Cindered Souls by Jonathan C. Gillespie

Author:Jonathan C. Gillespie [Gillespie, Jonathan C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror - short stories
Publisher: Heavy Caliber Publishing LLC
Published: 2012-10-03T22:00:00+00:00

They’d gotten mechanical about their task, detached from circumstances and yet absorbed in their work, despite the lack of light. Something about beating the nails into the wood got them distracted from the noises below long enough to make good time on their plan. Morgan put the hammer down and held the last two boards together.

Jeff looked up. “You sure?”

“I trust you,” Morgan replied.

Jeff took a nail from the box. A nervous moment as he raised the hammer. Smack. Smack. He pulled it away and pounded again, and again. A creaking protest from the board. The nail was in. He dug another from the box.

A screech-scrape below. “Three floors away,” said Jeff. “I can hear it again.”

“Don’t think about it,” said Morgan.

Smack. Smack. Crack! Jeff lifted his hand and wrapped his thumb in his palm. He held both hands to his chest. Morgan reached over and picked up the hammer.

Two more strikes saw the nail home. Jeff handed him another nail. “So dark,” he said as he flexed his bruised thumb. “Fog’s almost at us, Dad.”

Morgan pounded the next nail in. “We better hope it stays at least a floor down.” He picked up another nail.

A hiss-snarl from beneath. A quick pentameter of impacts driving across the floor below. Then the noise stopped. All sound bled away, like the aftereffect of equipment being cut silent after hours of steady droning. Morgan held the hammer over his shoulder, not daring to strike again.

Jeff could hear his own heartbeat.

Something pounded into the wood beneath them. The temporary flooring shook and rattled like it had come alive. Boards buckled and strained at their edges. Wood dust and steel shavings vibrated across the surface, like plucked strings on a guitar. Jeff sucked a breath in and jumped to his feet. Morgan fell from a squat onto his rear and backed away on all fours.

Then the noise faded, replaced by a rhythmic sound. Air rushing in. Air rushing out. Air rushing in. Then nothing.

Morgan picked himself up and stayed as silent as possible. Jeff took timid steps back to the boards. The nailed-together boards creaked just slightly as they lifted them off the floor.

Twenty-eight feet of boards hammered together end to end. Jeff looked ahead. He saw their goal through the darkness: a black hole against a dim, flat landscape. The eighteenth-story window of the other building on the site. At least twenty feet separated the building from its less-completed sibling.

He tried not to think about the gap between the two buildings as they walked forward. He heard the thing beneath, stomping around. Occasionally it would pound upward, constantly testing the floor.

They reached the edge of the building. The noise below stopped, as if the thing was aware of what they were planning. Jeff couldn’t bring himself to step on the girder that marked the edge. He could just imagine it reaching up and over the steel, slashing at his legs, pulling him over the side and then into its clutches. His knees slapped against

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