Anika Rising (Gretel Book Four): A Horror Novel Read online

  Anika Rising

  Christopher Coleman

  Anika Rising © copyright 2018 Christopher Coleman

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Description

  Anika Rising

  FROM THE BOTTOM OF a lake, deep in the Back Country, death takes a turn.

  Within a day of being struck down by Hansel, Anika has risen. The cruel, addictive infection of Marlene's poison has protected Anika from the finality of death. But the resurrection is not without a price. She has a new hunger, and its lure is irresistible. Anika sees suicide as the only option, until she learns of a new terror in the world, one related to the Witch of the North and which threatens the lives of her children.

  Anika must now find the threat and destroy it before it kills her children.

  Chapter 1

  HEAVEN DIDN’T FEEL as she had always expected it would, but it was still comfortable and warm, enveloping, pressing on her like a heavy blanket.

  Accompanying the comfort, however, was only darkness, with thin strands of light appearing sporadically to her right, waving at her and then disappearing into the dark. This darkness was also unexpected, opposite how she had always envisioned the afterlife. Where was the glow of illuminated clouds, behind which, presumably, was the source of the glow and the promise of everlasting life?

  Everlasting life. It was the beginning and ending of everything she now remembered. There was almost nothing she could recall about her life before Marlene.

  It was to be there though, she thought, on Earth. Not in the realm of death. Everyone was promised this type of afterlife.

  A stronger beam of light forced its way through the clouds of darkness, edging through her slitted eyes and striking her retinas like lightning. The pain in the back of her head was debilitating. She opened her mouth to scream and a flood of water poured in, rushing down her throat, thirsting to invade her lungs.

  She flailed her torso wildly and tried to breathe through her nose, but there was only water again. She was in Hell, she now realized. And why wouldn’t she be?

  She opened her eyes wide, lifting her head from the soft, pillowy pocket that had been its resting place since she had first awoken.

  And then the memory came.

  It was of Hansel, his eyes both soft and deranged as he swung the oar with a viciousness she’d not thought possible in her son. She remembered the flash of light and then instant blindness in her left eye, and finally the blurred look of sadness on the face of her teenage boy.

  She was suffocating now, drowning, and though her mind knew she was being tortured in the depths of Hell—and that this was to be her fate from here until eternity—her body floundered, reacting to its instinct for survival.

  She pushed herself from the soft sediment beneath her, feeling now that the weight enveloping her was not some embrace of God or the Devil, but the pressure of water. She swam toward the light above her, her body heavy and slow. The weight came not just from her clothes and shoes, but from the inside, like she had eaten a pile of stones.

  The effort of her swim to the light was enormous, but when she felt the tips of her fingers break the surface of the water, and experienced the cool air upon her skin, she was inspired, and thrust her head toward the light.

  She believed instantly, by both the color of the water and the smell of the air, that she had just emerged from the lake behind her Back Country cottage. And one lift of her chin confirmed it. There stood her humble home, only a few dozen yards away, staring blandly back at her, uncaring about its owner and occupant who was currently struggling for survival below.

  Anika grabbed for the water in front of her, furiously alternating strokes, splashing like a neophyte swimmer as she tried desperately to make it to the shore. It was a distance any child could swim, but she felt as if she were being pulled under by some invisible hand. She steadied her strokes now, accepting that each one was only going to move her fractionally, until finally she felt the resistance of the sediment against her toes below. She continued inching forward and was now in water shallow enough to stand.

  She tiptoed forward, lifting her head above the water line, and eventually made it into waist-deep water where she tried walking to the shoreline, again feeling the magnitude of gravity upon her.

  As she reached the bank of the lake, she turned from her house and stared across to the Klahr Orchard, and for the first time considered that she may in fact be alive.

  But how?

  Perhaps she had survived the blow from Hansel—that was possible—but not the water. Certainly she’d been underwater for hours. Days even.

  Suddenly she felt a sharp cramp in her stomach, a pain indicator that straddled the area between nausea and diarrhea. She grabbed her belly and lurched forward, opening her mouth to vomit and unleashing what must have been a half-gallon of lake water. Another lurch and more water flooded out. She coughed spastically, trying to catch her breath, and then felt the first wave coming from her anus, first as a slow leak, and quickly escalating to a full liquid bowel movement.

  She stripped naked now, pulling off every piece of clothing, trying to rid herself of every ounce of weight, and then stood on the lake bank, simultaneously crouched and hunched, vomiting and defecating lake water by the gallons.

  ANIKA CROUCHED ON THE porch, gripping the beam that jutted out from the wall in between the two center windows. The support beam ran from floor to ceiling and formed a vertical barrier behind which Anika could hide and wait, only the right half of her face exposed in the window as she peeked down through the trees at the still water from which she’d just emerged, anticipating some investigative scene to unfold. They would be coming shortly, no doubt, The System men, to dredge the lake or send in divers with cameras and the brightest of lights. They would search diligently for her corpse, summoned by Mrs. Klahr, Anika’s docile neighbor who had been captured in the crossfire of Anika’s madness and taken hostage. The woman had seen the whole episode from only a few feet away, including Hansel’s death blow, which had landed flush on Anika’s temple and had sent Anika toppling to
her death under twelve feet of murky water.

  But when they didn’t find her? When the bottom sediment of the small, regional lake rendered nothing? What then?

  Only a few years ago, The System wouldn’t have spent ten seconds debating whether to send an officer all the way out to the Back Country on the report of a missing corpse, and certainly not when it involved an obscure family like the Morgans. But things had changed significantly since then. The Morgan family had become infamous in the Southlands and beyond, thrust there unwittingly by the life, death and rebirth of Marlene. And the Back Country was now a steady beacon on the radar of The System.

  But The System’s interest went beyond just Anika and her family’s notoriety; they had lost officers in the unfolding of the terrifying story, men who had been corrupted and murdered by the Witch of the North. Any news of a death at the lake behind the Morgan property would not be taken lightly by System authorities.

  Anika waited in her position on the deck for what must have been an hour, and then, seeing no signs of a dive team or System men, stood and began to pace the deck, constantly extending her left arm in front of her as she did to avoid bumping into the room’s furniture. Her left-eye blindness would take some getting used to.

  She walked to the porch screen now and looked out across the lake to the Klahr house. She thought of Hansel, and as the vision of her son rose in her mind, she collapsed to the floor and began to weep. The feelings of love and longing and protectiveness suddenly felt brand new, as if she’d never experienced them for anyone before. It was as if the continuous months of addiction had destroyed her ability to feel anything resembling caring or devotion. The potion had consumed her to the point of total immersion.

  Anika closed her eye now and let her thoughts go fully to the potion, exploring down to the depths of her cells whether the addiction still existed in her. She visualized ingesting one of the thin vials of liquid, the fluid which she had so delicately measured out and then handed over to Hansel to dispense. The decision to cede this power to her son had made him an accomplice to her addiction, and she’d always known it was a monstrous thing to do, but there was no doubt it had kept her alive. Had she controlled the potion for the duration of her addiction, she’d have been dead early on.

  Perhaps that would have been a good thing, she considered now, but there it was.

  Anika brought forth a vision of the potion sliding down her throat, opening her mind to the feelings it had rendered in the past, and then gagged, a small amount of lake water spilling up her esophagus into her mouth.

  She turned and ran from the porch and into the bathroom, falling to her knees over the bowl of the toilet and vomiting more lake water into the empty ceramic basin.

  Her craving was gone, and, even more, it had been transformed into repulsion. She leaned forward over the toilet again and dry heaved, and then sat back against the wall behind her, lifting her chin to the ceiling, wiping the spittle from her face in the process. She stared at the light above her, hoping the answers to the questions she was pondering existed somewhere in its luminescence.

  Where would she go now?

  Her life with Hansel was over. He’d struck her down like the dragon she was and had presumably watched her sink beneath the surface of the lake and drown. She couldn’t simply show up at the Klahr house now, a day or two after her apparent death, hat in hand, asking for a chance to explain herself, requesting to start life over again. There was simply no place of trust from which they could begin. She was an abomination now. By all scientific explanations, she should be dead. People couldn’t survive underwater for longer than a few minutes, at most, except, perhaps, in icy waters and extremely cold temperatures. But the Back Country was warm at this time of the year, and never reached the levels that would have made any difference. Besides, even if she hadn’t drowned, the blow from Hansel’s oar should have killed her.

  That Anika was alive was nothing short of impossible.

  But the potion made it possible. The potion was the reason she still lived. Or had been reborn. She wasn’t sure what had happened exactly, only that she was conscious and breathing. It didn’t matter though; whichever it was, Hansel could never accept her again.

  Nor could she seek out Gretel. Her daughter had abandoned their property and family long ago, and, as Anika now sat on the linoleum floor of her cottage bathroom, she was thankful for her daughter’s decision. It had been unfair of her, perhaps, to strand Hansel in this land alone, but it had likely saved her life.

  Tanja.

  The word fluttered across her mind like a stray moth, hovering for a moment and then fading.

  The name was familiar to Anika, but she couldn’t immediately place it. It was one to do with Marlene though, about that she was certain.

  Anika stood now and walked back to the porch, and instantly saw the woman standing on the bank. It was Amanda Klahr, and next to her was Hansel. Had they been looking up toward the cottage on the opposite side of their lake bank, they would have seen Anika’s figure in the window.

