A-Sides Read online

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  “Jenny?”

  Lisa’s voice was serene, composed and gentle. “Jenny, come out. I’ve got something for you.”

  Jenny heard Lisa calling, but it was the way she was calling that made her nervous. Lisa never spoke gently. Although immediately suspicious, she was also aware of a chill that passed through her. The night wind pressed its icy palm against the window pane and rattled the glass while the frost-hardened night penetrated the walls of her room and settled its cold on her like a second skin. The house creaked around her in some dark corner.

  With a heavy heart and fear like icy needles pricking her, Jenny walked to her bedroom door. Disobedience might bring on another beating.

  Lisa stood just outside Jenny’s room, wearing the bride’s maid dress, her hands behind her back. For a moment Jenny wondered why the lights were out.

  “Lisa? What’s wrong?”

  Lisa continued walking forward slowly. She looked unflinchingly at Jenny as if she were something to eat.

  “What’s wrong,” Jenny repeated. “Lisa, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing, Jenny. Nothing,” Lisa said in a friendly voice. Her face was abloom with healthy color and she was smiling. “I’ve come to make a peace offering. You remember all the times I yelled at you and hit you?”

  Jenny nodded uncertainly.

  “Well, you won’t have to worry about that anymore.” Lisa was within a yard of Jenny, facing her. Her dark hair glimmered like oil in the moonlight and her eyes suddenly blazed. “You won’t ever have to worry about that again.”

  Lisa raised the knife over her head.

  “No!” Jenny screamed. She lurched backwards and her back slammed against the door frame, rattling her teeth and conking her head with a brain jarring crack. The knife came down in a brutal arc, flashing in the lamplight from Jenny’s room, missing her by an inch.

  “Nooooo...!”

  Jenny slid to a sitting position, cowering and sobbing. Her pinwheel was in her room, her magic gone. The light from the bedroom bathed Lisa in half light, half shadow, her visible eye gleaming triumphantly. In the welling darkness behind Lisa, Jenny saw the vague outlines of the demon-spawned creatures, but thought that might just have come from her brains being stirred.

  Lisa raised the knife again.

  “No!” Jenny screamed, that high, piercing shriek of a little girl that was like a nail in Lisa’s head. “No, no, no!”

  Lisa felt it hit her. A great rush of wind and then the invisible hand pushing her, smashing the breath out of her. Her mouth yawned open in a circle of pain and then she was flying across the room, tumbling in mockery of gravity, twisting like a scarecrow in a whirlwind. She crashed into the glass front of the grandfather clock, shattering its pane into a thousand crystal fangs. The chiming tubes bonged and clanged like lunatic church bells.

  A ponderous, oppressive weight levied on her chest, the invisible hand crushing her against the fractured grandfather clock. The muffled snaps of her ribs breaking seemed artificially subdued, but the flaring pain as the broken ends pierced her lungs was real enough. She dimly heard a squeaky wheeze like a bellows as the breath was crushed from her chest and out of her mouth, bubbling through the blood from her lacerated lungs.

  Lisa was dying and she knew it. A gathering black tide began to veil her vision, but not before she saw Jenny huddled in a protective ball on the floor, her moony, blue eyes staring at Lisa with an otherworldly mix of fascination and fear. Jenny wouldn’t be able to hound Lisa in death, and she wished for it to hurry. A last, blood-choked moan of desperation whispered from Lisa’s mouth as the last spark of her life ebbed out.