Darklings by Ray Garton

Author:Ray Garton [Garton, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, supernatural
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

4

The Lengthening Shadow

* * *

Something was wrong.

Although she couldn’t pin it down, Megan Crawford knew that something was out of place and, now that she was really thinking about it, had been for the last week. She’d recovered perfectly from the nightmare in room 307. Megan had known she would, although everyone around her had been worried; she prided herself in her ability to bounce back from bad experiences. But now, when she looked around her, it looked as if—as silly as it sounded—everyone else had been horribly affected by something and as if, unlike Megan, they weren’t bouncing back.

She lay on her bed, gently stroking her black-and-white cat, Boston; he purred loudly, stretched out beside her, and occasionally made the sound that had earned him his name: a meow with a sort of Eastern twang to it, as if he’d been born and raised in Boston—meeeaaah. Toto was playing on her small but adequate stereo and her mind was wandering back and forth over the past week:

Mrs. Skerritt was an old woman who had lived four houses down from the Crawfords ever since Megan had been a little girl. Her husband had died many years ago and the story went that Mrs. Skerritt had promised him, on his deathbed, to continue tending his garden after he was gone. He had taken great pride in his flower garden in front of the little yellow house. She kept her promise; for as long as Megan could remember, the woman could be seen daily, even during the winter, caring for the small patch of land that had once made her husband so happy. When others commented on how pretty the garden looked, Mrs. Skerritt usually replied with something like, “Yeah, but someday I’m just gonna have enough of it and pull them all out by their roots.” It was always said in a good-natured way, so no one took it very seriously. A few days ago, Mrs. Skerritt had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night and apparently taken an old hoe to the entire garden, destroying it all, even those flowers that had not yet bloomed. She was found curled up in the middle of the mess in her long flannel nightgown the following morning, dead of a heart attack.

Mr. Rand, the school librarian, was in the hospital in a coma. He’d just freaked out in the library a couple of days ago, throwing books and screaming at students. Megan had heard that he ran around the library with bulging, crazed eyes, yelling about “all the quiet” and taking swings at people. He’d pulled a whole bookcase down on top of his own head. Nobody knew why.

Of course, there were those weird things at the hospital: Mrs. Webster and Dr. Hollister. And Tom Conrad’s wife going crazy with a knife.

Just a few minutes ago, Megan had gotten a phone call from Winny Albertson. A pretty strange one. Winny hadn’t been to school all week, and Megan had neither seen nor heard from her during the weekend.

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