The Affliction

  THE AFFLICTION

  by

  Wendy E. Marsh

  TORRID BOOKS

  www.torridbooks.com

  Published by

  TORRID BOOKS

  www.torridbooks.com

  An Imprint of Whiskey Creek Press LLC

  Copyright © 2018 by WENDY E. MARSH

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 (five) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-68299-301-9

  Credits

  Cover Artist: Kelly Martin

  Editor: Katherine Johnson

  Printed in the United States of America

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not have come together or made it off my personal computer had it not been for the support from some special people. I want to thank everyone who encouraged and inspired me, from friends and family to classmates and strangers on a cruise ship.

  Special thanks to my parents, for always believing in me and teaching me to reach for the stars. To my amazing friends Lauren, Esther, Andrea, and Megan, for your passion and advice, for reading in the early stages, and pushing me to finish. Thanks to my fiancé, for your patience during long periods absorbed in the computer and enduring my broken record excuse, “I’m working on my book.”

  Thank you to my wonderful agent, Stephanie Hansen, for your enthusiasm in my diamond in the rough, the emails and phone calls. I couldn’t have done it without your guidance, critiques, and encouragement.

  Thank you to everyone at Start Media and Whiskey Creek Press. To Jan Janssen at Torrid Books for pulling everything together and Editor Katherine Johnson for refining my manuscript. Shout out to Kelly Martin for the countless emails and working so closely with me to bring my vision to life and create the perfect cover.

  Chapter 1

  I blinked up into the endless sky above me and wondered why the nightmares never go away. I stared into the gloomy atmosphere and realized no moon nor any stars winked through the charcoal clouds. I shifted on the hammock I had rigged up on my balcony, my little getaway from life. I loved spending time outside; feeling the fresh air, listening to the sounds of summer, and attempting not to think of the memories constantly tormenting me.

  Unfortunately, I knew all too well my most uninvited thoughts insisted on not only crashing my party, but bouncing around as the center of my attention. Of course, considering the circumstances, I ended up turning out all right. And I couldn’t complain profusely about my situations because I chose most of them. I sentenced myself to whatever doleful life I clung onto, because of the thing that disturbed me the most. Memories of the car accident would haunt me forever, and they provided a surplus of fuel to generate nightmares for the past couple of years.

  My nightmares abruptly ripped me from my wretched sleep about an hour before, the green numbers on my digital alarm clock told me it was three a.m. Instead of putting useless effort into falling asleep again, I admitted defeat. Not that I was particularly fond of continuing my nightmare anyway.

  Although I tended to view life with humorous cynicism and didn’t don a mask to pretend the tribulations of the world were nonexistent, I didn’t revel in misery. Instead, I looked those demons in the face and laughed. Or tried to anyway.

  Still, I wasn’t a despair monger and would rather not see Michael’s tortured face again. My first intention after waking was to spend the rest of the night watching TV in the living room, but I quickly remembered my best and only friend Cara currently inhabited the couch.

  Since her boyfriend of three years spontaneously left her without so much as a “goodbye” a few days before, I allowed her to sleep over at my apartment while she tried to heal a broken heart.

  I knew she purposefully avoided any conversation that might reveal why Adam left. I attempted to adopt an objective view of the situation, but it became wearisome not to make judgments when I saw the shattered remains of my once perfect friend lying motionless on the couch for days. She was the strong one of us; the friend who held us both up when my mom used to return home drunk or when Michael died and I was stuck with a tortured life I didn’t want to partake in anymore. Seeing her in pain challenged me, made me question my strength a million times over, because watching her suffer was almost as unbearable as going through it myself, and she had never flinched in her support of me.

  I didn’t want to disturb her that late in the night, but I had to escape my bedroom. The inanimate objects started to move in the dim light, but my eyes didn’t seem to want to close.

  As I crept down the hallway, I stole a habitual glance at the body-length mirror hanging on the wall and almost blew the silent cover I tried to maintain. My sapphire eyes cut into me with unnatural vigilance, glowing even more against my light complexion and long pearl-hued hair than they usually did. I shivered involuntarily, glanced quickly around me, and thought I saw something move in the mirror from the corner of my eye. I envisioned crawling lace, like frost blooming on a winter window, but when I looked back in the mirror it had vanished.

  Cowardly, I ran out to the living room; saw Cara was fitful but asleep, and quietly slid between the glass doors to my balcony, which was just the roof over the front porch. “Get a grip, Aubrie,” I breathed to myself. I silently slid the door shut to avoid waking Cara.

  I stood in a trance for a few minutes, staring out at the empty road below me, and tried to reason with myself while my heart rate slowed and my breathing eased. I recognized the same irrational response from my body as when I finished my laundry in the basement and had to kill the pull chain light bulb at the bottom of the stairs. I always ran up. I knew there was nothing down there with me, but my mind blew up and threw shards of imagined shrapnel tearing after me.

