Forever After (a dark and funny fantasy novel) by David Jester Read Free Book Online

on a stack of papers in her hands.
                  She was pretty, which was a rarity in this part of town. She also had a job, another rarity, and a sign that she probably didn’t live around here. Years ago Michael would have been all over her, but this was the eighth time he had sat opposite her and he had barely said more than a few words to her, none of which had referenced anything other than his appointment or her job.
                  He watched her blue eyes pore over a file, watched her thin lips unconsciously mouth the words she read, watched a smile tweak a fine wrinkle at the corner of her mouth when she read something she found amusing. She picked up the stack of papers and bounced them on her desk to align them. She yelped in discomfort as one of the papers slid against the nib of her forefinger, opening up a wound that dripped a drop of crimson onto the desk.
                  She glanced up at Michael, met his gaze with her beautiful eyes. Michael smiled back; she turned away. She lifted the wounded finger to her lips and opened her mouth to expose a powerful set of canines, out of place on such a small and delicate face.
                  Michael turned away, inwardly disgusted. He knew of course, when the angle was right, and the door was open, he could see behind the reception desk through a mirror in the doctor’s room, and she had never appeared in it. He knew it bothered him, turning some inner part of him against her, but it didn’t surprise him, no one in the surgery was alive, patients and Doctor alike.
                  The door to the Doctor’s room opened and Michael turned to greet whoever opened it, but there was no one there. He saw straight through into the doctor’s office; saw the folded legs of the doctor poking out from under her desk. The door closed, the handle lifting up and down as if clicked in place by an invisible hand.
                  Michael felt a cold air brush past him, he sensed someone in front of him and then heard that someone’s’ footsteps as they crossed his path, walked to the other end of the waiting room and then left through the main door which opened and closed in the same ghostly manner.             
                  Michael turned to the receptionist again, the blood sucked dry from her finger; her garish teeth hidden behind beautiful lips. She was staring straight back at him with a soft smile on her soft face. She answered his quizzical expression: “The world needs a bogeyman right?”
                  He shrugged, “Does it?”
                  Before the receptionist had time to reply a buzzer sounded on her desk, followed by the static-shrouded words of the Doctor: “You can let Mr Holland in now.”
                  The receptionist beamed at Michael. Her true nature hidden behind an endearing smile that wouldn’t hurt a fly. “You’re up” she said happily.
     
    ****
     
                  In the adjoining room Michael sat down opposite the doctor, immediately withdrawing his gaze when he felt her penetrating eyes boring into his.
                  It was light, bright and far from inviting. He felt cold within the confines of the room, it was clinical and sterilised; he would have preferred claustrophobic and dark.
                  “Mr Holland,” Doctor Khan began. “How are you today?”
                  Michael dragged his eyes to the doctor. He could never meet her gaze for long, so he divided his attention between her eyes and an encyclopaedia of doctorates and degrees on the wall behind her.
                  She was an accomplished psychiatrist, she had been in the business longer than Michael had been dead and alive combined. She was the go-to woman in the district, spending her time treating a multitude of patients between four offices in the country. She was a