Free Strange Dominions: a collection of paranormal short stories (short story books) by David Calvert

don’t have time for this now, but you can be damned sure it isn’t over yet. Now get the hell out of my sight before I change my mind.”
    Picking up the wallet he had absent-mindedly left behind, he took his leave.
    That night Sam brooded in the darkness of his room, forlorn images of his childhood firing across the synapses of his fevered brain, his mind caught up on a maelstrom of internecine rage and murderous desire.
    The pain in his temple was beginning to recede. He felt groggy and his eyes were leaden. The time had arrived to enter into his dreamscape before his father’s return.
    He was not alarmed, sometime later, to find himself standing at the foot of the stairs with a large kitchen knife in hand; this much he had planned. The distant rumbling that rolled across the night sky and the intermittent flashes of brilliance radiating from the turbulent thundercloud overhead were, however, not of his making. They had come unbidden into his dream, as if by some unconscious directorship. The uncertainty of it thrilled him in a way he had never know and he threw caution to the wind, allowing himself to be carried along on a current of hypnotic indeterminacy.
    A bolt of scintillating light crackled earthward, chasing the shadows from Victor’s room. In that briefest of moments Sam caught sight of his prey. The ridiculous sight of his pot-bellied father slumped naked across the bed, his flaccid prick poking out from between his thighs, brought Sam to a halt. Divest of his fatherly trappings, Victor presented an altogether sad and comical figure, an absurd antithesis of the fear-inspiring monster he knew and loathed.
    He inched closer to the bedside, the breath he had held in check suddenly bursting from his tired lungs.
    Victor stirred and Sam’s heart almost erupted from his chest.
    What was he afraid of? There was no way his father could hear him, unless he himself willed otherwise.
    He drew nearer, the lethal blade poised to strike. Then the moment was upon him, the blade driving deep into unresisting throat tissue. In a single stroke he severed the windpipe and carotid artery.
    Victor’s eyes sprang wide in bemused horror. Like a fish out of water his mouth opened and shut mutely. He grasped futilely at the obscenely gaping wound to stem the crimson fountain that hastened his end as Sam looked on, his face a mask of psychotic amusement.
    Sam had never seen so much blood, but he knew this was how he had imagined it and so it was. Rivulets of the stuff coursed down the walls and dripped from the ceiling onto the bedspread where Victor writhed in the final paroxysms of agony. It was all Sam had wished it to be.
    Though all too brief, the encounter had proven extremely gratifying and Sam felt somewhat reluctant to return to the banal existence that awaited him in the real world. Nevertheless, he found consolation in the knowledge that there would be other nights and other scenarios to explore. Nothing was beyond him now.
    Initially, he was not overly alarmed at his seeming inability to end the auto-hypnotic dream state. Under certain circumstances - such as his own, in which he had achieved a euphoric state - a time- lapse between command and response could occur.
    Outside, the storm continued to rage, despite his efforts to quell it. Then it dawned on him with horrifying clarity that this was the selfsame storm that only hours earlier had almost kept Victor indoors.
    He raised a tentative hand to his temple and winced. The pain was all too real and confirmed the bitter irony and horror of his situation.
    A tidal wave of stark reality crashed in on him, sweeping before it any hope of salvation. Even the darkest labyrinths of his mind could not conceal what he had done. There was no awaking from a living nightmare, nor escape from the perpetual abyss of insanity that had fragmented his mind.

The Fetch
 
     
     
    Eve Landru peered out of her window into the gathering dusk. The same shadowy figure she had seen the night