  No reason for it just now, but I attributed it to recovering from the terrors in my dreams. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d thought I’d seen something imaginary, but I always ignored it, excused it as a mind trick. I always knew there was something wrong with my brain.

  Finally, I climbed into the hammock and subconsciously roamed through the horrors that would have been present in my mind’s eye had I not woken, when a scream jolted me out of my trance.

  I didn’t move for fear that whatever had made that horrible noise would see me. I grasped the edge of the hammock as I looked surreptitiously around me. The panic caused my head to pound even though it was silent then.

  I tried to register in my brain, seemingly stuck in sloth gear, what had just split the thick night air with that heartrending screech. And now, the silence seemed even more perturbing than before.

  I felt myself wishing my nightmares still held me captive. I didn’t want a scream like the one I just heard to exist in real life. It contained such agony, and I couldn’t escape it, couldn’t think properly.

  Even without such provocation, my mind tended to run wild with horrid fantasies on a regular basis. Cara said I should write scripts for horror movies with the ease in which I distorted shadows into phantom terrors and the house’s natural creaking into invisible goblins reveling in the hastening of my heartbeats.

>   After the scream, my imagination flared up and sent images of masked serial killers flying through my brain. I tried to ignore the illustrations, but my mind kept throwing out the possibilities, each one more horrible than the last.

  The scream sounded again, a nearly inhuman wail that just about clotted the blood in my veins, but this time I realized, with blinding dread, the source of the sound was inside my apartment. Cara.

  I rolled out of the hammock and hesitantly approached the door. I had to go in and help Cara, but I was scared of what could have made her shriek like that. My instinct was to dash inside to see what was happening, but despite the fact my mind fogged over I knew I should take more caution. Don’t run in like an idiot and get killed before you can help her, I thought.

  My breaths came out unevenly in loud gusts as I placed my trembling hand on the edge of the door. My whole body shuddered, but I slid the glass panel all the way open, hurrying deftly aside as I waited for the unknown horror to leap at me from the darkness.

  A few seconds passed, and I still stood unharmed. Cara stopped screaming, but loud sobs echoed out to me. I took this moment of relative calm and stepped into the apartment as I scanned the living room and beyond for any sign of the intruder.

  “Aubrie. Get out now! I’m sorry.”

  “Cara!” I rushed to kneel beside her, where she sat in front of the couch with her knees bent up to her chest, not knowing what to do or how to help her since I couldn’t distinguish any immediate danger. She stared up at me through her honey eyes, which had seemingly lost their shine, and for the first time, I studied her face and realized how much she suffered.

  Cara had naturally bronze skin but it appeared unnervingly pale and stretched tautly over her too-prominent cheekbones. Her long mahogany hair was frizzy, her eyes hollow as she stared into mine with fear.

  “Get out, Aubrie,” she wheezed.

  “But it’s my house!” I exclaimed in confusion. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “No. Get out of my life. I’ve hurt you by staying here.”

  And then, frantic knocking sounded on my apartment door. We both froze, petrified like two hideous sculptures. The knocking transformed into furious pounding and Cara’s eyes were wide with panic. But I read something else in her frightened expression…understanding. She knew who was on the other side of my door, and abruptly I wondered what she hid.

  When I was a teenager, I had virtually lived at Cara’s house. I could never repay her enough for the countless times she opened her door to me after I ran crying to her house in the middle of the night. So when she showed up at my door, I hadn’t asked questions as she breathed the cruel truth of Adam’s desertion through silent tears. I just let her in, and she crashed on the couch, where she had remained for the past few days.

  I would have tried to talk or comfort her, but I knew she just wanted to be left alone. I had been through enough hardships with Cara to know she didn’t always need me to listen while she poured out her soul for hours. Sometimes we did need each other for that, but in most instances, it merely required the presence of the other, with the occasional interjection and tissue offering.

  For this particular situation, I sensed she only needed somewhere to stay where nobody would bother her. I didn’t think anything of it. But as I sat next to her, with my door about to cave at any moment, I wondered what had happened. What had she done? Where was Adam?

  I hadn’t foreseen him suddenly leaving her, but when Cara told me about the mysterious trips and gaps of time when she didn’t know where he was, I guess I hadn’t been extremely flabbergasted. There just always seemed to be this look in his dark bistre eyes that I didn’t trust. I thought maybe he was trying to hide something from the world. Other than that, I had always rather liked Adam.

  Though he was admittedly a little odd, he was perfect for Cara. She was the bubbly, affable one of us. I wasn’t a complete pessimist; I just put an extreme shade of realism over her never setting sun. She was a member of that club which preferred to ignore the struggles of life.

  Despite her winsome personality, she was somewhat irascible in stressful situations. Adam, on the other hand, was impressively laid back and could calm her down in any circumstances I had witnessed. He was also quite shy, and I couldn’t picture him as the one outside banging on my door, which was likely to reach its extinction, while I sat there fossilized.

