The Waiting: A Supernatural Thriller (35 page)

Souls, Evan—or I should say time, for that is all a soul is, time. A soul is time for life, energy for living, a drop in the ever-flowing well.

“Where’s my son?” Evan said.
Anger rose within him, a fury at whatever this was—hallucination or reality, he didn’t know. All he wanted was to find Shaun.

The
Abel-shape ignored the question and continued its circle around him. Evan saw the rear of its head shift and warp before coming back into definition. The thing stopped and faced him again. In a split second its face broke, peeling back and reabsorbing its flesh, until long, brown hair sprouted and dropped past its shoulders. Its frame shrunk and took on curves Evan knew well.

Selena stood before him.

As if hearing his thoughts, it spoke in the same ratcheting voice that grated against his eardrums.

You know her as Selena
, but her name used to be Allison. Allison Kaufman.

Evan stood
stock-still, letting its words sink into him. Selena, or what hid beneath her guise, smiled at him, revealing a broken and jagged grin that righted itself instantly. Then the shape became Abel again, the skin flowing like magma until the features solidified once more.

“I don’
t understand,” Evan whispered.

The Abel-
thing sprang at him.

It
leapt across the distance between them as though teleporting, and had both of its soggy hands around Evan’s throat before he could react. Its flesh was like a fish fillet—wet, cold, and pliant—but moved and crawled without releasing him from its hold. He opened his mouth to scream, to cry out in revulsion, and the thing holding him leaned in, touching its now-flowing forehead against his.

A rush of colors and images poured into his mind, a river of life he had only moments to discern before it plunged past. He saw Abel dancing with
a woman who could only be his wife in a magnificent ballroom, and they twirl until the scene becomes a workshop in which Abel toils over a bench, gears and sprockets stacked in canted piles, assembling a small timepiece. Kluge House rising from the ground, with dozens of workers lifting, nailing, setting its structure. Selena, her eyes as well as her smile unmistakable, so seductive, before him first on a front stoop, then on a bed, her body bare, writhing beneath him. A young woman bearing a great likeness to Cecil Fenz scrubbing a floor as Abel and Selena walk by, both landing a kick to her ribs, sending her sprawling. Speckles of blood on a mirror, Abel’s reflection gazing at the mess, his eyes far away. A dark basement full of tools swaying on their hooks, Abel assembling a large frame—the clock. Abel’s hand carving ideograms in the wood, his mouth open and chanting, sweat running in streams down his face. Abel doubling up, hacking out a blob of red and black tissue onto the workbench, his eyes bulging. The master bedroom of Kluge House, Selena lying on a settee, barely breathing, her eyes staring. Abel coughing as he chants again, cutting his wrist on the edge of the clock’s swinging pendulum, his eyes alight with fever and madness. Larissa crouching in the corner of the room, her delicate hands covering her head and face from the sight. Abel dropping to his knees before the clock, his arms outstretched in supplication as the darkness within the encasement bleeds into the room. Tendrils reaching, wrapping around Abel’s wrists and waist and then yanking him into the clock’s dark belly. A shock wave of ichor shooting out in every direction, blazing a shadow against the wall. The key exploding free of its hole, burying itself in the picture across the room as the frame bubbles and welds in place. Selena convulsing and twisting in the clock’s oily embrace before spewing blood over her lips, her form slackening. Larissa’s open mouth screaming as the wave meets her, engulfs her, drives her body against the wall and then to the floor, where she lies dead, her eyes half open. The clock smoldering, vapors of heat coiling from its top as the pendulum swings, the hands running backward.

Evan broke free of the thing’s hold,
shoving as hard as he could with his muscles as well as his mind, a coiling, mental tension released. He tumbled and fell onto his back, his mouth open and gasping. He had wet himself, but couldn’t summon the energy to care. The thing that used to look like Abel remained where it was, its face no longer bearing any features. Evan sat up and scrambled away from it.

“You caught it from her, didn’t you?
Tuberculosis.” Evan gasped. “The doctors you called weren’t only for her, they were for you. And when you knew you were going to die, you built this ... this thing and cursed it somehow.” He gestured to the darkness around them.

As if in reply
, a ripple flowed through Abel’s entire form, a wave of skin rolling and settling.

My time was cut short unfairly
, and unlike other pitiful mortal men, I didn’t succumb to my fate, I raged against it. You are correct, I built this, and it welcomed me into its womb, just as the ancient rites handed down through my bloodlines said it would. And yes, my beautiful achievement did need power. The ones that lay around us misunderstood my masterpiece for something it was not. It drew those that had regrets. It gave them hope that they could change their fates, and I waited, luring them closer until I could absorb their energy.

Evan’s
mouth opened and then shut.

“You killed th
em all. Your wife and Allison, all the others—to fuel it.”

The list of names and faces scrolled through his mind
—Jason’s grandmother and grandfather, Bob, Becky, Becky’s father.

“They were trying to warn us
.”

Evan choked and coughed, feeling the strange tickling in his throat again.

“The doll, the body in the lake, everything. They were trying to scare us away before it was too late.”

Abel’s form writhed as
though in ecstasy, the skin opening with sores, bleeding before healing, a scar there and then gone.

Evan slowly stood, waiting to fall back to the ground
, but didn’t.

Their
weak imprints meddle with my destiny, but they are only husks, hollowed out of the life I took from them. They are nothing but shadows and mist.

“The hair was from you,” Evan
said, coughing again. “From Selena, or Allison. You couldn’t help leaving a little trace of your own as you guided me, kept me working and hoping I could go back.”

Every soul come
s with a price.

“You give me
my son back, right now.”

