The Hunter Inside (27 page)

As she watched, the figure moved
towards the front door of the house. Her desire to scream did her no good, as
she was not in control of her own faculties. Also, there was nobody there to
hear her scream even if she could, and she wondered once again why, in the
middle of the afternoon, there was nobody to witness a thing that was ten feet
tall stooping down and pushing an envelope under the door. An envelope Sandy
knew she didn’t want to see the contents of.
Why is there no one here to see
it?

When it stooped, Sandy felt as though
she were on a roller coaster; such was the pace and distance of her descent
towards the ground. If she had been receiving a piggyback ride from this thing
she would have fallen onto the floor as it bent down or even as it stood back
up, such was the swiftness of every action it undertook.

In a flash it was at the rear of the
house and slowed as it walked towards the window through which Sandy knew she
must be visible.

This is it
, she thought, as it peered through
the window at her prone figure that lay on the floor, exhibiting no signs of
the dream in which she was involved. She could hear its ragged breath issuing
from it in a guttural, almost spluttering fashion.

It’s going to kill me; this is it,
she repeated to herself,
and felt a sense of tortured anguish at the realization that she was never to
see her boys again. A patch of condensation appeared and disappeared repeatedly
on the pane of glass, as it continued to watch her for over a minute, standing
close enough to the glass for its nose to touch.

Suddenly it began to move again.
Sandy’s fear continued to reach new levels. She had always wondered how it
would feel to know that you were about to die and now she knew; it felt like
torture. As the vessel which carried her sleeping yet awake form stepped back
from the window, she began once more to pray, despite the knowledge that it
would do her no good. There was nothing she could do now.

She couldn’t fight for Joe and the
boys; it hadn’t given her a chance. She couldn’t help Arnold – just the same as
she had been unable to help her own parents and the others it had killed. She
was beaten, and she would have to submit to the will of this huge creature.

Sandy’s view of her actual self lying
on Melissa’s lounge floor began to fade. As it did so, the reflection of her
stalker became more visible in the glass in front of her. As several seconds
passed, the outline of the huge head became clearer and clearer.

Sandy wished she could look away. She closed
her eyes, trying to escape seeing the features of the figure, only to be
confronted by an image of herself, standing in the old warehouse from where her
current journey had been made, feeling even more afraid and alone and more
desperate than ever before.

But it was night.

What does this mean?
she wondered, and opened
her eyes to see the reflection of her stalker in crystal clear detail in the
window in front of her.

Sandy was sickened and repulsed by
what she saw. Its face was hideous, and looked only half-formed despite the
huge size of its head. Similar sores to the ones that had been on its hands
earlier were present on its face also, and to Sandy it looked as though her
stalker had been in a bad car accident; one that he would surely not have survived.

She reeled back in horror, feeling as
though her heart were about to explode, and suddenly found that she stood
behind the huge figure. It had its back to her, and as it began to turn away
from the window through which it had watched her, she realized that she was now
in control of her body. Opening her mouth she screamed and screamed and…

…Woke up.

*

Sandy cowered against the
sofa, fighting for breath.

For a moment she lay still, drinking
in life and thanking her lucky stars that she was still alive. When her shock
gave way to full consciousness, she crawled to the side of the sofa without
looking towards the window. The last thing she wanted to see was the hideous
face of the thing that stalked her peering through the window as she crouched,
defenseless and terrified, at the side of Melissa Dahlia’s sofa.

Ninety percent of her consciousness
remained paralyzed by fear, and she continued to hide from the window she had
somehow been on both sides of moments previously. The other ten percent represented
survival instinct for Sandy, but the dreams told her that she could not run
from whoever, or rather
whatever
, it was that wanted to kill her. The
way in which it was able to manipulate her mind was terrifying, and she
wondered whether her next move would be her own.

It was obvious that the dreams held
significance. In ten years she had never had dreams like the two that had so
tortured her nerves over the previous twelve hours. Her body shook violently
from head to foot, as the paralysis of fear gave way to full wakefulness.

It must be warning me,
she reflected
. The time
must be close, and it’s feeding off the fear
.

Her reasoning was good; and she could
not stop fearing meeting this thing face-to-face. Her life and the future of
her family were at stake, and that would ensure she would keep on her toes. She
would fight this thing to the very end. She had to fight it; she couldn’t let
Sean and David down.

She had to beat it. For their sakes.

Using the determination given to her
by thinking of her family, Sandy rose from her position at the side of the sofa
and looked towards the window.

Nothing.

The garden was quiet except for the
birds that passed their day singing and chirruping in the trees around the home
of Melissa Dahlia, but Sandy’s fear was not extinguished by the hulking
figure’s absence from the area directly in front of the house. It could be
lingering anywhere. It had said it was watching her, and now she realized that
it could be watching from inside her mind.

Also, she was yet to check for the
envelope it had pushed under the door. It was not something about which she had
forgotten. It was the last thing she wanted to do, however, because she knew
that if the envelope was there, then the dreams had both been real. It was
definitive confirmation of the fact that her stalker was perhaps ten feet tall
and could show her things in dreams that suggested it was unstoppable.

She walked from the lounge and down
the hallway towards the front door of the house. On the floor near the doorway
lay the envelope, and she locked the front door before stooping and picking it
up with hands that shook fiercely.

