Dark of the Eye by Douglas Clegg

Author:Douglas Clegg [Clegg, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alkemara Press
Published: 2010-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

41

4:00 a.m.

“Ben?” Kate said from the doorway. She had been lying on the bed, feeling like every bit of her was dead, even feeling that Ben had been a phantom, a dream, part of some demonic hallucination plaguing her.

And when she looked out through the open doorway, she saw him.

The man with the eyes of burning coal.

Behind him, the yellow truck.

He said, “My little darlin’, come to Papa.”

He spread his arms wide, and she saw within their span a body riddled with disease, like tattoos along his naked chest and down his sagging stomach; the pockmarks of a visible cancer spreading from his armpits; rips and tears along his skin as if his bones were trying to push through the flesh.

Her eyes were dry; she would be brave. She was not going to let this make her go crazy. “You’re not my father. You’re something Robert put in my head.”

“I missed you, darlin’, I missed our times together. Come sit on my lap, come sit here. I won’t bite,” he said, his red eyes glowing brighter, his smile broadening into a feral grin, his teeth like yellow corn kernels pressed into his bleeding gums.

Kate Stewart shut her eyes tightly. I own my mind. You don’t own it, Robert. No matter what you did to me, you don’t own it.

She opened her eyes again, and the farmer stood there laughing at her, patting his knees now, whispering, “Come to Papa, little darlin’. Come on up here and let me see how fine my girl’s grown up to be.”

She felt the heat of fear and terror rising up through her body, just as if she were about to burn up; she heard her own breathing as if it were distant thunder.

“Little darlin, you can see your old papa with your own two eyes, not like my granddaughter with only one to look at you, but two, two eyes, the better to see me with,” he said, his voice becoming disturbingly real, and she wondered if perhaps she wasn’t insane after all.

Kate thought of Hope, and there was something about what the father image was saying, about Hope’s eye, about seeing Hope in her mind, seeing her whole, with both eyes intact.

Like a strong, stinging electrical current, shooting volt after volt through her body, Kate shuddered and let out a cry from her innermost being, a cry that had been there, buried so deep inside her for so long that it felt like another Kate was there, buried beneath her skin, a Kate she had forgotten about, a Kate who had been pushed aside while this other Kate had taken over her life.

The world before her exploded in a white-hot flash, and for a moment she thought someone had shot her in the head and now she was dying, for all she felt was numbness, and the pain of a memory of another Kate who was only now pushing herself up from inside, like a moth from a cocoon.

And she remembered.

Two weeks before,

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