Evan’s
voice shook, and tears sprang to his eyes. He knew the thing before him was laying out a path, but he didn’t want to follow it, he knew where it led to. The creature advanced on him, glided toward him without walking. Its chest opened in a vertical mouth from neck to groin, the blackened ribs beneath splitting, forming teeth, its organs melding into a giant lapping tongue.

Evan retreated, his shoes squeaking on the
ebony floor. The crescent moon’s shining eye spotlighted him like a star on a stage. The pendulum cut the air now as the chunking of gears and sprockets above him meshed. The clock was beginning its work.

TI
CK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK.

Time passing became the loudest sound in the world
, and Evan turned to run, to flee from the gliding horror Abel had become, but tripped and fell, his hands barely catching himself before he bashed his face into the floor. He rolled, trying to regain his feet, and saw what he’d stumbled over.

Shaun lay on the
floor, his eyes partially open.

Evan’s heart stopped dead in his chest
; sound peeled away until silence burned in his ears. He saw nothing but Shaun lying there, one arm twisted at his side, his skin pale alabaster. Unmoving.

Evan crawled toward him, touched his skin and felt the co
ldness of it, the pliancy gone.

“No,”
he pleaded, his throat tightening against a moan.

He
ran his hand up to Shaun’s shoulder, pulling himself closer, closer to his son, his boy. He pressed his face against Shaun’s cheek, feeling the first tear break free. Reaching around, he got an arm beneath his son’s back, curling his small body into his lap. Shaun’s head lolled on his neck, and Evan cradled it, the memory of the first time he held him coming back so clean and clear he could have lived in it forever. He heard Elle saying weakly from her hospital bed to support his head, and he was. He would never let anything bad happen to him, not ever. He would die for him; he would protect him and never let him suffer.

Evan rocked
as he held Shaun’s body, silent sobs racking him as he breathed in the smell of his boy’s hair, the shampoo they always used. A sound of pure agony came from deep within him, and it was a breaking, the tearing of something that couldn’t be repaired.

The
Abel-thing paused in its movement and then continued, stopping only a few feet away from where Evan sat.

I have enough power
to live again, for through their collected energy I will conquer death, and you will be my vessel for life. I will be free of this place and walk again, fully alive within your skin.

Evan
clenched his eyes shut, his jaw spasming so hard he heard several of his teeth crack. He vibrated with loss so deep he thought he would simply rip open and bleed grief onto the black floor until he faded away—away like his wife, and now his son.

Gently, so gently,
he laid Shaun back on the floor, putting his palm over his son’s cool eyelids to close them. He brushed back his hair one last time.

My beautiful boy.

Evan stood, facing the gaping maw of the Abel-thing. The clank and rattle of the gears almost twenty feet above him drew his gaze upward, and he watched their turning progress, interlocking and spinning with perfect timing. The clock’s hands ticked backward, and the pendulum slashed the air in swaths, counting off the seconds. Time, delicate and powerful, turning, changing, flowing.

Evan reached into his pocket, drawing out the long
, black key, its heavy steel in his hand comforting somehow. He looked down at Shaun’s lifeless body and gripped the key so hard he thought it might snap in his fist. Evan exhaled a long breath, and he opened his palm, hefted the key—e
verything has a purpose
—and lobbed it upward into the twirling gears.

There was
a screeching whine of steel binding, then an explosive bang that echoed through the infinite space of the clock. A haze of brass shavings came down like sharp party streamers, fluttering with golden flashes. The pendulum stuttered and then stopped, cocked to one side, holding its position before another massive boom.

The pendulum began to swing again, the hands running forward now.

The giant mouth in Abel’s front bellowed an incomprehensible word—maybe something in the language that brought everything around them to life—and the creature rushed forward, shrieking so loud Evan almost covered his ears.

A
nother earsplitting roar filled the cavern, and Abel stumbled with the sound, but it recovered at once and was upon him. Its hands grasped his arm, yanking him off his feet. He flew through the air and slid several yards on his back, then sat up to watch it approach.

Abel
’s face swam to the surface, the eyes maniacal, gleaming with hatred, then it was gone, and he saw a glimpse of Selena before it changed into a conglomeration of countenances. Dozens of eyes and mouths opening and snapping flowed across its face. Ears formed and changed into a mixture of fingers that scraped the air, which then became an empty hole filled with darkness. The darkness seeped like pus from a wound and reached toward him, its edges becoming sharpened into black razors.

Evan watched the blades of shadow lengthen and then shoot toward him, and he welcomed their touch, knowing it would be nothing compared to
the agony of touching Shaun’s dead skin.

A gear the size of a tractor tire fell from the ceiling and smashed into the Abel thing.

Its head split with the impact, the reaching darkness recoiling and evaporating in a billow of black smoke. The gear traveled into and through it, all the way to the floor, splattering its greasy flesh in every direction. Some matter landed on Evan’s bare arm, burning before he wiped it away.

The Abel-shape
knitted itself back together, its form becoming whole before several more pieces dropped away, its shed skin hissing like meat in a frying pan.

A sprocket at least two feet
in diameter crashed into the floor inches from Evan’s left leg, and he stood, backing away from the churning form before him.

The
Abel-thing moved forward, two large pincers of bone erupting from its chest, slicing the space before it as it came. A chain fell in a clattering pile somewhere in the dark, and more flesh sloughed off the revenant.

No!

The howl in Evan’s head was the rending of souls, the tearing of time. Malignant and dark, it was the sound of death itself.

The Abel-thing
staggered forward, the pincers dropping from its body and shattering into dust as they hit the floor. It pointed an arm in his direction, the fingers trying to form a fist, but they fell away too, first liquid, then flakes of ash. Eyes bulged in sockets lining its ever-changing face as well as its chest. One by one they exploded outward in pulses of milky fluid, until its body was awash in an acidic pool burning its dark hide into smoke.