Animals by John Skipp & Skipp John

Author:John Skipp & Skipp John [John, Skipp, & Craig, Spector,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
Publisher: Crossroad Press

24

The next several hours were a groggy, broken man's descent: a drunken tumble down the well of madness and despair.

Syd sat near the end of the bar, his eyes staring at some distant receding horizon while his sight turned wholly inward. There was no shortage of torturous images there, no dearth of painful memories and excruciating might-have-beens. They collided in his head with a shower of sparks where his dreams of the future used to be.

And—indestructibly burning at the center of it all—was the prismatic, multifaceted image of Nora. An image that radically shifted from one moment to the next, depending on exactly where he stood. As the hours passed, his mind moved constantly, viewing her from every conceivable direction. Trying to get a fix on who she actually was, the better to grasp the parameters of the vacuum she'd left behind.

There was Nora the catalytic agent and life-changing force: sweeping out the dead wood of his shipwrecked life, urging him to rebuild and set back out to sea. There was Nora the party animal cum fertility goddess: reawakening in him a boundless, transcendent appetite for life. There was Nora the vulnerable and tragic enigma, caught mysteriously weeping in the middle of the night. There was the dominant Nora, built of thunder and flame. The submissive Nora, led away on a chain.

And then there was the new face he had only seen tonight. The secretive face.

Of the Nora who lied.

And that was the bottom line here, wasn't it? That she had fucking lied to him: about her supposedly broken-up relationship with Vic, and God only knew what else. That Syd was ultimately nothing more than a pit stop on a long and twisted road that those two would probably be traveling forever.

The wounded part of him desperately needed to believe that was true. To think anything else was entirely too painful, pointed far too many fingers back in his direction. How could he have been so stupid, so utterly suckered by his own desperate hunger? Against his better judgment, against all sense or reason, she had breached the defenses of his little fortress of one. He had let her in.

And she, in turn, had released something within him.

And that was the point where his sanity threatened to skid completely out of control, go careening off into the uncharted abyss. Because something very weird had happened in the parking lot, and in one incandescent nightmare flash Syd had borne witness to something that he could neither accept nor deny. Acceptance was tantamount to deciding that yes, the world really was flat, after all, and there really were monsters waiting just over the edge, ready to eat you up. It was stupid. It was impossible. It was simply too much.

And if anyone had told him that three days ago, he would have laughed.

But he had seen it, and the certainty of the vision was a red-hot poker thrust into the deepest folds of his brain, igniting that long-hidden itch. Missing pieces of the lost weekend suddenly jigsaw-clicked into place.

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