GRAVEWORM

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Book: Read GRAVEWORM for Free Online
Authors: Tim Curran
sound registered, but made very little sense. Someone knocking? She was dreaming… she had to be dreaming.
    Thud.
    Blurry memories ran through her head. A road. A man. A doctor. A ride. A maniac. That insane girl. Her house… then… then she just couldn’t remember.
    Barely conscious, her fingers reached out blindly and touched… satin. Mildewed folds of satin knitted together, quilted. Rotting satin that came apart in her fingers like moth-eaten cloth. She couldn’t lift her knees up more than five or six inches. When she tried to sit up, her face pressed into the unyielding caress of moist, ragged silk.
    And that stink… that hideous stink.
    A box, her mind screamed through the fog, you’re in a box.
    A coffin.
    A casket.
    Her lips peeled open in a warm scream and then everything went black again, her concussion getting the better of her.
     
    10
    Tara managed to drag herself from the kitchen after a time.
    But like maintaining her sanity, it wasn’t easy.
    Nothing was easy or even real any longer. It couldn’t be. Her brain had now locked down quite firmly and refused to accept anything. Even the most rudimentary of sensory responses went out the window.
    Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was insanity. Maybe it was both.
    Her mind was short-circuiting, thoughts jumbling, as it tried to react to something the likes of which it could not properly process. Occasionally, some lucid and logical thing would occur to her… but these were few and far between. She was crawling on her hands and knees, wriggling along like a slug, soiled with blood, with vomit, with her own urine. Her mind stumbled along with no linear sense and this at a time when she most desperately needed structure.
    It was pointless to reason this out.
    Best just to breathe.
    What I need is a gun, she decided. Just in case the bad man comes back. Then I can shoot him. Shoot him down in cold blood. Cold blood. Stuff I put my hand into surely wasn’t cold, cooling, but not cold. And not hot. Not hot like the summer had been, hot hot hot. Glad it’s just about over. What a long hot one it was. We had a strike at Valve-Tec, the machine shop. It was a bad one. Busy as hell at the Union Hall whenever there was a strike and how am I supposed to put in overtime when I’m at the Starlight just about every night? A gun. Yes, I need a gun. The bad man hadn’t used a gun… maybe a knife or an axe… Christ, another school year and school clothes for Lisa and it’ll cost a fortune and what if he’s still in the house, the bad man? Laughing and laughing and laughing, lookit the crazy bitch crawling around, dragging her ass on the carpet like a poisoned dog I ought to slit her fucking throat pull her head off like the cork from a bottle and put it in the drying rack with the other one that silly crazy fucking snatch don’t she know I got her sister don’t she realize what I’m going to do to her oh no oh no everything’s going black fuzz blowing black fuzz oh God oh God…
     
     
    11
    Henry patted the earth down, satisfied with a job well done.
    But there was no time to lounge about and enjoy his special little world this night. Or what was entombed beneath his feet. Too much work to be done and precious little time to do it.
    Wasn’t that always the way?
    A man just never had the time to appreciate his own great works.
    He checked his watch. After midnight.
    ( quit lollygagging, do you hear me? there’s work to be done while the moon is still high snap to it!)
    “ Yes, mother,” Henry said.
     
    12
    When Tara’s eyes came open again, she wondered why her bed was so hard. But it wasn’t her bed. Her cheek was pressed against the rough nap of the living room floor. Then she knew.
    She knew everything.
    Trembling like a wet kitten, she pulled herself up to a sitting position. Immediately, the room spun and she went down again, striking her head against a chair arm. There was an agonizing hollow popping that made her see constellations. If nothing else, the

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