Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (63 page)

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 that 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 looked 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.

Then again, maybe the presence had not
meant to bring him out. Maybe it had brought him out by its change
in momentum. It was now moving at him faster than
before.

In a way, it all made him feel better.
If the presence had used the dream, or whatever you wanted to call
the vision, as a trick to stall him, that meant the presence needed
to stall him.

“Yes,” Dr. Porter said out loud. Then
he yelled. “You have a weakness! You had to stall me, because you
can’t get here fast enough!” He went back to work with his
pickaxe.

***

Once again, Dr. Porter had his
secretary reschedule all of his appointments. He wondered if he
would ever see clients again. He supposed if he did, it would be in
some new manner. He would understand the wall people had
completely. He would not have to work within those walls anymore.
Instead, he would work from the perspective of the outside. He
couldn’t predict what he would be once he broke through the tunnel.
He knew it would change him. But he couldn’t predict what he would
be like. He couldn’t predict what he would desire.