The Haunting of Anna McAlister Read online

  The Haunting of Anna McAlister

  Horror by Jerome Harrison

  Kindle: 978-1-58124-452-6

  ePub: 978-1-58124-547-9

  ©2012 by Jerome Harrison

  Published 2012 by The Fiction Works

  http://www.fictionworks.com

  [email protected]

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  In Paris, a woman screamed.

  She didn’t stop screaming

  until long after she was dead.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Detroit, Michigan—USA

  “Anna, Anna darling,” a voice whispered. “Wake up, Anna.”

  Anna McAlister rolled from her right side to her left. She mumbled a protest and resumed snoring.

  “Anna!” the voice now demanded. “Wake up!”

  Even in her sleep, Anna felt the chill as her down comforter was slowly pulled away.

  “Tom,” she moaned and batted at the air, hoping to land her fist firmly on the face of her boyfriend. After all, he had been warned about his habit of waking her up at all hours with much more than a midnight chat on his mind. He apparently thought it was worth the risk.

  “Not now,” Anna swung her arm back, again striking nothing but air. “I want to sleep. Go away.”

  Anna quickly snatched the comforter back up to her chin and pressed it tightly between her knees.

  “Anna!” the voice screamed, as if in excruciating pain. The comforter was yanked from her grasp and thrown across the room.

  Anna sat straight up in bed, suddenly wide awake. “Tom, what’s wrong?”

  She quickly looked around the dark room, and felt the empty bed next to her. There was nothing, no one, but still Anna absolutely knew she was not alone. The clock read 3:33 a.m. Anna shivered and started to sweat. She could feel her heart beating wildly in her chest. She suddenly realized that the voice she had heard hadn’t belonged to her boyfriend. It was deeper and more distant.

  “Who’s there?” Anna trembled and whispered. She couldn’t stop her hands from shaking.

  There was a sound at the other end of the room. Even on the darkest night, Anna could still make out the shapes of her desk and dresser against that far wall. Now, she saw nothing there but total blackness. All the familiar shapes, all of the usual subtle shades of night were gone. There was nothing . . . nothing. It was as if she were looking into the horror of infinity, or the gateway to hell.

  “I said who’s there?” Anna tried to sound strong and unafraid. She knew she failed on both counts. She pulled her pillow over her naked breasts as if it could protect her from what was now slowly approaching the bed.

  Anna heard distinct individual sounds, footsteps on the carpet. As they moved closer the blackness followed, embracing, then engulfing more and more of the room. Anna reached to turn on the light, but the bulb in the lamp exploded as soon as she hit the switch, covering her hands with shards of splintered glass.

  Anna stared toward the sound. More than half the room had vanished into the growing blackness. She saw no one, even though the footsteps definitely continued. Anna moved quickly to the far upper corner of the bed and pressed her back hard against the wall. It felt cold and unforgiving against her bare flesh. “Go away,” she cried and closed her eyes. “Please go away.”

  Anna heard a sound from the bathroom and the muffled footsteps stopped. She listened for them to resume, but they didn’t. Now, all Anna heard was the sound of a flushing toilet and running water. She opened her eyes and saw the familiar shapes of her furniture. The blackness had blended back into the night.

  “A dream,” Anna started to laugh, albeit nervously and without conviction. “It was a dream.”

  Anna felt the relief reserved only for those times when one wakes from a nightmare to realize that the terror was solely the product of the imagination, and therefore, presumably, not real. Anna rationalized into place an acceptable version of reality. She must have heard Tom leave the bed while she slept, and incorporated the sound of his footsteps into some bizarre dream. She breathed deeply and smiled.

  Anna tossed aside the pillow and lay back down on the bed, scolding herself for acting like a frightened little girl. She thought about retrieving the comforter from the floor, but she knew Tom would appreciate the sight of her naked body, on a naked bed, upon his return. She closed her eyes, happy that it was all only a dream.

  Anna placed one of her hands between her slightly parted legs and pressed down. She was surprised to find that she was already wet, even before she started to move her fingers. Anna moaned, but forced herself to pull her hand away. “Wait for Tom,” she ordered. “Wait.”

  Anna again closed her eyes and returned her hand to its most recently abandoned position. She again moaned softly and drifted into pleasure.

  What seemed like only a second or two passed before Anna felt the bed sag slightly on her left, as if someone had sat down next to her. She hadn’t heard Tom return from the bathroom, but that didn’t matter. I must have fallen asleep, she thought, quickly moving her hand to her side. With eyes still tightly shut, she whispered for Tom to make love to her.

  She felt a touch on her cheek. It moved gently down her neck to her breast, her belly and below. Anna arched her back in response.

  “Tom.” Anna didn’t open her eyes. Somehow, she knew she shouldn’t.

