Dr. Porter felt a little high. As the angel had promised, his pain receptors were turned off. He couldn’t even feel the aches he had from sleeping awkwardly in the chair, and he didn’t feel the pain of having another source, other than his own volition, move him around. His body’s moves were better than what he normally made it do. He was smooth and quick. And where was he? He was right there, in his body, but watching it all happen, as the angel told his eyes, like the rest him, where to go and what to see. They drove to Pious.
The Pollards lived in a nice, medium sized house. There was a car in the driveway that he recognized as Janet Pollard’s. She had driven Toby to the sessions despite Toby having a license and a car of his own. Dr. Porter hadn’t recommended that, but he had thought it made sense. Toby could debrief from the sessions in the car, without having to worry about driving. It was the kind of thing Janet Pollard, a conscientious mother, thought of.
Toby Pollard’s car was on the street. Dr. Porter suspected there was one more car in the garage. The angel took him to the door. They didn’t knock. They went straight for the knob. It was locked. Up to this point, the angel had not used his body in a way that violated physical laws. But now, the angel, on the second twist, made the knob turn despite it being locked. Dr. Porter wondered if that was the way it was going to be. Physical laws would be broken, but only when necessary.
Nobody came up to them as they walked inside and into the Pollards’ living room. Other than that, nothing seemed out of place. It was a neat and clean home, like Dr. Porter had imagined it would be, knowing the Pollards as he did. They moved to the side of the house and into a hall. They walked past one closed door and then into an open door. And there were Janet and Randy Pollard. What was left of the corpse of Toby’s younger brother was at the side of the bed, like it had been slung there. Janet Pollard was laid out naked on the bed, flat on her stomach. The flesh and muscles of her back were gone. The pattern was rough, as if the flesh had been ripped away. The back of her legs had also been torn into. The only reason he knew it was Janet was because her head was turned so that her face was showing.
The entire scene was gruesome, but not as bad as it could have been. The angel had spared Dr. Porter the sense of smell. It must have done some other things to keep his body from reacting to it all, because he should have been vomiting right now.
The angel turned Dr. Porter to inspect Randy a little more. It was his front that had been ravished. Dr. Porter wondered why they had been eaten differently. A couple of possibilities occurred to him. He went to speak and the angel let him. “I wonder if he couldn’t look at his mother’s face as he ate her, or if he just wanted to try the other side.”
The angel didn’t answer, but it did have him focus back on Janet Pollard, but just on her face. Dr. Porter realized that he was being given a chance to understand Toby a little better.
“She was a kind person,” Dr. Porter said. “She always concerned herself with the wellbeing of others. That was her life really, other people. But his father, that is, his biological father, was a compulsive eater. Janet was concerned with the life of those around her. His father wanted to eat. The combination, add some wicked force, was what led to this. Toby eats life.”
The angel nodded at that.
Dr. Porter considered human nature. Instinct was that we do the things of those who came before us. A baby knows to suck, because that’s what its parents did when they were babies. Instinct continued throughout life. A person felt an urge, subconsciously, to repeat the steps of those who came before him or her. Of course, that was not a simple thing, since each person came from two different lives. The path each individual felt an instinctual urge to follow was not the product of one path but a combination of two.
“Is that what it is, Dr. Porter?”
It wasn’t his voice that had asked the question. The voice that had asked the question had been powerful and deep, very unnatural. But there were remnants of the boy in that voice.
The angel turned and took them into the hall. Toby stood there. Dr. Porter looked over his client. Structurally, he was no different than before. He had not grown fur and didn’t seem to have fangs. He hadn’t even grown that much in size. But his expression was very different. He was no longer a timid boy. There was lust on his face, and confidence.
The angel would not speak to him. It just stood there, watching the boy.
“Did you know this would happen?” Toby asked.
Dr. Porter realized that when Toby had overheard him earlier, he must have thought Dr. Porter was talking to himself, thinking out loud. He wanted to shake his head, but the angel wouldn’t let him.
“Not that that angers me at all. I appreciate this gift very much. I am now closer to being alive than I ever was before. And it’s only going to get better. I’ll live in the forest and come out only to hunt. No one will ever catch me, because I’m too fast, and even if they do catch me, I’ll only escape. The more I eat, the stronger I get. The more I eat, the smarter I get.” Toby took a step toward him.
Dr. Porter wanted to step back, but the angel wouldn’t allow it. And though the angel had taken away pain, Dr. Porter still had fear. It wasn’t a physical angst. His heart wasn’t racing and his breath was normal. No, this was just mental fear, just knowing there was danger.
“I owe all that to you, Dr. Porter. And I know I should be grateful. But I can also smell things a lot better.”
Toby came all the way up to him. He sniffed him around the chest area. “My God, you smell better than anything I’ve ever smelled. You must be the most delicious person in the world.”
