Mercy Forsaken: A Meredeth Connelly Mind Hunt Thriller (Meredeth Connelly Mind Hunt Thrillers Book 1) by E.H. Vick

Author:E.H. Vick [Vick, E.H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Meredeth Connelly Mind Hunt Thrillers
Publisher: Dark Triad Publishing
Published: 2022-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Free For The Taking

In a darkened room

Little Mercy snapped awake as the flooring in the hall creaked, her heart thundering, the blood vessels in her neck throbbing, her head aching. A scream scratched her throat, her head still muddled with sleep and dreams. She didn’t know if a nightmare had roused her, or if some telltale sound before the creaking floorboard had nudged her toward consciousness.

“The creak doesn’t mean anything,” she whispered, but at such a low volume, it was almost inaudible—even to herself. She’d just turned ten and was too old to be scared by dreams and darkness. “It’s an old trailer. Or it might be Kenny getting up to pee. Or cryin’ out for Daddy.” She frowned in the darkness. Who is Kenny? she wondered.

After a few moments of half-drowsing, half-muzzy-headed illogical thinking, she shifted the bedclothes off her thin body and shivered at the early morning chill. It wasn’t cold outside—not up-north cold, as her mother said—but in the low forties, which was cold for their neck of the woods. Her father insisted they keep the heat turned low, that “nighttime was sleep time,” and the covers would keep them warm.

Mercy put her feet down on the thin, threadbare carpet, not worried about stepping on a toy or a book as she’d put all of that away before bed—another thing that her father insisted on. She stood stock-still, listening to the old trailer breathe in the night, imagining her father’s stealthy footsteps out in the hall, creeping back toward the room he shared with her mother. And if Kenny (whoever he was) had cried out, that would make a lot of sense.

Moving with the slow care of a young child aiming for stealth, Mercy tip-toed to her door and pressed her ear against it. She listened hard, but if she had heard stealthy footfalls rather than imagining them, they didn’t sound again. Softly, and with exaggerated care, she grasped her doorknob and twisted it, gasping silently and freezing in place at the loud click that sounded when the door’s mechanism came unclasped.

After a moment, she opened the door a skosh—just enough that she could press her eye into the inch-wide crack between the door and its frame and peek into the gloaming that swathed the hall. Kenny’s bedroom was toward the front of the trailer, and she could just make out its dark maw. That was unusual, as her father also insisted on closed doors after bedtime, but Kenny did get up from time to time to go to the bathroom, and sometimes, he left his door open so he could sprint back, fleeing from the terrors in the dark.

All her thoughts about Kenny getting up to pee took their inevitable course, and she eased her door open. After a quick glance toward the living room to see if her daddy was up and drunk, she darted down the hall to the restroom, leaving her door ajar. The entire trailer had the feel of the library at school—an artificial reverence and soft silence.

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