The Waiting: A Supernatural Thriller(44)

She stood, the sound of her chair sliding across the floor akin to the wailing below. A part of her wanted to stay upstairs, but another part, larger and kinder, couldn’t stand the sound of an animal in pain.

“I’m going to be right back, okay?” Becky said, placing a hand on Shaun’s shoulder.

Thoughts of what she would do if she found a beaten or abused pet cascaded through her mind. She would have to call someone, that much she was sure of. She would never turn a blind eye to a child being neglected, and she couldn’t ignore a pet in the same situation.

Shaun made an agitated noise behind her, but she didn’t turn. Her hand already lay on the doorknob, which was cold. She wrenched the door open, waiting for an injured dog to come racing past her and into the kitchen, but the stairs stood empty. Darkness clung to the steps, and she could barely make out a platform farther down. Her hand found a switch inside the stairway, but when she flicked it upward, no light bloomed below. At that moment she nearly shut the door. She hadn’t heard anything really, and Evan seemed like a nice man who loved his son, not the kind that would lock away a tortured dog.

As she began to shut the door, the dog whined again down in the dark. The sound was so full of anguish her heart ached. She could already feel its fur beneath her fingers and its grateful tongue licking her face.

Becky stopped on the landing, only then realizing she’d traveled down the stairs to get there. The black of the basement looked like swirling ink before her eyes. She’d never encountered darkness so thick. Not even when her cousins locked her in a closet when she was six. The gap beneath the door had let a little light in, enough to spur hope of getting out.

But now, her breath was trapped in her chest. She stepped forward, finding the next stair with her outstretched foot. Her hands groped before her, and she imagined what she would do if something reached out and touched her fingers. She would die, she knew it in her heart. There would be no scream, or even time to register the pure terror; she would simply drop, dead as a swatted fly.

Instead of the slimy touch of something unimaginable, her hand brushed a wooden post. Following it down, mostly for support, she felt the edges of an electrical box, and after an excruciating beat, the switch flipped up, coating the basement with dim light.

Becky stood motionless on the steps, her fingers pressing the switch up as though it might snap down on its own. A doll stood near the bottom of the stairs, its lifeless blue eyes gazing across the room. If they’d been trained on her, she might’ve screamed, losing all will to venture further. A few boxes and an old desk sat to her right, but the object at the far end of the space was what held her attention.

The biggest grandfather clock she had ever seen stood there, its hulking three-towered bulk taking up most of the wall. Its black finish looked like fabric cut from a midnight sky, and its face seemed to stare at her, pinning her to the spot on which she wavered.

“Puppy?”

Her voice sounded weak and small. The word died so quick in the basement air she wasn’t sure she’d even said it.

“Hello? Are you hurt?”

A quiet whimper came from the other end of the room, and Becky squinted beneath a makeshift worktable set up in front of the clock. Shadows cloaked the area, and she couldn’t see if anything lay there.

“It’s okay, I’m not gonna hurt you.”

She waited for the jingle of a collar or another noise, but none came. She moved down the last few stairs and onto the basement floor. The air was definitely cooler down here, and it smelled. What was the smell? Something sharp and acrid but organic. She’d smelled it before.

Blood.

“Are you hurt?” Becky said, forcing herself to walk toward the table.

She ignored the sensation of being watched, and completely struck down the idea that the clock was the one watching. A clock watching. She nearly let out a strangled laugh through her tightened throat but cut it short.

The dog whimpered again, and she tried to make out its form under the table. A dark shape lay there, but it looked wrong somehow.

An overwhelming urge to backpedal to the stairs hit her like a bat to the head.

You should run.

Instead, she took another step forward and squatted by the table to examine the darker shadow. Becky placed her hands on the floor and leaned forward, trying to make out the shape of the dog.

Something wet touched her fingers, and when she looked down, she saw why the form beneath the table looked so strange.

The pool of blood that she’d thought was a dog rolled toward her, a black puddle moving like quicksilver. Becky pulled her hand up, revulsed, her face crumpling. She opened her mouth to scream—she had to, there would be no getting around it now—but the dog whined again, louder this time, and she realized where the sound came from.

From inside the clock.

“No,” she gasped.

Her muscles, the ones she’d meant to work on and tone up for Greg so he wouldn’t leave her for someone thinner, shook, and her attempt at standing resulted in falling flat on her ass. Her air left her, and all at once she was a child again, lying on her back beneath the weeping willow she’d been climbing until a branch broke and released her to the cruel arms of gravity. A small amount of air whistled into her lungs, and it was this sound she thought she heard as she tried to crab-walk backward. But when her breath heaved back out, the noise continued, drawing her eyes upward.

The three bare light bulbs were slowly unscrewing themselves.