Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (32 page)

“Sully?” Anna said.

Sully came from his mind and to the
person sitting at the table with him. “Yeah, babe.”

“Is something wrong?” Anna asked with
a look of concern on her face.

Maybe he would understand his fear
more tomorrow. Maybe they could talk then. “No, not at all,” he
said.

#

The coma men are waiting. Their lights
shine in the mist. Their faces and bodies are featureless, just
light in the human form.

Sully awakes.

#

Darkness. There had been pain. But now
the pain was gone. He was left with a slight electricity. He tried
to move but could not summons the strength. He could not
breathe.

But he was alive. He knew he was
alive, because he could sense himself, his body, inside that tingle
of electricity. But his body would not obey him. So weak. He felt
very little connection to his muscles. Sully realized that he was
dying.

He focused, trying to find energy. He
had to move, somehow, to alert Anna to get help. Energy did come,
but just enough to open his eyes. With the energy also came pain,
sharp, running through his body, pulsating, knives through his
veins. His vision was blurred, but he could make out his location.
In front of him the moonlight shone through the windows of his
bedroom.

Anna? He realized that she must be
behind him, asleep in bed, oblivious to his pain, oblivious to the
fact that he was dying. He focused, and with that the pain grew, as
if every vein in his body would soon split open. But he was able to
gather enough energy to bring one hard breath. With that breath, he
turned his body, just enough to set it rolling. The momentum
carried him enough that he was facing the opposite
direction.

But Anna was not where she was
supposed to be. She was beside the bed, looking down on him,
blurry, but there. Could she possibly know? Did she know that he
was dying? She wasn’t moving. She just stood there, while he was
suffocating.

He searched. He had to find more
energy, one last spurt to alert her. He focused, but there was
nothing. Even the pain was dwindling away. He tried to force
himself to feel it, to have pain, to be alive, but to no avail. He
was slipping away, right before Anna’s eyes, and she didn’t even
know it.

Or did she know? Why was she standing
there, when she should be in bed with him? Had she, herself, caused
his condition?

Whether she had or not, she was now
all he had, the only risk that he could take.

He saw her blurry image move
away.

Pain!
Sully thought. He stopped
trying to feel and tried to remember. What had the pain felt
like?

It was there, just enough. He forced
something up from his lungs, some sound that he himself could not
hear, but he knew he had made a sound, because Anna had stopped.
She had been alerted. But would she come to him now?

Yes. The image of her approached him.
It got right up to him. Then it came right down in his face. But
the image was not what he expected. It was hard to make out what
was right in front of him. But that face didn’t look like
Anna.

It was too white. Glaringly
white.

Darkness passed in front of his eyes,
and that darkness stayed for a little while.

#

The coma men are there. One is coming
to him. But all is peaceful, and he’s floating away.
Darkness.

#

Again, he was suffocating. He didn’t
want to go through this again. But what could he do?

Breathe
, Sully thought, and to his
surprise, the air came. It came hard at first, like it had sought
him out and had dammed up on the outside, waiting for the gate of
his body to open. He welcomed it, all that he could let in. He
opened his eyes. He saw the moonlit windows.

There was unlimited air. There was no
pain, and Sully stopped panicking. He took a couple of minutes to
get his air under control.

“Just a dream,” he whispered. He
rolled over to cuddle with Anna, but Anna was gone. As it had been
in the dream, Anna was not in bed with him.

Sully got out of bed. He walked
through the dark room and then through the dark house. The lights
were on in the study, so that’s where Sully went. Anna was on the
couch there. She was on her back, wearing only a T-shirt. She was
asleep. Pale. Peaceful. She would have looked dead, if not for the
slight bobbing of her chest. Her hands were folded over a paperback
down by her stomach.

“Anna,” Sully said, standing over
her.

Anna’s eyes came open. Then, for a few
seconds, she oriented to her surroundings. She sat up, the book
falling onto the floor. She looked around a little more, then
looked at Sully and smiled. “I couldn’t sleep. I got up to read and
must have fallen asleep.”

Sully forced himself to smile back at
her. What had he just been through?

Anna got up and wrapped herself around
him. Even in his state of confusion and fear, he still noticed her
breasts against him.

Anna pulled his head to hers. Sully
thought of how the last thing he remembered, the last thing before
the awful nightmares, was that they had had sex. And now, the way
she was touching him, how good it felt, how good she felt, he
couldn’t resist. Right there, on the couch she had been asleep on,
they had sex again.

There were no more nightmares that
night.

#

Sully arrived at his parents’ house a
little before noon the next day. It was the last Sunday of the
year. The Little Axe Baptist Church was holding its annual
post-service social to usher in the new year. And on this Sunday,
every year, Sully’s dad stayed home from church, because whether it
was the last week of the regular season, or the first week of the
playoffs, the last Sunday of the year was one of the most critical
for the NFL.

His mom was at the church social, of
course. Anna, who was not big on either the NFL or church socials,
had opted to stay home to put the finishing touches on her new
short story and visit the websites of a few horror
magazines.

Sully walked in to find his dad in the
living room, sitting in the loveseat, a TV tray with a beer on it
in front of him.

“Cold ones are in the fridge,” was all
he said.

Sully walked back to the kitchen and
grabbed a bottle of beer. He came back to the living room, where
they watched the pregame show.

