A Place So Wicked by Patrick Reuman (life books to read txt) 📕

They reached the peak of the stairs. “Get her outside! I have to look for the others!” Toby yelled.

“They’re in the vehicle already!” Paisley said. “Everybody except Robbie!”

Robbie had woken suddenly. Every atom in his body felt like it was ready to burst. It was as if his body were giving him one last chance to live, to escape. He had been dreaming for so long, and so darkly, that he had begun to think those dreams were reality.

But they weren’t. He rolled off his bed and hit the floor with a painful thump, which woke him the rest of the way. He looked up, seeing that his bed had somehow been pinned against the door. He couldn’t move it. That’s what his mind, what logic told him. But while he slept, it was as if a thousand whispers had sewn themselves into his mind, infinite voices that all blended together into one message.

He had to get out of this house.

He grabbed the corner of the bed and started pulling. But nothing happened. The bed didn’t budge. He didn’t even have the strength left to move a damn bed. He pushed back the tears, the sorrow, that he felt building up within him. He just had to escape.

With everything he had left, he grappled the bed again and pulled. It moved. The bed slid across the floor just ten or so inches. But it was enough. He pulled the door open and turned himself sideways, thankful of the weight he had lost.

He popped through to the other side and immediately fell to his knees. The strength it took to move the bed really had been all he had left. He felt a sort of gust behind him, like someone had just cracked a window but then closed it again. He looked behind him. From the cracks in the floorboards, a darkness began seeping up. Small black droplets slid through and then lifted as if gravity didn’t exist and flung up to the ceiling, splattering on contact.

When he looked back down at the floor, he saw that those few drops were not the only ones. The entire floor was turning black. He didn’t know what it was, only that he needed to get away from it. But he couldn’t. He tried to stand, to get out of there, to run, but his body didn’t react to that need. Whatever energy he had; it was gone now.

And as the blackness took form in front of him, rising in front of him like a starving beast, he wasn’t even angry. It was a fact that he had already known to be true. Before he even moved the bed, before his last ounce of energy had been sucked from him, he knew that he belonged to this house. He remembered the woman he had seen in the hall, the one that looked like she was running toward him. He knew then that she wasn’t really running toward him, or toward anything at all. She was running away, away from this darkness. The same one that reached its black tentacles toward him now. But he wouldn’t run. He couldn’t, not even if he wanted to.

As Toby reached the top of the stairs and rounded the corner into the hall, he saw his uncle down on his knees, staring at the floor under him, the black mass hovering over him like a cobra ready to strike, and he knew exactly what Robbie knew. It wrapped its darkness around Robbie, but unlike with those in the basement, it didn’t rip into him. There was no fury. It just spread around him, calm, and quickly, consuming him. Robbie’s skin turned dark in an instant, and then his uncle burst into black dust.

Toby came running back down the stairs.

“Where’s Robbie?” Paisley asked.

But Toby didn’t answer. He just grabbed her hand and pulled her out the door. From the basement, Addison came running, the only captor who hadn’t been mauled on site. Behind her was another, a tall man who was trudging up the stairs on all fours, his skin darkened and sickly like he had just crawled up from the grave.

Eli stopped, the others not noticing right away. But when they both looked back, Eli shouted, “Keep going!” He slammed the front door behind him and held it shut as something slammed against it on the other side.

Toby remembered as they reached the car that he hadn’t grabbed the keys, but then Paisley pulled them from her pocket. She must have grabbed them in the moment he was upstairs. A love for his sister lit warmly inside him, an admiration that she was smart enough, and on her toes and had her wits enough, that she was able to grab the keys, something he had completely forgotten about.

She tossed them to him and then hurried into the passenger seat where Trevor sat, still mostly unconscious. Toby climbed into the driver’s seat and started the car. Another car was parked behind them, blocking the end of the driveway. So Toby had to crank the wheel and pull over the curb, clipping the car as he pulled out. When their car hit the other, Trevor’s head popped up for a moment, a gleam of life in his eyes. He mumbled something unintelligible and then dropped his head onto Paisley’s shoulder.

They were alive. That was one fear that ravaged Paisley as she sat tied up in the basement, the fear that if she were to make it out, the others would already be dead. The car bobbed as Toby reversed them into the road and turned to drive away.

As he did so, his and Paisley’s eyes met Eli’s. Eli stared back from right outside the front door. But he wasn’t frowning. Instead, he had the only smile on his face that Toby had ever seen. The kid looked