A Debt to be Paid
Page 9
She turned around and there was nothing. The closet was closed and so was the basement.
She must have been hearing things.
About the Author
Patrick Lacey was born and raised in a haunted house. He currently spends his nights and weekends writing about things that make the general public uncomfortable. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, his Pomeranian, his mildly psychotic cat, and his muse, who is likely trying to kill him. Follow him on Twitter (@patlacey), find him on Facebook, and visit his website at patrickclacey.wordpress.com.
The Dover Demon is real…and it has returned.
The Dover Demon
© 2015 Hunter Shea
In 1977, Sam Brogna and his friends came upon a terrifying, alien creature on a deserted country road. What they witnessed was so bizarre, so chilling, they swore their silence. But their lives were changed forever.
Decades later, the town of Dover has been hit by a massive blizzard. Sam’s son, Nicky, is drawn to search for the infamous cryptid, only to disappear into the bowels of a secret underground lair. The Dover Demon is far deadlier than anyone could have believed. And there are many of them. Can Sam and his reunited friends rescue Nicky and battle a race of creatures so powerful, so sinister, that history itself has been shaped by their secretive presence?
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Dover Demon:
What a waste of time, Kelly Weathers thought as she took drags from the bottle of whiskey between showering, changing into her dress and putting on her makeup. Def Leppard pounded from the boom box she kept on a shelf in her bathroom. It was the good stuff, not the pseudo-pop crap they churned out after Steve Clark bit the big one. How can Janie be the only one who doesn’t see that Kirk is gay? It’s not like she’s some dumb kid, and Kirk sure as hell isn’t working hard to hide the fact that he prefers a stiff one to a muff. Do I get my gift back if they don’t make it through the first year? She adjusted her breasts so they sat nicely in the expensive bra she’d gotten at Victoria’s Secret a couple of months back when ‘Janie the hero’ set her up on a blind date with one of the groomsmen. Yep, he was gay, too.
It was only a mile walk from her house to the Dartmouth Pub where the bachelorette party was being held. No need to drive, so no need to watch what she drank. Before she left, downing what was left of the Jim Beam, she’d admired herself in the full-length mirror by her front door.
“Not bad for a fifty-three year old broad,” she’d said to her reflection. Husbands and kids destroyed a woman’s body. To that end, she had done her best to defy Father Time and gravity better than most women her age. Staying single was more than a choice, it was a vocation. Makeup hid the wrinkles and dark circles under her eyes so no one was the wiser. Her jet-black hair, aided every other month by a trip to her favorite salon in Boston for a dye touch up, hung in loose ringlets along her shoulders. Her sharp jaw and naturally plump lips made the local gossip queens titter about secret plastic surgery. If they only knew it was just a matter of genetics—her mother had been quite the stunner until Alzheimer’s robbed her of her beauty and her spark seemingly overnight. Well, mom’s gene pool and not passing a child through her birth canal, thank you very much. Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean it’s your duty to be a mother. She’d been smart enough to realize she would never be cut out for motherhood at an early age, thereby saving some poor child from a miserable childhood that he or she could use to blame on a host of personal shortcomings as they got older, bending the ear of some overpriced shrink.
Walking down the path from her house, she couldn’t resist taking a quick detour to Farm Road. The heel of one shoe got caught between some loose rocks on the side of the road, stopping her in her tracks. It was almost nine o’clock and the midsummer sun had dipped below the massive tree line. Damn trees. They were everywhere you turned.
“I live in the world’s capital of trees,” she’d told everyone who would listen at the Boston accounting company where she worked. They thought Dover sounded just darling and would trade places with her in an instant.
They didn’t realize she was a prisoner here. There was no sense trying to explain it to them. Not that they’d give a burning turd anyway.
As she struggled to extricate her foot, she thought she saw something moving to her right. The cool buzz of the Jim Beam fought a war with instant sobriety.
“I see you sons of bitches. What are you afraid of me for?”
Kelly squatted close to the ground, her nylon tearing at the knee as she settled into the gravel.
So now here she was, on her knees like a back-alley whore or Sunday school supplicant, talking to a bush in the dying daylight. The cooling breeze made her eyes water, but she refused to blink. Not yet. She could win a staring contest with anyone—or anything.
