Fear Me

16

Maybe Heslip and Burgon didn’t have much sense, but the other cons surely did. As the day progressed into night at Shaddock, the rumors thickened and the paranoia came with it. Maybe it was imagination and maybe it was plain old superstitious fear, but the cons were feeling something in the prison, something that had not been there before. The atmosphere of the place had never been exactly balloons and parades, but now it was worse. Something was in the air, something dire and oppressive as if the guts had been ripped out of not only Weems and Gordo but the prison itself.

Men were afraid, but they could not admit it.

And worse, they didn’t know what they were afraid of. But in their minds, in the dark spaces and lonely tracts and locked rooms of childhood terrors, they were seeing things. Lurid shapes and white-faced haunters reaching out for them with hooked fingers. Things birthed from closets and beneath beds, things with moldering grins and shoe-button eyes that whispered your name in the dead of night and sucked the breath from your lungs with black, hungering mouths.

And as the night grew dark as tar and the cons huddled in their cells waiting for lights out, they began to see things reaching out for them from the shadows…