“Brian, what’s wrong?”
“She’s not breathing,” he replied, panic building in his chest. He probed with his finger. “She didn’t swallow her tongue and nothing’s lodged in her throat that I can see.”
Cupping his hands together, he started giving her chest compressions. Alice stood beside him, weeping now, waiting for 9-1-1 dispatch to answer the line.
Another roar from the hurricane slammed the house.
Outside the bedroom door, they heard the slow, steady approach of footsteps.
The boy, his face thrown into deathly shadows by the flickering candlelight, walked into the room.
Alice dropped her phone and staggered back against the far wall. Her mouth hung open, locked in a silent scream.
Brian turned to face the boy, James Thomas, and shouted, “No! You can’t have her! She’s not yours to take!”
He continued with the chest compressions, his eyes darting between Cassandra and the boy who stood beside the bed, waiting.
Louisa’s voice echoed in his head.
He wants Cassandra. Right now, she’s in a place that’s not quite life, not quite death. It’s a place where the
bhoot
can grab hold of her. She’s in his domain.
The boy walked closer, reaching out with a tiny hand to touch her.
“Mommy.”
The words were clear, but his lips didn’t move.
“No! She’s not your mother!” Brian screamed.
“Come on baby, come back to me.” His voice quivered with desperation. His arms ached and tears stung his eyes.
One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, push!
Cassandra’s body suddenly arced beneath him and she gasped for air.
“Mommy?”
Brian struggled to get his weight off her chest and stomach.
The boy watched him with cold eyes from the other side of the bed.
Cassandra’s eyes fluttered open. Brian pulled her body to the far end of the bed, away from the boy. He wrapped his arms around her chest, grateful to feel it rise and fall with the rush of air. Her skin was cold and clammy but she was awake and alive.
Alice stood frozen in her fear, behind the
bhoot.
When he kissed Cassandra’s cold lips, she struggled to say, “B-Brian?” His name came out in a dry, pained rasp.
“Yes, Cass, it’s me. Did you hear me calling for you?”
Her eyes rolled and her head turned to the boy. His face had gone slack, emotionless. She turned back to Brian, confused. She whispered, “I’m never going to leave you. I love you.”
Brian’s body shook with sobs. “I know, honey, I know.”
He locked gazes with the boy and felt the contempt, the despair. The door slammed shut, opened and closed again with deliberate, violent force. The floor quaked and the lathing in the ceiling sounded like it was being pulled apart.
The boy reached out to Cassandra. Brian tightened his grip on her, edging her further away from the
bhoot
’s grasp.
Cassandra screamed, “No! No! No!”
The image of James Thomas began to fade, becoming more ghost-like. His body turned to mist. Only his eyes stayed in sharp focus, clouded with anger, with confusion, and finally, with pained acceptance.
When Cassandra shouted, he broke apart, parts of him reduced to dark shadows fleeing in all directions like a spooked murder of crows.
Outside, the brunt of the storm passed, leaving an ear-popping silence in its wake. Their cries filled the room as the electricity returned, bathing them in soft, white light.
Alice rushed to lock them both in a shaky embrace.
Cassandra touched both their faces with cold fingertips, and smiled for the first time since their wedding.
The hinges on the door squealed as it opened once again. Brian looked up and saw nothing. Better still, he felt nothing.
He stared into Cassandra’s eyes and said, “Welcome back.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Brian woke up to the sound of birds whistling in the bird feeder Cassandra had hung outside their window. He wasn’t crazy about attracting the early risers, but she loved being woken up by their songs.
His arm reached out for her and touched a still-warm, empty side of the bed.
Stretching and yawning, his brain already buzzed with things that needed to be done. He and Cass had been up most of the night talking about plans for her re-birthday. It was the first anniversary of the night of the hurricane, the night she came back to him. She said her re-birthday was just as important as her birthday. Plus, it was a great excuse to get presents twice a year.
He chuckled.
They’d also talked about selling the house and moving somewhere up the line in Westchester County. She thought it was a great idea. It would give them a fresh start. For Brian, the house held too many dark memories of things he wanted to leave far behind. Alice and his parents had been more than generous in their offers of financial assistance to get them back on track. Without them, they would have been in insurmountable debt.
“We should put it on the market soon,” she’d said. “Besides, I can’t look at that room downstairs without thinking about being sick.”
Brian put his robe on and called out, “Hey Cass, do you want pancakes or waffles?”
Shuffling and still yawning, he heard her voice in the other room.
“I just took the test. Yep, I’m pregnant. No, I haven’t told him yet.”
Brian’s heart swelled with the news.
I’m going to be a father!
And this after all of the doctors telling them she’d never be able to conceive. So much for their opinions.
This was too much. He couldn’t resist breaking in on her phone conversation. Was she talking to her mother? To Marybeth?
I’ll bet there’s a lot of screaming on the other end.
When he entered the room, his stomach dropped to the floor.
Cassandra sat in her rocking chair, holding the little plastic pregnancy test.
