Read Online The Late Night Horror Show by Bryan Smith - Free Book Online Page B

drew her knees toward her chest. She sat there rocking and shaking on the soggy ground, her head turning this way and that as she searched the small clearing she was in for clues as to how she had wound up here.
    But there was nothing.
    Just a lot of trees and that creepily impenetrable darkness beyond them.
    The last thing she remembered was being at the theater. Had someone abducted her from there and brought her to this place? Maybe. She had been in attendance at a lurid movie about a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Maybe one of the guys in the audience was a for-real psycho. He had spotted her and hadn’t been able to help himself. He snatched her, somehow spirited her out of the theater, and brought her to this wooded locale. The perfect place to have his perverted way with her. To rape and murder her. To butcher her body the way he’d seen so many of his favorite movie killers do it to all those pretty actresses.
    Thunder crashed above her again, making her flinch. A subsequent burst of lightning, far brighter than the first, lit up the sky.
    Lashon sucked in a sharp breath.
    The flash at the theater.
    That weird grinning dude in the bow tie.
    She remembered it all now. She hadn’t been abducted. Not in any normal-world sense, anyway. Something very wrong and very strange had happened in that theater. Something connected with those blinding white flashes. Those weird theater workers, all of them so nearly identical to each other, were somehow responsible for this. She couldn’t begin to understand how that was possible, or even what the larger implications of it might be, but she knew in her gut it was the truth.  
    Just as she knew the theater workers hadn’t actually been human. She didn’t know what they were, but she knew that. And did it really matter? They were weird and dangerous. Those were the only relevant facts, in her view. And whatever had happened, at least one good thing had come of it.
    She was nowhere near any of those weird bow-tie-wearing fucks or their dumpy, run-down theater.
    Which nonetheless left her with the reality of figuring out where she was and doing something about it. The sooner the better, too.
    Now , in fact, would be a good time.
    She uncrossed her arms, braced her hands on the wet ground, and got unsteadily to her feet. Once she was upright she crossed her arms again, hugging her body as tightly as she could as she continued to shiver. She did a slow turn in the clearing, looking for any indication of a good direction to begin her journey out of this godforsaken place. She scanned the ground for signs of tracks in the muddy earth. If someone had carried her to this place and then walked back out of the clearing, there should be ample evidence of that, but there were no footprints anywhere, at least none that were visible here in this deep darkness. It was almost as if some unknowable power had scooped her up and set her down in this place. A crazy notion, maybe, but it would account for the lack of tracks in the wet ground. And the idea was impossible to dismiss, given the profoundly odd nature of the things she remembered from the theater.
    She thought yet again of the theater workers. Those mysterious creatures wearing their masks of false humanity. Who and what were they? Where did they come from? What were they trying to accomplish by doing what they had done?
    Questions without answers. At least for now. And maybe for always. She could live without answers, if she could somehow manage to get home and survive this night.
    And if I can do that, she thought, I’m never going to a goddamn horror movie ever again.
    She thought about that a moment longer and amended the resolution to include any movie of any type. Why take chances? She preferred books, anyway.
    There was a spot at the edge of the clearing where there was a larger-than-usual gap between two of the tall trees. Might a path back to something resembling civilization lie within the darkness beyond that gap? Maybe. Maybe