Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (the ebook reader .txt) 📕

his left pinky nail hadn’t been painted. By the time he finished and left with the two officers, it was almost four o’clock in the morning. She was surprised to discover it was so late. She’d completely lost track of time. Larry closed the patio door, although he couldn’t lock it, of course, then returned to the couch, sat, and held her. She didn’t think she’d fall asleep, was way too wired, but she remembered feeling drowsy and closing her eyes after only a few minutes.

And now she was here, in the Vermilion Tower once more. It was weird. She couldn’t remember ever having a multipart dream like this, one that picked up exactly where it had left off. She didn’t want to consider the possibility that this wasn’t a dream, that it was some kind of…what? Alternate reality? If sure felt real. Cold stone beneath her bare feet, a damp chill on her skin…. She still wore the flimsy, see-through gown with no underwear beneath, and she once more crossed her arms over her chest. Modesty seemed foolish here, but it offered her some small measure of control, and she’d take what she could get.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

The eyeless man – who she was starting to think of as the Driver – didn’t stop walking or look back at her as he answered.

“To the Chamber of Revelation.”

The words meant nothing to Lori, and since she couldn’t see any other option at the moment, she continued following the Driver. It seemed they walked for a long time, but eventually the corridor ended at a pair of large doors fashioned from some nightblack wood that Lori couldn’t identify. Two thick metal rings were bolted to the wood – one for each door – and the Driver took hold of the ring on the right and pulled. She expected the door’s hinges to give loud creaking groans of protest, but they were silent, and the Driver easily opened the massive door as if it weighed nothing more than a papier-mâché prop. He walked in first, not looking back to see if she would accompany him or take this opportunity to make a break for it. She was tempted to do the latter, but she thought once more of the Nightway, of the vast dark plain it cut through, and of the unseen things that might dwell there. Running off now could very well be a form of suicide, and while dying might be preferable to what the Driver and his friends – the Cabal, if she could trust the word Officer Ralph Rauch had written in gray-green goo on her bathroom mirror – would do to her, she wasn’t ready to kill herself just yet. She knew the old superstition that if you died in a dream, you died in real life too, and while she’d always thought the idea was nonsense, it didn’t seem so to her now. Not at all.

She followed the Driver through the open doorway.

Whatever this place was, it was dark inside. The only light here was the flickering of torchlight coming from the hallway outside, and that was only enough for Lori to see the Driver’s red-robed shape walking ahead of her. It was cold in here, so much so that if there’d been enough light, she was certain she’d see her breath mist in the frigid air. She hugged herself tighter, more concerned about warming herself than concealing her breasts now, but the action didn’t help. She began shivering, and she was unable to make herself stop.

She had the impression that there was a large space around them, but she wasn’t sure why she thought this. She could hear no sounds beyond her own breathing, but she nevertheless felt the pressure of being surrounded by a great deal of nothing. Was this the reason she’d been brought here? Was this dark place to be her prison, punishment for whatever crime the Cabal thought she had committed?

A small red pinpoint of light glowed to life in front of her face, and she stopped walking to avoid colliding with it. It became brighter as she examined it, and as soon as she was able to make out the features of the thing that was giving off the faint illumination. She expected it to be some kind of insect, like a firefly, but one whose abdomen glowed red instead of greenish yellow. But no bug lay at the heart of this crimson glow. Instead it was a tiny humanoid figure, something like an infant curled into a fetal position. Its body was distorted, asymmetrical, arms and legs different lengths and thicknesses, features stretched out of true, flesh covered with tumorous growths. The small humanoid’s eyes were huge in proportion to the rest of its deformed body, and they were wide open and blazed with baleful red light, which accounted for the crimson glow surrounding it. How it floated in the air, she had no idea. It possessed no wings, and there was no sign that anything artificial held it aloft. No strings, no wire. The tiny thing’s body didn’t move – arms and legs remained motionless, fingers and toes didn’t twitch or wiggle. And there was no way to tell if the creature’s eyes were focused on her because of how they were glowing, or if it could see at all, for that matter. But she had the impression that it saw her just fine, and for some reason it didn’t like what it saw. She could feel hatred radiating from it, rolling off in waves like heat from a blazing fire.

More crimson pinpoints of light glowed to life around her, at their core other miniature infants, all deformed in various ways, eyes all shining red.

Firebabies, she thought, and the name seemed fitting. They were ugly and beautiful in equal measure, and she was both fascinated and repelled by them. She wondered if there was a word for this mix of emotions. If so, she didn’t