Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

Chapter 51

Kendra bounced on the bed—stay and play—and grabbed the sprinkler pipe, planning to swing until she could kick the crazy woman off of Dad. But the pipe came loose from the ceiling, yanking jagged sheets of gypsum with it.

Kendra fell, snapping off one of the bed’s posters, then sprawled backward with a spluff, her fall softened by the wet blankets.

Ann hovered over her, and in the strange flickering light, her eyes were bright as embers, pulsing with the rage of the world.

“You can’t have it,” Ann said, grabbing Kendra’s hair with one hand. The woman grinned, and her teeth were impossibly long, far too big for her mouth. She was no longer a woman, really. More like a badly drawn creature from the imagination of some sicko cryptozoologist.

Rat face.

Dad moaned from somewhere miles away in steamy jungle night.

Kendra rolled until she was halfway off the bed, but there was no floor below, only a deep, inky blackness that looked like it would suck everything down into the dead belly of the world. The walls were still there, the bulky outlines of furniture still revealed by the emergency lights outside, but the abyss below was big enough to swallow it all. The water drops fell on and on until their reddish silver glints vanished forever.

Even if she escaped the clutch of the demon, she wouldn’t dare leave the bed and touch that bottomless morass. It looked cold enough to kill.

Ann tangled her fingers in Kendra’s hair and jerked. The demon wallowed on her, hot breath on her cheek. The mouth descended and teeth scraped the soft skin around her jugular.

Kendra squirmed and felt the pressure in her pocket. Pencil.

“You should never have been born,” the demon hissed in her ear.

Kendra dug her hand in her pocket, fingers settling on the solid thickness of Big Fattie.

Works for vampires, but it won’t reach the heart.If this creature’s even got one.

She flipped up with her hips, which drew Demon Thing’s mouth closer but allowed her to yank the pencil free. Hot slaver spilled on her neck, erasing the chill of the spraying water.

The creature’s grip eased just a little and she opened her eyes. Dad had Demon Thing by the shoulders, trying to pull it away. The creature had gotten even uglier, with wrinkled grayish skin and eyes burning toward blue-white intensity.

As the teeth closed, Kendra drove the pencil into the creature’s ear.

“Draw blood!” she yelled, as Big Fattie’s sharpened tip plowed through the fragile chambers into the demon’s ear.

The creature’s shriek drowned out the latest wave of fire sirens, and it stiffened and jerked upright. The spotlight swept the window, revealing the creature in silhouette as it wiped at the wound. Black ichor gushed from the thing’s head. It swung an arm out, knocking Dad from the bed.

Kendra called his name and reached for him, expecting him to be gone, just as Gruff had gone, down into a dark hole in the heart of God. But the floor was solid now, and he came up with the bed’s broken poster.

“Go back to hell,” he yelled, driving the jagged tip into the creature’s chest.

Another shriek shattered the room, and the demon’s face contorted, shifting rapidly to Ann Vandooren’s, Rochester’s, Eloise Lanier’s, Gruff’s, Rodney Froehmer’s, then dozens of others, shuffled like cards, moving back through time until at last it settled on the woman in the first-floor painting.

“Margaret Percival,” Dad said.

Margaret looked down at the chunk of wood protruding from her chest. “You should never make promises,” she said, her voice no longer deep and demonic.

She pulled the bedpost from her chest. She looked happy in the rain.

“This way,” came a voice from the door.

Cody.