the floor, his face pale, his tongue black and hanging from his mouth. Yes, she remembered finding him. But all her strong memories went to t
hat point. The moments after, when she must have called for help, and the moments before, when she came from the bedroom, were hazy, and different versions popped into her mind from time to time. Had she known? She could not possibly have known.
But why did it seem like she had known? Why did this memory of awakening in bed so many years ago seem so right? She had checked the crib first, where the infant Toby was sleeping away. She had been relieved that it wasn’t him. After that, had she known what she would find in the bathroom? No, there had only been a vague sense. Something terrible had been wrong then. Something terrible was wrong now.
Janet Pollard got out of bed. She checked her house. She found nothing out of place. She went back to bed, the terrible sense still spinning in her head.
***
It was coming. Something was moving in the tunnel at him. Dr. Porter tried to work faster. But it did no good. The tunnel broke at the rate the tunnel broke. He’d been in and out a couple of times since it first scared him out. Both times he hadn’t made as much progress as possible, simply because his fear wouldn’t let him. His fear would push him out. Now he was in again, swinging his pickaxe. What was coming? He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t like he could ever remember himself being. He wasn’t the usual cerebral person he’d been for so many years. He was fear, and he was the task at hand. He was picking away at a tunnel.
What was coming was not coming to destroy him. At least, that was what fear said. Destruction wouldn’t be so bad, compared to what it wanted to do. Millions of souls in Hell cried out for the relief of destruction. It didn’t want to destroy him. It wanted to take him.
Dr. Porter worked at the tunnel floor some more, and then he thought he heard it.
***
Again, awake. The awful sense would not leave Janet. Even as she had been sleeping, it had been in her dreams. There, she had been going through her day as usual, but she was getting nothing done. She would go to pay the bills, think she had finished, only to find she hadn’t started. She was meeting Robert for lunch, but it was too late and she had missed the date. She had to take Randy to the hospital; she thought she had done it, actually had a memory of it, but that couldn’t be, because Randy was still sick in his room.
Awake from the dreams, she didn’t feel better. Knowing that for the past few hours she had been doing what she was supposed to do, sleep, not being negligent of responsibility, did not make the anxiety go away. There was something she was missing. There was something she needed to do. But what? Was it in the dreams? Meet her husband for lunch? That didn’t make since. Robert came home to eat sometimes, but usually he liked to eat at school with the faculty and students. Take Randy to the hospital? Had she ever had to do that? Randy was always in good health. Why would she even dream it? Where was Toby in these dreams? Was he not even worth bothering with? Was there no warning that she needed to be there for him? Was it too late for him?
No. This was all ridiculous. She was reading way too much into what was nothing more than a random assortment of visions in her sleeping head. Only the anxiety had meaning. And that was just the anxiety she felt because her family had to heal itself. There was nothing she could do. There was nothing she had to do. Janet went back to sleep.
***
What he had heard was not the presence moving toward him. What he had heard was already there. It scared him so much that he came out of the trance, where he thought he was safe. But then, sitting in the chair in his bedroom, he heard it again, calling his name.
“David.”
But it couldn’t be real. He checked around him. If it wasn’t real, then something else in his environment would be consistent with that. Something else in his environment would be inconsistent with his usual reality and tell him that he’d merely slipped into a dream. He had fallen into sleep at sometime in this process.
He assessed the room. The lights were dim, but he could make out the usual things. The bed looked as it always did, and so did Tabitha’s dolls, sitting or lying here and there.
“David.”
It had come from downstairs. He focused on himself, sensing his body. If he were dreaming or hallucinating, it would feel different. His body seemed to feel as it always did. He didn’t sense that he could make extraordinary movements, move extra fast, or float from that chair. He didn’t feel extraordinarily hampered, like he couldn’t move. He stood up. The floor felt solid. He walked to the door, without feeling light or heavy, just normal, like in his waking life.
“David.”
There was only that one thing that violated his test of reality; the voice kept coming to him. He left the room and went to the ground floor. He picked out a book at random from a shelf in the living room. He opened it up to the middle and read. The words made sense and they seemed to have context. He looked away from the book for a second and then back at it. The words did not jumble, and they didn’t become different words. Even the book seemed real. This all seemed real. He put the book back on the shelf.
