Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (65 page)

That was a strange irony to Dr.
Porter. The more advanced an entity, the simpler the laws it
obeyed. “Why?” he asked. “Why do I live within the laws? Why am I
in the tunnel?”

The angel didn’t respond to the
question verbally. Instead, Dr. Porter was given an image. Where
his bed was, a table appeared. Two men sat at that table with a
chessboard between them. The game had not yet begun. The man with
the white pieces took a pawn and moved it clear to the other side
of the board and used it to knock off the opposing pieces. Once all
the black pieces were down, the man said, “I win.” Then the scene
changed back into his unmade bed.

“Yes,” Dr. Porter said, understanding
immediately. “Life without rules is like a game without rules.
Boring. It’s the complexity of these rules that makes life
interesting.” After thinking for a few seconds, he added, “You must
be . . .” He stopped, not wanting to anger the angel.

But the angel proceeded as if Dr.
Porter had finished. “Yes, I am very jealous of you. As I said, my
rules make my existence boring. All I really have is to watch your
kind. I am only allowed to influence you if you violate the tunnel
walls, or if I am otherwise commanded to do so.”

Dr. Porter couldn’t tell if the angel
was angry. But he feared that less now. “Then, when I was in the
tunnel and felt the presence, and when I experienced my dead wife,
that was all you just toying with me. You could have taken me at
anytime. You didn’t need to scare me. You were just having
fun.”

“It is allowed,” the angel responded.
“And there was still time. Time is one of the laws common to both
our realms. Of course, it does not restrain me as much as it does
you. With me, it passes with little consequence. I grow old, but my
body does not.”

“So God has time?” Dr. Porter abruptly
asked.

“Yes,” the angel responded. “God, that
is, the being you think of as God, has time. But God is not limited
by it. That is all I can tell you on that. The one you call God is
not totally within my comprehension.”

So there was more. Even for the angel,
there was more that could be searched out. There was more to
understand.

“I want to leave this realm. I want to
die.”

“And you will, when our work is
finished. But it is still not time. So ask me other questions if
you’d like.”

Dr. Porter thought of his questions
from before, what he had wanted to know. “The clients,” he finally
said. “Why did they have their barriers?”

The angel’s response was nearly
instantaneous. “Most people, as you know, do not have the extra
barriers. They are born fit to contain a soul. But there are some
who are conceived in a certain way that attracts evil forces to
them. Because of what their parents were, they are fit to be
invested with evil.”

Dr. Porter interrupted and the spirit
allowed it. “Then the barrier is there to prevent certain kinds of
evil from being manifested in their lives.”

“Yes, evil that would seem
supernatural to your realm. Evil that is not supposed to be in your
realm, but is supplied by renegade forces.”

Dr. Porter was interested in what the
renegade forces were, but he had other questions that were pushing
his curiosity harder.

“Then why should those like my clients
be born at all?”

“Because, as I have shown you, life in
your realm, with your laws, is a very special thing. It is a
coveted thing. I would love to have the opportunity to experience
it, as would most spirits. There are limited numbers of how many
lives the one you call God will allow, so not one will ever be
wasted, no matter what limitations must be placed on it from the
start.”

That might have been the most amazing
thing of all to Dr. Porter. How often did humans see life as
insignificant? How often were those seen as unfit disregarded or
discarded? How easy had it been for humans to waste lives, to take
lives, in the name of progress? All of the sudden, Dr. Porter felt
the will to live himself. But he knew that would not
happen.

“You have more questions,” the angel
said. “And I have more answers. For now, I will make you rest. Then
you will learn more as we go on.”

Dr. Porter was made to
sleep.

***

The angel woke him in the afternoon.
It told Dr. Porter to prepare himself for going out. He took care
of the mess he was now. He shaved and showered for the first time
in days. He dressed professionally in a gray suit. Then the angel
started issuing the commands to his body. It had him gather a few
things, like a chef’s knife from the kitchen. Then it took him to
the garage and made him start his car.

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. They 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.