HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Henry marched right up to the man, a smile on his face. The smile disarmed the man and caused him to hesitate. When Henry was close enough, he reached out and hit the man on the chin with a closed fist. The man went down and the bat fell from his hands. The woman rose to her feet, throwing out her arms as if in that way she could stem the violence. The child screamed.

  Henry took up the bat and brought it down over and over on the man's head until it looked like a bloody burst melon. Then he moved toward the females.

  Angelique again followed, unable not to. She wanted to see what was going to happen. Would he kill them both, too? Was murder his game? How plebeian. What a common monster he was turning out to be.

  Here more moonlight invaded the room from big high grim-streaked windows. The woman frantically turned in semi-circles looking for another weapon. She fell on a backpack, but before she could get to whatever it held, Henry had her by the hair of her head, slinging her onto her back on the stained concrete floor. When the child ran to help her mother, she was struck, propelled backward to land on her bottom. She screamed louder while she watched Henry beat her mother to pulp. Blood sprayed across the cement, the blood splatter black in the moonlight. The woman hadn't even had time to give voice to a protest.

  Then Henry dropped the bat and reached for the child. That's when he changed. It happened quicker than the human eye could follow. Angelique followed a bit of the change, but it was like looking at a blurry picture. Now she was looking at the squat, head-hanging, freak-skinned monster. He bent the girl backwards over one knee and peered into her face. The child was too afraid now to even make a sound. Her mouth stood open, but nothing issued from it. Her eyes bulged and tears fell from red-rimmed lids down her gray, shrunken cheeks.

  Angelique stepped closer. She felt it all—the child's terror, the monster's need, the emptiness of the warehouse, the complete and utter loss of all hope. She saw the moon reflected like a white marble in the girl's glassy eyes. “Now what?” she asked, incapable of staying quiet.

  The creature turned it's pendulous head on the thick, crusty neck and showed his nightmare face. His nose was bulbous and the nostrils flared. His eyes were the muddy green she remembered and in their depths she could see things wriggling. Pus oozed from scabs and open raw wounds gaped. “Watch this closely,” he said.

  He returned his gaze to the child. He leaned closer and closer to her terrified face. “Pretty little one,” he whispered in a gravelly voice that came from the depths of a fiery hell. “Come with me.” The girl's back arched, her legs kicked, and her silent mouth opened even wider. Her eyes rolled back into her head. The bar of silver moonlight across her face revealed a tautness of the skin that made Angelique think it might snap and split to show muscle and bone beneath. But it held, the skin pressed against the tiny skull until all the bone structure was apparent. She was pressing up, trying to escape her frail body and the beast who bent over her.

  Then the most incredible thing happened that Angelique had ever seen. The soul made itself known. It squeezed up past the esophagus, into the mouth, over the tongue, and out the lips. It took the form of an achromatic, foggy snake. The sinuous rope of soul rose up from the body and at that precise moment, the beast swooped down and covered the little girl's mouth with his own. The sucking sound echoed in the cavernous warehouse and was more chilling than the screaming or the bashing of a man and woman to death. The girl's chest first rose up, producing a hump, and then it deflated, all the life-giving air from her small body sucked out along with her small, gray soul.

  She went limp. Dead. A silence invaded the warehouse that was so deep they might have been sequestered at the bottom of a mine. Or on a cold, frosted planet lost in space.

  A second later the beast dropped the little body to the concrete, discarding her as someone would drop off a bag of trash. He stood, hunched over with his head down, chin on his chest.

  “Now she is mine,” he said. “She's in my legion.”

  Again, quicker than the eye could see, he changed into the human she called Henry. One second he was his true self, the unnatural monster, and the next he was just another nameless human being. He stood tall, gangly, throwing a stick shadow behind him. “Let's go,” he said. “We're done here.” He kicked the bat aside and it rolled across the warehouse floor alternately through pools of blood and pools of moonlight, ending in darkness.