  Anna groaned, first with pleasure and then, surprisingly, with pain. The track the hand had taken started to freeze. It was as though someone had pressed ice directly into her flesh and drawn a deep line from her neck down. The ice penetrated through her skin and muscles before wrapping around the bones below.

  Anna felt her hair being moved slowly away from her ear. She smelled the stale, putrid breath, just before she heard the same voice that had called her name earlier whisper, “C’est moi! C’est moi.”

  Anna now tried to scream for Tom, for anyone, but couldn’t make a sound. She tried to get up and run, but was held in place, first by panic, then by something else. It pressed against every inch of her body, pinning her motionless to the bed. She strained every muscle against the frozen weight, but it held firm, pushing against her even harder to compensate for her efforts. It got heavier, and even colder. Anna felt the air being forced from her lungs as the rotted breaths blew softly against her ear. She felt the ice touch her heart.

  Anna struggled for control, trying to force herself awake from what had to be a renewal of the nightmare. She searched for an explanation as well as a means of escape. Was she having a heart attack? A stroke? Some sort o
f breakdown? Was this just a dream? Or were these the hallucinations of an imagination gone mad?

  Her fear grew with each breath that moved the wisps of hair on the back of her neck. Anna felt a hand on her throat. Her scream was real, but again had no sound.

  “C’est moi,” the voice hissed. “C’est moi c’est moi c’est moi.”

  Anna remembered the words spoken by whoever had awakened her. She now knew that they had been spoken in French, and that she had understood them clearly, without hesitation or translation.

  But now, whatever language was being spoken was of little importance. Anna felt the breaths move from her ear, to her cheek, to her mouth. She was being kissed, or consumed. Anna couldn’t breath. The pressure against her mouth forced her lips to part. Something, something horrible was pressing into her mouth. The taste and smell of decomposing flesh filled her senses.

  Anna started to choke on her own vomit which instantly clogged her throat. The thing pushed deeper and deeper into her mouth. What felt like a bloated, decaying tongue moved against the back of her teeth and gums and flicked against the roof of her mouth. The weight pressed between her legs, forcing them open and making her very being vulnerable to attack. She knew she was going to die.

  “Anna, are you alright?”

  Anna felt the thing moving from between her legs and pulling out of her mouth, tearing her tongue in its angry retreat. The stench and the crushing weight were gone. Anna rolled off the bed, hitting the hard floor, first with her knees, then her left side and back. She stumbled to her feet, barely making it to the bathroom before starting to throw up.

  “Anna,” Tom called after her.

  “Anna,” another voice called out mockingly. It was a voice only she could hear.

  Anna vomited a mixture of blood and whatever else her stomach could offer. She kept vomiting until only blood spewed forth. Finally, gasping for air, she rose up and lurched toward the shower.

  In a silent frenzy, Anna scoured her skin with soap as if it were covered with unimaginable filth. She rubbed and rubbed, but the feeling that her spirit itself had been somehow penetrated, violated, wouldn’t wash away.

  She reached out of the shower for her toothbrush and paste. She used half the tube, but couldn’t get the foul taste from her mouth, or perhaps it was just the memory of it that she couldn’t force from her mind no matter how hard she brushed.

  She tried mouthwash, but it burned her freshly slit tongue. Spitting out blood and Listerine, Anna stood beneath the shower’s spray, letting the water wash over her.

  Washing away my sins, she thought. “Wash away my sins,” she prayed.

  Anna hadn’t prayed in years, but that hardly mattered as the hot water started to turn cold. Finally, long after she had emptied the hot water tank in the basement, Anna turned off the shower and got out of the tub. She looked at herself in the mirror. She had scraped herself raw with her nails, and her mouth and nose were bleeding. In the bright light of the bathroom, she couldn’t believe her eyes, or her memory.

  While the physical evidence remained, the emotional intensity of what she’d experienced was slowly, surprisingly, started to fade. By the time she finished drying her body, the fear was almost gone, and Tom was knocking at the bathroom door.

  What had occurred again seemed like a very bad dream that was evaporating in the light. Soon it would abandon its territory of terror completely. Now, Anna only remembered parts of the dream, a series of fleeting facts that made up what her logical mind would label a simple nightmare. Her intellect could deal with a nightmare much more easily then it could accept what her soul knew to be the truth.

  Anna opened the bathroom door. Tom looked both concerned and tired. One glance at Anna’s body made the tired part disappear. “You look like a lobster,” he couldn’t believe his eyes. “A cooked lobster.”

  Anna was going to thank Tom for his usual sensitivity, but had other things, fleeting things, fleeing things on her mind.

  “Did you see anything, Tom? Anything at all?”

  “When?”

  “When you came out of the bathroom.”

  “No, all I saw was you having a bad dream.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, what else was I suppose to see?”

