Read Online Blue World by Robert R. McCammon - Free Book Online

horror actor owned it?”
    “Sure did. A long time ago. Now I guess all that stuff is junk, huh.” He smiled faintly. “The stuff dreams are made of, right? I saw most of that guy’s flicks twice, when I was a kid. Like the one about the Invisible Man. And there was another one he did that was really something too, called… let’s see…
    The Man Who Shrank.
    Now, that was a classic.“
    “I don’t know so much about horror films,” Mullinax said. He ran a finger over the silver claw. “They give me the creeps. Why don’t you stay up here with our dead friend and I’ll radio for the morgue wagon, okay?” He took a couple of steps forward and then stopped. Something was odd. He leaned against the shattered doorjamb and looked at the sole of his shoe. “Ugh!” he said. “What’d I step on?”
    Doom City
    He awakened with the memory of thunder in his bones.
    The house was quiet. The alarm clock hadn’t gone off. Late for work! he realized, struck by a bolt of desperate terror. But no, no… wait a minute; he blinked the fog from his eyes and his mind gradually cleared too. He could still taste the onions in last night’s meatloaf. Friday night was meatloaf night. Today was Saturday. No office work today, thank God. Ah, he thought, settle down… settle down…
    Lord, what a nightmare he’d had! It was fading now, all jumbled up and incoherent but leaving its weird essence behind like a snakeskin. There’d been a thunderstorm last night--Brad was sure of that, because he’d awakened to see the garish white flash of it and to hear the gut-wrenching growl of a real boomer pounding at the bedroom wall. But whatever the nightmare had been, he couldn’t recall now; he felt dizzy and disoriented, like he’d just stepped off a carnival ride gone crazy. He did recall that he’d sat up and seen that lightning, so bright it had made his eyes buzz blue in the dark. And he remembered Sarah saying something too, but now he didn’t know what it was…
    Damn, he thought as he stared across the bedroom at the window that looked down on Baylor Street. Damn, that light looks strange. Not like June at all. More like a white winter light. Ghostly. Kind of made his eyes hurt a little.
    Brad got out of bed and walked across the room. He pushed aside the white curtain and peered out, squinting.
    What appeared to be a gray, faintly luminous fog hung in the trees and over the roofs of the houses on Baylor Street. It looked like the color had been sucked out of everything, and the fog lay motionless for as far as he could see up and down the street. He looked up, trying to find the sun. It was up there somewhere, burning like a dim bulb behind dirty cotton. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Brad Forbes said, “Sarah? Honey? Take a look at this.”
    She didn’t reply, nor did she stir. He glanced at her, saw the wave of her brown hair above the sheet that was pulled up over her like a shroud. “Sarah?” he said again, and took a step toward the bed.
    And suddenly Brad remembered what she’d said last night, when he’d sat up in a sleepy daze to watch the lightning crackle.
    I’m cold, I’m cold.
    He grasped the edge of the sheet and pulled it back.
    A skeleton with tendrils of brittle brown hair attached to its skull lay where his wife had been sleeping last night.
    The skeleton was wearing Sarah’s pale blue nightgown, and what looked like dried-up pieces of tree bark--skin, he realized, yes… her… skin--lay all around, on and between the white bones. The teeth grinned, and from the bed there was the bittersweet odor of a damp graveyard.
    “Oh…” he whispered, and he stood staring down at what was left of his wife as his eyes began to bulge from their sockets and a pressure like his brain was about to explode grew in his head and blood trickled down from his lower lip where his teeth had pierced.
    I’m cold, she’d said, in a voice that had sounded like a whimper of pain.
    I’m cold.
    And then Brad heard