Wolf Angel, Mark Hobson [best free ebook reader for pc .txt] 📗

his hand touched the surface, for it slithered and squirmed. Looking closely he saw that the whole of the floor was a broiling mass of glistening black snakes, twisting and coiling and spitting, their bodies slimy and sticky. Again he tried to climb to his feet, and again he couldn’t. Instead, his body started to sink into them, the nest of snakes so deep that in seconds his arms and legs and chest disappeared below the surface with just his face poking out.

And when he looked up in desperation, Pieter saw that the walls and ceiling were also bristling with them, every inch covered with their grotesquely moving bodies.

He screamed a silent scream, and they even slid into his mouth and down his throat, and finally he was pulled down into the hot and fetid darkness.

Pieter woke with a start.

He lay in his bed covered in a sheen of sweat, the covers twisted into knots by his thrashing body.

Staring into the darkness, remembering the nightmare, wondering briefly if he was coming down with a fever because his body ached all over.

He put these thoughts to one side, because something had woken him, and he didn.t think it was the dream.

Listening hard while he held his breath, the sound came again. The creaking of floorboards from overhead, coming from the attic which was directly over his bedroom.

Slowly sitting up Pieter craned his neck and looked up at the ceiling, as though doing this would reveal to him the source of the sound. Even though he already knew what it was. Because it wasn’t the noise of the old house settling, the wooden beams groaning and shifting. What he’d heard was the sound of quiet footsteps coming from upstairs.

Pulling back the damp bedsheets he slipped out of bed and padded barefoot across to the bedroom door. Quietly he eased it open. The window on the landing allowed streetlight to cast a soft glow inside, enough for him to see the open door and the narrow stairs that led to the attic.

Again the sound of movement, and this time a faint shimmer of light from a torch.

Shit. He had an intruder.

Moving slowly so as to make no sound, Pieter carefully crept into the corner of his bedroom and opened the cupboard door. He reached inside for a weapon. Contrary to what the public believed, Dutch cops did not keep their firearms at home – in fact strict gun laws also made the ownership of private guns more or less impossible – so instead he took hold of his preferred method for dealing with unwanted visitors. A wooden cricket bat.

Thus armed Pieter moved cautiously across the carpeted landing and paused at the foot of the attic stairs. Whoever was up there was now moving things around, probably deciding what to take, which was a puzzle really because the intruder would have broken in through the ground floor but had for some reason by-passed all of the other expensive items such as the car and smart TV and so on, and gone all of the way up to the attic room where there was virtually nothing worth stealing. Assuming he was alone, and his mates weren’t ransacking the rest of the house below. Certainly there seemed to be nobody else on this floor at least.

Pieter decided he could ponder about that later.

His main concern was catching whoever was up there. And now that Pieter had the only escape route covered there was no way out for him.

Feeling more emboldened, but with his heart racing all the same, Pieter started a careful ascent of the narrow wooden stairs.

Thinking it best to not give away his approach, Pieter passed by the light switch on the wall without flicking it, and climbed around the bend, and steeled himself to jump out with a loud shout, brandishing his weapon.

At the last second something must have given away his approach, perhaps no more than a shift in the air, for there was a pause in the sounds from the attic, followed by a sudden rush of footsteps. Two strong hands grabbed him, one on his shoulder and the other on his face, and shoved hard, sending him tumbling back down the steps. He didn’t fall far but ended up in a heap at the bend in the stairs, and he quickly scrambled up, all attempts at stealth now abandoned.

Bursting through the doorway, gripping the cricket bat in both hands, Pieter yelled fiercely. A quick, split-second glance showed him the room was empty, but when he looked over towards the small window he had the shock of his life.

Someone clad in a black coat or cloak was squeezing through the tiny opening, using it as a way out. Whoever he or she was, they were quite small in stature (for a crazy moment he was convinced it was a child) but it was still an effort to get their frame through, and they wriggled about with one leg still dangling down inside the room. Sitting half in and half out, the figure turned and looked back over their shoulder at Pieter. And when he saw the face, alabaster white with deep-set, shadowy eyes, his heart nearly stopped. The grin that appeared was like a narrow black gash.

Momentarily shocked, and unable to fathom the idea of anybody desperate enough to risk escaping this way, four stories above the street below, he nonetheless quickly regathered his wits and dashed across the room, his bare feet crunching over something on the rug, and made a lunge for the foot.

He missed it by inches and the intruder slipped through the opening.

Flinging the cricket bat away Pieter reached up for the edges of the window frame and pulled himself up, squirming his upper body through, and anger flooding his mind. Stupidly he looked down, seeing the street and canal far, far below, and a wave of vertigo overcame him.

He almost keeled over the edge and just in time he managed to grab a hold of the