  “I guess nothing,” Anna pushed by him and back into the bedroom.

  “You were mumbling something before I woke you up. I don’t know what you were saying. I think you might have been speaking French.”

  A quick shiver shot up Anna’s spine. For a brief instant she remembered the voice clearly. “I don’t speak French.”

  “I guess you do now.” Tom said. “At least in your dreams.”

  “I had the worst nightmare,” Anna walked through the room and sat on the edge of the bed. “It was so real.”

  “That’s one of the good things about waking up.” Tom stretched and yawned.

  “Yeah but, like I said, it was so real. It was like I could feel it, smell it. I just wish I could remember it.” Anna said as Tom jumped onto the bed and pulled her down next to him.

  “Fuck it, Anna,” Tom said as he snuggled up against her. “It was just a stupid dream.”

  As usual, Tom’s snuggle started to take a definite turn toward the sensual. “But I must say that your French was incredibly sexy.”

  Tom tried to speak with a French accent. He thought he sounded like Maurice Chevalier. Anna thought his attempt sounded more like a combination of Pepe Lapew and gargling. She had to laugh.

  “Stop it,” she jokingly pushed him away, but he came right back.

  “French. . . the language of love,” he gurgled.

  “Not the way you speak it.” Anna hit him with a pillow. “Now go to sleep, Renee.”

  “Yes,” Tom continued to try to sound French. “I am no longer Tom. I am Renee. . . your mad Parisian lover.”

  Tom hoped he would eventually turn Anna on, instead she turned over, said goodnight and tucked her knees up to her chest.

  Why did I call him Renee? She dismissed the thought with a quick, why not?

  From behind her, Anna heard Tom humming Thank Heaven for Little Girls, as he slowly drifted off to sleep. She smiled and closed her eyes.

  That was one hell of a dream, Anna thought before falling back asleep herself. I hope I can remember it better in the morning.

  Chapter 2

  Anna woke up tired. Her mouth hurt and her lips were swollen. While she had never experienced real violence before, she was sure that this was what it felt like to be beaten up. She remembered being sick, showering forever and having the most horrible nightmare. She could recall little else, her mind was too preoccupied with the pain in her body.

  She groaned loudly and tried to get up. She groaned again, and this time made it to her feet. Getting old, girl, Anna thought. And you’re making the noises to prove it.

  Ever since Anna had turned 35 last August, she had caught herself making involuntary noises at the simplest of movements. Getting out or into a car, bending over to pick up something as massive as a pencil, or even just standing up from a sitting position were occasions that seemed to call for a quick groan.

  This morning, no movement was simple or without an accompanying ache. As Anna walked toward the bathroom, every part of her body throbbed and demanded that its pain be recognized above the rest. It was no longer unusual for Anna to wake up with various physical complaints, but the old “Gee I must have slept funny,” sure didn’t begin to explain how she felt now.

  “Tom, what did you do to me last night?” Anna whispered to herself. She tried to remember if she had fallen for any of Tom’s “special requests” the night before. “No,” she shook her head. “I didn’t have that much to drink.”

  Any unusual nocturnal activity that resulted in injury or embarrassment usually had its root in something Tom wanted to try, in his words, “Before we get to old to try anything new.”

  Anna groaned again, this time more loudly and on purpose. It didn’t make the pain go a
way, but it helped to express it. She also hoped her cry of distress might awaken Tom, and he could offer a bit of sympathy and to make the coffee.

  Oh yeah, right, she thought, knowing full well that her chances of waking Tom were about as great as waking the dead. In fact she had several times in the past checked to see if he was still breathing as he slept.

  Once Tom fell asleep, almost nothing could wake him up. He had slept through a hurricane when they were on vacation in the Bahamas. Only one part of him rose when Anna tried to wake him with a sex act as an experiment. A simple moan, or for that matter an outright scream had no chance what so ever of waking Anna’s sleeping beauty.

  Anna added a slight yelp to her litany of groans and walked quickly to the bathroom, determined to brush the worst morning breath of her life from her mouth. She also felt an overwhelming need to shower again. Anna smelled the skin on her arm.

  “Whoa,” Anna said out loud, quickly pulling her arm away from her nose. She smelled, somehow, stale. A little like an old closed up country store with sawdust on the floor, or a moldy room that had been locked up for a long time.

  Anna’s shower lasted no more than ten seconds, the water and soap stung her still raw skin, like a million tiny needles hammering into her with incredible force. Brushing her teeth lasted only a little longer, before her tongue again began to bleed.

  What the hell happened? Anna thought while rubbing cream over her body, and, despite the pain, finishing off half a bottle of mouthwash to disinfect her wounded tongue. Only then did she look at herself in the mirror. She shivered at what she saw. Anna thought she looked like something between an anorexic drowned rat and her mother.