Enter the Dead: A Supernatural Thriller (29 page)

Four
hours later, Sam was still wide awake and gazing up at the ceiling. As
exhausted as he was, he was unable to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he was
met with the same image: his wife’s eyes staring at him, only they weren’t her
eyes but those of his father. Wild, cold, evil. Pure evil. It wouldn’t be long
before she woke up, and when she did, who would be there? Would it be Sarah –
the woman he loved so deeply, or his father – the man responsible for causing
so much pain and misery to so many people? Even if it was Sarah, it would only
be a matter of time before
he
showed himself.
I’m not sure how much
more of this I can stand
, Sam thought, terrified of seeing his father
again. He’d spent some of his four hours of respite trying to think about what he
could do to free her of him – he’d even scoured the internet for possible
solutions – but to no avail. Typing the word
possession
into Google had
produced over one hundred and ninety million results, none of which were
useful. Whilst some of them made for interesting reading, it was clear to Sam
that the only hope he had of curing Sarah was to ride it out and hope that his
father would eventually go away of his own accord. True…it was a long-shot, but
in the absence of a feasible alternative, it was the only option on the table.

He felt Sarah stir
beside him. When he turned to look at her, she slowly opened her eyes and
stared back at him. She tried to smile, but as she did so she frowned and
raised a hand to her brow. ‘Ow,ow,ow,’ she said, wincing with pain. ‘My head
hurts.’

For a while, Sam kept
quiet, studying her face for signs of his father. Fortunately for him, there
were none. For the time being, he was lying next to his wife.

‘I’ll get you some
painkillers,’ he said, pulling back the covers.

‘Wait,’ she said,
tightening her grip on him. ‘Get back into bed. I don’t want you to go.’

‘But what about your
head?’ he asked, reluctantly lying down again.

‘In a minute. I need to
ask you something first.’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s wrong with me,
Sam? Why do I feel so bad?’

The innocent,
child-like nature of her question caused Sam’s eyes to well up. ‘What…what do
you mean?’ he asked, trying his hardest not to cry.

‘You know what I mean.
Whatever it is I’ve got, you’ve had it too. The headaches, the nausea…not being
in control of your body. Only now you seem fine and I…and I feel like death
warmed up. Seriously Sam, I’d rather be dead than feel this way.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘But it’s true! Maybe
we should call for a doctor.’

‘No!’ Sam replied, a
little too forcefully. ‘You don’t need a doctor. All he would tell you is to
stay in bed and rest. You’ll be fine, I promise. Look at me – I felt exactly
the same way as you, but now I feel great. It’ll pass, Sarah. Give it time.’

‘I haven’t got time to
be ill,’ she said. ‘Max is coming home tomorrow, remember?’

‘Shit! I forgot all
about that. What time’s he due in?’

‘The bus is due back at
school for eleven. If I’m still feeling like this, you’ll have to collect him
without me. Some mother, eh?’

‘It’s hardly your
fault,’ Sam said, racking his brain for a way to stop his son from coming home
just yet.
Perhaps he could stay at a friend’s house for a couple of days.
Ethan Richardson’s place, maybe. Yes, that might work. I’ll call Ethan’s mother
and check if it’s okay. I’ll just lie and say that Sarah’s suffering from a
highly infectious fever.

‘He’s going to be
heartbroken when he finds out about Gracie,’ said Sarah.

‘I know. Maybe we
shouldn’t tell him straight away.’

‘We have to, Sam. It’s
not right to keep it from him.’

Sam sighed as he was
faced with yet another problem to add to his sizeable and growing list. ‘Let’s
cross that bridge when we come to it, okay? Right now I’m more concerned about
you. I’ll fetch you some painkillers.’

‘And a cold drink,
please. My throat is killing me.’

‘Coming right up.’

‘Sam,’ she said,
stopping him as he went to get up.

‘Do you want me to get
those pills or not?’

‘I’m sorry…it’s
just…it’s just…’ She began to cry.

‘Hey, come on,’ Sam
said, sitting back down and stroking her hair. ‘Don’t be upset. You’ll get
better soon, I promise.’

‘It’s not that,’ she
said.

Sam looked at her.
‘What is it then?’