“David.”
Maybe it was real, or at least, most of it was real. Maybe he was downstairs in his living room. Maybe he had just read from the book. But there was just one part that was not real. Maybe it was a hallucination but not an all out overthrow of reality. Maybe there was just a break with reality somewhere in his auditory sense. That was very possible. Usually when people broke with reality in their waking life due to some disorder of the mind, it was in their thoughts or in their auditory sense. Visual hallucinations were rare, even in the psychotic mind, unless there was chemical inducement.
“David.”
Guilt. Somewhere in his mind, he felt guilty for what he’d done. Then there was the fear on top of that, the fear of what was coming in the tunnel. The guilt and the fear had combined to create this hallucination in his mind.
“David.”
His theory could be confirmed. At least, he could confirm that it was only auditory. He went to the basement door.
“David.”
Yes, that was where it had come from. His anxiety increased. It said don’t open that door and don’t walk down those concrete steps. But it was the only way. He could confirm with his vision that this was not real, and then the auditory hallucination, inconsistent with and unsupported by vision, would have to go away.
He opened the door, flicked on the light, and then made his way down the steps. He went to the freezer, where he had stored her. It was a large rectangle with a door on top. He went to open the door but could not. His first thought was that his subconscious was resisting him. Something didn’t want him to confirm that this was all fake. But then he realized that he was letting his mind get further carried away. The door wouldn’t open because he had locked it earlier.
But he didn’t have the key. His keys were on the second floor in the bedroom. He’d taken them out of his pants so that they would not cause him discomfort while he was in his trance. Luckily, the freezer was an old model. The lock was fairly simple, a basic hook and latch. He went to his toolbox, where he got a simple putty knife. He slid the blade between the door and the casing, until he came to the latch. He maneuvered the blade to move the latch from the hook. He cast the putty knife aside, hearing it hit the floor, yet another confirmation that at least part of this was real. He opened the door.
There was a bulge in the tarp he had used to cover the contents. Relief washed over him. But then he noticed that the bulge was way too small. He removed the tarp.
His muscles tensed with dread. There was a body in that freezer. It had brown hair. It had on a baby blue petticoat dress. Its craftsmanship was exquisite, every detail attended to. Not the slightest run in the paint. Perfect symmetry in the dress. He’d paid a hefty sum for it. He’d gotten it for Tabitha ten Christmases ago. It was her favorite doll.
“David.”
This time the voice had not come from below. It was above him. He turned to see her at the top of the stairs. She wore the same blue dress as the doll, but made to her proportions. She might have looke
d beautiful, but her face and the skin on her hands, which were all that the dress exposed, were nearly the same color as the dress. She turned out the light.
Feeling faint, he leaned forward on the rim of the opened freezer. Wake up, he tried to tell himself. He tried to sense himself back in the chair. He tried to feel it against his back and underneath him, supporting his weight. But all he could sense was the cold coming from the freezer in front of him and the sound of her footsteps coming down the stairs. He tried to picture himself in the tunnel. He tried to feel the pickaxe in his hand. He tried to notice the presence coming. But it was still the rim of the freezer that he was touching. All that was coming was the dead woman. She was now moving across the floor. She made it so close that he could hear her breathing. She stopped.
It occurred to him how people often escaped dreams. They shouted out, and that shout translated to the outside world, where it would wake them. Dr. Porter let out a guttural type sound. It was loud, and he thought he felt it stir his body. Then there was silence.
It was still pitch dark. His hands were no longer touching anything. He thought he might be safe. He was now in his bed. It was all a dream that had occurred when he lay down for one of his catnaps. He would soon come to his senses and resume his trance duties.
But there was still a problem. He could still feel the cold air emanating from the freezer. He realized that he had merely moved his hands from the rim when he’d made the sound. Then he felt more cold, when her icy hand touched him.
“You’ve been very bad, Dr. Porter,” his dead wife said.
***
He had felt her place him in the icebox, and he had felt that cold. He had even felt the limited oxygen supply dwindling. But then he had come out of it. He was back in the tunnel. He thought it was the presence that had done it all. It was inside his subconscious, toying with him. But why? Maybe it had wanted to slow him down. But if that were true, why had it brought him back out? It could have just left him in the horrible vision until it arrived.
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 44