Toby ripped open Dr. Porter’s shirt and then he drove his teeth into his chest. Dr. Porter could definitely feel the flesh being torn loose. He didn’t experience it as pain, but he did experience it as a violation. Part of him was gone.
Toby backed off and chewed. He seemed to savor the flesh in his mouth as if it were a delicacy. Blood dripped from his lips and down his chin. Dr. Porter realized that the angel had changed his flesh in some way.
Toby reacted to it. He suddenly grabbed at his throat. Then he started choking. He fell to his knees. He reached up for Dr. Porter, but Dr. Porter could do nothing for him. The angel took his body around his client. Toby grabbed at him, but he pulled free.
“Will he die?” Dr. Porter asked when they got outside.
“Yes, very soon,” the angel responded.
So now there were two left.
***
“Did you put that there?” Dr. Porter asked, as they drove.
He felt a foreign energy. The wound Toby inflicted had healed shortly after he got into the car. His skin had simply pulled back together.
“No,” the angel said, keeping Dr. Porter’s eyes focused on the road ahead. They were headed south, on I-95, near the border of South Carolina and Georgia.
“Energy in your realm is also used as a lifeforce. Energy is what keeps your body alive. It gives your soul a place to live for a while. I simply told the energy inside you to become poison, and it did.”
“And that’s what killed Toby?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Porter thought of the ramifications for his own body. Was the deadly toxin still moving through him? Maybe it was, and the spirit was not allowing it to poison him. For now, anyway.
“The energy is not as complex as the laws make it out to be, at least not for you.”
“It is not,” the angel agreed.
They continued to drive, stopping only for gas. There was no food or water provided. They drove into the night and into Florida. Deep into that state, they pulled off the side of the road. They abandoned the car and walked into the Everglades.
***
James awoke alone in the morning. But that was fine. It was pretty warm inside the abandoned shack. The spirit was out scouting. It would come back soon and they would make their way out of the swamplands and into the city, where they would hunt.
They had yet to kill a person within the marsh. T
hey lived like the Seminoles had when the white man had come to take their land. They moved outside to make the kill and then retreated back into the swamp.
They slept in a different place every night. The first two nights they’d spent on the ground. On the second night, James had awoken to see the shadow of a figure approaching him. It had taken a little while to realize that just because the shadow was low to the ground didn’t make its source small. He knew they usually attacked from water, but this one had decided to take advantage of a sleeping prey. Once again, it was a hunter that James and the spirit did battle with. The alligator did not fight well out of water.
Though they wouldn’t kill people inside the marsh, they did kill animals. Besides the alligator, they had killed snakes and fish. Then they feasted on the flesh. It all tasted pretty much the same, like the swamp. Still, the meat was delicious. The meat was delicious because they’d had to kill it to eat it.
The kills they made in the city were awesome. One night they had stalked gang members. They had walked right into the squalor of the city and seen the intimidating figures. The men had moved fast, but the spirit had moved faster. They took on as many as four at a time, brushing with death, only to kill them with bare hands or with the weapons they took from them. Each time they went hunting for people, the victims were harder to kill. James wondered how far they would take it. He wondered about attacking the police, or attacking soldiers, right where they were stationed, bringing it to them.
James got up and moved around. His body was definitely weaker without the spirit, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been before. He was learning to be a better physical being, as the spirit said he would. The spirit’s movements were more natural to him now. Soon, he would will some of the fast movements on his own.
The cabin had been abandoned for a long time. It was not livable by most peoples’ standards. The sink and stove didn’t work. Everything was rusted and falling apart. It was basically just a few walls to sleep under. James actually preferred sleeping outside. Waking to the alligator had been one of the most exhilarating experiences yet, even though it had been easy to whip the creature once they awoke. But the spirit didn’t want him out in the open when it was out scouting, and the best time for it to scout was while he slept.
James went to the front door, which was nearly off its hinges by now. He pushed it open, only to shut it quickly.
There had been a man in the distance, walking in the tall weeds of the marsh.
Fear washed over him. He was stronger, but he wasn’t ready to do battle without the spirit. Maybe the man would just walk by. He peeped out the door again. By the man’s path, he was coming right toward the cabin. James ducked. Something had been familiar about the approaching man, but he couldn’t place it. He peeped out again and watched the figure approach for a while longer. The man came at a steady rate. He was walking very fast. The closer he got, the more familiar he was. Then James began to recognize him. But it couldn’t be right.
“Dr. Porter?”
James looked again. He thought he had to be wrong. The man just resembled Dr. Porter. But why would a man where a suit in the swamplands?
A little while later, the person was close enough for James to confirm that it was definitely Dr. Porter. He stopped, maybe ten yards away. He looked right at James.
This could not be real. It had to be a dream. But it really didn’t seem like a dream. Everything else, all aside from the shrink standing out front, seemed real enough.
Dr. Porter reached inside his suit and pulled out a large knife. He stood there with it, looking at James, like he was inviting him to come out. But James wouldn’t dare go out. Not without the spirit.