This is it
, she thought as she looked at the
word ‘CARSON’ on the front of the envelope, before turning it over and pulling
at the seal that held it together. The seal came away easily, and she gingerly
opened the envelope, dreading what she was about to see.

A postal bomb could not have made her
more nervous, as she pulled the edge of what she expected to be (and appeared
to be) a single sheet of paper from the envelope. As it came out of the
envelope it caught, and she pulled it more firmly, jumping nervously as the
paper came free in her hand.

A photograph fell to the floor.

She stood still, now listening to the
sound of her own ragged breath, and looked down at the back of the photograph.
It lay at her feet, one edge propped against her foot.

The memory of the other photo she had
received from her tormentor made her reluctant to look at the photograph at
all. Even seeing words on a page from this, this
thing,
made her feel
physically sick. She left the photograph for a moment, deciding she would look
at the written message before she stooped to pick up the small black and white
pictorial one.

It was no less or more than she
expected, containing the two names, Arnold and Carson, underneath which the
words ‘Tick-Tock’ were repeated. Two shivers raced down her spine, the second
losing the race towards her toes, and she convulsed with the strength of their
invasion as they worked to ravage her body momentarily, before petering out and
allowing her full control of her faculties once more.

The photograph
. Now she had to look at
the photograph.

It still lay propped against her foot,
and she took a step away from it, allowing it to fall completely faced down
before she stooped and picked it up. Adrenalin surged through her veins, and
she stood up too quickly, stumbling as stars swirled in front of her eyes. For
a moment her head seemed to become filled with helium. Her eyes bulged and she
stood still, telling herself unsuccessfully to calm down.

The photograph faced away from her,
and she turned it over slowly, fearing the new revelation that was about to be
made. When she saw what the photograph contained, tears welled in her eyes.

Everything was real.

Both of the dreams had certainly been
real, for the image with which she was now confronted was the man she had seen
murdered in her dream last night. Now, she looked at his lifeless body and
recognized his surroundings as the house where the killing had taken place in
her dream.

If these dreams are what I have to
look forward to every night
,
then I’ll never be able to sleep again
.

Sandy knew what she must do. She must
get help, as soon as she could. Right now, in fact. She would not seek help
from her husband, and she did not feel that she could seek help from the
police. They had not stopped the thing responsible for the murder of her
parents from killing again, and they would probably suspect her if she told
them of the detail in which she knew two of the murder scenes. She could
certainly not tell them of the strange dreams and the huge size of the thing
that stalked her; she would be locked up straight away, and while she knew that
she would be more likely to survive if she were locked up, she would still be
separated from her children.

She had to find another way. She had
to find the man from her dream. If she found Arnold then they could fight it
together. Maybe together they could find a way to beat it. It knew her every
move, so it would know she had gone to find Arnold, but it was almost like that
was what it
wanted
her to do. It had shown her where he was staying in
the earlier dream, and now it was the only option available to her. She had to
find Arnold. Maybe it was a trap, but she was backed into a corner, and she had
to find a way out.

Sandy knew she would have to go now.
Time was getting shorter both for her and for Arnold, and if she didn’t go now
she might never reach him. Their stalker might take him before she arrived. It
may even decide to take her on the way, and Sandy knew that she had nothing to
gain by hanging around. She had told herself that she would only stay at
Melissa’s while there was no danger to her friend, and the time had come for
her to leave.

She went up the stairs quickly and
into one of the bedrooms, grabbing a pair of her friend’s jeans and a blue
cotton t-shirt from the ancient and battered closet that stood open in the
corner of the room. She knew Melissa wouldn’t mind her borrowing the clothes;
the ones in which she had arrived were in a crumpled mess at the side of the
bed in the other bedroom. She had been so tired she had not even had the energy
to fold them, and the last thing she had been worried about was how she would
look the following day.

She dressed quickly, noting the fact
that the jeans were a little tight for her. Sandy and Melissa had always shared
clothes and had always been the same size. Having children had irreversible
effects upon the body of a woman though, and Melissa had not yet had any children.
She went down the stairs two at a time and used a pen and the envelope in
which the letter and the photograph had arrived to scrawl a note, telling
Melissa that she had to leave. She didn’t say why, and she knew Melissa would
be worried about her. But this was the way it had to be.

She didn’t want to get Melissa
involved in this, and if she knew about it then she would want to help. Sandy
knew there was only one man that could help her, and she paused as she reached
the door of the house.

Well, here we go,
she thought to herself,
this
is the moment of truth.
She opened the door of the house, expecting to be
jumped on by her stalker and a huge knife coming towards her. When nothing
happened she closed the door behind her and ran to her little Toyota.

The weather was good and this might
make her journey easier. That was if the car decided to take her to wherever it
was that she wanted to go. It took four or five attempts at turning the key
violently in the ignition and beating the dashboard with an equal air of
violence, before the engine finally obeyed Sandy’s command and spluttered into
life. She put the car into gear and pulled out of Melissa Dahlia’s drive, not
pausing to look back at her friend’s house. As she began her journey she stared
at the road ahead, knowing that she would have to be vigilant in trying to spot
the place she had seen in her dream.

Arnold had been staying at the
Sleep-Easy Motel, and that was where she now headed. It didn’t matter to her
that she didn’t know where she was going. She felt that she would get there.
She felt it would allow her to reach Arnold.