A Place So Wicked Patrick Reuman (children's ebooks free online TXT) 📖

even darker than he had imagined. Or it wasn’t. The dark couldn’t get darker; that wasn’t how things worked. Dark was dark, and that was it. He stepped forward, the hall like a cave tunnel a hundred miles below earth’s surface. He could see the walls but only just barely, shadows of light emanating through Trevor’s open bedroom door and off whatever surfaces it could reach.

Seeing was like comparing blacks to greys; everything looked almost the same but not quite. The floor was terribly quiet underneath his feet, as if he wasn’t really there, wasn’t really walking down this hall toward the sound. He felt like he was in a dream and he may have believed it had the pain he felt not continued so persistently.

Every door he had walked by was closed, only silence behind them, and all around them. He heard a barely audible snore coming from his parents’ bedroom as he reached the stairs, reminding him as he turned and looked down the shaft to the first floor that his entire family was only one scream of terror away.

He wanted to call down the stairs, to ask if anybody was there. It was a silly instinctive thought that he put away before he could do it. If there was a burglar down there, it wasn’t like they were going to answer back. Calling out, asking if anybody was there was just something silly that happened in horror films. Plus, he didn’t want to wake his parents, not yet at least. And on top of that, if there was someone or something down there, he didn’t want it to know he was looking for it.

The stairs did creak a little, which deep down, he was thankful for. Perhaps the sound, unlike his own childish voice, would tell the intruder that someone was awake and coming for them or scare them off altogether. He could only hope.

Why hadn’t he just woken his parents? If there was someone in the house, his parents would want him to wake them, not take on the intruder himself with nothing but the merciless strength of a sick boy. But deep down, he knew the answer to that question. He didn’t really think anybody was in the house. He wasn’t sure what he had heard, but he didn’t think it was someone breaking in to rob them or come kill them. That was insane, and they had nothing worth stealing anyway.

Maybe he just needed a reason to face his fears. He had allowed the sickness to control him since day one. Now that he had experienced what it was like to feel good again, he didn’t want that, to be controlled, to be a hostage in his own body. He wanted to take his life back.

The pain disagreed. It lurched at him and pulled on his nerves as he reached the bottom of the stairs. He fought against the oncoming vertigo, demanding that his mind remain steady. But it wasn’t that easy. As badly as he wanted to feel better, that didn’t make the sickness any less real.

He stumbled into the living room, where he caught himself on the couch. When he looked up, a reflection in the television screen made him jump. He turned to face where the reflection should have been, but the space was empty. What he thought he saw was a woman, her hair long and brown, her skin a pale white. She was gone. The reflection in the television was a vague outline of the couch now.

He was breathing heavily, regretting having come downstairs. What was he thinking? He wasn’t brave. He saw something near the corner of the room and jumped, only for whatever it was to be gone by the time he had finished blinking. Was it a man?

No. It wasn’t a damn man. And the reflection hadn’t been a woman. He had to get back upstairs and get to bed. He was sick. There was a throng in his head and his hand moved up to his forehead. He had to calm down. Freaking out wasn’t going to help anything.

He lifted his head and saw another woman, this one’s hair as white as her skin. She was in the shadows, barely discernable from the wall. She may have been the wall, he wasn’t sure. Everything was beginning to move again. Faces began to pop up everywhere. The shadows became one undulating mass of people and faces, quivering around from the floor to the ceiling.

His head pounded. Groans and moans filled the air. Voices: too many of them to understand any single one. They were all yelling at him, but he didn’t know what they were saying. He stepped back. There was a scream like someone was being stabbed to death somewhere just out of view.

“Trevor!”

He swung around, his heart pounding, his eyes near tears. It was Paisley.

“Are you okay? What are you doing?”

He looked around. The shadows were still. Light came in from the streetlights out front. There was nothing in the television’s reflection or in the walls. He blinked and swallowed, trying to get a hold on himself.

“Trevor,” she repeated as she stepped forward and put her hand on his shoulder. “I thought I heard you leave your room, and when I heard you heading down the hall, I thought maybe something was wrong.”

There was something wrong. But it was him. He felt his legs trembling. He shook his head no. “I’m—I’m fine. I just came down to get a drink of water.”

He stared into her eyes, doubting she would believe him but hoping she would so he didn’t have to tell her what he thought he was seeing. He already thought he was going insane; he didn’t need his sister thinking it, too.

She looked around the room as if checking if there were others. “Do you want to go in the kitchen, then?”

He