Preta's Realm Read Online Free Page A

bomb into Tom’s mouth. Drew fumbled for the remote control and pushed buttons until he could no longer hear the commotion. He turned to his side and buried his head in a pillow on the couch. Drew laid there for a few minutes before he opened his eyes. When he did, the room sat under a blanket of solitude. The only light came from the VCR clock that read 2:29. He had slept for the better part of four hours.
    A buzzing sound came from the end table where Drew’s phone sat.
    Text or email , he wondered while reaching for it. He could not remember setting it to vibrate, but that’s what it was doing. The vibration ceased as Drew turned it towards his face. When he touched the screen, there was no message.
    He dropped the phone on the table hard enough to register disgust but without enough force to break it. Drew sat and rubbed a hand through his hair. He heard Sara snoring and smelled the sour milk that had congealed on the floor underneath the dining room table. He lost the evening to rage and a migraine, a couple that liked to go out together at his expense.
    The old refrigerator buzzed and popped while the amber glow from the streetlamps returned to the room. A few random toys lay scattered on the floor, novelty pencils and scraps of notebook paper scribbled with broad strokes of permanent marker. The winter wind grabbed the wooden storm doors and shook them to the core. Drew stood and felt the floor shift beneath his feet. He sat back down on the couch.
    “Prison.”
    He turned to face the gaping maw of the doorway leading to the stairs. Shadows wavered like a mirage on a desert highway. Drew slid a finger between the blinds and scanned the front yard for a sign. Nobody outside the house and nobody at the door.
    “It’s all a prison.”
    The sentence could not be mistaken for random noise. Drew sat back on the couch and closed his eyes. He felt swirls of red passing beneath his closed eyelids and a slight buzz in his extremities that caused his fingers to tingle. His mouth went dry and his tongue turned into a wad of cotton.
    “What is?” He heard his words but could not tell if they originated from his mouth or from the charged ether of the room.
    “All of it.” The voice delivered the words with perfect diction, but as if spoken from the bottom of a well. Each syllable resonated and reverberated with mathematical precision.
    “I don’t understand,” Drew replied, this time certain he had spoken the words and not thought them.
    “You will. Now that we have been introduced, there are important things that must be done.”
    Drew put both hands on his ears. He had to convince himself that he was not wearing headphones, listening to a psychedelic recording that pushed the audio back and forth across the stereo field. The voice bounced from left to right as if a cyclone of sound swirled around his head. “I’m coming apart. Again.”
    A slight sigh brushed past Drew’s nose. His eyes saw nothing but the darkness of the witching hour holding dominion in his living room.
    “I can help you.”
    “Where do I begin?” Drew asked.
    “The temptress,” replied the voice, the last syllable trailing away like the hiss of a serpent.
    ***
    Drew awoke by leaping out of bed. He leaned over and kissed Molly on the cheek, something that all but extinguished around year seven of the marriage. She opened one eye and smiled before turning over and hitting the snooze button on her side of the alarm.
    He smoothed down the collar and fixed his tie in the mirror. A set of bright eyes and a slightly upturned smile looked back. Drew pulled Billy and Sara’s doors shut to give them another thirty minutes of sleep before they had to get ready for school. He bounced down the steps, mumbling the melody of a long-forgotten tune from the 1940s big band era. He never listened to the Benny Goodman stuff, but his grandfather loved it. Drew remembered going to his grandparents’ place every Sunday and thumbing through his grandfather’s