‘Don’t you see? It’s
everything! You, me, Gracie, Tom…for God’s sake, will somebody tell me what the
hell is going on?’

If only you knew
,
Sam thought.

‘I don’t know,’ he lied.
‘But what I do know is that you need to rest. You’re in no condition to dwell
on the past week. You need to focus all your strength on getting better, okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said. And
then, with the same smile that had made Sam fall in love with her all those
years ago: ‘I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

‘We don’t say it to
each other enough, do we?’

Sam smiled at her. ‘Why
don’t we promise to start now, eh? Once a day at an absolute minimum, twice on
special occasions.’

‘Sounds good. I don’t
deserve you, Sam. After what I did to you…the way I cheated on you with T-’

‘Sshh. Not another word
about that, okay? As far as I’m concerned, what happened in the past can stay
in the past. I forgive you. Maybe I’m stupid for saying that, but it’s true. I
can’t help the way I feel about you; the way I’ve always felt about you.’ He
leaned over and kissed her cheek. ‘Let me get you that drink and those pills.’

He stood up and opened
his bedside table drawer,  retrieving the key to the bedroom door. He walked
across the room and opened the door in such a way that Sarah wouldn’t have known
that he’d locked it earlier. He turned to look at her, relieved to see that she
was lying back in bed with her eyes closed, drifting back towards sleep. ‘Don’t
go anywhere,’ he whispered, only half-joking, but there was no response.
Nevertheless, he chose to lock the door behind him. He wasn’t about to take any
chances.

He
returned around five minutes later to find her fast asleep. For a moment he
considered waking her to give her the pills, but immediately thought better of
it.
Let sleeping dogs lie
, he thought, smiling as he thought about how
Sarah would react if she knew he was comparing her to man’s best friend.
Locking the door, he tiptoed around the bed and placed a glass of water and two
Paracetamol on her bedside table, before returning to his own side and lying
down. The second his head hit the pillow, he knew that this time he would
sleep.
Maybe she’s stronger than me
, he thought, reaching under the
covers and taking her hand in his own.
What do you mean, maybe? She’s a
thousand times stronger than me. If anyone can stand up to that bastard and
give him a run for his money, she can.
Feeling slightly more confident, he
leaned over and placed the key back into his drawer.

Within thirty seconds
he was dead to the world.

He
knew something was wrong the second he woke up. He moved his arm to touch her
but felt nothing. She wasn’t lying beside him. She wasn’t in bed.

‘Sarah?’ he said, rolling
over to switch on his bedside lamp. As he did so, he noticed the drawer. It was
pulled open. The key had gone.

‘Shit.’ He scanned the
room, his eyes quickly adjusting to the light. He was immediately drawn to the
bedroom door, which was wide open, the key still in the lock. ‘No!’ he shouted,
leaping out of bed and sprinting towards the door. ‘Sarah! Where are you,
darling?’

When he reached the
unlit hallway, he paused and listened for an indication as to where she might
be. He found the answer as soon as he looked across to his right; there was a
thin bar of light coming from under the closed bathroom door.
She’s in there
,
he thought, moving towards the light.
Please God. Please don’t let any harm
come to her.

Arriving at the door,
he tried the handle, softly at first but then harder, to the point where he was
twisting it with so much force that it threated to snap off if he continued. It
was no use. The door wouldn’t budge.

‘Sarah!’ he screamed,
banging his fist against the door. ‘Open the door! I beg you, darling. I beg
you. Open the damn door!’

Silence from the other
side.

Having exhausted the handle
option, he stepped back from the door, and in a fit of fury, he lashed out with
his right foot and struck it against the door. Nothing happened. He kicked it
again. And again. Summoning every ounce of strength left in him, he turned
side-on to the door and barged into it, using his shoulder as a battering ram,
and this time he was successful. There was a sharp snapping noise as the lock
gave way and the door flung open and struck the side of the shower cubicle
behind it. Unable to control his momentum, Sam fell into the room and landed in
an undignified heap on the tiled floor, crying out as his forehead cracked
against the base of the toilet and began to bleed profusely from a resulting
cut above his eye. He ignored the pain, wiping the blood away with his pyjama
sleeve as he grasped hold of the toilet and hauled himself up to his knees.

