Fear's Touch: A Darkworld Novella (The Darkworld Series)

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© 2014
Emma L. Adams

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ISBN 978-1-62007-810-5 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-62007-811-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-62007-812-9 (hardcover)

1. Start Reading
   
2. A Taste of
   Darkness Watching
   , by
   Emma L. Adams
   
3. About the Author
   
4. More Books from
   Curiosity Quills Press
   
5. Full Table of Contents
   

saw my first demon at a Halloween party. To be honest, I don’t even remember whose party it was—possibly Lola’s. Someone who lived in the rich part of the neighborhood—I remember there being a freaking
balcony.
I remember falling off that balcony and almost breaking my arm.

I remember laughter, followed by screaming.

It took me weeks to put together what happened before, and it began, would you believe, with an Ouija board.

Yeah, such a horror-story cliché. Not like I believed in that kind of crap then, anyway. All I wanted was a good dance, a drink or two, and maybe kiss one of the cute guys who were checking me out in the ridiculously short dress I’d worn as part of my witch costume. Technically, it was a kid’s Halloween costume, but no one had to know that. I’m short and skinny, and it showed off my legs, which was the plan. Alcohol, loud music, and unruly dancing were the recipe for a perfect night out.

Except the power cut had to ruin everything. Ten minutes in, all the lights blew out, and the music blaring from the iPod speakers died out with an ominous sparking sound. Hell, that was a horror-story cliché, too.

When the lights went out, the living room was full of noise and people running about, knocking over paper cups of cheap wine and bumping into each other, when Lola yelled at us to shut the hell up. She was holding something in her hands.

“We’ve got an idea!” she said, holding a light up to her face so it looked ghostly. “How about we try and contact someone from the other side?”

She shone the light over an old-looking wooden board with the alphabet on it, along with a few words. At the bottom, it read “Good-Bye”, which struck me as kind of ominous, though I didn’t know why.

I groaned, turning to Bethany, my best friend, who’d been the one to drag me to the party in the first place. I didn’t even really know Lola that well.

“Seriously?”

“Hell, yeah,” she said. “I always wanted to try one of these.”

Everyone else seemed to be in the same sentiment. I suppose there really wasn’t much else to do but wait for the lights to come back on. In the meantime, make contact with the Other Side.

Ha.

“There’s more room upstairs!” Lola called, and the rest of us—thirty-odd half-inebriated teens—stumbled upstairs after her, following the torch-light into her bedroom.

Even with the lights out, I was still impressed by the size of her room—she had a four-poster bed, for God’s sake, and what looked like the entire window display at TopShop. The curtains were open over the glass doors to the balcony outside, allowing the moonlight to shine on the wooden board as she set it up on the ridiculously plush carpet. We all gathered around her, eager whispers and drunken laughter filling the air.

Lola moved the cursor over several letters, spelling out something like, “Is there anyone there?”

Yeah, like dead people were just hanging about waiting to have a conversation. But hell, what do I know? This whole mess has taught me nothing about life after death—just that life’s too short to worry about it. Of course, back then, I had no idea. I was actually entertaining the idea that it would be kind of cool to have a conversation with my dead granddad again. Not that I thought he’d actually show.

I sure as hell wasn’t expecting the demon.

As Lola’s hands moved over the letters, a chill began to creep up my arms, like from an open window. I rubbed the goose-bumps, feeling the chill slowly work its way over my skin, like dipping toes into ice-cold water. And—I don’t know why—but I lifted my head to look out at the balcony.

Darkness obscured everything, but it wasn’t regular darkness. Somehow, I knew that, even though at the time my mind was more focused on coming up with an excuse to leave this lame-ass party and get my dad to come and pick me up. The chill settled somewhere at the base of my spine, and my vision wavered as I stared unblinkingly at the darkness spreading across the balcony. My eyelids flickered, and when I opened them again, I found myself looking into a pair of cat-like eyes, suspended in the darkness.

My hand jumped to my mouth, my heartbeat loud in my ears. I glanced from side to side to see if anyone else had noticed, but everyone else was fixated on the Ouija board. Like anything
that
said could be as scary as what I was looking at.

Blink. They were still there. No body, no face—just eyes. They screamed
unnatural
at me, and I knew they didn’t belong to anything living. The chill that numbed me was the sense of being watched by something otherworldly.

The eyes shifted, and the darkness crept forward from the balcony into the room. The eyes remained fixed on me, but I still couldn’t make out what they belonged to. A horrible feeling started to nag the corner of my mind, though I didn’t know where it came from—the idea that the eyes belonged to the darkness itself.

All common sense totally deserted me. The sounds of the others giggling over the Ouija board were distant, muffled, like I had cotton wool in my ears. I was the only one who’d seen the darkness, and I couldn’t say a word.

So, naturally, I screamed.

That grabbed everyone’s attention. I was on my feet by now, stumbling around over people sitting in the dark, looking everywhere for the door. When another wave of panic rose, the last bit of sanity departed, and I found myself running
toward
the darkness. Out, onto the balcony.

Blackness swallowed me whole. I couldn’t see a thing—not even my own outstretched arms. Whispers sounded in my ears, and I felt the presence of that awful creature, though I could no longer see it. I ran blindly through the darkness, hit something solid, and fell.

I wish I could say I lost consciousness right away. But as I lay sprawled in Lola’s manicured garden hedge, a sharp pain in my arm, I heard cold, inhuman laughter above me.

Then I passed out.

Mum and Dad took me to the hospital, where, after a long wait for the X-ray, I found out I was lucky and had only sprained my arm, not broken it. I sure as hell didn’t
feel
lucky. For one thing, Bethany hadn’t even accompanied me to the hospital. For another, I was fairly sure I’d gone insane.

When I got home, I braced myself for the talk about drinking responsibly—even though I’d only had a couple of vodka and cokes,—or I don’t know, about not using hallucinogens. But that wasn’t the talk I got.