  Angelique knew of no creature like this, not in God's heaven, in the dark void, or on the earth. “Where have you come from?” she asked. “What are you doing here? Who made you? Where is your 'legion'?”

  “Enough time for all that,” he said, starting off across the big warehouse toward the door he'd entered, trusting she would follow.

  Angelique knew she could use such a powerful creature as this, but probably only if he wanted her to. More likely, he would use her for some nefarious plot of his own. If she let him manipulate her. Which she wouldn't.

  She felt her buried wings stir in her back and wondered if she should bring them out and try to dispatch this ugly man-thing and be done with him.

  But he hadn't answered her questions yet. And she wanted to know everything. She wanted to know it all.

  #

  It was morning, a dim overcast San Francisco chilly morning, before Nick awoke. Jody, having dozed on and off during the night, came to wakefulness right away. He hopped from the chair and to the bedside. He scrubbed at his eyes. “How are you?”

  Nick blinked twice, raised a hand to place on his bandaged stomach. He winched in pain and removed his hand to let it fall on the bed at his side. “I'm better. I think. I guess you found a doctor?”

  “Not much of one, but I have to admit he was pretty meticulous while performing surgery on you.”

  “Here? In the bed?”

  “He didn't have time for you to be transported anywhere. He said you were ten minutes away from dying.”

  “I don't think I can get up.”

  “No, you've got to stay immobile. You can't even eat solid food for two weeks. I'll go out and get some soup or some broth.”

  Nick smiled weakly. “You're a good friend, Jody. I don't know what I would have done without you. You saved my life.”

  “Oh, gosh.” Jody turned his back and headed for the door, dismissing any further gratitude from Nick. Then he remembered. He turned back. “I don't have any money left. I gave it all to the doctor to get him to come here.”

  Nick carefully reached into his back pocket to withdraw a battered wallet. “Here, take it.”

  Inside the wallet Jody found three crisp new hundred dollar bills. “Wow, where'd you come by this much money?”

  Nick again smiled. “Reno was a gambling town, remember? I played a little dice, a little roulette, some cards, got lucky.”

  “That's great! I didn't know what we were going to do for dough because sure as God is in heaven and ignoring the hell out of us, I'm not leaving you alone here while I go to work.”

  Taking one of the bills, Jody placed the wallet back on the bed near Nick's hand. “I'll be back in a jiff.”

  Nick lay looking at the ceiling once Jody was gone. Jody had said, Surely as God is in heaven and ignoring the hell out of us...

  It seemed to Nick that was an absolute truth. God hadn't taken any notice of him for millenniums. He probably didn't even remember those of the fallen like himself. They had fought him and been cast out and forgotten. He wasn't going to intervene to stop a knifing by a vagrant or to heal the wound that knife made. He wasn't in the least interested in Nisroc, the rogue angel.

  A severe sadness overcame Nick and he shut his eyes. The sadness was like a palpable thing, a suffocating blanket thrown over his entire body, permeating not only his mind, but his body as well. He had felt such sadness before, when lost in the dark void, uncared for, unforgiven. It was so deep, this feeling, that it made him ache and weep inside. Had he asked for forgiveness? Yes, he had, in a million different ways on a million different occasions. His pleas went o
ut into the cosmos and evaporated like breath on a wind. He could not even imagine God now, though he had once been in his presence and made of the same substance as Him. God was an imagining anyway, appearing to each being as that being was able to perceive Him, but after falling, Nisroc could not even conjure up an image at all. Was God tall, large, beautiful? Was he made of pure light? Was he energy, swirling larger than all the universes put together?Was he man or woman or something other?

  I am sorry, Nick thought, trying to project that thought as far into the sky above as he could imagine. Won't you hear me?

  Won't you listen?

  Can't you forgive me?

  Nothing came back, not a feeling, thought, or tingle in his being. It was as if God had vanished and left Nick in the world on his own. Just as He'd done leaving him in the darkness that was without end. It was as if God did not exist and had never existed.

