Читать книгу Last Seen - Rick Mofina - Страница 19
Оглавление“Mom, help me!”
Faith hears him first, crying out, then screaming for her.
“Mom, help me! Please come and help me, Mom!”
He’s still in the Chambers of Dread. It’s where he’s been all this time.
Faith gets in her car, flies to the fairgrounds, scales the fence, rushes into the horror house, passes through the jaws of the Demon King, plunges into the darkness, following Gage’s pleas.
“Mom, please, please, help me!”
“I’m coming, sweetheart! I’m coming!”
A cloaked figure points the way for her with a blood-dripping head. Faith blurs through the labyrinth, races by the flames of the burning witch queen.
“Hurry, Mom!”
Faith comes to the fanged clown thumping a malevolent tune on the keyboard of skulls at the organ and nodding the way for Faith over the river of snakes, through the cavern of bats and spiders. She weaves through the tombstones in the graveyard as the zombie points. “He’s in there!”
“Mommy, help me!”
Gage is lying on a cutting table and the insane butcher—surrounded by twitching limbs and bleeding torsos—raises his cleaver over Gage’s neck.
Faith screams at him, “Stop!”
She rushes to Gage, but hands clawing at her lower legs, wretched hands of the damned from the Dungeons of Dread, keep her back. She struggles, reaching toward Gage, his eyes ballooning as the cleaver begins its descent. She cries out to him—oh God—straining, almost reaching him—almost!
“Why didn’t you take my hand, Mommy?”
“Gage! No! I’m here! Mommy’s right here!”
Faith fights to break free—to save Gage—but the hands are holding her...pressing her down...voices are calling to her...
“Faith! Faith, honey, wake up!”
She gasped and startled awake. Michelle and Pam were with her, holding her down.
“You’re having a bad dream,” Michelle said.
Battling through her torpor Faith discovered she was at home in her bedroom.
“A dream?”
“Yes, it’s just a bad dream.” Pam nodded.
“Gage is home?”
Before they could stop her, Faith bolted from her bed and hurried to Gage’s room. She called for him but the deathly quiet of his empty room and his empty bed that was still made stopped her cold.
“Gage?”
She picked up his pillow, held it to her chest and pressed her face into it, smelling a trace of him.
That’s all she had now, that and her guilt.
Was this the price she’d have to pay for her sins?
“Faith, honey.” Michelle and Pam took her shoulders. “Let’s get you back to your bed. You need to rest.”
Racked with unrelenting agony, Faith slammed her back to the wall and slid to the floor. Through her sobs, as Michelle and Pam helped Faith to her bed, they heard her say, “I’m being punished! I’m being punished!”
Officer Angie Berg heard it, too, and made a note of it in her log.
