Doug Goodman Dominion (epub)

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.Colt looked under the camper and out behind the shed.He double-checked the gates, but they were all closed.Just as the tears started to well up in his eyes and he was ready to run to his brothers, he saw the large body curled up by the side of the house.It was hard to make out the dog in the beam of light.Cthulhu faced away from him.His side rose and fell sporadically.He looked sunken in the ground.“Cthulhu?” Colt called out.He felt embarrassed that his voice sounded so weak.He wished it would sound stronger, more like his brothers.He put the food bowl down and crept up to Cthulhu, the light shaking in his hands.Colt sat down beside his pet and placed his hand on the dog’s side.Suddenly, Cthulhu snapped.His teeth popped wetly and his head arched, all teeth and bite.Colt shrieked and jumped away.Cthulhu didn’t chase the boy, though.He just lay there on the ground snarling and snapping.Something about the way his head jerked around scared Colt.Made him think something was wrong with the mechanics of the dog’s body.Colt ran away, knocking over the food bowl, and slamming the sliding door shut behind him.He locked the door and stared out into the darkness.He couldn’t quite see out there, so he shone his light in the darkness.A beam of light set a golden halo around the area where Colt had last seen Cthulhu, but the dog was no longer there.“What’s up?” Mike asked.Colt screamed, and Mike laughed.“Shut up!” Colt yelled.“What’s the matter – why so tense?”“It’s Cthulhu.Something’s not right.I think he tried to bite me.”“You think he tried to bite you? Let’s see where you think he thought about trying to bite you.”Colt held out his hand.“Well,” Mike said in mock doctor’s voice, “It looks like his thought was worse than his bite.”Colt jerked his hand away.“I know what I saw.Something’s not right.”“Of course not.He’s an old dog.C’mon, the game’s set up.All we have to do is build some characters.”As the two boys walked back towards the bedrooms, a dark shape came up to the back door.The door began to rattle, quietly at first, then aggressively.The hard part about role-playing is getting started.Once the game begins, the adventure commences.But until then, there was nothing for Aidan to do except watch everybody create characters, and everybody had a different theory about how to create a character.Some used generators to spit out characters, others made spin-offs of old characters, but most created super-sized versions of themselves.For Jaxon, that meant a mysterious ninja.Kirk, bard; Peter, thief-acrobat with an eccentric personality.Aidan double-checked his references, and then braided some of Alyssa’s hair.Her hair felt so soft in his hands.He thought about the possibilities of the upcoming year, what the dorm rooms would look like, who he would meet, and whether or not he would get to absorb any of the “cool” of Austin.Somewhere out in the distance, he heard a scream.At least, he thought it was a scream.It sounded too inhuman to be a scream.Aidan looked around the room, but apparently, the sound was faint enough that nobody else heard it.Everybody was too absorbed in creating their characters.He shrugged it off as people partying way too hard for this quiet little suburb and returned to braiding Alyssa’s hair.Suddenly, the window rattled as if something hit it.The noise startled Alyssa, but the boys kept rolling dice and studying books as if nothing had happened.Aidan walked over to the back window that had rattled and hit the drywall beside it.“Cut it out, Cthulhu!” he shouted.“Go on.”“That dog always wants in,” Peter said.“Dad says we could train him to track air conditioning.”“I don’t like him,” Alyssa said.“He has that weird look in his eyes.”“That’s what makes him cool,” Kirk interjected.“He looks crazy, so nobody’d fuck with him.”The shadow moved around the house, passing from window to window and pushing up against them, too.While the boys finished off their meat-lover’s pizza, the shape jumped the fence and started around the front side of the house.First, it tested the windows along the front bedrooms, but they hadn’t been opened in years.Then the front door began to shake on its hinges.The doorknob fumbled, then turned slightly, but the door was locked.The shadow moved on.The symphony of pages flipping, pencils writing, and Cokes being guzzled was broken by a high-pitched ringing, like the kind landlines used to make in the sixties and seventies.“Sorry,” Jaxon said as he plucked out his phone to see who it was.“What the hell kind of ring is that?” Mike asked.“Dude, it’s classic,” Peter said.“It’s annoying.Like PewDiePie annoying.”“Mom and Stu,” Jaxon said.“Want to bet they’re calling me cause they smelled smoke in the house?” he said while glaring at Kirk.Kirk shrugged, as if there was nothing he could do about it.“They can bitch about it in the morning,” Jaxon said.He silenced the ringer and ignored the call.The shadow quickly passed by the kitchen windows without stopping.The garage door, which was never locked, swung open.Aidan’s cell started buzzing.He picked it up to answer, when he heard another scream.This time it was much closer, and much less human.It was guttural and low, more a moan than a scream.From the look in Alyssa’s eyes, he assumed she heard it, too.He glanced out the closest window, but there was nothing unusual in the backyard.“What’s up?” Mike asked.“You didn’t hear that?”“I heard it.It sounded weird,” Alyssa said.Aidan guessed that “weird” could easily substitute for “scary.” Then he saw something both strange and frightening.He saw a man run through the alley, past their fence, and continue on.This was the sort of thing that was usually more odd than anything else.Perhaps the guy was high on something, or maybe he was a jogger taking a short cut.But this guy wasn’t jogging.He was running.Sprinting.Then the strange man turned to look behind him and saw something that made his eyes go wide and his face turn white.It was a brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it look.“Did you see that?” Aidan asked Alyssa.Her eyes tightened as she tried to see out the back window.With the lights out, it wasn’t easy to see.“See what?” she asked.“That guy with the crazed look running down the alley.”Peter and Mike’s cellphones went off almost simultaneously, but they didn’t answer them.They just let them ring while everybody gathered at the window to look for the crazy guy.“Shut off the lights so we can see better,” Aidan told Mike.The inside lights went out, and everybody stood at the open window, faces to the glass and hands above their eyes to cut out any residual light.“It’ll take a second for everybody’s eyes to adjust,” Jaxon said.Finally, everybody’s phones stopped ringing.A few seconds later, they all started ringing again, but nobody paid them any attention.“How did you see a guy in the alley?” Mike asked.“I can barely see halfway out of our backyard.”Aidan’s stomach grew cold and his face darkened.He realized this was the part in the movie when everybody stopped and stared in shock at something inexplicable while the maniac with the chainsaw came up behind him.It was a paranoid delusion, but the night was turning weird, fast.The screams, the cellphones, the crazy-looking man – separate, they were coincidences, but combined, they were something else.But what?Aidan stepped away from the glass and backed out of the den [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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