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

“How about you?” she asked. “Have you been here long?”

“Yeah. I don’t know exactly how long, though. Time doesn’t operate the same way here as it does back home.”

“What is this place?” she asked. “Do the laws of physics even work here?”

“When they’re in the mood. The Nightway is like a path between worlds, one that circles the outermost edge of the Gyre. Because of that, reality here is…situational.”

Lori didn’t understand, but she didn’t ask for further explanation. There was only one thing that really mattered to her right now. “How do we get back to our world?”

“The Nightway has on and off ramps, just like a regular highway. The trick is finding them.”

“I didn’t have any trouble getting back before.”

“That’s because the Cabal brought you here. At first, they can only hold a person in this dimension for so long. But the more you come to the Nightway, the more you adjust to it and the longer you stay. If you get home and stay home, you’ll be okay. But if you enter of your own free will – like you did this last time – you’re stuck here. Unless you can find an exit.”

“You said you hate the Cabal. Have you dealt with them too?”

“Sure have. Fuckers.”

Edgar drove in silence for a time, and Lori waited for him to say more. It took a while – so long she thought he would say no more on the subject – but then he finally started speaking.

“My story’s pretty much the same as yours. I didn’t see any Shadowkin, though. I had encounters with weird people, some of the same ones you’ve met, some different. They all had something wrong with them – one eye way bigger than the other, extra fingers on each hand, a forked tongue like a snake’s – and they had red pinky nails, too.”

Lori had checked Edgar’s left pinky before getting into his van, and she’d been relieved to see it wasn’t painted. Then again, she supposed that didn’t necessarily mean anything. All a member of the Cabal had to do to go incognito was remove the polish from their finger. The thought wasn’t a comforting one.

Edgar continued. “They all gave me the same message yours gave you: Confess and atone – or suffer. But the bastards wouldn’t tell me what I’d done or how I could fix it. One of them said it wouldn’t be a true confession if I had to be told what to say, and if the confession wasn’t true, atonement wasn’t possible. Whatever the fuck that means. I’d find myself in the Vermilion Tower on and off, and several members of the Cabal would torture me while the rest looked on. Things started happening in the real world, too. Bad things.”

She didn’t like the sound of that, not at all.

“The Cabal did something to my friends and family. They started to change, become crazy…evil. They began hurting people. Killing them. All to get to me and give me that goddamn message again. My wife, my two kids, my brother, my mom, my best friend….”

The man’s voice had grown thick and Lori thought he might start crying. But all that came out was a lone tear, and he wiped it away before it could get halfway down his face.

“I tried, but I couldn’t figure out what I’d done. Or at least, what the Cabal thought I’d done. The next time I found myself in the Vermilion Tower, they locked me up in a small chamber. I wasn’t alone, though. They gave me some new friends. Hundreds of them, as a matter of fact.”

“The beetles,” Lori said.

Edgar nodded.

“This’ll probably sound stupid since I’m an exterminator, but I’ve always hated insects. Damn things creep me out big time. Maybe that’s why I chose to make a living killing them, I suppose. The beetles – big black ones like none I’d ever seen before – crawled all over me, taking little bites out of my flesh. Not enough to kill me, but it hurt like a motherfucker.”

In the dim glow of the dashboard lights, she could see small scars and pockmarks on his face, neck, arms, and hands. She tried to imagine the pain he must’ve experienced, and she was glad she couldn’t.

“I tried to knock them off me, tried to crush them with my hands, stomp on them, but there were so many. Too many to kill them all. I bled from dozens of wounds, dozens upon dozens, and of course the beetles triggered my phobia, and I was terrified as well as in pain. I screamed myself hoarse, and I kept screaming after that, except it came out as a sort of whispery rasp. I started talking to the beetles then. Guess I’d kind of lost my mind a little. I begged them to stop hurting me, told them they could have anything they wanted if they just left me alone – or better yet, helped me escape the tower. They told me they would. For a price.”

She felt a cold heavy weight settle in her stomach.

“Oh god.”

He nodded. “They didn’t take my legs right away. First they entered me and rearranged some things inside so they could remain there without killing me. It hurt so bad, I wished they would’ve killed me. When it was over, I lay on the cell floor, barely conscious. When one of the Cabal came to check on me, the beetles flooded out of my mouth and attacked her. I don’t know what sort of powers the Cabal possess, but evidently immunity to flesh-eating beetles isn’t one of them. Once she’d been reduced to a skeleton, the beetles went back inside me, and I hauled ass out of there. The beetles had to kill a couple more Cabal members on the way out, but I made it. There were vehicles in the courtyard. Only a couple looked like regular cars, though. I stole one of them and raced off down the Nightway, pedal to