Shivers 7 by Stephen King, Clive Barker, Bill Pronzini, Graham Masterton, Rio Youers, Ed Gorman, Rick Hautala, Norman Partridge, Norman Prentiss Read Free Book Online Page A

happen—
    Then it got worse, much worse.
    Then the screaming started.
    Horrible screams like nothing I’d ever heard before, shrill with pain and terror, so loud that they penetrated and echoed inside the box. On and on, on and on, as if the night itself was being ripped apart. I jammed the heels of my hands over my ears, but I could still hear them. They were like knifepoints jabbed into my eardrums.
    I couldn’t stand it in there, surrounded by the noise; couldn’t breathe. I flung myself out of the car and stumbled around and away from it, trying to escape the screams. But I lost my bearings among the yuccas and went the wrong way, toward them instead—far enough to hear the other sounds that came before each of the shrieks. Meaty thwacking sounds. Crunching, snapping sounds.
    I swung around, staggered back to the car. I knew I ought to run, hide, but my legs wouldn’t work anymore. All I could do was lean against the front fender with my hands back over my ears.
    It was a long time before the screaming stopped. And then I heard him coming back, shuffling over the parched ground—alone. He was just a giant looming shape until he reached the car and opened the passenger door and the dome light came on again. Then I saw the blood. It was smeared on his hands and on his pantlegs where he’d wiped them, spattered on forearms and across the front of his shirt. Even more terrible was the way he was grinning. Like a death’s head mask. Like a skull.
    I turned aside and puked up my dinner. When the convulsions stopped I sagged against the fender again, weak, shaking, my knees like pudding. He was watching me. Not grinning any more, his face without expression of any kind.
    “You killed him.” Somebody else’s voice, not mine.
    “Yeah. Busted all his bones.”
    “A kid, a stranger. Why?”
    “I like it. It’s fun.”
    Fun. Jesus!
    “Tell you a secret,” he said. “Nobody give me my nickname, like I told you before. I give it to myself after the first time I done it.”
    I couldn’t look any more at those hands, the scars and gnarled joints that hadn’t come from manual labor, the blood glistening like black worms in the spill from the dome light. I said to the darkness, “You going to kill me now?”
    “Kill you? Naw, I wouldn’t do that. I like you, Jack, you been real nice to me. We’re friends. I never had a friend before.”
    Friends….
    “You got a blanket or something in the car?”
    “What?”
    “So I don’t get blood all over the seat.”
    “Trunk.”
    He went back there, rummaged around, came back with the picnic blanket Karen had bought for us. “Okay,” he said then. “Let’s go.”
    I groped around to the driver’s side. He squeezed in next to me, the blanket wrapped around him, and let me have the keys, but it was a little while before I was steady enough to drive. I still couldn’t think, didn’t want to think. Finally I started the engine, turned the car around, headed back down the road with the headlights boring holes in the night.
    When we neared the intersection with the county road, I heard myself say, “What now?”
    “Find some place I can wash up, change clothes.”
    “Then what?”
    “Keep on going. Drive all night, maybe. Get us another car, bigger one, then go wherever we feel like. Big country. Ain’t hardly seen much of it yet.”
    It took a few seconds for his meaning to sink in. “No! No! My girl, my job….”
    “They don’t matter no more. Just you and me, Jack, from now on.”
    Bloodstained fingers snaked out of the blanket, closed around my knee again. The feel of them made my flesh crawl.
    “We’ll have fun together,” he said. “Lots of fun.”

The Storybook Forest

    Norman Prentiss

    It wasn’t a girls’ ride any longer.
    The giant teacups had lost their glossy white sheen, and the flowery trim had faded beneath new designs of chipped paint and cracked fiberglass. Craig aimed his flashlight over the nearest rim: dead leaves and broken branches