Tim Meyer - The Switch House

“I was gonna text you.”

“Sure you were.” She stopped a few feet away from him. “You okay? You’ve been acting weird. First last night, now, you quit your job? It’s not me, is it?”

“No, definitely not you.”

“What then?”

Rob knew what it was— that goddamn movie. He couldn’t bring himself to speak the words aloud. “Nothing. Just going through some stuff.”

She clicked her tongue. “Got it. Say, wanna take a ride with me?”

He glanced around the half-vacant lot thinking he shouldn’t, how he should go home instead and wait for Dan’s darkness to slither over him like a bucket of poisonous snakes.

“Sure, why not.”

“Follow me,” she said, almost seductively.

He did.

When he plopped himself down on her front seat and shut the door, he felt better. Not perfect, but better than he had only minutes ago. Like he’d shut out Dan’s darkness. Brianne’s car acted as a safe place, a haven from the unnamable things released by the foreign film.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

She pulled out of the parking lot, onto the main drag. “I dunno. For a drive. We never got that IHOP dinner you promised me.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“No, I wouldn’t imagine you would be.” A horde of invisible spiders crawled down his arms. “With everything you’ve witnessed.”

He snapped his head in her direction. “What?”

She smiled. Grinned. Much like Dan’s jaundiced face had.

“Did you like my movie?” she asked. “I made it for you, you know.”

“Wha-what?”

“Well, not you specifically. The children like you. My little puppets. There have been so many of you over the years.” She giggled, a high-pitched noise that sliced open his nerves. “My little agents of darkness.”

Rob went for the door handle but the child locks were already on. He tried to push the button, but it didn’t move. He elbowed the window but the glass held, held through each violent effort.

“There’s no escape, little one,” she said, the lower half of her face complete with a crescent smile. “Did you know the Frenchwoman was my birth mother? Bet you didn’t. That’s a fun piece of trivia for you. One you won’t find on IMDB. Though, you won’t find Ouverture on there, either. Will you?”

No, he didn’t think he would.

“What are you?” he asked, squeaking the words out.

“Oh, a little of this. A little of that.” She let her head fall sideways and set her eyes on him. He stared back, looking into the shimmering black orbs that filled in her irises. “My kind are the creators of the void. And I’m its keeper. Its protector. Its mother. Like my mother before me and hers before her. And, like all good mothers, we need to feed our babies.”

Her eyes were normal again, bright as two blueberries.

Rob could barely speak, his windpipe feeling about as wide as a drinking straw. He croaked. “W-what d-did you make us watch?”

“Just a film. One of my favorites.”

“That wasn’t just a film.” Rob felt weak, barely able to move. His thoughts began to bleed away. “What… was it?”

She shrugged. “The void needs to feed, and there is nothing more nutritious than the human noggin. Not the outside, of course. The shell is too bony and tasteless. But what’s on the inside, what exists within the brain, where thoughts and imaginative cognitive skills are brewed—now that’s the ticket. One human imagination can sustain the void for a thousand years, which is a long time for your kind, but, in the grand scheme of the megaverse, it only equates to about a day or two in Earth time.”

“Why… me?” Rob felt all strength abandon his limbs. As he wasted away, he looked into the sideview mirror and saw his features had yellowed, grown overripe with jaundice. “Why…”

Brianne, or the thing she truly was, shrugged. “Because you were easy. And the film was here. Dan had his copy stashed away, the one he’d stolen once upon a time ago, just waiting for the right opportunity to come along. I thought I could nudge you in the right direction. You wanted to impress me with the film, didn’t you? That was your plan? Scare your way into my pants? Hm, how shallow you are, Robert.”

“Didn’t…”

“Save your last words as they mean nothing to me.” A sleek grin spilled across her features. “The only thing I require is what’s inside here.” She tapped his forehead.

Everything suddenly ached. His arms, legs. Bones. Head. His muscles swelled with pain.

“Now, come on,” she said, leaning over him. “Give me a kiss.”

She opened her mouth and instead of seeing a tongue, teeth, the hanging pink orb in the back of her throat, he saw nothing but a glowing, white light. A heavenly flash of nothingness. Like staring into a xenon bulb, completely blinding.

She pressed her lips against his and he tasted chaos. Scented ash floating above burning buildings. Sniffed salt in the air over eroding shores. Inhaled smoke over cities on fire.

She tasted like the apocalypse.

And then he experienced the void, that floating black ocean of perpetual nothingness.

Enlightenment

Gateways

Defiance

DEMON BLOOD BOXED SET (BOOKS 1-3)

Sunfall: Season One

Sunfall: Season Two

Sunfall: Season Three

In the House of Mirrors

The Thin Veil

Worlds Between My Teeth

Less Than Human

Sharkwater Beach

KILL HILL CARNAGE

The Organ Harvest: An October John Novella

Tim Meyer dwells in a dark cave near the Jersey Shore. He’s an author, husband, father, podcast host, blogger, coffee connoisseur, beer enthusiast, and explorer of worlds. He writes horror, mysteries, science fiction, and thrillers, although he prefers to blur genres and let the stories fall where they may.

You can follow Tim at https://timmeyerwrites.com

OR like his Facebook page here: www.facebook.com/authortimmeyer

Never had I given much thought to the timeless debate of fate versus freewill, until I found that damned camera, the one that nearly cost me my life, and threatened the existence of the universe as we know it.

But that comes later.

I guess I should start at the beginning.

I pulled my car off of the Garden State Parkway around a quarter to two, on the first Friday of January. The green sign I passed welcoming me to the Jersey Shore stood like a titan on the side of the highway, exactly how I remembered it when I was a kid. It’d been about six years since I’d been back in my home state, ten since I lived there. Once I moved to Atlanta after college, I left and never looked back. Never thought about returning. Never cared to.

But in that moment, I was glad to be back. When I crossed the state line an hour earlier, my stomach knotted with nervous excitement. It had died when I left the parkway and pulled onto Route 7, passing a sign for Treebound, a town I never spent much time in when I was younger. I was headed to Red River, the town I grew up in, a stone’s throw away from the infamous beaches of the Jersey Shore. It was the largest town in the county, bringing together a diverse blend of people. It was always a good town, never high on crime or anything like that. There was always stuff to do, whether you wanted to spend a night with the family or go drinking with the guys, Red River had everything for everyone.