Something Wicked SF & Horror Magazine #4 by Something Wicked Authors

Author:Something Wicked Authors [Something Wicked Authors]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Come nightfall, there was still no sign of movement across the street. Jenny had stationed herself at the living room window with a book, doing her best to read yet finding herself staring out across the street most of the time. She'd been unable to pluck up the courage to call Mrs Derringer. Part of it was her fear that she'd find the phone turned off, or that it would just ring and ring before switching to voicemail. If that happened, she thought she might be forced to pick up the phone and call the police, or risk going mad with the fear of what might be lying in that house across the street.

By eight o'clock, she had given up pretending to read altogether. She'd forgone both lunch and supper for her place on the couch, the tension in the pit of her stomach not doing anything to whet her appetite and the very thought of food a far and distant thing anyway. She didn't even stir to draw the drapes when darkness fell and the lamps blinked on all along the Avenue outside, setting the stage for another sticky, humid night. With the living room light off, it wasn't like you could make out anything from the street, anyway.

You need to stop this, you know, she thought to herself. You've been staring at an empty house for most of the day. Some people would call that the first sign of madness.

Sure. There were people who might call her mad. People who might called her obsessive, paranoid, delusional. But she doubted that any of those people lived on Madson Avenue. Mrs Derringer wasn't one of them. Julie Crass wasn't one of them either, or little Rory King. Meredith definitely wasn't one of them. Because they knew. They knew what could happen if you left the door unlocked, or an open window unwatched. Or a front gate unlatched. They knew about the animals. The savages. They'd been there. They'd all been there.

They came in through the back door. That's what the papers said. Allison was in the kitchen by the looks of things, and Paul was in the lounge—just a retired couple going through the motions of the life they'd grown accustomed to in their private little corner of the world. They tied them up first, fishing gut, wrists and ankles, before dragging them into the upstairs bedroom and ransacking the drawers and closets, getting away with all the good stuff, the—

There was a child crying in the bushes under her window.

Jenny started, drawing away from the pane on legs that weren't ready for her and subsequently sprawling across the lounge, avoiding denting the coffee table with her skull by the barest of inches. The fall sent the air whooshing out of her, and for a long moment all she could do was lie there on the paisley patterned rug while constellations drifted across her vision, trying to get enough oxygen into her bruised lungs to keep from passing out.

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