Poltergeist II - The Other Side by James Kahn Read Free Book Online Page A

his gaunt smile, and reached out to touch her. She backed away a step. His hand seemed unearthly cold, and even though he and she didn’t actually touch, her teeth began to chatter.
    “Come child,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. Come along with Reverend Kane.”
    She shook her head no.
    “It was I who kept you from getting lost this morning at the shopping plaza. Don’t you remember?”
    She shook her head no.
    “Come, then, put your hand on my heart—you can feel how pure it is.”
    He took a step toward her; she took a step back.
    “Touch my heart,” he repeated, his smile mellowing to entreaty. “Then I’ll know you trust me, and we can be friends.”
    He pulled open his jacket, exposing the thin white shirt that covered the left side of his chest. A gesture of vulnerability.
    She shook her head no.
    “Please,” he beckoned. “Don’t reject me. I’m opening myself up to you.” His voice was soft, vaguely Southern, in a register high enough to suggest imbalance.
    She trembled, looked around for escape, but her feet would not move.
    He loosened his tie, began slowly to unbutton his shirt. “Let me lay myself open to your touch,” he pleaded, pulling his shirt open.
    Beneath his shirt, there was no skin—only glistening ribs, shreds of rotting muscle, oozing veins enclosing a dark red heart that beat, slapped against the ribcage, and gray-pink lungs that dripped like sodden sponges.
    Carol Anne gagged. She’d never seen the insides of a person; it was a horror. But she couldn’t move.
    “Touch my heart,” he beseeched her. “Here, let me make it easy for you.”
    He grabbed his left third rib and, with a wrenching crack, tore it out of his chest wall and threw it away. Blood seeped from the ragged end of his breastbone; the pumping heart seemed to push itself against the space made by the absent rib, as if it were trying to squeeze through between the second and fourth ribs, as if it were straining on a leash to attack Carol Anne.
    She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think; she could only stare.
    “Let me make it easier for you,” he whispered, and grabbed his fourth rib.
    There was a sickening crunch as he pulled the fourth rib out and let it drop. His heart flipped around wildly now, jerking against its vascular connections, pushing the opening in the ribcage, getting tugged back.
    “There.” Kane smiled. “I couldn’t be more open. But you must meet me halfway. Come, child, it’s so warm. Come, touch my heart.”
    She couldn’t stop staring at the thing, all red-black and flopping like a bloated fish.
    “Here, now, it wants to be touched so badly.” There was gentle scolding in his voice. “You can see plain as anything how it’s tryin’ to get near you. Just wants to be held, like we all do. Here, I’ll show you.”
    Without even wincing, he splintered the remaining ribs out of his left chest, leaving only the heart exposed and pulsating along the underside of the dark, slippery lung.
    He looked down. “Ah, getting shy, now, are you?” he said to his heart. So he pulled his lung away as if it were a curtain; then he reached his other hand up, cupping his heart tenderly, like a dying bird, and lifted it out of the chest cavity toward Carol Anne, as far as it would go without tearing from the aorta.
    “Here,” he said to Carol Anne. “It’s not so wild now. It just wants to be held. Here, now —you can hold it.”

CHAPTER 3
    Taylor had his own way of approaching Sceädu in the Canyon of Shadows. He located the creature by sensing disharmony among the shadows—the flow of darknesses that moved, wavelike, there—and when he’d found him, he chanted the song of the Shadow Way, restoring the harmony, putting the benighted creature at rest. And when Sceädu was thus nestled in his proper place, Taylor stepped through him to the next plane—the place of mists and souls and the One Light.
    He shielded his eyes from the Light but did not falter. He looked closely from face to