The Fathom Flies Again by James Walley

Author:James Walley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ragnarok Publications
Published: 2016-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

The thing about total darkness, is that it is usually followed by complete silence. Nobody wants to wake the sleeping monster, or advertise their whereabouts. It was something of a mystery therefore, that Timbers, Whipstaff, and Oaf had taken this opportunity to embark upon an impromptu game of hide and seek.

Marty stood frozen to the spot the moment the torch light had gone out. It was an involuntary instinct, borne solely and unashamedly from nights of thunderstorms and x-rated movies he had been too young to see, and more recently, from a brush with the monster under the bed. Standing as they were in the bedroom furniture section of Acey’s department store, Marty had made a judgement call to stand as quietly and motionlessly as possible, for the foreseeable future. It seemed that Kate had decided upon a similar course of action, and Marty flinched as a hand grasped his in the pitch blackness. Beside him, the faint yellow glow of a petrified Benji did nothing to allay the void, and the little koala’s repeated mantra of, “Oh no. No, no, no,” only served to fan the flames of panic inside him.

Somewhere out in the smothering nothing of the store, voices cropped up here and there, as the pirates taunted each other from their respective hiding places.

“You’ll never find me,” sang a voice that sounded liked Timbers.

“Oaf, where are you?” Whipstaff called from somewhere off to the right.

“I’m in the wardrobe,” Oaf replied, provoking uproarious laughter. “No. I’m not. I’m definitely not in the wardrobe.” He clearly had about as much grasp of the rules of hide and seek as he did on the rest of life.

Marty edged forward, feeling Kate moving just as tentatively alongside him, and hearing her muffled curses as she attempted to slap the torch back into life. His leg brushed against something wooden, and he staggered, flopping down onto what might once have been a finely sprung mattress, but was now little more than finely sprung garbage. Something below him gurgled expectantly, and bright plumes of bristling panic shot up Marty’s spine. He managed a rasping SHH! which seemed to draw more movement from beneath the bed, before silence once again fell upon the department store.

“Who’s shushing? That’s not in the rules.” The voice was off to Marty’s left, and could have been Timbers. The thing under the bed seemed to like it, and a flurry of movement and shadow slid fluidly out into the store. Marty squinted, trying to see what had spilled forth from beneath him, but it was just shadow. Shadow that moved, significantly more than shadows had any right to move.

Marty’s mind wrenched him back to the incident earlier that night, and how it had been so similar to the nights spent huddled under the covers as a child. You never saw the monster, but you knew it was there, his mind chided, and he fought against the ‘keep quiet, keep still’ reflex which was now putting his friends in danger.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.