The Glimpsing Read Online Free PDF Page B

stepped inside.   He waited there, staring around.   No thunder.   No lightning.   No boogeyman.   Portia was lying on her back beneath a dark blanket at the far end of the bed.     He made his way over and stood above her. She looked, very much so, like an angel.
    He had seen it almost exactly this way.   Just over an hour ago, around 3:30am, he had been at home using a bottle of bourbon to sooth the sting of yet another of Portia’s rejections. Earlier, during one of their infamous kissing sessions, he’d become extremely aggressive and she’d been forced to send him home.   He’d brooded there for hours, his body still aflame with passion, and his mind unable to push her out.   Then he saw it, a vision passing before his face.   It was Portia.   She was lying in her bed, gazing up at him with those large and seductive blue eyes.   She raised a hand, soft and delicate, and extended it toward him, clasping his own.   Then she pulled him in, where finally, mercifully, she extinguished his flame.   She wanted him.   Needed him to return to her.   And somehow Jack’s drunken mind actually believed this.
    He raised his hand and brought it toward the rim of the blanket.   It eased through the air, shaking gently from the bourbon.   He swallowed hard as it neared, his mind exploding with the vision of what lay beneath the blanket: a body carved from a pearl, white, warm, and sensuous.
    His hand was just falling to the blanket when a loud thud, like a bowling ball falling to the floor, rapt the air.   He jerked badly, instinctively yanking his hand away, and turning toward the closet.   Its door was just swinging open to a stop, now yawing at him like the unhinged jawbone of a skull.
    He gazed confusedly at the blackness inside, his mind only half-comprehending what was taking place.   He cut his eyes toward the window, believing a draft might have drawn the door open, but it was sealed shut.   He wondered if the door might have been more open than it first appeared, and, that explanation seeming to fit, he turned back to Portia and once again advanced his hand toward the blanket.
    A soft moan erupted from the closet, sending a sharp chill through him—or had that been Portia?   She was now writhing beneath him, stirring from sleep.   He cut his eyes back to the closet… and balked when he saw something moving within, a peculiar red hue roaming at the base of the blackness.   It seemed to expand, spreading out and up, parts of it becoming more and sometimes less bright.   For a moment, he thought he caught a peek-a-boo glimpse of something even deeper within, something ashen in color.   A face.   A woman’s face, watching him steadily.
    Jack reacted as if hot coffee had been spumed to his face.   Someone was watching.   As unbelievable as that seemed, someone could see him.   And as that thought continued to fester, he found himself feeling the way any sane man should in a situation such as this.   Like an intruder.
    Bristling with anger, he slowly backed away, and departed the bedroom.
     
    Jack Parke blinked away from the painting, then turned and faced the bed.   Gabrielle still lay there sleeping silently.
    It was clear to him now that the spook in Portia’s closet had really been nothing more than an article or two of clothing—and quite a bit too much bourbon—but the false entity had nevertheless served a very important purpose.   It showed him the disturbing depths of his obsession.   God knows what might have happened had it not appeared.
    Afterward, he could remember sitting in his car, watching the colors of dawn breaking on the horizon.   Yes, he was obsessed.   That was clear.   But he had not arrived there on his own.   She had driven him to it.   Portia had made him the monster he’d now become.
    He began to hate her then.   He hated her almost as much as he desired her.
    He knew he needed to end things.   But he wasn’t merely going to bow out gracefully, taking