Screamscapes: Tales of Terror by Evans Light Read Free Book Online

he screamed, his threats in time with the pounding of his fists. His voice faded to a rasp, his breathing labored.
    He twisted himself around in the small space and lay flat on his back in the mud, planting the soles of his feet solidly against the crawlspace door. He resumed stomping on the steel again, with the full strength of both legs at once, not missing a single beat of the rhythm he had established with his now battered and bleeding fists.
    “How dare you lay a finger on her? She never did anything to you! You killed her for making me happy? You had no right!” he screamed at the wife he imagined must be standing just outside. His voice began to change, to falter, to tire out. What had started as a lion’s roar had been reduced to a pathetic whimper.
    WHAM-WHAM-WHAM slammed his feet against the steel.
    “I’LL – KILL – YOU!”His threat had become a mantra.
    Yet the door stood firm, unyielding. Some tiny part of Tom’s brain knew that the door would never kick open, that it only opened inwardly – but the rest of his mind didn’t care.
    Time stopped for Tom. He continued pounding for what might have been hours, but what was more likely only a few minutes longer. His voice grew softer and softer as his exhausted body continued its increasingly hopeless flailing in the cold, wet mud, the gasping spasms of a fish in a drying puddle, taking its final breaths.
    “I’ll… kill… you.” His last statement of malevolent intent amounted to little more than a thought in his head and a small wisp of steam above his lips.
    Tom’s feet dropped to the ground beside the doorway. He lay there, as spent as three-inch ash on an abandoned cigarette.
    Then silence set in, a quiet so dark and deep and real that his heavy labored breathing seemed to belong to it, not him.
    Tom lay motionless as his body slowly sank into the cold mud. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed since he had come to be here, but it was long enough for him to be certain that he was, in fact, completely and utterly alone. He knew there was no one in the house, no one outside of the house, no one for miles.
    He felt the reality of his solitude with so much certainty it was as though a sixth sense had emerged. His wife had never been there listening, smirking as he had imagined. The silence that greeted him from outside the door and from the house above him was complete. It contained not a hint of a presence other than his own, and even that felt as though it was in danger of slipping away.
    The flashlight, tossed aside during his rage, lay in the mud somewhere off to his right. Its filament was a dying ember, a soft red halo of light in Tom’s peripheral vision.
    Then, as quickly as he noticed it, the glow extinguished.
    Silence had arrived first; now its companion, darkness, announced itself. Tom barely had time to register these sensations as actual thoughts before the next unwelcome guest arrived, like the third horseman of the apocalypse: the cold.
    A bitter chill gripped Tom’s body with a sudden rushing ferocity. The hot heat of rage that had burned in his veins only minutes before was replaced with a torrent of frigid water, ripping through every capillary in his body like tiny jagged shards of ice.
    Tom tried to roll over onto his front, but found he was unable to move. He lay terrified, half-paralyzed, teeth clenched as his entire body convulsed; shivering as the excruciating pain of the cold drew him into its arctic embrace.
    The unholy trinity of cold, darkness and silence now owned his soul. With enormous effort, Tom dragged himself onto his stomach; his shredded hands dripped blood that clotted in sticky spiral ribbons on his forearms. He wanted to crawl from his muddy puddle back onto the dry plastic sheeting, but the exertion of his rage had completely depleted his energy.
    He looked towards the light bulb in the center of the crawlspace that still burned like a distant sun in the darkness; it seemed as though it was a million