Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

Chapter 35

The pressure in his head was enormous. Like sitting at the bottom of the ocean.

He couldn’t hear Paige anymore.

Couldn’t hear the rain on the roof.

Not even the mad thumping of his heart.

There was a single source of illumination—a salt lamp resting atop a chest of drawers at the foot of Paige’s bed. The fractured crystal put out a soft orange glow that failed to reach the corners of the room.

Grant’s vision doubled.

The lamp split into two orbs of light.

He blinked and they came back together.

The pressure swelled inside his eyes, his lungs struggling with each breath to inflate.

A stabbing pain thrummed through his inner ear in time with his pulse.

Fighting the disorientation, he tried to tune back into the rage that had brought him here.

He grabbed the salt lamp and tightened his grip on the knife.

A dust ruffle skirted the bed, an inch of blackness between the hem and the floor.

Grant stumbled toward it and dropped to his hands and knees, the fog in his head thickening fast, thoughts and intentions flattening under the pressure.

He put the side of his head on the floor and reached for the dust ruffle.

Some remote part of his brain screaming at him to stand up, turn around, get out, but its voice was growing quieter every second.

Under the bed.

He was staring under the bed.

He’d walked into his sister’s house thirty hours ago, and since then he’d been fighting this moment. Why had he resisted?

The light in his hand spilled into the darkness.

Dusty hardwood floor.

A pile of blankets.

Grant pushed the light forward, dragging himself behind it.

As his head passed beneath the bed frame, he registered a peculiar smell.

Vinegar and electrical burn.

The blankets shifted.

Grant reached out, took hold, pulled them aside.

The light eked onto two sacs of spider eggs—rust colored clusters that resembled the overripe drupelets of blackberries.

As Grant stared at them, a translucent membrane slid over one, and then the other, and retracted simultaneously.

The pressure in his head vanished. He dropped the knife.

Not spider eggs. Eyes. He was staring into a pair of eyes.

From behind the blankets, a long, slender arm shot out, and fingers encircled his neck.

# # #

It is dark and he is not alone.

There is nothing before, nothing after.

It is all and only now.

The floor beneath him rushes away. His stomach lifts. He’s gripped with the sensation of falling at an inconceivable speed, hurtling through darkness at what has been pulling him toward this room since he first set foot in the house.

He crashes into a terrible intellect.

For the first time in his life, he is aware—truly aware—of his mind. Its weakness and vulnerability. His skull is a pitiful firewall. The invasion effortless. Everything he loves and hates and fears is unhoused, his private circuitry torn out and laid bare.

Before Grant can even wonder what it wants, it is unrolling his mind like a parchment.

He feels the synaptic structure of his brain changing, being rebuilt, reprogrammed.

The tingle of neuron fire.

Thoughts he’s never had materialize as if they’ve always been.

A sequence of directions take shape.

Right turns and left turns.

Street names.

All at once, his mind cauterizes shut, and he is left with the absolute knowledge of what he must do next.

The eyes blink again.

The floor returns.

He is no longer under the bed but standing beside it and cradling something in a tangle of blankets.