Seven Deadly Tales of Terror Read Online Free

the thing with a bit more gentle probing. It was an almost perfectly round knob and felt like it was about half the size of his thumb. He tried pulling at it slightly, but this resulted in a jolt of pain sharper than any of the previous jabs.
    He was breathing heavily and his heart was beating faster as he tossed aside the blanket covering his body, got out of bed, and hurried out to the bathroom down the hall. The bathroom door had a tendency to stick in the frame. After shouldering it open, he traipsed across the small space on legs turning more rubbery by the moment. He stopped at the sink and peered at his reflection in the mirror above it.
    John knew what he had to do.
    But he was reluctant.
    There was something in his neck that shouldn’t be there. It hadn’t been there when he’d gone to bed. That he knew for a fact. He’d gone to bed stone sober, just as he had every night for the last five years, following his fifth (and final) DUI arrest. He’d been in full possession of his senses until lights out, no question about it.
    So, again… what the fuck ?
    He lingered there in frozen terror a moment longer, knowing he needed to visually appraise whatever it was. Until he did that, he couldn’t even begin to figure out what the thing in his neck really was or how to remove it. And yet a very frightened part of him didn’t want to see it, was, in fact, terrified at the very idea. Whatever this thing was, someone else had put it there.
    Or some thing else.
    Aliens, maybe.
    The idea was ridiculous on the surface. He’d always scoffed at tales of alien abductions and experiments, treating the stories with the same disdain he felt for kooky conspiracy theories. Only now, with this goddamn thing stuck in his neck, it was hard to discount any of the wild possibilities he’d once treated with such contempt.
    “I’ve got to do this,” he muttered, his voice too loud in the otherwise empty room. “I’ve got no choice.”
    He turned to his side, craned his neck around, and lifted up the little scraggle of dark hair at the nape of his neck. The object protruding from his neck was pretty much as he’d envisioned it from his initial tactile examination, except that the hard knob was a shade of light blue rather than the dark brown or black he’d expected.
    Leaning over the sink, he put his head as close as he could to the mirror, his eyes swiveling and straining in their sockets as he tried hard to get the best possible view of the thing. He still couldn’t tell whether it was made of metal or some other hard material. With the fingers of his other hand, he pressed down as hard as he could on a patch of flesh adjacent to the protrusion, hoping for a glimpse of the part of the object that was actually inside his flesh. This resulted in a series of minor stings that were bearable and nothing compared to the sharper jabs that came when he applied direct pressure to the object.
    By doing this, he was able to catch a brief glimpse of something silver attached to the bottom of the blue knob. He was only able to observe it for a few seconds before the stinging sensations became more than he could tolerate. Though minor at first, they became steadily more intense the longer he pressed down on the flesh adjacent to the object.
    He took his hand away from his neck and let out a breath.
    A rod or bolt of some sort, apparently made of metal, had been inserted in his neck while he slept. How this had been accomplished without waking him or causing excruciating pain, he did not know. He stared at his reflection and wondered what to do.
    Get it out. Now .
    Well, that was easier said than done, wasn’t it?
    The object was deeply and firmly embedded in his flesh. Removing it would require a significant amount of force. Judging by the jabs of pain triggered by simple prods of the exterior knob, any attempt at removal would likely result in waves of mind-bending agony. There was also the issue of the placement of the object to consider.