Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

– an action Lori found so absurd she nearly laughed – and pulled off the road. The surface they now drove on wasn’t as smooth as the Nightway, and the car juddered as the driver pulled up to the tower. He stopped, parked, and turned off the car. The headlights flicked off, but the pulsing scarlet light emanating from the tower provided enough illumination for Lori to see. Her skin looked blood-red in the tower’s light, and she was surprised to find the effect beautiful in its way.

The driver got out of the car and opened one of the passenger doors for her to disembark.

What if I refused? she wondered. Would the eyeless man grab her by the arm and pull her out of the car? Or would he stand there and wait until she chose to come out, regardless of how long it took? Either way, she’d end up leaving the car, so she saw no point in putting it off. She climbed out, acutely aware that her naked body was fully visible through the thin fabric of her robe. Once outside, she crossed her arms over her chest again, even though the man who’d brought her had no eyes with which to examine her body. She covered herself more for psychological comfort than anything else.

The ground felt rough and pebbly beneath her bare feet, and when she looked down, she saw the area around the tower’s base looked more like animal hide than soil, the thick, tough skin of some large mammal like a rhino or elephant. This reinforced her impression that the tower was in truth the horn of some buried creature, and she shuddered at the thought that she stood upon the skin of some unimaginably vast horror.

The driver closed the passenger door then faced Lori.

“Follow me,” he said, and then he walked toward the tower. After a moment’s hesitation – perhaps solely to give herself the illusion that she had a choice in the matter – she followed. A sound emerged from beneath the car’s hood, a soft, high-pitched tone that made Lori think of an unhappy dog’s whine. It was crazy, but she thought the car was expressing sadness over her departure.

The air was chilly, like a late fall morning in Ohio, and it had a curious stale quality, like a room that had been closed for years. Dead air, she thought, and the description seemed apt.

The eyeless man led her to the tower’s base. Now that she was close to it, she could see the tower was smooth and shiny, as if it were made of pearl, or a substance very much like it. She felt an urge to reach out and run her hand along its surface, but she resisted. She sensed touching the tower’s outer surface would be bad, although she had no idea why it should be so. Still, she heeded her instinct and kept her arms crossed over her chest.

There was no apparent door in the tower’s base, but when the eyeless man waved his hand in the air inches from its surface, the pearl-like substance flowed away like liquid, forming a semi-circular opening large enough for both of them to enter.

She thought he might turn to her, smile with his too-white teeth, say After you, then gesture for her to precede him. But he didn’t. Instead he walked into the tower without waiting to see if she would follow.

This was it – her chance to escape.

She could run off into the darkness, take her chances with whatever might be out there waiting for her. She heard a quiet chorus of whispers then, like a sudden strong breeze, but she felt no stirring in the dead air. She could make out what sounded like words.

Yes, yes! Come to us, come! We will welcome you with our claws and mouths and our sharp-sharp teeth!

She looked back at the car that had brought her here. It looked something like a cross between a limo and a hearse, and while its surface appeared dark crimson in the light pulsing from the Vermilion Tower, she thought the vehicle was likely painted black – the blackest black that had ever been created, darker than night, despair, hopelessness, and sin. Could she steal it – get in, slide behind the wheel, and drive away from the tower, and try her luck on the Nightway? If this was a dream, she’d wake up eventually, and if it wasn’t, at least she’d be away from this place and whatever awaited her within.

She didn’t know if the vehicle needed a key to activate its engine. She hadn’t heard the eyeless man remove a key from the ignition and slip it into a pocket of his robe as he got out of the car. But maybe the car only needed a keyless remote to turn it on, in which case, the eyeless man probably still had the remote on him. But this car wasn’t an ordinary vehicle. It seemed to possess some kind of independent life of its own – and she thought it liked her. If she got in, maybe it would activate its engine for her, only too happy to assist its newfound friend.

She thought then of the way the car’s back seat had rippled under her hand, and she wondered what the car might do once she was alone inside it.

What can it do? she thought. It’s just a machine, for Christ’s sake.

She took a step toward it, the driver’s-side door swung open, and a low thrumming sound like the purr of a large cat filled the air.

She stopped, stood for a moment, reconsidering. Her grandmother had loved to dispense bits of homespun wisdom via folksy sayings. Lori had come to loathe them as a child, but as an adult, her grandmother’s words came back to her now and again, and she often found them pertinent to her life. Once of those sayings was, Dance with the one that brung you. In this case, she thought