Spawn of Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

folded around her hand, like a mouse writhing in and out of her fingers. Small bolts of lightning jumped from the opening and produced an aura around her, a glowing halo that seemed to emit from her body. The aura changed from white, to yellow, to black, and then the opening began to chip and splinter like pieces of a shattered mirror.
    Mary spoke as if in a dream, ‘Doctor Daniel, you took your own life to send the demon back to where it crawled from.’
    Then there was an explosion as the phenomenon imploded in on itself and winked out of existence. Mary’s hand was sliced away in a clean cut, as if it had been drawn on paper and snipped off with scissors. The hand vanished along with the opening and Mary studied the stump left behind, clean, bloodless, no wound, no pain, and as if she had simply been born that way. The chair began to slowly revert to its original shape and the generator’s screech diminished to a barely audible hum. Apart from the pool of blood that stained the stone floor and splattered the chair, there was no evidence that the event had even taken place.
    Mary turned and walked to the small table, opening the drawer where the revolver she had used to kill Bartholomew had been kept. She found the store of bullets and using her teeth and remaining hand she reloaded the weapon. The aura around her crackled like static electricity and it turned as black as raven’s wings as she walked calmly past the inmates’ cells. The inmates were all dead, their brains fried by the huge energy levels that had backfired from the generator. Mary climbed the stone stairs and walked calmly across the small study. She closed and locked both doors behind her and left the key on one of the small tables that decorated the large reception hall, and made her way to the main body of the asylum.
    John Miller looked up from the ledger he was busily updating. It was a record of the hourly rounds completed by the asylum staff and he had been too preoccupied with it to notice Mary until she was mid-way across the reception hall. Her footfalls were silent on the wooden floor as she wore only a gown. John frowned and peered into the lamp-lit twilight of the hall. Mary became more distinct and John saw the flayed folds of skin around her head that had housed the electrodes, revealed now where her light hair was shaved. He saw the crusted blood caught in the illumination thrown from the lamps, the full mouth, her breasts moving beneath the gown, the stump of her left hand and the revolver in her right.
    John started and moved to press the alarm button on the wall of the office, but before he could do so the first bullet hit him just below his left eye. He fell backwards, crashing into a table and upsetting the books and forms stacked there, before collapsing into a seated position. Papers drifted like large snowflakes to rest in his lap and he inclined his head, making a high-pitched gurgling noise as Mary shot him in his large chest. John sat with his head bowed, slipping into death as Mary watched the pool of blood begin to form around him.
    She admonished, ‘Someone is going to have to attend to this mess and it will not be me sir, I have other business to keep me occupied!’ and she began to ascend the main staircase.
    Deep in the east wing Matthew Bailey had nearly finished checking Dominic Cray’s room. Old Mr. Cray was the last inmate Matthew was required to visit on this particular round. Mr. Cray was an emaciated, wasted, pitiful, skeletal creature. He was a tormented man and his shrunken eyes burnt with a nameless fear. That spark of animation and the living tissue stretched across his bones were the only things that suggested he was still alive, as he did not move, did not speak, and did not blink.
    As an adolescent, he had claimed to see demons, hideous apparitions that manifested in this world and skulked in the shadows, watching. The young Mr. Cray could not understand why he alone was cursed with this ability and