The Seven Sins, Joslinne Morgan [good fiction books to read .TXT] 📗

slip back into his body and, after a few days of painstaking mending, he was up on his feet and back on the road once more.
But there were no such creatures – Crawlers as they were called – about this day. Indeed, Phantom had seen no signs of physical life for days now. No birds flitted about the trees, or lack thereof, and no squirrels skittered across the path. No creatures other than Crawlers inhabited the bog, and they only came out at night for their endless and oftentimes fruitless search for fresh human meat. Phantom had vowed that he would never again allow a Crawler to chew up his insides, but to avoid that happening again he was going to have to find somewhere to be, even if it meant sleeping in the hollow of one of the few rotted trees.
Fortunately, Phantom would not have to endure that this day.
Dim light filtered through the thick swampy reeds that grew in such abundance around the place. In one peered closer they could see the light was actually coming from an open window, which was attached to a rather homey looking place, so welcome after hours of trudging through the marsh that one would never care to think twice on what such a place might be doing out in the middle of the Border.
Phantom did, however, stop to think about this, and he took great pains to study the house before deciding to enter. It seemed harmless enough. It was just barely two stories, the first story being a bit more squat than the second, giving the house a comical appearance. It was painted the kind of yellow suitable for a canary, the better to stand out against the gloom and darkness. The shutters were painted a cheerful green, there was a white door from which hung a sign painted with the words, “Home Sweet Home” in red. The air smelled faintly of sugar and baked goods. Phantom mused; it was like walking up to a gingerbread house.
Whoever lived in a place like this couldn’t be very dangerous. After a moment’s hesitation, Phantom stepped forward and rapped sharply on the door.
The door handle turned. The door opened just a crack, then it flew open all the way. And standing in front of Phantom was a monstrosity of which he had never seen the like.
It was a woman. Or, perhaps, what might have been a woman. Whatever womanish features she had were hidden behind rolls of soft, spongy white flesh wrapped tightly in a bolt of rose-pink silk that just emphasized how utterly enormous she was. Her eyes, blue dots hidden behind mounds of flesh, literally gleamed when they caught sight of him. Her face was painted pasty white, seeming only to enhance her most unflattering features. A ring of scattered crumbs, no doubt from the half-eaten pastry she still clutched in her hand, wreathed her small and somewhat pinched mouth. She smelled strongly of gingerbread, almost sickeningly so. Phantom wondered idly if she had simply taken over the house and eaten the original owners.
“Come in, come in,” the woman said, beckoning with one flabby hand for Phantom to enter the house. She was trying to be seductive, but she couldn’t have looked more the opposite. The gesture was just made more obscene by the fact that her hand was still purple and sticky with jelly.
Phantom walked in, politely ignoring her frequent winking and batting of her eyelashes. She gestured for him to have a seat at the table before stuffing what was left of her pastry in her mouth. It was remarkable, she had devoured an entire Danish in less than three seconds.
“Have a seat, please,” she said, a few stray crumbs flying from her mouth. Phantom did so, pulling out a chair and seating himself. His hostess lumbered toward the table and pulled out a chair for herself and sat down, the flimsy wooden seat creaking dangerously as she sat back and crossed her swollen ankles as she plucked a cluster of grapes from a bowl and two by two began to pop them into her open mouth. “Please. Eat.” The request came out more like a command.
“No, thank you,” Phantom said. “I was just hoping for a brief rest. Perhaps you have a spare room…?”
“Of course I do, and you’re free to have it, but you have to eat something first.” She insistently shoved a heavily laden plate in front of him.
“Thank you,” he said, but touched nothing.
Not that his hostess noticed, she was much too engrossed with satisfying her own insatiable hunger. She kept on eating, and when her plate was empty; she began to eat off her guest’s, not that he minded much at all. And when all the food was gone, she omitted a juicy belch and sat back with a satisfied sigh.
“Oh, excuse me,” she said, thumping her chest and reminding Phantom very much of a disturbance in a bowl of Jell-O. “Pardon my lousy manners. I have not offered you a single thing to eat.”
“I’m quite fine,” Phantom insisted patiently. His hostess nodded, her three chins waggling left and right like the gobble of a turkey. “What brings you here?” she asked, pushing herself back and utterly testing the endurance of her already over-strained chair.
“No offense, madam, but I hardly see how that is any business of yours.”
“Oh come, come! There must be a reason you are here, yes? No one ever comes here without a reason.” She leaned in closer to him, once more attempting to win him over with her feminine wiles. Phantom’s lips drew into a very thin line, and his expression became cold and hard as stone.
