Free The Light at the End by John Skipp, Craig Spector Page A

that.
    She mused, sight unfocusing, turning inward. She was only dimly aware, in the back of her mind, of something stirring in the hole at her feet. It didn’t fully register until, with a loud snap of splintering wood, something burst through the lid of the coffin.
    Josalyn stared down at the grave in horror, frozen. The cigarette slipped from between her fingers and tumbled downward, a slow-motion spinning that seemed to go on forever.
    From the grave, a rotting skeletal arm projected upward, clawing at the air as if to rip bleeding holes in the sky. A tiny cry escaped her throat, and the mouldering hand froze, clenched like the talon of a great winged bird. Then slowly, slowly, it twisted itself around so that the back of the hand was facing her. The index finger, it’s broken end dangling from a few strands of greenish flesh, straightened and then curled back toward the palm. Repeated the gesture. Repeated it again.
    It beckoned to her.
    NO! she cried silently, no wind in her lungs. NO! She spun, eyes snapping shut reflexively, and something was there: something warm and comforting, wrapping itself around her arm, holding her tightly. She shivered, blind and terrified; she whimpered, deep in her throat; she nestled against the figure that held her and understood, though foggily, that it was a man. A good man. She let herself go, and huge gut-wrenching sobs escaped from her mouth, smothered in the warmth of her protector.
    It’s alright, a kind, soft voice assured her. It can’t touch you now. It can’t hurt you. And though she could still feel that skeletal arm, trying by its sheer presence to claw through the back of her skull and take her, consume her, she also knew that the dead thing was losing its power. That the voice wasn’t lying. That she was, in fact, safe.
    Oh, thank you, she whispered, pulling her face away from the man’s chest and opening her eyes to see him…
    …and suddenly she was alone, in her apartment, with the typewriter quietly humming on the desk before her as she jotted down something in her notebook with a finely sharpened No. 2 pencil. Life is good, she rendered in tight, elegant longhand. Life is sensible. Life is fair…
    The phone rang. She jumped, and the pencil went flying out of her hand. She watched it spin through the air like her cigarette on its way to the grave, with the same slack-jawed expression of horror on her face.
    She watched the pencil imbed itself point-first in the hard wooden floor, sticking straight up like the needle of a compass pointing north. Trembling for a moment. And then standing completely still…
    …as a dark pool of blood began to spread across the floor, slowly at first, then more and more quickly…
    …as a mocking, sneering, inhuman voice from somewhere in the room breathed the words you were expecting company? into her ear and began, horribly, to laugh and laugh and…
    Josalyn awakened, screaming, into the otherwise silent darkness of her bedroom, alone.
    It was the first, and the mildest, of the dreams.

 
    CHAPTER 9
     
    At 11:08 the following morning, by the company time clock, Allan took the call from Rosa, the woman who lived downstairs from Joseph and watched his mother during the day. Rosa’s English was poor, and the fact that she was crying and lapsing sporadically into Spanish didn’t help, but Allan got the message loud and clear.
    He hung up the phone, feeling like he’d aged a hundred years in the last three minutes. His breakfast started to churn sickly in his stomach; sweat covered his forehead like a thin sheet of ice; he reached for his pouch of Captain Black tobacco with a trembling hand, tamped it into his pipe, and just stared at it for a long unhappy moment.
    Jerome was the first to notice that something was wrong. He’d just been clowning with Allan a few moments before, and everything’d been hunky-dory. He could only think of one thing that could bring a dispatcher down that fast.
    “Did somebody get hit?” he