  “That can't be true. I know there is a God. I am angel,” he said aloud bravely. His words echoed in the room and made him feel foolish.

  Yes, he was angel, and lying in a bed with his gut split and sewn back together. The pain came now that his mind had left the heavens. It was a red hot poker in his belly, a fire that burned his veins and turned them to dust. His mind struggled with the pain, repudiating it, willing it away.

  I deserve this and worse, he thought. I spent all those years as Angelique's help mate, doing as she asked—except for loving Mary—doing whatever it took to mold people and ensnare them and deceive them for our own reasons, for our own enhancement. I used people and pretended it didn't matter, I was lost anyway. I let Angelique murder people and manipulate them to her own ends while I stood by and said nothing. I am as contemptible as she. I am as lost. I am nothing more than a worn out, injured angel on the run, scared of my own shadow, fearful of a bad angel in the guise of a child.

  A small voice in the back of his head said, Stop running.

  His eyes flew open. Where had that thought originated? Had he just told himself to stand up, to be a man, to be a real angel?

  He didn't know if he could. He didn't know if he had any hope of defeating Angelique. She had ruled over him for so long...

  Yet he'd never tested her until now. He didn't truly know whether he could defeat her or not. Should he take that chance? If he failed it meant his dispatch back into the nether world of nothing--where no voice at all spoke to him, no sunlight fell on his face, no heart beat in his chest, and no love waited for him anywhere. Existence there was a long, unendurable suffering. A waiting. And nothing more.

  Could he chance trading this world and all its pleasures and experiences for the dark?

  He fell asleep thinking the same thing over and over. Was it worth it? Was it worth it? Could he chance losing everything?

  #

  When he came from uneasy sleep, or unconsciousness, Jody hadn't returned. The light leaking through the dirty window was thinner and the room overcome with shadows. Nick tried to raise his head and shoulders, but the pain that rose from his midsection was so great he groaned and fell back.

  Then she came to him. He knew she wasn't real, she wasn't in the room in a physical way. It was a piece of her intelligence forming the small child next to his bed, the black wings spread and shivering.

  “Go away,” he whispered. He could feel her malevolence like a black sheath of hate and impending violence hanging over him. Her eyes stared hard at where he lay, taking in his condition.

  “You're not dying,” she said. “Not yet. Pity.”

  He closed his eyes to her, but felt forced to look again. She still stood there, ephemeral, diaphanous as a length of sheer cloth hanging in a breezeway. She vibrated, her whole body and great wings shimmering, floating, going away and coming back, like a dream.

  “Leave me be. Don't come for me.” He spoke now with more authority. She could not hurt him as a vision. He feared her but a little.

  “I heard you trying to talk to the Creator. Fool! He doesn't hear you.”

  Nick sighed heavily. “In that respect I'm sure you're right. And I am a fool. A fool for ever wanting to come here to be your puppet. I hated you so much. You have no idea how much I hated you.”

  Now she laughed, but it was as if from a distance, somewhere outside of the room, down the hall, across the rooftop, floating to him through forests and over plains.

  “I'm coming, Nick. I'm coming for you. Be ready.”

  Despair and lost hope came into him—either from her or from the knowing she was always right. She was coming. He couldn't outrun her. He couldn't escape. Not on a ship, not on any man-made conveyance. Not even on hope and prayer.

  She wavered in the air at his bedside, finally disappearing like a wraith going home.

  He didn't know how near or far she might be. He suspected the former over the latter since she was able to find him and appear in his room. Since she was able to send an assassin to try to kill him...

  He had to get well and do it soon. The antibiotics would help, but he needed to instruct his very cells to repair the damage quicker, faster, sooner. He needed all his strengths, both man and angel, for what was coming. Angelique never made idle threats. She was furious with him. If she did not destroy his human body, chasing him back to the void, she would find some way to cause him the greatest suffering—more than a knife wound, more than anything another man might do to him.

