Slave: The Ghost of Cambria - Book Two

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Tony didn't open his eyes when he heard glass shattering from far away. He still held firmly onto the sweet comfort of sleep. When he eventually heard Penny barking, some part of his mind recognized he needed to return to consciousness, but rest wasn't ready to let him go. It was the loud crash of wood being ripped to pieces that forced his eyes open.

As his mind came to, Tony recognized that the wall lamps in the guest bedroom where he slept were turned on. The amber flood pursued him even when he closed his eyelids again in protest. Resting upon the air mattress chest down, the young man faced the right corner behind his headboard. He could hear a quiet scratching sound, and again his eyes were forced open to allow the room's unmasked electric light into through his retinas. The simple logic agreed with Tony's presumption: if the lights were on, Kristen must be awake, and he should get up. But his limbs felt like iron weights—he had rarely slept so hard. Perhaps there was something more to be said about this air mattress that held him. Maybe it was the three rounds of intercourse that had done him in.

And then he smelled it.

A putrid odor filled Tony's nostrils, causing him to quickly scrunch his nose and bring his hand to his face. Burning garbage or rotten eggs, or maybe even sulfur—the sharp, offensive smell burned his throat and eyes.

"What is that?" he moaned, control returning to his limbs as he wakened. "Kristen?"

Turning over in the bed to face her, Tony found Kristen lying beside him naked, her eyes closed as if she were still asleep. On her chest lay the Ouija board just under her chin. In her right hand was the indicator piece, which she slid in small increments over the letters, moving and then stopping in a slow rhythm, creating the low scratching sound Tony had heard.

"Kristen," he said, baffled by the sight, then moved to sit up in bed beside her.

Tony nudged her gently. He wanted her to stop what she was doing and account for the terrible smell, rather than because he cared about the Ouija board. The synapses of his mind were still not landing correct, and he double-checked his senses a few times to prove to himself what he smelled and saw were real.

"Kristen," he raised his voice and reached to lift her hand from the small heart-shaped piece of plastic with the little window on top magnifying each letter.

With the woman's hand in his own, Tony realized the indicator piece was still sliding across the board, one little movement at a time. It stopped and started again every two seconds, and he recognized that each stop was landing on the next letter of the alphabet, arranged in sequence along two rows across the board.

His only thought was that it must be a toy with magnets affixed underneath to slide the indicator to and fro. It was probably designed to be programmed with words to entertain partygoers. Tony reached with his other hand to stop and lift the piece from the board, but found that it was not removable—whatever held it in place was stronger than mere magnets.

From outside the guestroom, Tony heard a clamoring of wood creaking as if something enormous were moving along the floor from the living room through the foyer and library. Tony swung his legs over the bed to the floor in search of his clothes when the sound reached the hallway where the guestroom sat.

"Hello?!" his voice shot loudly at whoever was approaching. The naked man found the denim pants where he'd cast them near the head of the mattress, but not his briefs.

From atop the Ouija board on Kristen's chest, Tony saw the indicator fly violently toward the window, shattering the glass. Recovering from the shock that contracted his shoulders, Tony felt the hairs on his neck and arm pickle painfully. Remembering what he was doing, he pulled on the denim work pants commando style and struggled to push the fat metal hardware through buttonholes of the stiff material. On both sides of the room, the lightbulbs in the glass wall lamps popped loudly, shuttering the room in the same darkness of the hallway outside the open door.

Tony was confounded by the change. He'd never experienced a moment in his life where he'd felt so helpless, so alone, and Tony suffered a breed of fear that managed to astonish him while it froze his legs.

From the hallway, Tony heard whatever approached arrive at the door frame. The young man could not see what it was, even in the dim moonlight that poured through the broken window. But Tony could feel its presence through his other senses. The smell intensified as if whatever man or animal was standing in the doorframe were itself exhaling the rancid odor that burned Tony's eyes. The sound in the room changed. It dampened, muffling even the noise of his own chest breathing as if his ears were closing to guard him against an attack.

Tony thought to turn on his iPhone and engage the flashlight, but his feeble attempts to feel in his pockets resulted in nothing. A glance down at the pitch-black floor quickly proved futile.

"Hello!" Tony's voice came strongly as he pushed through the fear to stand as large as his chest would allow for, the deep timbre of his baritone booming in his closed ears more strongly than he expected. "Who the fuck is there?!"

From behind his head, Tony heard whispering, a low din of syllable and phrases he couldn't make out. When he turned his head sharply, he found that the location of the voices immediately changed. This unnerving strategy of the silent language moving behind him whenever he turned soon crescendoed Tony's fear at the damning realization they didn't come from behind him. The voices were inside his head.

Tony saw a flash of light, almost imperceptible to his eyes, and then another. It felt like a trick, the ghost image of something in his field of vision that lingered on his retinas just barely long enough to make out a figure. He moved his eyes, trying to see the image better, but nothing seemed to improve his clarity of vision. Slowly, the flashes increased, and Tony began to see more, if not at all clearly.

And then the pain started.

He felt sick--his chest felt constricted and paralyzed as if he couldn't breathe. Behind his eyes grew such sharp discomfort that he suddenly lost his fear of the moment and thought he should run from the room to locate some fresh air. He would grab Kristen from off the mattress and carry her out of the room, make his way to the back yard. But then he understood that he couldn't control any part of his body. As his center of gravity began to spin, Tony expected to feel the mattress or floor hit him as his body fell to the ground. But he felt nothing, and after a few more seconds, his consciousness abandoned him altogether. His last thought was of the face that burned in his mind.