Unholy Shepherd by Robert Christian (classic literature list .txt) 📗

Her hopes were dashed as soon as her eyes met the back of the house. As she approached, the darkness parted to reveal an upside-down horseshoe above the back door. A measured study of the object might have led another person to see it for what it was: a talisman for good luck and protection. To her, it was simply the upside-down U from her nightmare staring her in the face. Maureen felt a tingle run down her spine. She couldn’t pretend any longer that this wasn’t the house she had seen.

The battle within her raged as her mind tugged at her to back away, to not proceed, but the hypnotic allure of the home continued to beckon her closer. She crept to the door and placed her hand on the knob. Locked. Why she thought she would be afforded such easy access to a crime scene almost made her laugh out loud. After all, her vision had never revealed how the assailant had gotten into the house. The ludicrousness of what she was attempting hit her and shook her from her self-imposed trance. There was no need to push any further, and she resolved to turn and leave before she was seen. This resolve, however, only lasted for a moment.

The voice in the back of her mind whispered even more earnestly to her, insisting that there was something inside she had to see. Maureen’s hand went to her scalp and pulled out the two bobby pins that kept the hair out of her face. A strand of her bangs slipped down into her vision as she knelt in front of the door. She brushed it aside, bent both pins, and inserted them into the lock. It had been a few years since she’d opened a door like this, but the muscle memory took over and before she knew it, she felt the familiar click of the door unlocking.

Maureen slowly pushed the door open and felt her stomach turn as she took her first step over the threshold. She closed the door quietly behind her and found herself in the home’s darkened kitchen. She took one cautious step after another, slowly working her way further into the house. If her nightmare had really mapped out the home, somewhere up ahead there would be a staircase. She followed the hallway out of the kitchen. Its photograph-lined walls taunted her, making it more difficult to deny that she, at least in consciousness, had been there before.

She found the staircase exactly where she expected to find it. A sense of inevitability now gripped the majority of her being, yet that voice in the back of her brain rebelled to the end. As she climbed the stairs, her inner voices continued their quarrel, but by the time she reached the top, she was convinced that it was necessary to see it all through.

Maureen took a deep breath and blew it out loudly. The noise seemed to ricochet off the upstairs walls like a clap of thunder. She froze in her tracks and looked wildly around, expecting someone to come darting out of some hidden corner somewhere in response to the sound. Nothing happened, of course, but the sensation that it roused in her forced Maureen’s breath to continue in short, shallow spurts, lest she make any more noise than she had to. She unglued her feet from the carpet and continued to pad along the hallway, her head peering from side to side looking for a certain doorway.

She found it, the second door on her right, covered by police tape. Maureen carefully took the tape down, allowing her to step into the room. The décor—cartoon robots, sports posters, and various other action figures—spoke to the fact that it clearly had been occupied by a young boy.

Maureen inched around the room, her eyes focusing on nothing, but the tips of her fingers lightly brushing along the walls and shelves, as if they knew better than her brain what they were searching for. She closed her eyes and continued to circle, her right hand serving as her only means of sensing. It grazed the shiny plastic of a poster and bounced along the spines of a row of books like a xylophone. She continued forward until her hand felt nothing but air while her legs were stopped by an impediment in her path.

As she opened her eyes, the sight of the child’s bed filled Maureen’s vision. It was a short twin, lying on a plain, wooden frame. The colorful sheets were reduced to hues of white, black, and various deep blues and purples in the dim room, lit only by the ambient light streaming in through the window. She could see that the blanket was still bunched up at the foot of the mattress, in the same position it would have been in after a young boy’s legs had stopped kicking as he lost consciousness.

A brief glint of light next to the bed caught her eye. Maureen turned her head and settled her gaze on a small, round object, half hidden in shadow on the nightstand. She picked it up and, holding it in two hands, raised it close to her face. It was a child’s alarm clock. Despite the darkness, she could pick out the twelve numbers that circled around the white face etched with two semi-circle stitches. The likeness of a baseball. Maureen peered closer to see that the hour hand and minute hand were two different-length bats. As she watched hypnotically, the hands of the clock wound themselves from their original position to reveal the time that it had read when the hands had grabbed the boy. The time that had been buried in her mind until that moment. 2:31.

A flurry of images passed in front of her eyes with blinding speed, yet she saw everything clearly. She could see through the eyes from her nightmare again. She could see the little boy asleep in