Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > Seed > Status Update

“I’ll do what I want with you,” she hissed. “And I’ll take your family too.”

Copeland had prescribed antianxiety meds, assuring Gilda that as long as Jack took them he’d be fine. But Jack didn’t take them. He had wanted to, especially on nights when he knew he wasn’t alone, when he could feel the rats crawling over him only to disappear when he opened his eyes. But every time he reached for that pill bottle, somehow, by some unexplainable force, he failed.

“I do,” she insisted. “Please? I won’t be scared, I swear.” Her expression gave her away. She was terrified. Anything was better than sleeping in a room with someone who held darkness in their eyes.

Even he knew that if demons could exist, it meant there was real evil in the world, and if you believed in the devil, somewhere in the deepest fibers of your being you had to believe in God. He knew, firsthand, that the devil was real; he’d seen it with his own two eyes. But he’d never seen God. He’d never felt God. He’d never been helped by God.

Jack returned to his seat, smoothed his napkin across his lap, and grabbed his fork. “Let’s all just keep quiet and eat,” he said. “We’ll trick him.” “Or he’ll trick us,” Aimee muttered. Less than a minute later the sound was back, but this time it was in the walls. “Great,” Aimee said with a huff. “We’re going to have rats making little rat families inside the house.”

Jack couldn't sleep again. He tried to stay still as he lay in bed, not wanting to wake Aimee and throw her into another fit of hysteria. It had taken hours to calm her down. Finally exhausted by her incessant tears, she had passed out while Jack stared up at the ceiling. It was the moment he had feared, the moment when Aimee started to realize that something wasn’t normal. That something was terribly wrong.

THE DAY JACK’S parents first suspected there was something wrong with him was the day they found a stray cat hanging from a tree.

“Charlie?” She got to her feet and swallowed against the lump in her throat, taking a few hesitant steps toward the bed. She was afraid to pull those sheets back, afraid of what she’d see. What if she was too late? What if she yanked the blanket away and Charlie was dead and blue and it was all her fault?

He looked to where she pointed, his own eyebrows knitting together as he tried to spot movement in the darkness. “Probably just an animal,” he assured her, taking Charlie’s hand into his own. “Come on, let’s get you back to your mom.” Charlie reluctantly gave up her position, craning her neck while her dad led her back to the overturned car. “It wasn’t an animal,” she murmured. “It walked on two legs, like us.”