People of the Dark Read Online Free Page B

"Where'd they find the other arm, and the fingers, and the ribs?" She leaned over, stroked Ginger, said to her, "No, that's enough."
    "Various places," I said. "Here and there. They found part of a head, too. Did I tell you that?"
    That was a bombshell. Her mouth dropped open, though very briefly; she closed it at once, leaned over again, patted Ginger, said "No!" to her again.
    "Did you hear what I said, Erika?"
    She looked up at me. "I heard."
    "And?"
    She looked down at 'Ginger again. She said nothing. "And?" I said again.
    She shrugged, her head still lowered. "I don't know." She was clearly upset; her voice was trembling. "Fingers and toes I can deal with, Jack." A nervous smile flickered across her lips. "'Part of a head' —that's a different story, isn't it?" She straightened, looked very seriously at me. "Isn't it?" she repeated.
    "It was a very small part, I'm told," I said. "Part of a forehead, and part of a nose—they were attached—"
    She cut in, "Oh, give me a break, Jack! I really don't want to hear this!" And she stalked from the room.
     
    T he boy who swept toward me from behind that dying oak twenty years ago was a boy I recognized. His name was Harry Simms. He was my age; we went to school together, we even shared some of the same classes. Earlier in the day, we'd been on opposite teams in a game of battle ball. Battle ball was a game we all liked because it allowed us to vent whatever pubescent anger and tension had built up—I think it gave us nearly the same kind of relief as masturbation.
    He screamed this as he swept toward me from behind that oak: "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" Then he was gone.
    In school three days later, Harry's seat was empty and rumor had it that he'd run away from home. On my way back from school that night, through the park, I went looking for him.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    T he farmhouse has thirteen rooms, including five bedrooms, a huge dining room, a library, powder room, music room, formal living room, and at the rear, facing our mountain, a good-sized spare room that Erika and I use as a storage area. The house's previous owner, a retired Kodak executive in his late sixties, had begun to renovate this room. He'd put fake wooden beams in the ceiling and had laid a blue-speckled no-wax floor, but death caught up with him before the job was done. The walls were a scarred and patchy yellow-with-age plaster; here and there, he'd started to take the plaster down altogether, and diagonal gray wooden furring strips were visible beneath.
    The room has a constant smell of fish to it. The smell varies in intensity from day to day—it seems to depend on the outside temperature and humidity. Erika and I decided that some hapless animal had crawled into the wall to die and that when we got around to finishing the job the Kodak executive had begun, we'd find the animal and give it a decent burial.
    There were lots of small jobs to do at the house. The dining room needed painting; its teardrop crystal chandelier needed rewiring; several of the doors had to be rehung ; a gutter on the northeast wall had to be replaced; a little bridge spanning a creek a hundred feet south of the house was in desperate need of rebuilding. We looked forward to seeing these jobs done. We were going to do them together. It was our first house, and we planned on being happy in it.
    Of course, Jim Sandy's discovery got us off to a lousy start. I had hoped that it was the kind of thing that was so bizarre and so hard to believe that we could subconsciously deny it, that we'd be able to say to ourselves something like, How could anyone find a man's arm in our side yard? How could anyone lose one? And for a while that was precisely the attitude we were able to take. But at the same time that we asked the question we were able to answer it: "Yes, but it happened." And try as we might, we could not deny that. It happened. It was real.
    I've lived in a few places since college: Baltimore; Syracuse; Rochester;