Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes by Jack Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

heavy
enough to trap anyone walking underneath them. It looked like the kind of place
no person should ever go, and the feeling seemed to spread out of the confines
of the painting and seep into the room.
     
    My bed was opposite from the door.
The wall behind it was stone, cold to the touch and greyer than grey. Marsha
obviously didn’t care about the comfort of her guests, because everything about
the room made me feel I was unwelcome. Even so, the hard mattress of the bed
had never looked so inviting. My body ached so much that I felt like I could
lie down and melt away.
     
    I wasn’t going to do that. It was
stupid, but because Jeremiah’s last words to me were “go to sleep”, I was going
to do the exact opposite. I wasn’t going to let him order me around like I was
the hired help.
     
    A writing desk sat in the corner of
the room, next to a window that was covered by a sheet of darkness. Outside the
window was the front of the pub. A wooden gate slapped against a post, and the
wind grabbed the stalks of the plants and throttled them.
     
    I pulled out the chair and slumped
into it. I spread my dissertation books on the scratched surface and opened
them to pages saved by crumpled post-it notes. The text was small and I had to
strain to read it. Someday all this studying was going to put me in a pair of
glasses.
     
    My dissertation was nowhere near
ready, which was pathetic considering the sacrifices I had made. I had spent so
long with a book in front of my face that I couldn’t remember the last time my
phone rang. Sometimes, I didn’t even bother to charge it. I’d let the blood
drain out of my friendships until they have shrivelled and crumbled into dust.
I always carried books in my bag, but they were becoming more like weights that
threatened to drown me in a raging sea.
     
    I flipped to the front of the book in
front of me and looked at the title.
     
    “Shadows That Walk Behind Us: How
Historical Horrors Affect the Present,” I read. “This is going to be lovely.”
     
    Reading these books always made me
squirm. Even back in my halls of residence where the floor was carpeted and my
room warm and inviting, staying up into the early hours reading about myths
made me shiver. There was something wrong about urban legends. They were
bullshit, I knew that much. That didn’t explain how the same stories could turn
up again and again, thousands of miles away and hundreds of years apart.
Legends of old women who would appear behind you in the bathroom when you turned
off the light, of teenage girls possessed by demons.
     
    The temperature of the room started
to drop as though someone were blowing snow into it. I reached to my left and
felt the radiator, and the coldness stung my hands. The lever that controlled
the temperature was turned on and twisted to full heat. Great, another thing
in this shithole that doesn’t work.
     
    I put on my dressing gown. As I read
about Romanian legends, the lamp in front of me flickered like a flame being
teased by fingers. The temperature plummeted, and it felt like fingers nipped
at my skin. I shivered into my clothes. A feeling built in me that the cold
wasn’t just from the winter air. That something was forming in the room, a
shape taking hold in the darkness and creeping just out of sight.
     
    I looked at the door. I hoped to see
a slit of light peeking through the bottom, but instead there was a black
rectangle that indicted the hallway outside was dark. I pushed the thoughts to
the back of my mind. I was reading too much of this stuff. I bet even Professor
Higson got the creeps sometimes. I spread the book in front of me and stared at
the page.
     
    The words span round my brain.
Devils, demons. Witches. Skeletons buried in church graveyards. My head felt
heavy and my eyelids began to slip. I felt my vision fade into black.
     
    I opened my eyes and found myself
staring into red eyes. The corners of them were twisted in fury, as if I had
wronged their owner.