Spitting Devil by Brian Freeman Read Free Book Online

seeing this man?” she murmured.
    “I don’t know. Since the weather got cold.”
    Since the weather got cold and the women started dying.
    “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
    “I thought it was my fault he was here.”
    Alison didn’t know what to believe. She saw the earnestness in Evan’s face and knew that he believed it. She bent down in front of her son again and gave him a reassuring smile.
    “You stay here,” she told him. “I’ll make sure there’s no one in your closet. Okay?”
    “Be careful, Mom. Don’t let him spit on you.”
    “I won’t.”
    Alison put Evan in one of the kitchen chairs and gave him several of his comic books from a stack on top of the refrigerator. She opened the utility closet and removed a heavy silver flashlight that had once belonged to her grandfather. With a weapon and a light in her hand, she climbed the stairs toward the dark second floor. At Evan’s door, she hesitated, but then she turned the knob and crept inside. She shot a cone of light around the dirty space, and the plastic eyes of stuffed bears glistened back at her. She stopped in the middle of the room, listening to the quiet. She inhaled but smelled only the cigarette she’d smoked in the car. Nothing felt out of place.
    Evan’s closet door was open by six inches.
    Alison opened the door with her foot and tensed. No one jumped out at her. No one spat at her. There were no devils. She examined every inch of the closet floor with the light and saw nothing but Evan’s mess thrown together in small mountains. The man with the knife was only a comic book villain. He wasn’t real.
    She was almost sorry. She’d almost hoped it was true.
    As Alison turned away, her flashlight beam swept upward and glinted on a small gold ring in the wall. Around it, she saw the outline of a square access panel, and she realized that one of the sliding stairways to their sprawling, unfinished attic was located here in the closet. She flinched at the odd coincidence that her son’s closet, where his spitting devil lived, led upward into space that loomed over the entire house.
    It was a spying ground for every other room upstairs. Including her bedroom and her bathroom.
    Standing in the closet, uncertain and afraid, Alison realized that something had changed inside her head. The ants were gone. They’d fled. For the first time in months, she didn’t feel them or hear them above her.
    Maybe they had finally delivered their message; maybe she’d finally heard what her mind had been screaming at her.
    Look upstairs.
    She doused the light. In darkness, she tugged the gold ring, anticipating the squeal of the hinges on the access door. Instead, the door opened silently, as if the hinges had been freshly greased. She reached up by feel to unhook the laddered steps, and the steel structure slid smoothly down to the floor, creating a narrow, angled staircase leading to the upper level.
    Alison listened again. She heard wind blowing through the peaks of the roof. The tunnel of air flowed onto her face. She put a bare foot on the lowest step, which was metal and cold, and she used her hands on the railings to climb upward. She ascended into blackness. When her torso cleared the hole, the wind became a gale. She shivered as she stepped from the ladder onto the plywood floor.
    As she reached for the switch of the flashlight, she froze.
    Behind her, someone coughed.
*
     
    “Hemoptysis,” Maggie said to Michael Malville.
    “Our guy coughs up microscopic particles of blood,” Stride added.
    Malville thumped his chest with his fist. “Do I look sick? I’m a swimmer, for God’s sake. I swim one hundred laps a week. Do you think I could do that if my lungs were so weak I was coughing up blood?”
    “No, I don’t,” Stride acknowledged.
    “Then let me go. I didn’t do this.”
    Stride shook his head. “Unfortunately, Mr. Malville, we finished searching your car, and our technicians discovered the same kind of