Gifted by Peter David Read Free Book Online

Her bare feet touch the hardwood floor and it’s cold, so cold, and she 46 pads across it and out into the hallway toward the safety of the only place she can think of where monsters would not dare to follow.
    Her parents’ bedroom door is partly open, which means she can go in. She knows better than to try to do so when it’s closed because the last time she did that her parents were all tumbling in the sheets and breathing hard, and they yelled at her and she didn’t like it at all.
    Her mother is lying there, and Tildie clambers into bed with her. Mother’s wearing a flannel nightgown. Tildie puts her body up against her, taking solace in the feel of the flannel and the warmth of her mother, the security of her steady breathing, her bosom raising up and down rhythmically.
    The monster cannot attack her here
.
    And she hears the closet door burst open from down the hallway.
    Her spine stiffens; her sphincter tightens. She stops breathing.
    The monster could not possibly know where I am
.
    It’s approaching, its claws clicking on the hallway floor.
    The monster would not dare come in here
.
    The bedroom door bangs open, and Mommy, startled by the noise, sits up, looking confused, caught in that same place of half-awake/half-asleep that has Tildie in its clutches. “What the—?” The words sound thick like syrup, and suddenly Mommy screams and clutches Tildie to herself protectively, and she screams again and the monster charges forward, grabbing at Tildie, yanking her out of her mother’s grasp. It pulls Tildie into it, and it’s only at that moment Tildie realizes the monster is a she, a female, a mother itself, and it wants Tildie for its very own. It shoves Tildie into its body and Tildie is floating in the air, a part of it now, trapped, and 47 her mother screams inarticulately, lunging for it. Mommy is screaming and Tildie is sharing the monster’s thoughts, and the monster is thinking, “Her screams are yummy.” And the monster reaches out and grabs her mother by either arm and starts to pull, and suddenly Tildie is back in the schoolyard, watching that icky Hunter Jenkins plucking the wings off a writhing fly, and Tildie’s mother has time for just one shriek before her body is ripped in half, right down the middle. Blood is everywhere, on the bed, on the wall, on the tongue of the monster that savors it, on everything except Tildie herself who continues to float helplessly, and Tildie is screaming but her screams are muffled by the monster.
    Her father is at the door, fully dressed in his day clothes, shouting things like “What the hell is going on up here? Did you drag Tildie into this?” She tries to yell, tries to tell her father to run, but he stands there paralyzed, his eyes wide with horror, and the monster goes for him, grabs him, guts him, the blades going into him so easily, like knives slicing into butter, and her daddy stares down at what’s seeping from his gut, trying desperately to shove pink tubes and other stuff back into where it’s supposed to go. He sags to his knees and there’s gurgling sounds coming from his mouth, which the monster doesn’t seem to like all that much, so the monster picks him up and slams him against the wall to stop him from gurgling.
    Then come the red lights that flood the room, the red lights that she doesn’t understand, and there are two more men at the door, policemen. Policemen are her friends. She knows this because one of them came to school a few months ago and told them 48 so. He’d had a bright, shiny badge and a dog, and a gun in his holster that he wouldn’t remove so the boys could see it, no matter how much they begged him to.
    There is no dog now and she can see the guns clearly, both pointed at her, and the monster lashes out with its free hand (its other hand is still buried in Daddy’s chest) and drives its fist straight through the chest of the nearest policeman. It lifts him clear off his feet, pinning him against the wall like a