“Cowboys might just get in this year,”
the old man said.

Sully, thinking he had heard something
in his dad’s voice, looked at the man. His eyes were bloodshot and
his body overly relaxed. He had missed it when he first got here,
but now it was clear. His dad was drunk.

Sully had always known his dad to
drink, but rarely heavily. And he had never seen him drunk this
early in the day. He tried to pretend he didn’t notice.

“Yeah, they have a shot,” Sully
replied.

For a while, neither of them made a
sound. Sully thought of the phone call the day before. He had
always considered his dad a good, but predictable man. Now he had
shown two unpredictable acts almost within twenty-four hours of
each other.

Then the next. It was just a little
while after the kickoff, when his dad began to laugh. At first, it
was just a short spurt. Then there was another about two minutes
later. Then there was a third. Then the fourth time it started up,
it didn’t stop for a while. After about a minute of it, Sully
looked and saw the tears coming down his dad’s face.

Sully quickly looked away. He thought
he should probably say something. He couldn’t, though. It was too
awkward. He had never seen his old man cry before. And what a first
time this was, laughing and crying at the same time, like a mad
man.

The laughter finally stopped. That
made things worse. It was an opening, a time where something could
be said, maybe should be said.

Sully hated himself. He hated himself
for the way he felt. Something was not right with his dad, and all
Sully wanted was to leave, to be out of the awkward
situation.

Finally, his old man spoke. “Sully?”
his dad said in soft, slightly croaky, voice.

“Yeah, dad,” Sully returned, without
looking at him.

His dad sucked in a hard breath and
then asked, “You know what your mother thinks? I mean, you know
what she thinks about how I reacted to your coma?”

His mother had never said as much, but
she had still managed to make herself clear.

“Yeah, Dad. I know.”

Again, his dad laughed, like a madman,
like a drunken madman, but this time it was mixed with sobs. When
he finally stopped, his dad said, “Well, it isn’t true what she
thinks. It wasn’t like that at all.”

“I know, Dad,” Sully said. “I wouldn’t
have hesitated to do the same thing had I been in your
place.”

For a few seconds, that was all. Then
his dad laughed some more. “Okay, Son,” he finally said. Then he
got up and left into the bathroom. He came out a few minutes later,
looking and sounding somewhat more together.

And for the rest of the time Sully was
there, the conversation was only about football.

Chapter Five

The new year came, and the weeks
passed. Anna became extremely involved in her book. She was the
perfect contrast to herself. One minute, she seemed loose and
smooth, effortlessly hammering away at the keys, leaving no time
for second guessing the words she made. The next minute, she was
growling at her computer screen, proclaiming that she would have to
delete the last ten or fifteen pages, because they weren’t quite
right. Sully had never seen her work this hard before. That made
him all the more sure the book would be incredible. He couldn’t
wait for her to set it in front of him.

It was a fun time of year for him at
the high school. The freshmen were really starting to come around,
to see what they were capable of when they understood how their
minds liked to work. More and more, they were pushing themselves
instead of being pushed by him. Responses started trickling in from
a few colleges and some seniors were already receiving scholarship
offers. But Sully knew it would be early spring before most of the
decisions were made. A big part of his job became helping the most
serious students cope with the anxiety of waiting to hear back from
the various schools they had applied to.

All the while, Sully tried not to
think about the decisions he had to make. From time to time, he
indulged himself in a fantasy world, where he lived and relived
January and February over and over again, never having to come to
March, never having to know if the omen were true. But the last
week in February came, and Sully had to face it. His fantasy would
not come true. Monica was scheduled to leave again in one week. And
nobody knew his dilemma.

He couldn’t go. He couldn’t go because
a part of him was certain that the omen was true. If he got in the
car and traveled across the state, he and his daughter would not
arrive at their destination, and his daughter would not return home
ever again. But how could he not go? Would not going be accepting a
world of madness? Would such an act of acceptance allow madness a
firmer grip? Could he give in, and let imaginary things run his
life?

It was the Wednesday of February’s
last week when the dilemma was solved for him. Sully had just come
home from school to find the large stack of papers on the kitchen
table. He found Anna in the bedroom. She was wearing a black teddy.
In each hand she held a glass of champagne.

“I took Monica to your mom. I thought
we could celebrate.”

Sully smiled. “You finished your
book.”

Anna nodded and pushed a glass toward
him. Sully reached out and took it as he got into bed with
her.

“Oh no,” Anna said matter-of-factly.
“You have far too much clothing on for the celebration I have in
mind.”

Sully got out of bed. He looked for
somewhere to set the glass.

Anna laughed and then said, “Here,
Silly,” extending her glass in front of her.

Sully clanked his glass against hers.
Then he downed the champagne, barely able to restrain a sneeze as
it tickled his nose. He then began to undress.

Suddenly, he had an idea. It had all
just fallen into place.

“You know, babe. I want to read it
right away.”

Anna nodded.

“But I want to read it straight
through, without interruption.”

“Okay. And that’s how I want you to
read it,” Anna said.

“Well, I can’t read it like that
during the week, with all my school stuff.”

Sully had planned on asking her. But
Anna beat him to it.

“I could go this weekend,” she said
excitedly. “And you could stay and read my book.”

Sully finished undressing and got in
bed with her. “Great idea.” He kissed her, and there would be no
more words for a while.