Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (61 page)

Toby went out into the
night.

***

Celeste sat at a table at the side of
the bar. She was next to a window that gave a perfect view of a
sandy beach leading to the Gulf of Mexico.

Celeste had been raised by her aunt,
who had been poor and never traveled much further than a hundred
miles from Green Pastures, at least up until she met a man who took
her to Pennsylvania, shortly after Celeste had become an adult and
moved out on her own.

Celeste had traveled a little more as
an adult and she’d seen the ocean, but only for brief periods of
time. Now she felt as if the ocean was hers, because that was the
path she traveled. She took her victims at various places, men with
at least some money. She made them take her down the road during
the day and then to hotel rooms with a view of the ocean at night,
first the Atlantic and now the Gulf. There she fed on them, only to
leave them dead in the room the next morning.

She knew she would have to stop this
pattern eventually. Patterns, she suspected, were the most
dangerous thing to those of her kind, if there were others of her
kind. She would eventually move north, into the country, and from
there establish a random pattern. But for now, she relished in her
love for the ocean, of taking her victims as she listened to the
waves.

Celeste stared across the relatively
quiet tavern at two men. She had yet to send out telepathy to them.
She was having a little fun without the mental power right now. She
had her legs up on a chair, her miniskirt coming up her leg
slightly. Occasionally, she opened her legs and showed them the
bareness underneath. They glanced as nonchalantly as possible
without losing the good views.

She had been careful to take only one
victim a day, not wanting to overwhelm herself with the energy. But
now she was ready to try for two. After toying with them for a
while, she turned on the telepathy. She made them bend to her will,
made them want what she wanted. The two upscale looking men drove
her down the road a few miles. She made one of them watch from the
corner of the room as his friend entered her and she took his
lifeforce. The live man stood and cried for an hour as Celeste
looked out over the ocean. But he didn’t leave. He wanted her too
much to leave. Even knowing that he would die to have her, he would
not try to escape. Celeste took him too.

It didn’t overwhelm her. In fact, it
was the best and most refined high she’d had yet.

***

Janet Pollard came to with a jolt.
Something had disturbed her sleep, and she didn’t know what it was.
She just knew that there had been a terrible sound and that it had
come from outside. She thought it might have been some kind of
scream.

It might have come from inside, within
her sleeping mind. But that didn’t seem right. It wasn’t like her
dreams to be bad. In her dreams, she was usually solving some kind
of dilemma that involved her family. She was always successful,
helping whatever member of her family had the problem, or at least,
fixing the problem to the extent that it could be solved. Her
dreams, in essence, though symbolic and odd at times, mirrored her
real life.

Janet got out of bed. Whether it had
been a dream or real, she had sensed that the noise had come from
outside of her house, which meant her family was fine. But still,
the noise had been terrible, and it made her want to know that what
she loved was safe. She went into the main parts of the house and
looked around. Everything seemed in place. She checked the front
and back doors and the door that went to the garage. They were all
locked. She checked the windows and found them locked
too.

The only places she would not check
were her sons’ rooms. She had found that when boys reached a
certain age, namely the age of puberty, they didn’t appreciate
their mom coming into their room at night, not unless summoned. She
respected that.

But it was hard to respect it on this
night. She stood outside their bedroom doors and listened inside.
She spent an extra long time at Toby’s room. She was far more
protective of Toby, whom needed more protection. It was hard not to
go in. Her nurturing sense warred with her logical sense of wanting
to be a good mom who didn’t let her own fears cause her to violate
her sons’ privacy. The logical sense won out, and Janet went to
bed.

She fell back asleep and didn’t hear
when Toby crawled back in his bedroom window.

Chapter 14

School had been a strange continuance
of Friday night. Students and teachers walked around like somebody
had died and they weren’t supposed to talk about it. The zoned
state was especially pronounced in the senior football
players.

They split the football players on
Monday. A few went to the basketball court to prepare for that
season. Most went to the weight room, where they would spend the
last hour of every school day until the end of the year, except for
those who ran track in the spring. A school board from years ago
had decided that three sports, football, basketball and track were
enough, that a school the size of Pious should focus its efforts on
three sports, lest it be spread too thin, and that decision had
stuck through the years. Pious didn’t have a wrestling or baseball
team.

Toby also managed the basketball team,
which wasn’t nearly as hard, since they used far less equipment. He
mainly sat off on a bench or in the bleachers and studied, until he
was needed. He watched the basketball team a little on Tuesday. He
was quickly able to size up the situation, at least the situation
of the players he was interested in. Randy looked terrible. Like in
football, he was probably good enough to make the basketball team
and probably be its star player, but on this day, he was sluggish,
seemingly hungover from a football season that had been so perfect
up until its last few hours. Toby was even more interested in Matt,
who also played basketball. Matt was pushing his teammates on,
trying to get them to practice harder, to focus more. But he was
downright cruel. His desperation was shining through. He was a
senior and not good enough to play college ball. This was his last
chance.

Toby doubted the team would do well
with Matt acting this way. Basketball was a game of finesse, unlike
football, which required more raw physical attributes like speed
and muscle. If Matt was allowed to push like this into the season,
it would harm the team. How well the team would do was all a matter
of if and when Randy would step up again.

Toby hated Matt more and more. He
hated him for his arrogance. He loathed his stupidity. All he
really had going for him was size. Size shouldn’t have been a
reason to lead, or in Matt’s case, push people around.

