The Skull Ring by Scott Nicholson Read Free Book Online

take us down and we won't even fight it. We’ll hug him right back and give him thanks."
    The man paced back and forth in front of the plush purple curtain and floral arrangements that served as a stage setting. The Love Offering telephone number was emblazoned on a banner in great golden numerals.
    "But the Lord will fight," said the man, voice lifting, fist shaking in the air. "The Lord will burn Satan's eyes out, the Lord will take our love and use it as a weapon, a mighty sword that will cleave down into the fire—" He made a slicing motion with his free hand "—and cut Satan's grasping fingers and silence that nasty tongue, the one that whispers such sweet lies to us. Lies of all the pleasures we can have, if we only turn our hearts from God."
    Pause. Medium close-up. The man lowered his head in sad reverence. A perfectly scripted moment.
    He pointed again. "Satan wants you," he said, almost a caricature of those patriotic Uncle Sam posters. "He owns you."
    Julia pointed back, her fascination shifting to boredom. "No, he's only borrowing me."
    She'd rather watch the Cardinals lose by six. The VCR must have jumped its memory, shut off and lost its programming. First the clock and now this. She'd have to call George Webster and have Walter check out the wiring.
    Sure, blame it on mechanical failure, not operator error. Or operator insanity. Talk about God sending messages wrapped in ridiculous packaging.
    She clicked the set off, the sound dying, the televangelist's face sinking rapidly to black. After checking the front-door lock, she went to the bathroom and took a shower. She managed to shampoo and rinse without once looking outside the shower stall. No Creeps here, no Anthony Perkins wannabes, no peepholes carved in the walls, nothing but the sweat of mist on the tiles.
    Before leaving the bathroom, she glanced at the figure in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. The steamy glass almost disguised the two long scars than ran up her belly and just under the swells of her breasts. Aside from the scars, she was not too bad for an old-timer of twenty-seven. Mitchell certainly found her worthy.
    She went to bed and read some Jefferson Spence and was carried away to a land where the protagonists always drew upon inner reserves to overcome evil obstacles. The clock was still behaving itself, so she set it to wake her early. As she turned off the bedside light, she went over a checklist in her head.
    Doors locked. Windows locked. Curtains pulled closed. Mace in the living room. Baseball bat under the bed, the commemorative Louisville Slugger her adoptive parents had given her for her sixteenth birthday.
    All set.
    Nothing but darkness and the quiet settling of the house. The leaves flapped a little on the trees outside, one of them occasionally brushing against the window screen. The neighbors had cut the music. They were pretty considerate about that, except during their weekend parties.
    She lay in the dark thinking of the morning's episode of paranoia, the wooden blocks, the session with Dr. Forrest, the Satanic murder, Rick. Dr. Forrest. Something during the hypnosis. A memory, crawling from its slumber, fingers reaching from the damp murk of the cellar. Clawing its way out.
    The bad people, around her, touching and hurting her.
    No.
    That memory was for Dr. Forrest's office, where it could be bound by walls. Not here, not in Julia's house, where it could slither out of her ears and under the bed to lie in the beggar's velvet and wait. Wait for just that right moment when Julia was asleep, tangled in the sheets of nightmare. Then it would grab her ankle, open its slathering jaws and—
    She sat up and flicked on the bedside lamp.
    The digital clock moved on, counted its way from the past or toward the future, however you wanted to look at it. Julia watched it for a while, and then picked up her book. Julia read until after midnight. By that time she was thoroughly irritated with Spence's too-perfect heroine