Finally, he felt the spirit come in. Confidence pushed out his fear. But the spirit didn’t move him. In fact, aside from his voice, the spirit wasn’t taking him over at all.
“I’m sorry,” the spirit said. “I had not foreseen this. I have to go.”
“What? Why? No man can beat us. No man can beat you. Let’s go kill him!”
“No man can defeat me. But that is more than a man out there. I cannot fight it. I must go.”
Just like that, the spirit was gone.
“What? No! This is not how it was supposed to be! I’m not ready!”
James looked outside, where Dr. Porter was now moving slowly toward him.
“No!” James screamed as he backed away from the door. Then, in the moments he waited for Dr. Porter to enter, he tried to calm himself. He was better now. He could fight.
The door swung open as James scanned the floor for something to use as a weapon. But his search didn’t matter. Dr. Porter was close enough that James would not get to a weapon on time. He charged the shrink.
James was almost to him when the knife moved. It was so fast that, for an instant, James wasn’t even sure if he’d been cut. Then he felt the terrible sharp pain in his neck and felt the blood coming from his throat. The next cut was merciful, and James was spared anymore pain.
He was now in the tunnel, and there was light.
***
“It was that his parents were both so able to observe and take in their environment.”
Dr. Porter said it out loud and out of the blue. The angel didn’t respond. He took that as meaning he was right.
They were now back in the car, moving north, towards Tampa. He thought of how the mental capacities of two parents must combine. A parent high in an attribute paired with one low in the attribute might result in a leveling off in their offspring, depending on the relative contribution of each parents’ genetic makeup. Two parents high in an attribute could create a child higher than both of them if the cards fell right, if both contributed that to the DNA.
“His mother was a professor and a writer. His father was an anthropologist. Both had to be very capable of absorbing their environment. They found that such absorption made their world more understandable and more interesting. Their combined effects were passed to James. He was able to absorb at even higher levels, double what either of them could, maybe more. He was even able to absorb the will of a spirit.”
Again, the angel didn’t respond. Dr. Porter went back to pondering the tunnel wall. He thought he came to another realization. “The tunnel is nothing more than the limits imposed on this universe. It’s part God and part what man has made it over many generations.”
At that, the angel actually nodded.
Ancient records reported many acts that would be seen as supernatural and impossible by today’s standards. The acts themselves had not ceased. With each successive generation, people became more scientific. That was passed on to the next generation. Just as it was the baby’s instinct to suck because that was what many generations of his ancestors had done, each generation better than the next, so was it instinct to believe in a set of rules for how the world worked, because the preceding generations had successively stamped out more and more of the other possibilities. Magic had not left the world. The human being’s ability to perceive magic had left the world.
“The tunnel walls grow stronger with each generation.”
Again, the angel nodded.
***
The southern part of California had been one of Celeste’s favorite places. But that was as much due to the set of circumstances of the days before she entered the region than to the region itself. She had loved her ocean, and for a few days, a country, Mexico, had been in her way, and the population had been sparse.
She had been so excited to see the ocean again, and the city, that she took four men on a beach her first night in San Diego. It was that night that she learned that she didn’t have to wait between them anymore; at least, she could take two, one right after another.
She was more careful now. She took men down the road before killing them. Sometimes it was in a hotel room; sometimes it was in the trees or on a secluded beach. Then she would get two more from two different locations. But before she killed them, she had them return the corpses of the previous two to plac
es near their original locations.
Her last romp of the night was always just one man, the only one she’d leave in the place where she killed him. All this made it look as if there were five scattered deaths during the night, seemingly due to natural causes.
All of this kept her busy. So she didn’t travel as fast. She was still in California, which was fine. Its coastline was perfect for her. It harbored big cities, where her exploits wouldn’t standout, especially since she could hop from one city to another. And always the ocean. She knew it would be a long time before she tired of California.
The level of energy increase with the extra men was incredible. So she didn’t mind the extra work. In fact, she enjoyed it, thinking constantly of the logistics, getting better at it all the time. She required very little sleep.
Tonight Celeste had decided to escape the city scene. She was in a nice little resort town somewhere between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. She had taken one man about ten miles down the coast. He was now waiting for her near a patch of palm trees. She was at a hotel bar selecting her next victim. She wanted to try taking from two men simultaneously, one entering her from behind while another was in her mouth.
An amazing sense caught her attention.
She could feel the heat of her victims before she took them, and she could select the ones with more lifeforce inside them. Suddenly, sitting right at the bar, she could sense a lifeforce that was nearly triple that of any she had sensed before.
But it wasn’t there in the bar. She got up from the stool, drawing glances from about every man in the place. She looked around, trying to understand where the energy came from. She went out to the patio, where five people sat, three of them men who turned their attention to her. But not one of them was the source of the energy. She stared past them.
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 46
