Slash, p.30
Slash, page 30
There was no hurry. She’d get there in time. She always did.
As she passed by the big green sign to the exit, her heart thundered. This was where it always got worse.
Her friends told her to stop doing this to herself. What was the point? In their eyes, she was only hurting herself, and there had been enough hurt in her twenty-four years to last two lifetimes.
They couldn’t understand and she would never try to make them. Life was too short to linger on the impossible.
She pulled up to the front gates and swallowed hard, her bowels loosening just a bit, as they always did. Gripping the wheel until her knuckles whitened, she pressed the brake pedal all the way to the floor, the tension in her leg turning it to stone.
“Here we go.”
She drove through, winding up the hill, the wind buffeting the car, the old shocks groaning.
God, she hated this bleak gray place.
Getting out of the car didn’t come without effort. She locked the door, turned her collar up against the biting wind.
Today was worse than the other times because….
Because it felt just like that night.
She looked up at the newly erected sign, wondering why it was even necessary. Everyone knew what this was the moment they laid eyes upon it.
FISHKILL CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
“I’ll be back soon,” she said to the mangy black cat in the carrier she’d belted into the passenger seat. Elvira, curled in a ball within the soft blanket, opened one eye and blinked. It was as good an acknowledgment as she was going to get. She opened the front cage door and ruffled between the cat’s ears. Elvira purred and closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
Sharon Viola went through the usual questions and indignities that came with visiting anyone in the maximum-security wing. This was where the fluttering nerves turned to anger. She was much more comfortable with anger.
She was shown to a seat within a small cubicle, webbing of steel in the glass before her.
Minutes later, Todd came shuffling in. He was pale, drawn, having lost almost half his body weight since the multiple surgeries to save his life. The gunshots had left him with a bad limp, bent over like an old man, his left arm close to useless and his speech, which he had to relearn to do, slurred and wandering.
A guard guided him into the chair, lifted the phone and put it in his good hand, the hand missing his fingertips. When he saw her, the cloud of fog and death in his eyes cleared.
“Ssssharon.”
It broke her heart every time. Todd had officially died that night, and had been revived, his soul deposited in this broken vessel.
A bit of Sharon died each time she saw him, and came back to life when she saw that flicker in his eyes. He’d promised he’d never leave her when he thought Otto was going to kill them. Now it was her turn to never leave him.
Sharon smiled and put her hand to the glass. She had the Hebrew letters for aleph, mem and tav tattooed on her palm. They were the letters written on the paper in the golem’s mouth.
“Todd.”
He let the phone slip from his ear and put his palm to hers.
They wept as they smiled.
* * *
Tabitha hated living at the Dunwoody. The luxury living community had way too many rules.
Don’t ride your bike on the sidewalk.
You can’t draw with chalk on the ground.
No diving in the pool.
You can’t leave your scooter anywhere but in the assigned bike/scooter rack by the front of the property.
No kids under fourteen allowed in the game room unless they have an adult with them.
No bouncing a ball or running in the apartment after eight pm.
No-no-no-no-no!
It was so much better when they had their own house in Saugerties. Back home, there were woods to play in, pools to hop and so many places to ride her bike with her friends. They had the run of the neighborhood. She could stomp all night long with her friends if she wanted to because the only thing below them was the furnace, and not that crab-ass Mrs. Detweiler.
Her parents had never adequately explained why they had to move here to this cramped apartment. She knew it was because they thought she was too young to fully understand. Just because she was young didn’t mean she was stupid.
She’d just been kicked out of the pool by the property manager because she was caught running. What was she supposed to do when that ugly Bill Weaver was chasing her with a live worm?
Pissed at Bill and the manager, she’d stormed home and hatched a plan.
Kids – and adults – weren’t allowed to dig holes anywhere on the property.
Grabbing her mother’s gardening spade (you could have potted plants on your patio), she set out for the tucked-away corner behind building eight. She was going to dig a hole where no one could see her. And she wouldn’t fill it up either. Let them find the hole and send out another one of their stupid emails reminding people of their stupid rules.
