Screamscapes: Tales of Terror Read Online Free PDF Page B

bitch wouldn’t know what hit her, after he manipulated her into letting him out of here.
    Shit, I might lock her ass under here and be done with it, he thought to himself. I like the sound of that.
    He pressed his ear against the stinging coldness of the door and listened with all his might for her reply, for a muffled sob, for the sound of the padlock being lifted out of the collar, anything.
    Silence.
    She was being exceptionally stubborn, he thought. It wasn’t like her for more than thirty seconds to go by without some sort of bitching spewing from her mouth.
    “Sweetheart?” he tried again, using the most humble voice he could manage. “I never meant to hurt you. I love you. I am so, so sorry. Let me out so we can talk about it, okay - about where we go from here.”
    There was still no response, only maddening silence. Minutes ticked by. Without his watch or his cell phone, he had no way of knowing how much time had passed.
    OK, think, Tom, think. How long can she keep me under here before she gives in? When did she find the picture – this morning? Last week? What else could she know about it, other than the fact that he had a picture of someone she didn’t know in his wallet?
    He didn’t know how long Kelly might have had the picture. He hadn’t looked at it recently himself. It had only been two days since he had last seen Miranda in person, so it was possible that Kelly had taken it several days ago, if not more.
    She would cool down, Tom knew. She couldn’t leave him under the house forever; she wouldn’t kill him, it wouldn’t be worth it. He had not been the best father lately -that was true. But Kelly would not take her daughter’s daddy away.
    It wasn’t like she had had much use for him since he had been laid off anyway, he figured. They hadn’t had anything resembling a true conversation for months. Now that she knew about the other woman, she would probably be glad to see him leave, to be able to get on with her life.
    Regardless of how she had found out or how she felt about things, here he was: trapped under his own house, freezing cold, soaking wet, and powerless to do anything about it.
    Fuck that, he thought, and fuck her. I’m getting out of here, and she can go fuck herself. There’s got to be a way out. I’m not going to lay here and freeze my ass off while she sits upstairs fingering herself while I suffer.
    Tom scanned the crawlspace in earnest for any other way to escape. He knew there was only one door, but he scanned the perimeter of the foundation.
    The usual small vents usually built into the foundation walls were missing, since the house had been built long before building codes had required them. He wouldn’t have been able to fit through a little vent anyway, he knew. It would have been nice to be able to see sunlight, though - for his sanity’s sake if nothing else.
    Previous owners had upgraded the house’s heating and cooling to a central system decades ago, but the air ducts ran inside the attic, not the crawlspace. Unfortunate, because that eliminated the possibility of pulling an air duct loose from the floor and breaking his way up into the house through the hole.
    Too bad, he thought. He could’ve knocked loose one of the air ducts to blow warm air down here while he plotted his escape.
    His flashlight was losing its brilliance and cut weakly through the darkness. He thumped the head of the flashlight against his palm, and it brightened back up. Near the front corner of the house, he could make out what looked like a neat stack of objects, but details were lost in the gloom. Cinderblocks, he guessed. Maybe an abandoned tool might be nearby?
    He crawled forward to inspect, full of renewed hope. His elbows and knees made a wet sucking sound as he pulled them from the mud.
    After sloshing his way through twenty feet or so of mud and muck, he was surprised to find himself looking at several very new-looking, shrink-wrapped packages of bottled drinking water.
    He