  Within a few seconds, I thawed out and sprinted to my bedroom, fumbling with the nightstand drawer, and then bounded towards my endangered door with my Beretta handgun. My fingers outstretched longingly toward the knob, muzzle of the gun shaking slightly but purposefully aimed. The back of my neck prickled and the hair on my arms stood on end as I realized someone stood behind me. And then, before I could react, I knew nothing but a sharp pain on the top of my head, heard whatever the intruder hit me with shattering onto the floor. They whipped my gun out of my hand and I was too stunned to scream.

  As I dropped to the ground, I felt my scalp split open in merciless agony and I guessed a carnelian wetness seeped through my hair. Strong hands grabbed my ankles and dragged me away across the roughness of the carpet, but I saw nothing as the pain inhibited my sight. And the last thing I heard was the apparent destruction of my front door.

  Chapter 2

  I was comfortable when I woke in the morning but a little chilled, mostly from the crystalline sheet of dew that covered me. I scrunched up my face in disorientation and immediately wished I hadn’t. Even the slightest stretching of the skin over my face shot torrents of pain across my skull, so I lay still while I became the preschooler with a million questions.

  I remembered what had happened the previous night…How could I not? But why was I outside, and was I on my balcony or some other unknown place? I didn’t know because I hadn’t opened my eyes. It felt like my hammock. Not the ground or the road. That was good; at least I wasn’t in danger of being pancaked by a car, not that I didn’t feel like I already had been. I risked opening my eyes and groaned as the acute throbbing returned. Yep. I was on my balcony.

  I sat up slowly and very carefully touched the top of my head. Matted blood in my hair crumbled off under my probing fingers. I guessed that the open wound was quite small, although I had probably sustained a larger area of superficial damage. After my assessment, I concluded that it was not a severe injury, even if my head did feel as though my brain tried to outgrow it.

  I looked around, hoping to see someone, but my scouting came up empty, go figure. I had chosen this particular apartment for two features: the porch roof balcony and the exclusiveness. After the accident two years before, I preferred solitude and avoiding people as much as possible. I had no desire or need for social interactions and quite enjoyed the peace that came with my reclusive living.

  I had always lived in Aurora, a small town in Northwestern Pennsylvania, in what once was oil drilling country. I grew up in the bigger half of a grand old Victorian styled house, now painted an ugly shade of forest green. All the old houses were split up like that; they had been built and occupied by the prosperous oil barons in the late 1800’s, but once the wells dried up, they moved away and left the town forgotten. Now nobody could afford a whole house, with their brilliant architectural designs and impressive square footage. So we shared.

  Or at least I did until I started to rent my apartment in a shabby white house on the very outskirts of town, where the houses thinned out considerably but before you reached any corn fields. The floor below me remained vacant. Although my landlord also fixed the first level into an apartment, nobody had ever occupied it. People generally wanted to be in the town or out of it.

  I had never resented my choice to live alone, but as I sat so bewildered on my balcony, I experienced an emptiness I had never known. Cars passed by on the only road out of town to the north, but the angle of the sun obscured their drivers’ faces. None of the few neighbors around me were out and about; somewhat unusual for a Sunday morning. Usually, someone mowed the lawn or walke
d their dog. This morning there was no one.

  I stood up shakily and immediately noted the shattered glass panes of my door and the disturbing pool of blood beginning to dry and absorb into the shingle roof footing of the balcony. I evaluated my body again but was sure that the blood had not leaked from me. I side-stepped the crimson mess, prepared to return inside.

  This time there was no sound as I stepped through the threshold into my living room, which bore small signs of the mayhem the night before. It appeared as though someone had cleaned the bathroom and subsequently dumped the waste onto the floor by the couch. Dark hair was eerily flung everywhere, and tissues covered the blood-strewn flooring.

  Even though intuition told me I was alone in the house, a part of me expected an ambush at any second. I performed a quick search of the room with no luck in finding my gun, and I felt vulnerable. I snatched the iron poker from beside the fireplace, the victim’s obvious choice, although that didn’t make me feel much better. I had never taken any form of martial arts, let alone a class in defending oneself with mundane household objects.

  Independence was always kind of my forte, though. I never had support from my mom and had to learn to find my way through life by myself. She would laugh if I asked her for help. She would yell at me if I cried.

  I developed some particularly disturbing defense mechanisms. I hardened myself to the outside world; built a barrier between myself and everyone else. I didn’t express emotion like most other people; I held it all in so I couldn’t get hurt with it. And I never depended on other people if I could help it, never let myself appear vulnerable. I could take care of myself, and I didn’t want anyone to think otherwise.

  I guess that’s one reason why I took to shooting so well. Cara’s dad was in the military and hunted recreationally. He taught me to shoot when I was eight, and I’d practiced ever since. My nickname, behind my mother’s back, of course, was Annie Oakley because I was a natural and could out-shoot everyone when we practiced. I liked it because it was a “do” sort of activity. I didn’t have to worry about talking or collaborating with other people. It was me and the gun. Focus. Control. Do. Excel.