The boy, James Thomas, stood in a dark corner of the room, every cell of his incorporeal body tuned to Cassandra.
She didn’t notice Brian’s presence.
“You see. I promised I’d never leave you, James. Come on. Come to Mommy.”
He moved across the room with preternatural speed. Brian watched in mute horror as he knelt before Cassandra, bent forward and melted into her body like smoke through a screen window.
Brian backed out of the room, unable to tear his eyes away from the awful tableau.
Cassandra closed her eyes, smiling, rubbing her belly and humming a lullaby.
“Oh hush thee my baby,
Thy sire was a knight.
Thy mother a lady,
Both lovely and bright.
The woods and the glens from
The towers which we see,
They are all belonging,
Dear baby to thee.”
About the Author
Hunter Shea is the author of the novels
Sinister Entity
,
Forest of Shadows,
Swamp Monster Massacre
and
Evil Eternal
. His short story collection,
Asylum Scrawls
, is the first of an annual anthology that will highlight the brightest new talents in terror and suspense. His obsession with all things horrific has led him to real life exploration of the paranormal, interviews with exorcists and other things that would keep most people awake with the lights on. Hunter is also the proud and slightly demented co-host of the Monster Men video podcast. A native New Yorker all his life, he waits with Biblical patience for the Mets to win a World Series. You can read about his latest travails and communicate with him at
www.huntershea.com
.
Look for these titles by Hunter Shea
Now Available:
Forest of Shadows
Evil Eternal
Swamp Monster Massacre
The Graveyard Speaks
Sinister Entity
Coming Soon:
The dead still hate!
Forest of Shadows
© 2011 Hunter Shea
John Backman specializes in inexplicable phenomena. The weirder the better. So when he gets a letter from a terrified man describing an old log home with odd whisperings, shadows that come alive, and rooms that disappear, he can’t resist the call. But the violence only escalates as soon as John arrives in the remote Alaskan village of Shida. Something dreadful happened there. Something monstrous. The shadows are closing in…and they’re out for blood.
Enjoy the following excerpt for
Forest of Shadows:
They screamed.
And impossible as it seemed, George Bolster was grateful for his family’s unbridled cries of terror as they masked the other unearthly sounds that ghosted their every move.
Whump. Whump. Whump.
The steady beat of an unseen giant’s footsteps up the stairs.
“Into the bedroom, now!” George shouted at his panicked wife and sons. They scrabbled into the room at the end of the hall while the floor quaked beneath their feet. Once inside, George slammed the door shut and braced his back against its oak frame. His sons, Cory and Matt, clung to Sharon’s sides, their eyes wide and terrified, darting around the room, looking for death in benign shadows.
“Sharon, push the dresser over.”
Stifling a sob that made her entire body shudder, she reluctantly pulled away from the boys and ran over to the large dresser. George grunted as the unseen force in the hallway pounded against the door.
“Hurry!”
Matt leapt to his mother’s side to help push the heavy piece of furniture across the floor and against the bedroom door. Cory, who was only six and barely forty pounds, could only curl up into a corner and whimper. A clap of thunder made the entire house quake and they all shrieked in unison. George still pressed his weight against the door while Sharon and Matt gathered as much bulk as they could find and piled it as high and as fast as they could on top of the dresser.
The door shook as it was rammed again and again, so hard that the arch above the doorway began to crack. It wouldn’t be long before the entire wall would collapse and then where could they go?
A deep thrumming emanated from beyond the door, a sonorous hum that was not so much heard as it was felt. It hurt like hell. They felt it vibrate their chest walls, disrupt the hammering rhythm of their hearts. It crept up their spines and exploded in their skulls, threatening to liquefy their brains.
So they screamed. Fighting fire with fire. The pile of debris stashed against the door shook as the pounding on the door continued. Staggering on jellied knees, George peered out the sole window into the moon-bathed woods outside. It was only a drop of twenty feet or so. Maybe, if he jumped first, he could catch them one at a time and they could run into the woods. But it was so damn cold, well below zero, and they didn’t have a coat between them. Could they possibly navigate their way through the snow-steeped forest to their nearest neighbor a mile away?
Suddenly, everything stopped. The pain ceased and they all dropped to their knees. What sounded like a thousand tiny claws ticked across the hardwood floor of the hallway, retreating to the other end and descending the staircase that lead to the living room below.
George shook his head and went back to the window.
“Is it gone, Daddy?” Cory whispered.
“I don’t know. Everyone stay quiet.”
He kept his eyes on the faintly illuminated yard and his ears tuned for any sounds within the house. Matt and Cory muffled their cries into their mother’s breast.
“What are you thinking?” Sharon mouthed.
George pointed out the window and used two fingers to simulate running. It was their only chance.
“George, we’ll freeze to death.”
One look from her husband ended any protest. Gently pulling the boys from her sides, she went over to the dresser and found two blankets, several pairs of sport socks and one wool hat. She worked in silence, wrapping the boys in the blankets and putting an extra pair of socks on their shoeless feet. Cory, being the youngest and frailest, got the hat.