SHUDDERVILLE FOUR Read Online Free

right? Your little girl. You want all the details. Right? How all this started? What’s going on? Well, Sophie. I’ll tell you. If you’ll let me.”
    She stared at him hopelessly. She didn’t believe him, but at the same time she was dying to find out what he knew. She held the gun steady but her arm was getting tired. “Go on,” she said.
    “Estelle and I were married in 1955. I was twenty-six. She was twenty-three. What a cutie! She had these lively brown eyes and a funny, crooked smile… always with the jokes. We laughed a lot. Despite the tears. For ten years, we tried to have kids. For ten long years we tried. We wanted a whole passel. You know? Our own little F-Troop. But, ah, no such luck. Not for us. It put a strain on our marriage. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Turns out you need a healthy sperm and a healthy egg to conceive, and we thought we had plenty of both. But it wasn’t in the cards. Not for us.
    “Eventually we gave up. When Estelle stopped marking her calendar with her ovulation date, it was a very sad day for us.” He poured himself another drink. “And so we moved on. Like they say in the movies—get on with your life.” He winked at her. “Anyway, Estelle tried to preoccupy herself in other ways. Meanwhile, my career was going well. I worked for a company called Lon-Gen. We studied things. Fascinating things. I’m a mathematician; I’m pretty good at it. They hired a quantum physicist in the early sixties, and he and I got along great. We worked on some projects together. This and that. But then one day, we discovered something… how can I put this?” His voice had fallen to a mere whisper. “Something remarkable.”
    Sophie’s hands were trembling. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her nerves. She tried not to accidentally pull the trigger—not now. Not when he was about to reveal everything to her.
    “Well, anyway, I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, I went home that very day and asked Estelle what she wanted more than anything else in the world. What was her fondest wish? I was flexing this newfound power of mine. She thought I was kidding around, you know? I was quite the jokester back then.”
    Sophie’s nerves fluttered. Her stomach tensed. Her mouth tasted sour.
    “But I told her—no, take this seriously, Estelle. And she confessed what she wanted. Babies, of course. Two kids. What are you thinking? I want babies, she said! A boy and a girl. A little devil and a little angel!” He gave Sophie a significant look, then paused to wipe his brow with his hand. He squeezed his eyes shut and sighed. “She got pregnant the next day. Twins. We were delighted. We decided on the names. Bella and Teddy. We were over the moon. Pregnant at last. After all these years! It was a miracle. I immediately got to work turning the guest room into a nursery.
    “But then, as you well know, wishes can take strange turns.” He licked his chapped lips. “Seven months later, Estelle went into premature labor. It happened so fast. Before I could call for help, our son came out. And as you’ve probably guessed, Sophie, he wasn’t a normal little boy. He was a little devil. Literally. He didn’t cry. His eyes were bloodshot and not entirely human. I could tell right away there was something terribly wrong with him. He growled and snapped at me. I had no choice but to put him out of his misery. He was slithering around on the floor, alive and powerful, kicking and having all these seizures or something… it was awful. Just awful. It was terrifying, Sophie. I had to kill him. I remember looking around for something and finally went outside and got an axe. But I had to do it. No question in my mind.
    “And then, of course, there was Bella. Our little angel. I thought she was dead. Her eyes were fused shut, and she wasn’t breathing. She couldn’t have weighed more than a pound. I wrapped her in a dishtowel and put her in a shoebox and left her by the