It was there, she just knew it. The leaves of the bush riffled. Could have been the wind. Kelly squinted, focusing on the dark spaces within the scrawny limbs of the hearty, untrimmed bush.
“Blink, you little asshole,” she said, her thick tongue actually spitting out asshole.
She fumbled in her purse for Betty. Her fingers flicked away her makeup bag, wallet, rolls of Certs, spare change and various other debris that had accumulated within its depths. She kept Betty in a zippered compartment at the bottom of the bag. Kelly pulled back the zipper, her eyes never wavering from the bush.
Betty’s heavy, icy reassurance jacked up her confidence.
Cocking the hammer back on the .38, she whispered, “Nothing to be afraid of. As long as we all play nice, there’s no reason for Betty to make a peep.”
The air was preternaturally silent. This time of night, the surrounding woods should have been bleating with the caterwauling of night bugs and the scurrying of nocturnal critters fresh from a day’s sleep. That’s how she knew she wasn’t seeing things. Even the wildlife knew there was something hiding in that bush, waiting for her to flinch.
They were fast—possessing logic-defying speed when it came to hide-and-seek. Kelly knew from experience that if she so much as flicked her eyes away for an instant, it would be gone and there’d be no hope of following it to its hiding place. Natural born hiders, they knew exactly how to keep their presence secret. Unless you were looking for them, you’d never even snatch a blurry glimpse in your periphery.
But, if you knew they were about and you purposefully sought them out, there were times when you could snag them in your sights as they skulked around. Spotting them wasn’t easy. Just ask the scores of curious and serious-minded cryptid hunters alike who had come to Dover hoping for their own encounter. All of them had walked away without a story to tell. And the stories they did tell were fueled by delusion or Budweiser or both.
The only people who knew the signs were the very few who had seen them before, larger than life, stranger than a fever dream, a moment in time that could capture you in amber if you let it. Kelly would never have been able to explain the how to anyone who asked. It wasn’t anything tactile, a triggering of the senses that alerted her to their presence. It was an inexplicable knowing, an itch at the base of her skull that could never be scratched.
The problem over the past few years was that her need for a drink often brought on that same itch. The only way to get it to stop was through anesthetizing herself with Jim Beam, Sam Adams, Johnnie Walker and a host of other gentlemen callers that came in a bottle.
On a night like tonight, when that itch should have been nothing more than a novocained patch of brain matter, it came anyway, luring her to this spot.
The wind shifted, now going from east to west, bringing with it the ever-present musk of horse manure. Farm Road was surrounded by stables. The horses had all been safely tucked away in their barns for the night, but their essence lived on in the fields and soft summer breezes.
It would be easy to just fire a shot into the bush and be done with it. The blast would either scare
it away, wound it to the point where she could, perhaps, follow it, or outright snuff the little beast. She was fine with any of the three options.
However, it would also scare the hell out of the people nestled in their pricey homes. Sound out here carried. The cops would be called. She’d have to run home, take off her dress and pretend she’d been watching the television too loud to hear anything if they came to her door.
A particularly sharp-edged chunk of gravel bit hard into the soft flesh underneath her kneecap. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could maintain her position. Kelly noticed the slight waver of the heavy gun in her outstretched hand.
Did it just move?
A shape no bigger than the palm of a man’s hand, darker than the pitch and shadows of the night, looked as if it had moved just an inch to the left within the bush.
What if it’s a scared squirrel or skunk? Kelly thought, her dry eyes stinging.
No way. Squirrels and skunks don’t scare the other animals and bugs away.
She took a deep breath, the burning of her muscles in her arms and legs beginning to chip away at her resolve.
No, but people do. I sure did make enough noise clomping over here and cursing like Dad during one of his DIY projects when my heel got caught.
Maybe, just maybe, she could scare it out.
“Hey,” she barked, but not loud enough to be heard across the fields to the neighboring homes. “Boo!”
With her free hand, she tossed gravel into the stygian depths of the bush. The pebbles plinked against the lush green leaves, raining down among the branches.
The damn thing didn’t even flinch.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
A Debt to be Paid
Copyright © 2015 by Patrick Lacey
ISBN: 978-1-61923-119-1
Edited by Don D’Auria
Cover by Scott Carpenter
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: September 2015
www.samhainpublishing.com