Read Online SHUDDERVILLE THREE by Mia Zabrisky - Free Book Online

invisible force released her, and she nearly fell over. She regained her balance, picked herself up and looked around the room. It was filled with a dense heavy mist. The sudden silence was suffocating. A single window cast a dim light through the fog, and she noticed a four-poster bed next to a nightstand crowded with pills and medical supplies, and a bureau off to one side. She could hear a child breathing at the center of the bed. She could see the small outline of a girl’s body. Isabelle was smaller than her sister and wore a long white nightgown patterned with tiny pink roses. She looked about ten, same age as Olive. She breathed and behaved as if she were living inside a cloud—it was hard to describe. She appeared to be floating, although Cassie could plainly see that she was lying on the bed.
    Now Ryan stepped out of the mist like a ghost and looked at her with tender, forgiving eyes. Cassie felt her worries beginning to slip away. She began to lose the tension in her body. It was the exact opposite of what she expected to happen. What she wanted to happen. She wanted to prevent this. She wanted to fight for him with every fiber of her being. She reached for him but couldn’t get any closer. Something was preventing her from moving any further into the room.
    “It’s okay, Cassie,” he said. “Let it go. Let it be.”
    The little girl on the bed didn’t wake up. She slept soundly, her ribcage moving up and down. It was hypnotic, watching her sleep. Cassie kept expecting something to happen, but all was silence and cottony stillness as Isabelle breathed softly in her sleep.
    “Ryan, don’t leave me,” Cassie pleaded, trying to grab hold of him and pull him out of this room, an impossible task.
    With a sickening crackle of static, the mist began to gather momentum, at first swirling around their ankles and gradually moving up their legs. She could hear other people breathing inside the room. She could see vague outlines—Olive and Andy and Delilah. They were standing inside a cloud, small jewels of mystery and power. They appeared to be floating and simply breathing. Just floating and breathing and watching her from the dense whirling haze.
    She shifted her position in another effort to get closer to Ryan and heard something crunch underfoot. Dead flies. Isabelle had a round unblemished face and pale unscarred skin, but she wasn’t as pretty as her twin. She had the same delicate features and dark hair as Olive, but Cassie couldn’t see her eyes. They were closed. She had a low forehead that made her look slightly ugly or deformed, and a severe mouth with thin lips.
    Fear tightened Cassie’s chest until she almost choked. Why was she so scared of this little girl? She reached for Ryan and managed to grab hold of his hand. His eyes were shiny bright—he felt deep empathy for her, she could tell. She tried to drag him out of the room, but the swirling mist pushed her back with such force, she felt her arms almost pop out of their sockets as she slammed to the floor and hovered on the brink of consciousness. She fought off the encroaching darkness and sat up just in time to witness what happened next.
    The mist began to thicken around Ryan, absorbing him like a meal tucked inside the belly of a whale. It was as if he were caught in a rain cloud, and the cloud kept edging further and further away. She could do nothing to save him. She was powerless. It had caught him and trapped him, and now it was slowly pulling him apart, molecule by molecule. She screamed as she reached for him again. The sounds became unbearable, like amplified shovelfuls of dirt tumbling on top of a wooden coffin. Loud, clumsy, roaring sounds. Thunderous, low-frequency sounds.
    Delilah said, “Don’t go near him again, or worse things will happen. Horrible things. You can’t even imagine.”
    “Ryan,” Cassie cried. “I love you!”
    His mouth moved silently, forming words she didn’t catch.
    Delilah said, “Now, girls.