Free Screamscapes: Tales of Terror by Evans Light Page B

laughed, only half joking.
    “It’s okay,” Gerard mumbled. He still had no idea what was going on.
    Sonia grabbed her briefcase from beside the dresser and headed for the door. She stopped and looked back at him, a wistful expression on her face.
    “You know I love you, right? I’m really sorry about this morning – and I do hope you have good luck with your book. I didn’t read your finished manuscript, but it did look very nice, very professional. I bet you it sells a ton.”
    “Thanks. Fingers crossed,” Gerard said. He felt more confused at that moment than he had in his entire life.
    As soon as Sonia’s car left the driveway, he threw on some clothes and went into the kitchen to find the shipping receipt Sonia had thrown at him earlier. He fished it out from under the table, and headed for his study.
    A thick ream of printed paper was stacked neatly in the center of his desk. He was sure he hadn’t printed anything so large in the last few weeks. Curious, he picked it up.
     
    A cover sheet read in large, bold lettering:
     
    Serenity’s Termination
    A Novel by Gerard Faust
     
    It was the title of his novel, the one he had thought he would never complete. The heft of it in his hands quickened his pulse. He flipped to the last page. Three hundred, fifty-two pages - like Sonia had said.
    His book was real.
    He had no recollection of finishing it, though; no memory of printing it, no idea how his book could have been completed.
    Had he been working on his book the whole time, managed to actually finish it while banging away in a daze? He opened it to a random page and began to read.
    The writing was a lovely flowing prose; its literary sophistication and tonal resonance surprised him. He had no idea he was capable of such elegance.
    The beauty of the writing stood in stark contrast with the depravity of the content, however. Sordid, revolting images bloomed to life inside Gerard’s head as he read. Deeds so vile, he was filled with shame.
    Gerard flipped through it, reading snippets here and there. It was foreign to him; the things he read barely resembled the book he had intended to write under the same title. Entire passages of the book had been written in an unknown language. Notes from the author encouraged the reader to repeat those passages aloud, in order “to fully appreciate the alliterative and musical properties they contained”.
    Those tonal passages were followed by English-language descriptions of unspeakable brutalities, acts so profane and malicious Gerard was repulsed by even the possibility they had been written by his own hands.
    One such section told the story of a man bound by wire to a luxurious, velvet-covered chair facing a golden vanity, complete with desk and mirror.
    Beside him sat another man, dressed in white and holding a gleaming scalpel.
    The man in white began to slice the skin from the bound man’s face with the razor-sharp scalpel, piece by piece - not saying a word, his face expressionless.
    As the story told, the man bound by wire to the velvet chair was powerless to do anything other than watch his misfortune unfold in the vanity mirror before him. As each new sliver was cut from his face, it was placed beside the others neatly arranged on the vanity’s tabletop.
    Slice after slice, his face was removed. After the last piece was cut away, the bound man saw that his former face had been transformed into a grotesque mask that stared at him from now-empty sockets, a bloody jigsaw puzzle of human flesh.
    The short tale ended by telling that, once finished with the task of cutting, the man in white plunged his scalpel into the bound man’s heart, and then began to feast upon the delicacy he had so carefully prepared.
    Gerard tossed the stack of pages away as though diseased. It slid across the smooth surface of the desk, knocking over the ink well Sonia had given him. The shipping receipt slipped off the desk, catching his eye as it fluttered to the floor.
    His heart sank