Page 183 of Sinister

“I hid it. I didn’t want to scare you. Not until I could explain everything. Until I told you the truth.”

“Then explain. What is happening, Sin? I want to know everything. No more lies. No more half-truths. Tell me about the creature. About Mr. Snowden. About these rituals and this occult and your involvement. I need to know.”

“I’ll show you,” he says. “If you think you can handle it, I’ll show you.”

“Show me what?” I whisper.

He doesn’t answer with words.

He turns me around in his arms and pulls me close. And somehow we’re moving. Not walking. Not even floating. But traveling through shadows that curl and ripple around us like smoke.

The lights from the house and garden flicker, then blur, until we are surrounded by shifting dark.

“Don’t speak too loud,” he whispers into my hair. “You must be quiet now, Petra. We don’t want them to hear us.”

“Them?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer.

Instead, he carries me farther into the depths of the estate until we’re close to the woods.

Hidden deep in the foliage of the well-groomed shrubs, we watch as if from above. In the middle of a square-like formation, there are two people. It takes me a moment to acclimate to the darkness of my surroundings.

Then I realize that one of them is Mr. Snowden. He is on his back on the grass, his clothes torn to shreds, pieces of fabric littered all around.

On top of him is . . . something. Or someone.

“What?” I whisper to Sin.

“That,” he replies. “That is what you freed from that basement, Petra.”

“What is it?”

At that moment, she—no, it—moves. A creature with the body of a woman, her skin dark and greenish, mottled like a rotting corpse. She undulates her body atop Mr. Snowden, her hands pressed to his chest, her nails elongated into talons as she digs them into his flesh.

From her back, tendrils slither outward, gliding toward Mr. Snowden’s head. Two tendrils, one on each side. They find his ears and insert themselves into his ear canals.

“What is that, Sin?” I whisper in shock.

“She’s feeding.”

“What?”

“See what they’re doing?” he says quietly. “They’re fornicating.”

“They’re—” I murmur, horrified. “But she’s a creature. A dead corpse. How is that—how is that possible?”

He finishes the thought for me. “There are many things that might seem impossible, Petra, but are entirely too possible in the vastness of the universe. That creature is one of them.”

“But how can something alive . . . fornicate with something dead?”

“That is the crux of the issue, isn’t it? It goes against nature. And yet, it’s happening before our very eyes. Those tendrils you see—she’s using them to feed on him, on his essence. That’s the only way she can be controlled.”

“But doesn’t that harm him?”

“It does. But that’s his cross to bear.”

“I don’t understand.”