  He thought of Jody, the little man who seemed so devoted to him. Just then the door opened and his friend entered. He smiled at him, but his thoughts were dark. Angelique would destroy this man first. Just for being with Nick, just for being in the way. She'd destroy him to make Nick watch.

  Jody brought over his purchases. He had a covered bowl that when he set it down and uncovered it, the rising steam smelled of chicken soup, of garlic and onion. He pulled a bottle of red wine from a bag at his feet.

  “Look what I've got for you,” he said. “And more bandages! And a bag of chocolate candy! And apples and oranges.”

  As he withdrew his prizes, Nick tried to form in his mind what he would say.

  “Jody...”

  The little man stopped piling the groceries on the chair and looked up, a little alarm going off in his eyes. “What's wrong? Are you worse?”

  “No, no, I'm going to be all right. I'm not really...a man...you know. I'll heal fast.” To prove it, he managed to leverage himself from the pillow and prop himself on his elbows. He swallowed a wince.

  “What is it then? Something's wrong, I hear it in your voice.”

  “You're going to have to leave, Jody. You're going to have to get out of here, away from me.”

  Jody cocked his head. “It's that freak girl, isn't it? She's been in my dreams, trying to scare me.”

  “Has she? Well, she can do more than that, Jody. She's the one who sent the man at the door. It was her. She can make you wish you'd never been born. I don't want to take the chance she might hurt you. You have to go.”

  “But...” Jody spread his hands in supplication. “I thought...I thought we were going to take a ship, we were going to sail away from her.”

  “There's no point. She came to me while you were gone. She's not that far away. She'll be here before we could leave and even if we did, she'd follow. I'll be all right, I told you. I can manage on my own now. I'll give you another hundred dollar bill and you take one of those ships down in the harbor. You leave on it, the very next one leaving, I don't care where it's going. You need to be far away from here soon because she's coming.”

  “You know that for sure? Can't I at least stay until you're on your feet?”

  “I know it for sure and for certain. And no, you can't stay. I'm sorry, Jody, you've been the best friend.”

  “You can't...protect me if she comes?”

  “I don't know so I can't chance it. If anything happened to you, I'd...well, I couldn't take it. Imagine if it had been you who first opened the door and faced that killer.”

  Jody had his bag of things together in minut
es. He had let go of all protests. He leaned down and gave Nick a brief hug. “It's been a real pleasure.”

  “Likewise,” Nick said. He felt his vision cloud as if tears were there so he turned his head aside and let Jody go.

  Jody said at the door, turning back, “Now I know there's a heaven when before I wasn't sure. That is a fine gift you gave me. The best gift.”

  And then he was gone, the door closed, the room smelling of chicken soup and garlic and onions.

  #

  Down in the second floor stairwell, Jody moved swiftly to a narrow door he'd noticed when climbing up the stairs earlier. It had a rusty bronzed sign on it: CLEANING SUPPLIES. It was locked, but not too hard to open with a nail file Jody carried in his pocket.

  He slipped inside, pushing a box farther to the back with his feet, and pulling closed the door. It was dark as midnight, but eventually his eyes adjusted to the gloom enough for him to find a place to perch on two boxes of cleaning solutions. He left his bag on the floor, slid the nail file back in his pocket.

  If Nick thought he was going to abandon him, he was mistaken. He knew there had been no hope of changing the angel's mind, so this place was going to be home until the devil came. No matter how long it took, he could wait. When hungry or needing to relieve himself, he'd slip out to the lobby and the street, otherwise he'd sleep here, wait here. In this dark musty closet. Where only a little man could fit.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE MAKING OF A MONSTER

  The next leg of the trip found them in Reno, Nevada. Angelique wasted no time in discovering the hotel where Nick and the little person had stayed. From there she tracked their scent to the bus station and from the ticket man, after her description of the two, she found they had bought tickets to Sacramento, California.

  Henry drove them out of town, admiring the new casinos as they passed them by. “I like a bit of gambling. Too bad we're in such a rush,” he said.