She tucked her hair behind her ears, dropped to her knees, looked around to make sure no adults were nearby, and got to work.
Now, she knew you couldn’t dig a hole to China, but she wished she could tunnel her way to her house in Saugerties.
But this wasn’t about escape. It was about rebellion.
She dug and dug, her sweat dripping off the tip of her nose and into the widening hole.
The pointed end of the spade hit something soft and squishy. The ensuing smell made her jump away from the hole.
“Eeeeewww! That’s nasty.”
Had dogs been digging here and hiding their poo? It sure smelled like it.
Tabitha pinched her nose shut and crept back toward the open maw of the hole. The smell was so bad it painted her tongue and slipped down her throat and into her stomach.
What the heck was down there?
Never one to contain her curiosity, Tabitha reached into the hole. The tips of her fingers slipped into dirt that was colder than the inside of her freezer.
Weird, but cool.
She touched on something hard and oddly shaped. It definitely wasn’t a rock or a root. Pinching it between her thumb and forefinger, she pried it out of the mushy ground.
“Oh wow!”
It was jewelry. From the looks of it, some kind of antique. Tabitha rubbed the dirt off with the edge of her shirt. It was a cross. And a big one too. Not like the little crucifix her mother wore on the thin chain around her neck when they went to church. This cross didn’t have a battered Jesus on it, which made it so much cooler. The last thing Tabitha ever needed to see was a naked man impaled on two blocks of wood, even if he was the son of God. That didn’t make it any less creepy. She wasn’t allowed to watch scary movies, but she was forced to stare at a dying Jesus above the altar every Sunday. She couldn’t tell a big person the meaning of the word hypocrite, but she intrinsically knew the concept.
“Maybe there’s more.”
Setting the cross into the grass, she pushed her hand farther into the muck, twisting her head to the side so she could breathe through her mouth and not puke.
Something shifted under her hand.
Tabitha’s hand was swallowed up to her wrist.
She yelped and tried to pull her hand back.
What felt like sharp stones nipped at her fingers. The tears came before the pitiable wail.
No matter how hard she tried, the frozen earth wouldn’t let her go.
About this book
This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK
Text copyright © 2019 Hunter Shea
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
FLAME TREE PRESS, 6 Melbray Mews, London, SW6 3NS, UK, flametreepress.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Josie Karani, Molly Rosevear, Will Rough, Mike Spender, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio with thanks to Nik Keevil and Shutterstock.com.
FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
HB ISBN: 978-1-78758-180-7, PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-178-4, ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-181-4 | Also available in FLAME TREE AUDIO | Created in London and New York
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Award-Winning Authors & Original Voices
Flame Tree Press is the trade fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing, focusing on excellent writing in horror and the supernatural, crime and mystery, science fiction and fantasy. Our aim is to explore beyond the boundaries of the everyday, with tales from both award-winning authors and original voices.
Other titles by Hunter Shea:
Creature
Ghost Mine
Other horror titles available include:
Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach by Ramsey Campbell, Think Yourself Lucky by Ramsey Campbell, The Hungry Moon by Ramsey Campbell, The Influence by Ramsey Campbell, The Haunting of Henderson Close by Catherine Cavendish, The House by the Cemetery by John Everson, The Devil’s Equinox by John Everson, The Toy Thief by D.W. Gillespie, One By One by D.W. Gillespie, Black Wings by Megan Hart, The Playing Card Killer by Russell James, The Siren and the Specter by Jonathan Janz, The Sorrows by Jonathan Janz, Castle of Sorrows by Jonathan Janz, The Dark Game by Jonathan Janz, House of Skin by Jonathan Janz, Dust Devils by Jonathan Janz, The Darkest Lullaby by Jonathan Janz, Will Haunt You by Brian Kirk, Hearthstone Cottage by Frazer Lee, Those Who Came Before by J.H. Moncrieff, Stoker’s Wilde by Steven Hopstaken & Melissa Prusi, The Mouth of the Dark by Tim Waggoner, They Kill by Tim Waggoner
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Hunter Shea, Slash
