Excerpt 4
A passage from my true crime novel, based on an appalling true crime story that happened within my own immediate family:
Kissing the boy on his smooth forehead, she exhaled very slowly and released a tiny sigh, the sudden chill of her warm breath on his cool skin causing her flesh to prickle with goosebumps. She closed her eyes in the briefest of respites, before opening them again and releasing her precious son from her arms so he could sleep. He let out a faint and restful coo as he relaxed onto his back in blissful abandonment of the cruel world.
She crept out of the room then, more cautiously and soundlessly than she even knew herself capable to move. Every step down onto the dirty plush carpet seemed to reverberate deafeningly, promising to wake the neighbors and trigger her inescapable downfall. So with every step down, she slowed her pace, and attempted to calm her pulsing heart.
In the murky blackness of the room, she failed to account for the door frame, smacking a hip against the solid wood with a low thud. Jennifer froze. She strained her ears for any sign that he had been alerted by the noise and remembered she existed, and was standing up from his sunken hole to give chase. For the moment, he was not. He let out a congested chortle in response to something Ed Sullivan said. So she continued forward.
Three eternities later, Jennifer reached for the tattered quilt that lay rumpled at the foot of the bed. She move still ever slowly, eventually lying flat on her back, with the cover pulled up to her neck. She was always cold, laughably so. Growing up, her mother, from whom she inherited frozen blood and who suffered the affliction herself, used to pile two or three blankets on her daughter every night while she slept. Jennifer always awoke under a heap of warmth, usually thus starting her day in thankfulness for her mother’s thoughtfulness. In this house however, in her eternally damp prison, the stuff of nightmares, she was permitted only the one holey blanket, frayed and threadbare as it was. The problem was thoroughly exacerbated by her teeny petite frame. Without any body fat to speak of, Jennifer spent the greater portion of every night shivering recklessly from scalp to sole.
Outside her window, the inky night played host to a wild wind that growled low and hostile. It grumbled deeply, ever constant, bemoaning that its dark terror was only permitted to reign over the night, and never the bright day. Jennifer lost her thoughts in the blow of the wind, like one who gradually stops noticing the tick of the clock, or the trickle of faucet water. She wondered dazedly if there were such beings as evil spirits, swarming in circular patterns around this house. If there were, perhaps that’s why the hero spirits of joy and light continued to fail to reach her. For surely, if Satan’s spirits exist, then too must God’s angels. Lucifer, the brightest of them all, she recalled dimly from Sunday school.
The moon, glowing brightly in its turn, peeked out from behind her hiding place to see whether the terrors had gone and let her be. Seeing that the maleficent wind still ferried the whispers in circles around the homes of unsuspecting saints, she dimmed her shine and backed away out of sight, leaving Jennifer St. Joy to her own devices.
A stiff bare branch pecked at the pane of her tiny window. She started at the sudden sound. It scratched out a message three times, then fell away with a new gust of wind.
Reassuring herself that odd weather was nothing to fash about, she settled again, her heart slowing down once more.
But lo, a footfall, faint and terrifying.
Liquid fear bubbled up beneath her frozen skin, warming her everywhere. Her blood pulsed in her ears.
A sharp clap of harsh thunder. A shriek as it pierced the silent night. Another hellish bellow as the veil was torn and the full dominance of the night unleashed itself.
Another footfall. Distinctly closer. A creak of a cracked floorboard rang out. As loud as the demon inhabitants of the wind outside.
Silence.
Then a booming crash as her bedroom door was flung open with such violent force she thought the house would crumble down and crush her. The sharp sound of puncture to the wall by the doorknob had been overpowered by the boom, but she surmised what had happened from David’s sudden jerk on the door from the other side. He yanked at it, and tugged hard, groaning as he did until it finally came loose and the door could swing freely again.
She felt, rather than saw in the blackness, him stare at her. Demon eyes searching and scanning for her figure in the bed.
“Now.”