Toby suspected Randy would eventually
overcome his grief. He would get over the fact that the football
team had went as he went, and when he had sucked Friday night, they
had sucked too. He would eventually be willing to take up the role
of playmaker again, and he would get over this
sluggishness.

But Toby had something bigger on his
mind than the basketball team. He needed to test himself again. But
he couldn’t do it now, not with all these people around. Luckily,
one of his duties as manager was keeper of the keys. After practice
was finished upstairs and all the weightlifters were finished
downstairs, it was his duty to shut off the lights and lock up.
Around 4:30, the entire building was his. He went to the weight
room. He set the pin in the bench press machine. He tried first
what he had failed to do last week. One-twenty went up like it
wasn’t even there. He skipped up the one-sixty, which he got with
ease. He got all the way up to two-hundred pounds before he maxed
out.

Was it enough? No. But it was still
good. Power, the speed at which work could be done on an outside
object, depended on mass. His mass was increasing, but very slowly.
He was still very skinny compared to most kids of his age and
height.

Luckily, power was more dependent on
velocity than mass. Small people who were strong could move with
great velocity. He went up on the gymnasium floor, where the
basketball players had been earlier. He ran sprints from one end of
the court to the other. His velocity proved incredible. His
stronger muscles could really make his little body move. But he
knew he could get even stronger and even faster. He wasn’t limited
like before. His barrier had broken, and he didn’t have to wait for
next week for his appetite to increase. He would feed
more.

***

Again, Janet Pollard awoke in the
night. This time the sounds were clearer and had come from inside
the house. There had been the creaking of a door opening, then the
sound of feet moving, then the sound of a door shutting, then the
sound of a door shutting again. She got up fast and made her way
through the house. Her head hadn’t been clear enough to distinguish
what doors had been moved. So she first checked the front and back
doors. To her relief, she found them both locked. That still left
the question as to what was going on. She went to the hallway that
contained both of her sons’ rooms. Both of those doors were shut
too. Was it all in her head? She didn’t think so. Maybe one of the
boys had gotten up to use the bathroom. That would explain why she
had heard two doors being shut. She had merely heard one of them
returning from the bathroom.

That explanation had its holes. The
feet she had heard moving had been a little too quick for simply
returning from the bathroom. Their timing was such that the person
had moved in response to the sound of the door. The person feared
detection.

But why?

It was hard to gauge her family right
now. One son, Randy, seemed to be in a depressive funk. At the
dinner table, his father wanted to talk about the upcoming
basketball season. Randy definitely wasn’t ready for that. His
father didn’t realize that by trying to hasten the recovery
process, he was actually hindering it. Randy just needed time.
Sooner or later, his natural tendency to take command, that
tendency that had failed him last Friday night, would return. Until
then, he was just a little unpredictable.

And Toby. He was taking even larger
portions of food now. But he still ate in the privacy of his room,
and he was private in more ways than that. He seemed standoffish.
He wasn’t saying anything about the big family news, that a big
game had been lost and his brother was now in peril. Janet
suspected that was due to his own semi-failure. He was focused
inward, on his own problem, trying to understand why he couldn’t
eat in the presence of others, why was he getting better without
getting better if others were around. Until he could correct that,
he was unpredictable.

Then there was the final
consideration. Janet herself. She wasn’t used to her family being
this much out of her control. She had two sons who had failed and a
husband who was failing because he didn’t know how to react. There
wasn’t much she could do to correct anybody’s situation. Toby’s
situation was in the hands of Dr. Porter. Randy’s situation was in
the hands of time and himself. Robert’s situation, sadly, was in
the hands of Randy’s success. All she could do was be supportive
and wait. That didn’t seem like enough.

So maybe she hadn’t heard anything.
Maybe she was unpredictable too. Maybe her anxiety was feeding into
her dreams, causing her to hear things that she interpreted as real
as she came awake, causing her to search for ways to protect her
family in the night, because she couldn’t do it during the day.
With that thought, Janet returned to bed.

***

James awoke in the night. He realized
that he hadn’t awoken naturally, but because the spirit had moved.
Tonight, before dawn, they would leave.

In its scouting, the spirit had found
that they were safe. There was no connection found between James
and any of the murders he had committed. The police were
scrambling, looking for anything to help them solve the cases. They
were taking their usual routes, talking to the people they usually
talked to, other outlaws who usually could point them in a certain
direction, but finding nothing of use, only taking false leads to
dead ends. They had even arrested seemingly likely suspects, only
to find solid alibis. They assumed the person they were looking for
had to be a sound criminal mind. That assumption was what killed
them. They weren’t looking for a man whose forty years of isolation
should have made it impossible for him to perform these
crimes.

The last couple of days had been the
best James had ever spent with his parents. They went to various
places: movies, restaurants, plays. They were home only at night.
James knew that the last two days didn’t make up for the first
forty years, and that they wouldn’t make up for the remainder of
his life, during which his parents would probably not see or hear
from him again. But he didn’t let that bother him. Being with his
parents could never compare to what he had felt in the woods,
taking down the solitary hunter and then the three hunters
together.

Now James and the spirit were to leave
in the night. But first, the spirit spoke.

“When the body dies, the spirit is
free to leave this world. It is no longer subject to its
limitations. This world, this realm in which humans live, is
established by laws. The body senses this realm and so this realm
is. In order for the spirit to stay here after the death of the
body it must have a reason. For most, that reason is closure,
revenge or completion in another way. But there is another way to
stay. A spirit can stay in this realm by falling in love with it.
You must learn to want the laws of this place. You must love the
sensations it can provide.”