House of Rain & Lords of Twilight by Greg Gifune

Author:Greg Gifune [Gifune, Greg F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, supernatural
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2018-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

LORDS OF TWILIGHT

This one’s for Clint Salisbury

“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

—Arthur C. Clarke

ONE

The girl does not run. Through clouds of breath he sees her standing in the center of the snowy road, still as a mannequin and staring straight at him with hollow black sockets where her eyes should be. In a winter world of endless white, the dark craters look like pools of ink mistakenly spilled on an otherwise pallid canvas. The nightmare is dying, decaying right before him, returning to the shadowy lies of night from which they came. Around them, on this desolate wooded road, the storm is over but renegade snowflakes still fly about in the delicate light of early morning.

But for his labored breath, it is eerily silent.

A whimpering sound behind him draws his attention. He glances back quickly at the puppy trembling near a snow bank on the side of the road. “It’s OK,” he says, his voice gravelly and strained, foreign as it echoes across the frozen landscape. “Stay there.”

He turns toward the girl. She still hasn’t moved. She won’t. He knows this now. There is nowhere else to go, and like him, she—it—is weakening.

A gust of icy wind cuts through him like a razor.

Despite his pain and exhaustion, he summons a primal screech he hopes will silence the tempest of demonic whispers slithering through his head, and raising the ax, staggers forward along the road. Emma opens her arms in welcome, even as he stumbles closer and slams the blade down into the top of her skull.

Even then, he knew they were watching. He didn’t know how or why or even what they were, but he knew there were eyes on him. Eyes that could peer deep inside him where all those things he didn’t want anyone to see crawled to darkness and hid away. He could feel it. He could feel them. But it all seemed little more than a dream, really, a vague premise drifting through an exhausted mind. The possibility that something was out there but on its way to him, or perhaps had already arrived, he couldn’t be certain either way, refused to leave him. All he knew for sure was that he was no longer alone with his thoughts and fears. Something else had joined him in these things. Something sinister.

“For God’s sake,” he sighed, “get hold of yourself.”

Even before the storm most of the locals had been spooked, but Lane knew better than to allow such foolishness to frighten him or cloud his judgment. He had no doubt his feelings of paranoia were a subconscious reaction to the goings on in town of late, yet they remained impossible to dismiss.

It all began about a week before, when three cows from one of the farms in town had turned up missing, only to be found hours later strewn across an open field like discarded garbage. The carcasses had been mutilated, with wounds which appeared

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