Resurrection House Read Online Free Page B

made.
    A lot of kids’ parents picked them up that afternoon or met them at their bus stops. I wanted to catch a ride with Wilt, but I got out the door in time to see him driving away with his Mom. No one else lived in my direction. I considered calling my mother, but she never picked me up, rain or shine, since we lived less than a mile from the school.
    The weather had turned gloomy, but not cold enough for snow and a gray dampness suffused everything. I put my hood up against the light drizzle. All the other kids had gone straight home, and the sidewalks were empty. I turned down Chestnut Street toward the strip mall on Hartford where I knew a short cut through the back alley and across the soccer field. I went that way all the time and knew the spot to hop the fence and squeeze through the thick hedges behind the back door of the Chinese take-out.
    The alley was deserted. I scrambled over the chain-link fence and pushed my way into the thin spot in the wall of dry branches, inching toward the muddy field that stretched toward a parallel hedgerow at its far end. My backpack snagged and wouldn’t come loose until I twisted around and shrugged it free. When I started forward again, I saw him standing in the center of the field, waiting like a bloated rag doll: Mooncat Jack with his black gaze set unwavering on me.
    I froze. I wanted to run back but the branches drew close around me, squeezing and pushing to spit me out onto the open dirt. I fought them to retreat, and then watched as a white van rolled into view and crawled down the back alley. A faint voice in my mind strained to tell me the van belonged to the florist, and look there on the door where the shop name is faded, but you can still read it if you squint! See the phone number? But I wasn’t listening. Panic surged through me, and I stopped pushing, thinking maybe Mooncat Jack didn’t work alone. The branches forced me forward toward the field where his cavernous face awaited.
    The dark man tilted toward me in an odd, pathetic pose, his head listing, one flaccid arm poised palm upward as though to take my hand as he presented himself. A drowsy, chilly sensation washed through me. Jack glided over the field like an old paper bag borne on the wind. Once more I threw my weight against the bushes, scrambling to plunge through, but they tore up my hands and scraped at my face and refused to part. A shadow surrounded me. I knew it was his and that if I turned I would see Mooncat Jack looming close enough to reach me with his cold dead touch. I tucked my face against my shoulder and clamped my eyes shut, ready for his terrible grip to fall and drag me into the vastness of the field.
    It never came.
    I dared a single glimpse to see that he was gone. All at once the branches loosened and gave way, and I scrambled back to the parking lot, stumbling from the sudden release. I squirmed over the fence, forgetting the white van until I saw it directly across the alley, engine running, its doors open. But then I breathed a sigh of relief.
    An old woman was counting boxes of flowers and bundles of bouquets loaded one-by-one in the back by a teenage boy—it was Wilt’s brother, Chris, a senior in high school. The two looked up as I popped free of the shrubs.
    “Are you all right?” asked the woman.
    “Adam?” Chris said.
    I was too scared to speak and I couldn’t catch my breath. I wiped a hand across my face, smearing tracks of blood from the little cuts left by the biting branches.
    “You shouldn’t be playing back here,” said the woman. “You’re liable to get hurt a lot worse than that. Where do you live?”
    “It’s okay, Mrs. