Please help me welcome Christopher Farris with the next story in the Friday the 13th Series, 13 Sessions...
Fun Fact:
The story started off as throwback to the character, Renfro, from the novel Dracula. I had initially intended for Patient 13 to be a Renfro-type who brought about the downfall of the doctor. That’s not where it ended up. 😊
Father Dragos Tepesch, asylum administrator, does not fit Dr. David Montaine’s expectations. His new employer is too religious, too old world, too—too, he can’t quite put his finger on it. Frightening, maybe? It doesn’t make sense. The priest is old and frail, his voice kindly. It’s his eyes, David thinks, something in his eyes. Hunger, maybe?
The Wallachian asylum is hopelessly behind the times. His wife, Sally, seems to have left him and, more troubling, his mind is playing tricks on him. Still, this new job is far better than the old. The authorities no longer hound him. The booze is free. He has a whole new practice to build, lunatics desperate for his particular brand of salvation and, right down the hall, Patient Thirteen. She’s silent, young, and oh, so beautiful. Her pain calls to him. And pain, Father Tepesch says, is a meal that must be eaten one bite at time.
“All considered, Father, I think things are looking—” Movement under Tepesch’s chair caught his eye. A giant rat, black as midnight and scarred from a hundred savage battles, sauntered from under the old man’s soutane, stopped on the oriental rug, and fixed David with a beady, red eye.
He stiffened. A shudder of disgust and fear coursed down his spine. The malevolence in the creature’s eye, the sheer hateful hunger froze him with his hand half-way to his mouth.
Tepesch cocked his head, “David?” He spoke as if he didn’t see the evil thing, though the beast stood not a foot in front of his black boot tips.
The rat rose on its hind legs and sniffed the air, exposing its long, yellowed incisors and its bare belly. The skin, the awful, wattled, bare skin of its underside showing through the wiry hair was too intimate, too… It was too much. And the thing smelled. A reek that settled into his nostrils and clawed its way into his throat. This was no common rodent. His imagination took him to dark places, dank holes and caves, to the morgue deep in the basement, to the trenches of World War I where millions of the damned things had swarmed the dead and dying. When he’d pictured those monsters, they’d look like this in his mind. Two-and-a-half feet tall and savage. No natural rat ever grew so big. He pointed with a quivering hand, “L—look!”
“What David?” Tepesch’s face registered confusion. “What?”
The rat grinned at David and shuffled forward on its hind legs, front paws waving in the air like a dog doing tricks for its dinner.
He shoved the chair back with a shriek. He wanted to cry out. “Don’t you see it? It’s right there? What’s wrong with you? Are you blind!” But all he could manage was a hurk-hurk-hurking sound in the back of his throat.
The animal leapt under the desk. Before he could get his legs up onto the chair, the thing pounced into his lap. Its weight pinned him to the chair, heavy as a bowling ball. The creature’s questing nose nuzzled into the soft flesh of his belly and groin. He screamed and a flush of hot urine spread across his lap as his bladder let go.
About the Author…
Christopher Farris Christopher Farris lives in a very old, very small house in a very old, very small town nestled deep in a valley of the Boston Mountains of Northwest Arkansas. He is not a hillbilly, but he is trying. He has four well-adjusted children and the two best granddaughters available.
His horror novel, The Fountain, was published by The Wild Rose Press in January of 2021. His Christmas novel, Intersection: A Trucker’s Christmas Carol, was published in November of 2021. Both are available at Amazon.com.
The Fountain: Amazon.com: The Fountain eBook : Farris, Christopher: Books
Intersection: A Trucker’s Christmas Carol: Amazon.com: Intersection: A Trucker’s Christmas Carol eBook : Farris, Christopher: Books
Facebook: @ozarkgothic
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Author Alicia Dean 