The Marionette Chapter 4
Shannon usually enjoyed the peaceful drive home in the hours after midnight--not tonight. The call drove her to the edge of panic, leaving her muscles tense and her head aching.
Trent was asleep by the time she made it home. Their bedroom was bathed in a dancing cool hue— an early episode of Cheers played on the large TV that Trent insisted be mounted on the wall. She found it charming how her husband loved falling asleep to the classic shows.
She quietly retreated to run a bath. Steam quickly filled the room as she undressed and stepped into the hot water. Her aching body, once submerged, tinted to a subtle glow beneath a thin layer of lavender scented bubbles.
It was soothing…but the bath only subdued the terror — the stress that neither booze or sex could fix. Was it real? Maybe it was all a nightmare.
She examined the scar on her right hand. Despite running the length of nearly three inches, it was faded and hardly visible. The memory of it was dusty — accumulated under decades of bullshit brought on by adulthood and after all of these years, she nearly forgot it even existed.
Shannon had a creeping recollection of a place lost to time…a dark room. Elara. The girl was only fifteen, helpless and afflicted by the supernatural. She was in Elara’s bedroom, that’s where it revealed itself to her. The experience played back like a fever dream; lost in an otherworldly version of her best friend’s house, she wandered the home in all of its darkness and misplaced lighting. She had dreams like this before — nightmares of being guided by an unknown force against her will and the strange sense that something terrible is waiting for her. She knows where it will lead her.
Shannon, through the eyes of a young girl, is brought to the staircase where she slowly ascends each step, a creak follows. Once she reaches the top, only one door is presented to her…Elara’s door. It opens on its own. Inside, a naked light bulb hangs above a comatose girl in a hospital bed. The rest of the room is enshrouded in darkness. Something else is waiting for her…something hidden near where the closet would be. Shannon could feel it, hear it even…she reaches into the shadows.
A fleshy paw embraced her hand. A cold grip squeezed and she wanted to scream but couldn’t. Instead, she pulled back to reveal her hand locked in the embrace of a nest of black talons and pale flesh. From the darkness, a face appears…but only briefly.
Only then was she allowed to scream.
As she laid in the comfort of her king-sized bed, beside her husband who had remained fast asleep, Shannon struggled to once again forget the haunting experience. She convinced herself once before that her mind had no room for such things.
“Take the bad things and lock them away,” she whispered. With her eyes closed, she filled her lungs, held it, and released slowly…and then again…and again.
She imagined herself in a bright warehouse, carrying the box of bad things, sealed with black tape. The aisles were long and the shelves were high. She walked to the end where the light wasn’t as bright and placed the box on the top of the shelf where it couldn’t be easily found.
Shannon was aware of the childish nature of such a coping method but it worked before and she hoped it would work again.