Kindle Edition
Amazon
Robin Ive
Robin Ive
Category:
Horror
Type: Fiction
Pages: 330
Copyright: Jan 2, 2016
ISBN-13: 9781523226023
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
What happens when eight-year-old Willa Kelly is possessed by a Victorian occultist living in a parallel dimension?
Childhood’s Innocence, Hell’s fury…
The Gifted… It’s a very bad day for Josh Kelly, ex-soldier and reluctant black ops assassin, when he discovers that his eight-year-old daughter Willa has inherited the strange and ancient powers of The Dreaming. To some, The Dreaming looks like a gift. But Josh knows from his past that it’s a curse…
The Damned… Titus Belvedere, insane Victorian occultist, should have been dead for a century or more – but he isn’t. He’s alive, although not for much longer. He’s trapped in a parallel dimension which is rotting around him. He’s desperate, Willa Kelly is his ticket out - and he doesn’t care that it will mean the total obliteration of her mind, body and spirit…
To save his daughter from Belvedere’s horrific threat, Josh must find the courage to unlock his own gift before it’s too late, and not just for Willa’s sake - because if Belvedere succeeds in getting back to this world the consequences for hundreds of innocent people will be catastrophic…
Excerpt
Willa sat cross-legged on her bed, staring dolefully at the cupboard. She could still smell the fresh paint. She hadn’t believed Daddy when he’d told her he’d repainted the door because it was badly scratched “and could do with a fresh coat.” It hadn’t been scratched at all. Daddy had repainted it because of the burn marks, which he thought she hadn’t seen. Well, naturally she had, she wasn’t blind. Daddy treated her just like a baby sometimes.
Those marks had been made by The Robber, of course.
Willa had her magic bubble to protect her against him now, but there was something else she could do which might help too.
She got off the bed, scooped a pile of clothes from her chair and dumped them onto the floor, then wedged the chair against the cupboard door. She stood back, pondering. The chair needed something heavy on it to stop it moving, so she took one of the drawers out of her bedside cabinet and heaved it onto the seat. She hopped back onto her bed, gathered Jasper into the crook of her arm and picked up her drawing pad which had been lying on the cover. The picture showed a beach, the beach, with the palm trees at the edge of it, and Ruthie on the sand, gathering her seashells and small pieces of wood that the sea had washed up. Willa knew Ruthie’s name from her dreams.
Ruthie and the island were the nice things. The other stuff she’d been dreaming about weren’t nice at all.
“I’m going to tell you a bedtime story,” she said to Jasper, as she held the pad in front of him. “It’s all about a fairy princess called Ruthie, who lived on an island where the sun shone all the time.” She pointed to the figure in the drawing. “That’s her, there. See?”
Willa could tell that Jasper did see. She smiled, and carried on with the story.
“One day, Ruthie found a very special shell, which was magical. She lived by herself on the island and was very lonely, and she wanted a prince to come and rescue her.”
She paused, making sure Jasper was still listening. But before she could go on, her bedside lamp flickered for a few seconds. That sort of thing often happened on the Marie Ellen. Daddy said the wiring wasn’t very good. Putting it right was on his ‘to-do list’ – that’s what he said.
The flickering stopped. Willa regarded the lamp with suspicion, but the light stayed steady. She resumed her story. “Ruthie knew that if she spoke into her magic spell, then her prince would hear her and would save her…”
With a faint fizzing sound, the lamp dimmed again before going out altogether.
“Daddy,” Willa whispered in the dark.
Silence.
Then the rattling started.
It came from beyond the foot of Willa’s bed, and sounded exactly like the cupboard door being banged repeatedly against the back of the chair that was keeping it shut.
The sound stopped abruptly, and just as abruptly, the light snapped back on.
It took half a second for Willa to register what was revealed.
The cupboard door was wide open, the chair had been pushed out of the way, and standing at the end of her bed was The Robber. Willa had only ever sensed him before, or seen him as a fleeting shadow, but he was here now and he was horrible – horrible – halfway between a man and a giant insect, with a shiny black face, huge flat eyes and spidery legs. His mouth was sucking at her and tiny flames were flickering around his mouth parts. He leaped onto the end of the bed, crouching and grasping the duvet with his snippy-fingered hands. His antennae twitched.
Willa screamed once, briefly, threw the duvet off and scrambled for the corner of the room, trying to make herself as small as possible, but she knew straight away that The Robber would come after her. She squeezed her eyes shut, hugging Jasper tightly to her chest, and tried to imagine her magic light wand, but she couldn’t hold the thought. It was impossible to concentrate because she knew The Robber hadn’t gone; she could smell he hadn’t gone and she could hear his hissing, diseased breathing too. As horrible as he was she had to see; like looking at an animal squashed in the road – it was nasty but there was no way you couldn’t look.
The Robber was right in front of her, his face within touching distance of hers, his mouth busily working from side to side like he was chewing something. He turned his shell-like, stretched head slightly to one side as if he wanted to get a better look at her with his fly-eye. Then he reached up with one of his legs and touched the side of her face with the tip of his pincer-hand and all the horrible images from her nightmares came rushing into her mind all at once, but worse, much worse.
Willa screamed again, with all the power she could muster. “Daddeee!”
And then she felt tingling all over her body, she saw a whirl of multi-coloured lights flash and sparkle all around her, becoming so bright that she had to screw her eyes shut again; but the lights didn’t disappear, they enveloped her.
|