  She instinctively stepped behind the support beam, but the attentions of her son and neighbor were fixed on the lake. Mrs. Klahr had her arm across Hansel’s shoulders, and Hansel held in his hands a cluster of flowers. And as she watched them standing there, Anika soon realized they had no intention of calling The System. They were handling this business on their own, as Back Country folk had done for centuries before Marlene had poisoned their land.

  Hansel leaned forward and tossed the flowers forward, and Anika could see his intentions for the wind and drift of the water to take them out to the center of the lake. But the breeze was blowing downstream, and the flowers flowed to the left along the shoreline, never making it anywhere close to his mother’s watery gravesite.

  “It’s okay, my darling,” Anika whispered. “I see them. I love them.” She paused. “And I love you too.”

  At that moment, Hansel raised his head and looked toward the porch. Anika turned away from the window and stood with her back to the beam, completely out of sight. She didn’t think he saw her, not with the glare of the sun as it was, but she considered he may have sensed her. Hansel wasn’t Gretel, but he was her brother, and he was capable of a lot more than he knew.

  Anika waited a few minutes longer, listening for signs that Hansel and Mrs. Klahr had left the lake, and once she thought it safe, walked to the kitchen, where the smell struck her instantly. It was the smell of meat.

  Suddenly Anika could think of nothing but food. She pulled open the refrigerator door with a heave and her eyes landed on a lone chicken thigh resting on a stark white plate. It was raw, puddled in blood and almost certainly spoiled.

  But she didn’t hesitate. She grabbed for the hunk of bird flesh with both hands and brought it up to her mouth, tearing into it with her large teeth.

  Chapter 2

  PETR RAISED THE AXE high above his head and brought it down even and pure in the center of the log, barely feeling any sensation as the cylinder of wood separated in perfect symmetry and fell to either side of the chopping block. As always, with every swing, he thought of Marlene.

  The creaking sound of the screened porch door erased the hag’s face from his mind for a moment, but Petr stayed focused on the axe blade lodged into the wood in front of him.

  “Petr, phone.”

  Petr gave no visible indicator that he’d heard Gil’s voice, and instead uprooted the blade from the block and loaded another log on the stump. He gripped the axe handle again and swung the blade out low and wide, extending his arms fully, accelerating the head down perfectly on top of the flat, blonde surface of the log, splitting it identically to the last.

  “Petr, you hear me? Phone.”

  Petr loaded another piece of wood upright on the block and stared at it, studying its vulnerability, noting how helpless it looked as it awaited its clean and hasty demise.

  “Petr!”

  Gil was Petr’s only housemate for the semester, though Petr had been sche
duled to house with two others during his freshman year. One had transferred to a different school a few days before classes were to start, and the other had simply decided college wasn’t going to be his path, so it was just Petr and Gil for the time being.

  Gil was portly and sociable, and he seemed to have a knack for making friends, though Petr wouldn’t have yet counted himself amongst that group.

  Petr squinted and nodded at Gil and then tossed the axe to the ground. “Who is it?”

  “Sounds like your grandmother. Or...whatever she is to you.”

  Mrs. Klahr.

  “But remember, it’s Saturday, Pete? I didn’t think you were allowed to talk to anyone other than Gretel today?”

  Petr smirked and looked sideways at Gil, his eyes slits as he walked past his fellow schoolmate.

  “This might be the first time I’ve seen you awake on a Saturday without that girl either standing next to you or on the other end of the line.”

  Petr hopped the step from the yard to the house, and grabbed the phone, suddenly feeling the pang of concern rising in his gut. A call from Mrs. Klahr this early on a Saturday was unusual. He and his elderly guardian had settled into the routine of speaking every Sunday morning, a schedule that fit Petr perfectly, and one which Mrs. Klahr had thus far respected. Petr’s workload for his first semester was grueling, particularly for a freshman, his classes and study sessions occupying his days and nights during the week. That left Saturday as his day to unwind from it all, and to this point in his college endeavor, that meant spending all of his Saturdays with Gretel.

  “Mrs. Klahr? What’s wrong?”

  Petr could hear the deep inhalation on the other end of the line, and he could almost see the look of unease on the old woman’s face. He felt his heartbeat accelerate at once, and a glaze of water flooded his eyes.

  “Mrs. Klahr?”

  “Have you spoken to Gretel today?”

  It was 10:30 a.m. and Gretel hadn’t yet called or come over. Petr had left two messages at her house, which was a little less than two miles across campus, and when she hadn’t returned them, he had assumed she’d just decided to sleep late. That was fine; he had some weight to pull in the house. The first nip of fall had arrived, likely to be followed in a few weeks by something that resembled winter, and that meant there was wood that needed chopping. “No. Is she okay?”