At first glance, there
was no sign of her anywhere, prompting him to breathe a sigh of relief at the
possibility that nothing untoward had happened to her.

But then his
blood-splattered eyes noticed the hand that was sticking up above the lip of
the bathtub and he froze. He didn’t need to see the plain gold ring on her
third finger to know whose hand it was. Any last remnants of hope that she
might be safe drained from him as he slowly rose from his knees to his feet and
peered into the tub.

Several years earlier,
Sam and Sarah had hosted a dinner party at their house; a small gathering of
close friends who liked to get together socially once a month for dinner or to enjoy
a few drinks. On this particular occasion, one of their friends – Joanne
Thackeray – had been describing how her grandfather had recently died. Apparently,
he’d passed away only two weeks after the death of his wife – Joanne’s
grandmother. They’d been married for fifty-three years, and in all that time
they’d never spent so much as a single night apart. Sam remembered Joanne
saying at the time how her grandfather’s doctor had claimed that he had died
from a broken heart, and that despite there being a clear lack of medical
evidence to support the diagnosis, it was – in his experience – an extremely
common phenomena. Later that evening, when all the guests had gone home, Sam
and Sarah had briefly pondered the subject in bed together. Being a pragmatist,
Sam had scoffed at the idea that someone could actually die as a result of
being heartbroken, but Sarah had been more open to the possibility, claiming
that love was an intangible entity that had the power to do all manner of
things to an individual…good
and
bad. Throughout history, people had
willingly died in the name of love, killed for love, risked everything for
love; so why was it so hard to believe that there were some couples who loved
one another so deeply that they couldn’t begin to contemplate a life without
the other. Again, Sam had laughed at this, but nevertheless the idea had stayed
with him, buried deep inside his subconscious.

But only now, as he
stared down at the blood-soaked body of his darling wife, did he know beyond a
shadow of a doubt that it truly was possible to die from a broken heart. As he
looked at her, he felt a tightness in his throat, a heaviness across his chest,
a crushing pain around his heart as he fought to process the atrocity of what
he was seeing.

She was lying in a pool
of blood, her nightie drenched and splattered with dark, irregular patches. In
the hand that wasn’t poking up from the tub was a pair of nail scissors, the
blades of which were covered in incriminating evidence. From the puncture marks
in her stomach and her legs, it was evident that she had used the scissors to
repeatedly stab herself to death. Only it hadn’t been
her
. It couldn’t
have been. The blame for this lay entirely at the foot of one man. And although
Sam had tried to protect her,
he
had won. His father had destroyed her
life, and in the process had succeeded in taking away from Sam everything that
had ever mattered to him.

Everything, that was,
apart from Max.

Close to
unconsciousness, Sam hobbled across the floor, leaned over the bathtub, and
kissed his wife tenderly on the cheek. The fact that her skin was ice cold
suggested that she had been dead for an hour or two at least, but Sam didn’t
flinch. Instead, he reached out and pried the scissors from her fingers.
Kissing his wife one final time, he knelt down by the tub and took her hand in
his own.

‘You’ve won, dad,’ he
said, tightening his grip on the scissors. ‘You’ve had your revenge and you’ve
won. But I won’t allow you to take Max. You won’t take my son.’

Then, lifting the scissors
towards his face in a dreamlike state, he pointed the blades towards him and
whispered: ‘I love you, Max.’ With that, he sunk the scissors into his eyes;
the left eye first, and then, in an uncontrollable fit of rage, the right. He
howled in agony as he felt the sharp metal split through the cornea and into
the pulp of the eye. As he did so he thought he could hear his father screaming
at him to stop, but this only served to spur him on and finish the job. Where
there once was light, there was now only darkness; a pitch-black void that
could never be healed.

Still holding Sarah’s
hand, he pulled the scissors from his face and dropped them on the floor, blood
and vitreous fluid streaming down his face. In spite of the pain, he suddenly
felt a triumphant wave of joy flow through him.

He stared up into the
blackness and grinned. ‘Maybe you haven’t won after all, dad,’ he said,
picturing Max smiling at him.

As he smiled lovingly
back at his son, he felt an excruciating surge of pain crushing his heart as if
it were being squeezed by two huge hands, and in a matter of seconds he could
no longer feel anything.