13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m still here. Marisol, I’ll
be honest, I just don’t think that’s a good idea at this point.
You’re still recovering from the accident. I know it must seem like
I’m keeping you in the dark, but I can promise you that everything
I do is in your best interest, sweetie. I care about you more than
you know.”
    “ Ugh. You’re killing me with the
saccharine bullshit, Lorna.” The humming became almost deafening,
threatening to swallow the world. “Call me back when you realize
I’m just a case and not your kid.”
    She slammed the receiver down, expecting sweet
relief from that humming. But it droned on, forcing her to turn and
face the TV. Instead of morning talk shows, Marisol found herself
staring at an image of a little boy humming to himself while he
carved up a sparrow with a pocket knife. His hands were slicked
with deep red blood and dotted with tufts of downy feather. He’d
already hacked one wing off and was working on the second. The
sparrow’s dead black eyes stared at Marisol.
    She jammed her finger against the power button
but the image never flickered. The boy’s lighthearted humming
turned her stomach. She gave up on the power button and ripped the
plug out of the wall.
    The humming ceased and Marisol breathed a sigh
of relief. But she didn’t have time to dwell on creepy shit that
most definitely shouldn’t be on TV at 9:00 a.m., when little kids
could be flipping through the channels looking for
cartoons.
    She dug Brent’s phone out of her purse,
called the home , and asked
for Brent.
    “ Hello?”
    “ It’s me calling from your
phone.”
    “ Jesus.” Marisol heard him fumbling
with the receiver. “You can’t call me here. The other staffers
might recognize your voice.”
    “ Doubtful. You get my file
yet?”
    “ Working on it. I’ll call you
tonight. Don’t call here again.”
     
    ● ● ●
     
    SOMETHING’S missing.
    Marisol had met up with Brent at an all night
diner and spent the last twenty minutes combing through a printout
of her file.
    “ No wonder you were so fucked up,”
Brent said. “You saw a kid drown.”
    With sketches of six different foster homes
and euphemisms like “urban” and “street-smart,” the file fleshed
out the drips and drabs of memory that returned after the accident.
Like many of the other latchkey and foster kids in the Bronx, she
spent nearly every summer at a camp for “underprivileged
kids”—whatever that was supposed to mean—in rural New Hampshire.
She became friends with a boy her age and, when they were fourteen,
he and Marisol snuck away from their counselors, found a canoe, and
paddled out to the middle of a deep lake. The boy fell overboard
and, after a three-day search, was presumed dead.
    According to the file, a year after the
accident, Marisol suddenly went catatonic for three weeks. When she
finally spoke again, she earned herself a textbook diagnosis
of childhood disintegrative
disorder . In their notes, countless shrinks and
therapists had theorized that she’d regressed back to a time before
she knew the boy.
    Rather than sadness or self-pity, she was
struck by the overwhelming feeling that a massive piece was still
missing from the puzzle. The words in her file smirked at her,
daring her to dig deeper, to get lost in the great white void
between the lines of text.
    “ I just can’t imagine,” Brent said
as he doused his tofu scramble with hot sauce. “It’s so
tragic.”
    “ But why did it take me almost a
whole year to lose my marbles?” she asked. “If I was going to turn
into a full-on nut job, how come it didn’t happen right
away?”
    Brent shrugged. “If there’s one thing I’ve
learned from working with crazy kids, it’s people can become
unhinged in a thousand different ways.”
    A sapphire sky with a few golden clouds rose
to the surface of her mind. The image undulated, as if reflected in
water. The scents of sunscreen and mid-summer trees hung in the
air. She could hear the gentle lapping