13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors Read Online Free PDF

said. She
sprang out of bed, padded to the bathroom, and swallowed two
Tylenol PM.
    Sleep hit her like a dark wave and pulled her
into the motel bed’s scratchy sheets. A dream materialized in her
mind, trapping her in a smaller body. How
old am I? She gazed at her tiny hands, with pink
polish flaking off nails bitten down to the quick. Just a rugrat. Maybe five or six.
    She was on a bus. Another girl sat next to her
and trees flew by outside the window. The bus pulled off the
highway onto a dirt road, and a crop of rustic buildings appeared
on the horizon.
    “ Welcome to Camp Fresh Air,” a
smiley young woman said when Marisol stepped off the bus. “You’re
going to have so much fun.”
    Other smiley-faced twenty-somethings herded
the kids from the bus into a hall with sky-high ceilings and miles
of long tables. Marisol felt miniscule. She skipped over to a table
of boys playing cards.
    “ Go fish,” one of the boys
said.
    “ I know that game,” Marisol
squeaked. “Can I play?”
    “ No chubby churros allowed,”
another boy barked. Dick.
    The first boy glared at him and set his cards
on the table. “That’s not nice.” Then the boy did exactly what
Marisol had done to Brent. He dug his fingers right into that
dick’s collarbone.
    “ Ow!”
    The boy laughed and so did Marisol, though
something deep in the pit of her stomach told her she shouldn’t
have.
    “ This game is dumb anyway,” the boy
said. “Come ’ere.” He grabbed Marisol’s hand. “I want to show you
something.”
    Marisol followed the boy to a row of cubbies,
where he pulled out a shoebox. He knelt down on the floor and she
followed suit, staying quiet when he put a finger to his lips,
though she doubted anyone would have noticed them among the
hundreds of kids running amok.
    “ Don’t scream,” he whispered before
lifting the lid to reveal a menagerie of creepy
crawlies.
    “ Awesome,” Marisol breathed. “I
like bugs, too. But you gotta be careful with that one.” She
pointed to a dragonfly with a half-crushed wing buzzing along the
bottom of the box. “They’re pretty but they bite.”
    “ It can’t hurt me if I hurt it
first,” the boy said. He pinned the dragonfly down with his thumb
and plucked one wing off, and then the other. The boy grinned as
the maimed dragonfly flailed around the box.
    Next, he squeezed a fat Japanese beetle
between two fingers. “Wait ’till you see what I do to this
one.”
    The squeal of the hotel phone jolted Marisol
from the dream. The scratchy sheets were soaked with sweat and the
fast food she’d eaten for dinner churned in her stomach.
    Images of tortured bugs danced in her mind.
And even uglier things rose to the forefront. A flayed squirrel
left to rot under a bunk bed. A chipmunk with a stump for a tail
nailed to a tree. Despite the horrors flickering behind her eyes,
she forced her mouth to form a socially acceptable
greeting.
    “ Hello?”
    “ Hello, sweetie! Are you all right?
You sound panicked.”
    Lorna. “You’re the
one calling me in the middle of the night,” she barked.
    A few seconds ticked by. “Marisol, it’s nine
a.m.”
    She jumped out of bed and yanked the curtain
aside, only to be blinded by daylight. “Oh. You’re right.
Sorry.”
    “ Are you sure you’re all
right?”
    “ Yeah. Yes, I’m fine. I just
overslept.” An odd little melody, like a tune hummed by a happy
little kid, found its way into her ear.
    “ Your therapist told me you missed
your appointment.”
    Shit.
    “ Sorry. I just forgot. Maybe if I
was allowed to be in charge of my own life I’d remember that kinda
thing.”
    Lorna sighed into the phone. “Forgetting your
appointments isn’t helping your case.”
    “ Fine. I’ll call her to reschedule.
Hey, next time I meet with her, can I look at my file?” The hummed
melody intensified. She wanted to swat it away like a fly buzzing
too close to her ear, but she couldn’t hang up until she had an
answer from Lorna. “Hello?”
    “ Yes,