Dark Siren Read Online Free Page A

seen through water, like swimming shadows in the gloomy darkness of the corridor. Then they disappeared.
    When she was looking through the eye of her camera, it was as if she had become a part of the camera itself. Her field of vision wasn’t constricted to a tiny square of light, but rather expanded so that she could see more of the world than she could with the naked eye.
    “No,” Alice said, “I’m going to take its picture.”
    “Is… that how you… do it?”
    Alice lowered the camera and let the smile come naturally to her face. “Do what?”
    “How you, you know, deal with these things.”
    “I don’t think a pair of good, church-going Catholics such as yourselves really want to know the answer to that question. Best leave the Necromancy to the heathens, as it says in the Bible.”
    “You know the Bible?”
    “You sound surprised.”
    Something smashed on the other side of the door. Sherry jumped and made a sound half way between a laugh and a cry before hiding behind her husband. Mack’s eyebrows met in the middle and he clenched his jaw. The sound hadn’t startled Alice, but it had set her body alight with anticipation and excitement. The drums of war had started beating.
    “That thing’s been causing us nothing but trouble,” Mack said through gritted teeth. “I don’t care how you do it, just get rid of it.”
    Alice nodded. She reached for the door and let her hand rest on the knob. Icy to the touch . “Whatever happens, whatever you hear,” she said, “Don’t open this door.”
    I’ve always wanted to say that, she thought, and she didn’t check for Mack’s reaction as she turned the knob and pushed on the door. It swung open, croaking loudly on its hinges like a fat toad in a swamp, and revealed the dark room beyond. A cool, stale breath which reeked of old beer, wet wood, and burnt electrics rode out to greet her, but she pressed on and swept inside. As soon as the door closed, she understood two more things about the thing taking residence in this room.
    She wasn’t welcome here. Despite it being the intruder, it had made this place its home—a place of rest, a lair. Who wants a stranger stepping into the place where you sleep? She was also beginning to understand, judging by the slowly rising electric charge in the air, that it was aware of not only her presence, but also her power… and it hated her for both of those reasons.
    “Alright,” she said into the darkness, in an almost casual way. “I know you’re in here, we both know you’re not supposed to be here, so why don’t you just pack your shit and leave?”
    She heard a sound from the other side of the room, like a chair scraping across a floor. The only illumination in the room was a rectangle of light filtering in from a small window high up on one of the walls. Dusk was settling outside, and the shaft of pale, orange light was cutting a clean set of lines in an angle across the room. But she couldn’t see what chair had moved, or where it had moved to.
    “C’mon, man,” she said, “We both have stuff to do. Can’t you just get out?” No points for trying, but she figured she would attempt the easy approach first.
    Silence followed, but her heart was starting to pick up the pace. Alice brought Trapper up to her eye and looked through it. She made a scan of the room, first left and then right, and settled on a corner of the room in which shadows seemed to congregate like flies on a corpse. There were boxes on the floor there, and a set of tall shelves which had been knocked over, their contents nowhere to be seen. Alice concentrated, blinked, and the shadows lightened to reveal… a shape. It was human, but it also wasn’t. The angles and dimensions were all wrong; the shoulders too hunched, and arms so long that the hands—if they were hands—almost seemed to drag across the floor.
    If she hadn’t known she was looking for a human, it could have been mistaken for a large ape.
    “There you are,” she