Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (62 page)

“And that is why you stay?” James
asked.

“Yes,” the spirit agreed. “I love the
limits of your body. I love to push them. I love what it gives you,
and thus me. I will help you to have all the best of sensations in
this world. You will learn how to sense them as I do. After many
years, you’ll be able to do it without me guiding you. Then you
will truly love it. And when your body dies, that love will make
you stay.”

James got out of bed. He left his
basement, his prison of forty years, for the last time. They headed
south.

***

Dr. Porter usually did all of his
investigating in his office. That had always been sufficient.
Everything he had needed to know about his clients was within their
subconscious minds. But now his clients weren’t being up front with
him, and at least one of their subconscious minds had denied his
request. So he had to leave his office.

He had started the investigation
Wednesday morning. He called Janet Pollard and asked how she
thought Toby was doing and if she had noticed anything strange
about him. She said he seemed to be doing well. The only odd thing
was that for the past couple of weeks he couldn’t eat in front of
people. That threw up a red flag, but what was more was that
something seemed to be eating at Janet herself.

She was probably being honest with him
about Toby, but by her tone, something else bothered her, something
in particular to her. Did she even know what it was?

That afternoon, with an opening in
clients, Dr. Porter drove to Morgan’s Pub. It was closed. A sign on
the door announced that it would not be open for the rest of the
week due to the death of one of its workers. Dr. Porter drove by
Celeste’s apartment. Her car was there. He actually went up to the
door and knocked. He planned to say he had been worried when she
hadn’t returned his call, but she didn’t come to the
door.

Dr. Porter had read in the paper about
a rash of heart attacks, all occurring within the span of three
days. One of them had been the worker at Morgan’s Pub. One had been
an attorney who worked downtown, near the pub. One had been a young
man, whose body had been found at a park. He had no idea how
Celeste was connected to these seemingly natural deaths, but he
suspected that she was.

He was supposed to meet with James at
six tonight. He was not surprised, though, when James didn’t show.
He called his house. After several rings, James didn’t answer, so
Dr. Porter hung up and called his parents’ line.

“Hello.” It was James’s
mother.

“Hello, Mrs. Kisner, this is Dr.
Porter. I’m sorry to bother you, but is James
available?”

“No,” she said, her voice a little
panicked. “He didn’t come up this morning. Then this afternoon, I
knocked on the door and he didn’t answer. Finally, I got so worried
that I went downstairs to check on him, but he was gone. He must
have left before I got up.”

Dr. Porter had found other odd things
in the paper. There had been a couple of different murders around
Arabuke. Then there had been more up in the mountains. The mountain
murders had occurred while James’s parents were gone, a time when
James could have been away from his home without anyone noticing.
He wasn’t sure that James was involved, but it seemed like a good
possibility.

What was going on with his clients? It
was a question Dr. Porter would have to wait to think on. Right
now, he had a panicked mother on the line.

“I wouldn’t worry much about it, Mrs.
Kisner. You have to remember that James has been cooped up for a
long time now. He’s likely to experiment with freedom in many
ways.”

There was a sigh of relief. “You know,
James’s father said something similar. But it helps to hear it from
you. I guess the best thing to do is just continue to allow him his
space.”

“Absolutely,” Dr. Porter said, not
knowing if that were true, just glad the woman was
pacified.

After hanging up, he had time to sit
and think. What he had opened up in his clients was beyond what was
natural. He had removed a barrier, and now what they experienced
was probably beyond what most humans could. What did that mean for
the barrier inside everybody? What did that mean for the tunnel
walls? If he could break through, what limits that he’d always had
as a human would he be able to overcome? What knowledge would he be
exposed to?

Seemingly, part of what he had turned
them into involved murder. That meant they would eventually be
traced, and through his connection to them, he would also be
traced. He could not know how much time he had. He had to start the
next phase immediately, tonight.

***

“Tell me what you remember,” Dr.
Porter said.

Tabitha lay on the bed, a pleasantly
astonished smile on her Barbie Doll face. She had been cooking when
he came home. He’d had her turn off the burners and put the food
away. She protested a little, but he told her not to worry about
the waste, that what he needed to do was much more important. A
little while later, he had put her under.

“There was a tunnel,” she responded.
She was speaking as if it were the first time she were there. That
was because he had cleared her memory of it before. It was still
readily available, though, just waiting for him to turn her
attention back to it. “I had a hammer,” she continued. “I was
striking at the floor of the tunnel.”

That was where Dr. Porter had told her
to strike. He doubted it mattered what part of the tunnel was
broken. He suspected it was all the same on the other
side.

“Did it break?” he asked.

For a little while, she thought. She
then said, “It didn’t break completely, but I know I made
progress.”

“How?” Dr. Porter asked.

“Because there was dust.”

“Dust?”

“Yes, just a little. But it was
there.”

Dr. Porter had what he needed. The
tunnel would break. And he had all that he needed from Tabitha,
ever again.

“Now,” he said. “I’m going to take you
back under.”

***

Toby sat alone on the bench late
Thursday afternoon. Basketball practice was over and all the weight
lifters had gone home. Now he was a little disappointed. He had
tested himself on the bench, only to find that his strength had not
increased since Tuesday. He would have to do more. He was about to
get up to leave when he heard the large metal door open above. He
had yet to lock the doors, a precaution he knew he should have
taken, lest someone come in and catch him testing himself. Nobody
would be able to understand why the little weakling was suddenly
able to bench over twice his weight or move at speeds that were
alarmingly unnatural. He was lucky that that back door to the
gymnasium was so large and so loud.

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.