Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (audio ebook reader .TXT) 📕

practice his dexterity, John picked up a knife from the drawer as Jennifer filled the kettle and placed it on the stove in readiness to make her favorite tea.

Too quietly to be heard by either of them, at that moment David Miller opened the front door with his keys. With their backs to him, neither of them saw him enter the kitchen. If they had, John would have stopped what he was doing immediately. As it was, David became the unintended witness to a knife, seemingly on its own, entering a jar of peanut butter and spreading a dollop of the contents onto a piece of bread. He stood hypnotized for a second and then coughed––a habit he had when nervous. The knife dropped to the kitchen work surface.

Jennifer looked around, startled, and saw David with an understandably bewildered expression on his face.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said, flashing a concerned look at John. “Come and sit down.” He gave only the barest inclination that he had heard her, so she led him to one of the couches in the family room.

David didn’t respond. His eyes remained fixed on the knife and peanut butter. He assumed that he was so tired that perhaps his mind had been playing tricks on him.

“He’s in just the right mood for the talk,” John whispered.

David sat down. He wanted to ask about the knife but couldn’t bring himself to do it. As it turned out, he didn’t have to.

“I know you saw the knife in the air, Dad . . .”

“You saw it, too?”

Jennifer nodded, glancing again at John.

“But . . . but . . . how was that possible?” David stammered, and followed it with another of his nervous coughs.

Jennifer looked her father squarely in the eyes. “It’s John, Dad. John’s spirit is here, and it was John who held up the knife!”

“That’s not possible,” David protested. “This is your obsession with the supernatural again! He’s not even dead—he’s in the hospital in a coma, for Pete’s sake!”

Jennifer said nothing. She went to fetch the notepad and the pen used for writing grocery lists from the kitchen table and placed them on the coffee table in front of her father. She placed her hand on top of her father’s hand. “This will prove it, Dad!” she said gently as she nodded to John.

David tried to come to terms with what he thought his daughter was expecting to happen––the thought of the pen moving under paranormal forces was insane. Then his pupils widened with the unexpected thought, but what if it does? He glanced nervously up at Jennifer. “You’re not seriously suggesting…” His voice, nearly a whisper, now trailed off as he watched the pen lift itself above the pad.

David bolted backward, pressing himself deep into the couch. The pen started to write on the pad on its own, before being laid to rest, again by an invisible hand, on the glass coffee table. The words left on the paper were:

I AM HERE

JOHN

Jennifer and John watched David as he sat staring at the paper, his face frozen, for what must have been a full minute. Then he shook his head slightly as if to make what he had seen fall from his memory. Finally, he whispered, “What the hell?” and looked up at Jennifer. His eyes darted around the room as if he might somehow glimpse John. The logical part of his brain was trying to negate what he had just seen, while the primitive part was slowly succumbing to fear—fear of the unknown.

David looked at his daughter as if maybe she was somehow bewitched, but she seemed to be her usual sweet, believable self. Except that what she was telling him was unbelievable.

She told him then how she, too, had been shocked, even repulsed, when John had made contact with her. But the difference was that when John had reached out to her, she had actually seen him as a spirit, an orange glowing form, and since then she had been able to not only see him but all the other spirits on the planet.

David sat silently, listening to her explanation of how they had found out John was in another, hidden world on Earth, and how the fact that his body was in a coma could mean there was a chance he could come back to the real world. She suggested he think of John as being in an extended out-of-body experience, hoping it would ease his confusion.

This explained her seemingly strange response to the trauma of the event, David thought. He recalled the psychologist explaining it by saying that everyone grieves in different ways. She hadn’t been grieving, he realized, because she hadn’t really lost John—she was still communicating with him.

She gave him a few more moments before telling him the next part. Maybe this time he would believe her. “Dad, spirits can possess mortals. You have to believe me now. I saw a spirit possess Vernon Hardwell. It was the spirit of Juan Santiago, the drug lord you prosecuted in Miami.” She paused, seeing the bemusement in her father’s face before pressing on. “Devereux said those things to you at the clinic and stabbed you in the hand because Santiago’s spirit transferred to him after Hardwell was locked up.”

The primitive part of David’s brain was taking over because the logical brain had nothing rational to offer. He felt as though his heart had turned to lead and his palms moistened in fear as he desperately wanted to dismiss everything that he had just heard. Yet the image of the pen writing on its own kept replaying in his mind, reminding him that his wish to return to his prior ignorance would never be fulfilled––his perception of the world had just been irreversibly changed. Unable to dispute what he had seen with his own eyes, he found himself considering the possibility that maybe—just maybe—it had been Santiago speaking to him through Devereux. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed as the memory of his conversation with