Night Terrors Read Online Free PDF Page B

on her chest, like she couldn’t breathe anymore, and she shut down.
    A few minutes later the cops checked Tara’s house as she waited in the front seat of the squad car, numb with grief. They found her parents slaughtered. Whoever had killed them had entered the house and killed them quickly, hacked them up within minutes. The killer had searched through every room in the house; his bloody footprints had revealed that. He searched the rooms, but he hadn’t taken anything. It was like he was looking for something.
    Or someone.
    They never caught her parents’ killer. The police considered it a home invasion gone bad. But Tara knew better, she knew that the Shadow Man had picked their house specifically, and worse, she knew that he had been looking for her. It was a guilt that always stayed with her. Her rational mind told her that if she’d been at home, the Shadow Man would’ve killed her parents anyway. But it didn’t matter; she still couldn’t help feeling guilty about running away in the middle of the night.
    Tara’s Aunt Katie, her mother’s sister, took Tara in. Tara moved to Philadelphia with her aunt. But they didn’t stay in Philadelphia very long; they moved around a lot. Even if they lived in the same town for a little while, they would move from house to house, never staying anywhere longer than six months.
    Tara finished high school early, doing some of her studies online, and then she applied to an art school in Tampa, Florida. She was accepted. She had always been a good artist, but her teachers in school always commented on how “dark” some of her works were – they would rather she stick to ponies and rainbows.
    Her parents had a life insurance policy in place, but it was held in a trust (along with the little bit of money that the sale of their “murder house” had made) until she was eighteen years old. Tara wasn’t a millionaire, but she was set for a while. But even though she had the money, she still wanted to get a college degree and do what she’d always wanted with her life – to be an artist.
    When she moved to Tampa, she got a nice apartment. The night terrors had subsided some, but they never completely went away. She would have the occasional nightmare about the Shadow Man, but more often than that she would dream of a murder somewhere, she would see the person while they were dying – just like she’d seen Jen last night, like she was looking through the killer’s eyes. She had tried to help the police a few times, but she couldn’t give enough details about the killer, and she couldn’t see the future, she couldn’t see these things before they were going to happen.
    At least not yet.
    Tara was never able to live with anyone for very long. She had tried. But eventually a roommate would wake Tara up in the bathtub, or in a hall closet, or even out in the driveway, and she would have to explain to them about her night terrors.
    And boyfriends found it a big turnoff when they woke up in the middle of the night to find Tara on top of them, punching them, clawing at them. And it didn’t help that her training in the martial arts allowed her to punch and kick with lethal force.
    She had been with one guy, Rick, for almost a year. She had told him about her night terrors and he promised that he could learn to live with her condition. He told her that he would be there to protect her from the shadowy man that she feared in her nightmares. But when she broke his nose in the middle of the night, it was too much for him, the last straw. He was sorry, he told her, but he couldn’t go on like this. What if she grabbed a kitchen knife while in the middle of one of her night terrors? Tara agreed and she watched him pack his bags and leave. She cried for a few days after he was gone, but she could not blame him for leaving.
    Tara was destined to be alone – she realized that.
    She kept weapons around her house in case the Shadow Man finally found her again: knives in the kitchen,