Shimmer: A Novel Read Online Free

talk.
“Semper spes est.”
    There is always hope.
    Logan wished he could believe that.
    After a pit stop in the hall bathroom, Logan retired to his bedroom and slipped between the unpacked boxes standing sentinel duty around his bed. He stripped down to his underwear and flopped down on top of the blankets, forearm draped across his eyes as if to ward off the coming visions. Not that it would help. Nothing ever helped.
    Across the U-shaped hallway, he heard Barrett in the gym, grunting as he pounded the heavy bag with fists and feet. Barrett had to exercise to unwind, releasing all that coiled energy before surrendering to sleep. Logan felt drained by the anxiety of his premonitions. Barrett longed to strike the first blow in this new war, but for Logan the battle had already begun.
    Exhausted, he slipped down into the familiar, screaming darkness.

Chapter 3
    Liana bypassed her second floor bedroom and climbed the stairs to the third floor, a converted attic that served as Thalia’s studio. Her older sister spent most of time, day and night, on the third floor, sitting at her easel with pencil or paintbrush, depending on her mood, alone in the muted light cast by fringed lampshades. She never tired of her studio and only came down at Liana’s insistence.
    When Thalia hummed a broken, haunting melody, it seemed that she was almost at peace with her life. Other times she would talk to herself, a confused, rambling, solitary discourse for extended periods, sometimes punctuated by fits of glossolalia. On rare occasions, her apparent non sequiturs held meanings which, though not immediately clear to the Walkers, eventually proved prophetic in nature. But she also suffered bouts of agitation, and these episodes usually coincided with violent rift activity. And that was how Liana found her, in the early morning hours after the first Hadenford incident.
    Wearing her paint-spattered smock over her floral blouse and white wraparound skirt, Thalia stood before her sketchpad, uttering a repeated sound, an uncomfortable sound of apparent emotional distress, “Uh—uh—uh…”
    Liana hurried to her older sister. “Thalia? What’s wrong?”
    Thalia had attempted to pull her long blond hair back with a ribbon, but loose strands fell in front of her face, obscuring her hazel eyes.  With a pencil gripped in her white-knuckled left hand, she was making forceful vertical strokes on the sketchpad. Liana caught her hand, but Thalia continued to stare at the drawing. “Dead. Dead. Dead.”
    Liana looked at the drawing. Trees, a forest of trees like elongated skeletons, bare limbs terminating in clawed arboreal hands. At the bottom of the page, she’d drawn the boxy shape of a car crumpled against the base of a tree, bracketed by two stretched human faces, contorted in agony, reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
. Thalia had made slash marks through both faces with her pencil, gouging furrows in the heavy bond paper. “Thalia… did you see this?”
    “See? See?” Thalia shook her head. “Nooooo!” The sound was a pitiful howl. “Darkness. It’s the Dark again. Blood. And darkness.”
    “It’s over now, Thalia.” Liana assured her. “It’s all over.”
    “No—no—no!” Violent head-shaking. “It’s just beginning.”
    Liana pried the pencil from Thalia’s fingers and placed it on the easel’s narrow shelf. She held her sister tight and whispered in her ear. “It’s okay now, Thalia. Let’s go to bed.”
    “There’s more,” she said. Her body was rigid. “More. Always more.”
    “We’ll take care of it tomorrow,” Liana said. “Enough for today. Okay?”
    Thalia nodded, but tears streamed down her face. Liana wrapped an arm around her sister’s shoulder and guided her to the narrow staircase. In the bedroom they shared, Liana helped her undress, then slipped Thalia’s white nightgown over her head and led her to her bed. Thalia stared at the ceiling while Liana changed into her nightclothes.
    Moments