The Dark Game by Jonathan Janz

Author:Jonathan Janz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2019-03-04T14:22:02+00:00

Chapter Twelve

At the exact moment Evan was being exsanguinated, Elaine rose from her bed, drifted to her window, and peered into the cloudless night. Her sleep had been fitful, a delirium really, the way it often was when she was shitfaced. The last three nights, she had smuggled a bottle upstairs – tonight it was Grey Goose vodka – and swigged from it until her writing devolved into incoherence. She told herself that the sound she heard was her imagination. An agonized voice. Someone’s death throes.

Elaine squinted into the night, teetered, and thought, Yes. Shrieking.

Abruptly, it stopped.

She was about to open her window when something else arrested her gaze, a shadow beneath her. She stared, spellbound, as a figure emerged from the mansion and waded into the lush grass of the backyard.

It was a nude man, she could see that instantly, despite the way her vision tried to double. He was sinuous, well formed, if a bit older. She realized it was Roderick Wells.

Unexpectedly, she felt a wave of arousal, the man incredibly well preserved. She disregarded her estimates of his age. He couldn’t be in his seventies, or even his sixties.

He had the body of a man in his early fifties, and even that was a stretch. Wells’s buttocks were smooth and round, his hamstrings striated. In the moonglow the calves looked like polished apples, ripe ones that cried out to be tasted, to be licked.

He’s old enough to be your grandfather. Get ahold of yourself.

Wryly, she thought, I’m about to get ahold of myself.

Wells stopped, faced the forest.

Elaine noticed the yard was illuminated not only by the moon but by a series of accent lights as well. Funny she never noticed before. Strung around the trees, spangling the yard like rhinestones, they lit up the deep blue night like a carnival.

But Wells alone absorbed her. He was motionless, godlike, his arms hanging loose at his sides. Though she couldn’t see his eyes, she knew he’d heard the screams from the forest, was staring raptly toward them.

Wells knelt, placed a hand on the ground. Head bowed, he remained like that, some anomalous lovechild of a sprinter and a parishioner, and Elaine couldn’t help but notice the bulge of his triceps as he waited, waited.…

She became aware of the new sound not with her ears, but with her skin, which tightened in dread. Shivering, Elaine tried to back away from the window but couldn’t. Frigid perspiration trickled between her breasts. The sound was a slow, metronomic pulse, a bruising thump. Her eardrums stung, her head throbbed, the sound like iron calipers squeezing her brain, and somehow the lights in the trees had begun to blaze up in time with the throb, and Elaine saw something that stole her breath, that made the wet mass in her chest threaten to burst in terror.

A ghostly skein of luminescence was advancing toward Roderick Wells, was serpentining from the forest, brightening and darkening in the same relentless pulse that illumined the rest of the night.

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