“Forgive me, but I prefer to keep my business to myself.” He repeated, slowly and clearly, so she might understand. Her expression completely changed and she leaned back once more. The spindly legs of the chair groaned.
“Oh yes, I understand perfectly well,” she said, making great effort to stand. She moved her bulk across the room to light a fire, but then discovered she had no wood. She quickly excused herself and went to the shed to go fetch some, promising Phantom with a few more winks and bats not to worry, she would be back as quickly as she could. Although someone of her enormous weight and size trudging through the sticky, squelching mud was no small task, and Phantom didn’t imagine she would be returning anytime soon. The prospect cheered him considerably, and he decided to use his bought time to gather his bearings and explore the house.
It was not a big place at all. Phantom wondered how someone of such proportions could wander about. He reasoned it must be magical, made to shrink or grow to the comfortable size of whoever was living in it at the time. Because if not, there was no hope of his hostess being able to squeeze between the back door and the pantry.
The stairs were in awful condition. They were sturdy oak but might as well have been plywood, the way they bent and creaked and threatened to cave in right out from under him. One would think that compared to the strain they were normally put under, he would be second only to air. But apparently this was not the case.
The staircase led up to a landing on which was one and only one door. Phantom puzzled over this and searched for other doors, but there were none. Only that one. Reasoning that this must be the guest bedroom, he twisted the doorknob and it opened.
The room behind it was plainly furnished in a way that Phantom supposed his guess to be correct. The curtains were heavy and dusty, and the most horrendous shade of pink. The bed had pink sheets, and pillows with pink shams. The walls were painted the same shade of pink as the curtains and the bed sheets. The only items not pink were the wood floor, the bedframe, and the wardrobe that stood in one corner.
Phantom took his time looking through the room. He opened the wardrobe and found a robe and slippers waiting for him, folded neatly at the very bottom. He pulled them on and then shut the wardrobe doors again gently, so as not to alert anyone else that might be in the house. There was not much else in the room to explore, so he left, shutting the door with a soft ‘click’. The clock in the living room chimed eleven o’ clock, and from a small porthole-like window he could see his hostess was just then entering the shed. He still had plenty of time.
He started down the staircase again, musing at all the oddities of the house, when the door above him slammed. He whirled around, nearly losing his footing but managing to keep his balance somehow, and saw there was a man standing in front of the door.
He was the queerest little man, to be sure. He was rotund, not fat but pleasantly plump. His cheeks were red and breathless as if he had been running, and his hair was long, down to his shoulders and curling at the ends, pulled back in a tie and a dark auburn. A pair of gold spectacles rested on his hawk-like nose. His green eyes reflected a good personality but were at the moment tinged with fear.
“My God,” he said breathlessly, staring at Phantom. Phantom returned the look with a cool, casual glance of his own, and the man turned around and ran back into the room he came from, closing the door behind him.
Phantom flung the door open just seconds after it was closed, but it only showed the room again, and even though he checked it thoroughly it proved to be completely empty. Besides, there was nothing in there big enough to hide the man.
It was one mystery Phantom couldn’t quite solve. He left the room, shaking his head and feeling he had just imagined it all, and was just at the top of the stairs when the door creaked open just a crack and the man’s head stuck out, apparently seeing if Phantom was still there or not.
Phantom, having always been agile and gifted with quick reflexes, caught the door before the man could shut it again and yanked it open. Much to his annoyance but not altogether his surprise, he found that he was in a room much different than the one he had just exited. It was a cozy room where the walls were lined with bookshelves and a warm fire was blazing in the grand fireplace. Plush, overstuffed chairs were scattered about in odd places. One even had a book sitting spine-up on the cushion, as if it had been tossed aside in a great hurry.
And then Phantom felt something wet splash against his neck.
“What the-?” he felt the nape of his neck with his hand and brought it back around. It wasn’t blood, it was just water. Was the roof leaking?
He was answer by a shrill little shriek that came from directly behind him.
“The holy water doesn’t work!” the queer little man he had seen earlier squealed in terror. “What demon-sent fiend from Hell ARE you?” he splashed Phantom again with more holy water, but when it didn’t burn holes through his skin or render him powerless where he stood, the man discarded it as useless and dropped to his knees.
“Please!” he pleaded. “Please, PLEASE don’t kill me!”
“I have no intention of doing so, rest easy,” Phantom said, layering sarcasm as he wiped away the moisture from his face. “Now get up. And tell me where