Pet by Asher Ellis

Author:Asher Ellis [Ellis, Asher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, dark thriller
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

10.

This is where the dream ends—behind the wheel of a wrecked blue 1969 Ford Thunderbird.

It’s always an odd experience to wake up within a dream itself, and that’s exactly how this nightmare begins. The shouts are muffled by the automobile’s still running engine when Ray comes to. His vision is blurred. His head feels like a jagged fissure separates his skull into two serrated halves. And the lights in his rearview mirror: blue and flashing and much too bright.

“Let me see those hands!”

Silhouetted by an azure strobe are two dark figures. Ray can’t make them out against the harsh backlighting, but he immediately recognizes their shared stance: Feet apart and planted, arms outstretched, and something small in their hands.

Ray is being held at gunpoint.

His hands raise on their own, an automatic survival mechanism. The figures begin to separate, each one walking to a different side of the car. As the men approach, Ray tries to figure out how he got here. He doesn’t remember wrapping the hood of the Thunderbird around the telephone pole. He doesn’t even remember getting in the car. The only thing he can recall is lying on the floor.

Jenny …

Ray fights to keep his hands in the air as the cop approaches his door. His body feels as weak as when the intruder injected the anesthetic into his forearm. Violent tremors rack his body, not a single muscle spared from the tensing shudders. He still doesn’t know how he got here or what is about to happen, but he doesn’t care. All he cares about is Jenny.

And all he knows is he has failed to protect her.

The cop stands a few feet away from the door. Through the fogged window he yells. “Step out of the car. Slowly.”

Time ceases to behave correctly the moment Ray’s hand touches the cool surface of the door’s metal handle. As dreams often do, the nightmare begins to skip like a perfectly flat stone across a glass watered lake.

The arrest—his hands on the hood, the right to remain silent, the cold kiss of the handcuffs—it all passes in a single heartbeat. The stone skips to the trail. A neighbor takes the stand and testifies to overhearing a particularly aggressive argument. A doctor takes the stand and explains the puncture mark in Ray’s elbow is not from an injected sedative, but a long history of heroine abuse. A detective takes the stand and holds up a straight razor in a plastic baggie. It’s the tool used to remove the victim’s eyes, ears, and tongue.

Though the judge would sentence him to death, it is the arrival of this gruesome piece of evidence that ends his life. The newspapers and television stations spread the word: Raymond Phillips is dead.

Razor Ray is born.

The stone skips once more and it is the quickest skip of all.

The bars slamming on his cell.

It all passes before Ray can pull his Thunderbird’s door open to greet the policeman. Time never behaves in dreams.

“Step out of the car. Slowly.”

Ray lets go of the handle, slumps back in his seat, and closes his eyes.

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