Free The Summoning by Mark Lukens Page B

just some kind of nightmare that he was having while he was still awake. Some kind of hallucination. “You’re not real,” he whispered.
    He stood right behind the red-haired man. He reached his hand out towards the man’s back, about to touch his shoulder with his trembling fingers, but then he drew his hand back to himself. The man still hadn’t moved a muscle.
    Ryan glanced behind him.
    No one behind him. No one in the hallway outside the room.
    Ryan turned back around and the red-haired man had turned around. They were face-to-face now, only inches away from each other. Ryan could see the eaten-away flesh around the red-haired man’s mouth in more detail now. He could see the long gashes running from each side of the man’s mouth up to his ears with horrifying clarity. He saw the other smaller scars that lined the man’s pale face; the scars took up almost every square inch of the man’s flesh. The red-haired man’s eyes were so light blue that they were almost translucent.
    “Nice to see you again, Cutter,” the red-haired man whispered, and Ryan could feel the man’s ice-cold breath on his face; he could smell a musty odor from the man that was not unlike the duffel bag of money and the brown suitcase, a wet and earthy smell.
    Ryan shook his head no and backed up a step, nearly tripping and falling down. He couldn’t fall down – he couldn’t be helpless on the floor in front of this monster. He needed to run.
    “No,” Ryan grunted out. “This is all wrong. This can’t be real.”
    The red-haired man took a step closer to Ryan and his polished dress shoes echoed on the concrete floor in the dark room. “This is no dream. This is real. More real than you can imagine.”
    Ryan took a few steps backwards, ready to bolt out of the dark room, back out to the hallway, away from this thing.
    The red-haired man didn’t walk towards Ryan anymore; instead, he raised his ruined hands towards his own face, his smile never wavering. The red-haired man grabbed his own mouth, one hand on top, the other on his lower jaw, his fingers gouged inside of his mouth, finding a grip. And then he pulled on his mouth, pulling his lower jaw down impossibly wide, ripping open the scars on each side of his face, the skin slowly splitting apart with a sick, wet sound. The scars split all the way up to the man’s ears and the lower half of his face hung open, the bottom jaw hanging down loosely, bottom teeth exposed and a tongue (which seemed way too long) wiggling and squirming around inside like a pink snake.
    Ryan stared in disbelief, his grip on sanity suddenly beginning to slip. A short grunt of a scream escaped his throat without his noticing.
    He had to get out of here he had to get out of here he had to get out of here.
    Ryan bolted out of the room and sprinted down the hall. He glanced back at the doorway to the dark room, sure that the red-haired man would be running after him with his loose lower jaw swinging back and forth as he ran. But he wasn’t there, he wasn’t coming after him.
    Ryan turned back around and ran right into …
    … John, who did not look happy.
    “What the hell are you doing, Ryan?”
    Ryan stared into John’s eyes and he tried to speak, his mouth was moving and he was trying to form the words as his mind spun with horror. He looked down at the concrete floor about to point down at the trail of blood that he’d followed earlier, but the spots of blood were gone. He turned and looked back at the doorway to the dark room, but the blood spots weren’t there anymore, either.
    He turned back around to face John. “They were there,” he finally managed to whisper. “He … he was there. In there.”
    “You on something, Ryan?”
    “No. I saw … saw …”
    “You need to get back to work.”
    “I don’t … I don’t …”
    But Ryan couldn’t finish his sentence. He bolted past John and threw open a door that led to the outside. He barely made it a few steps outside before he bent over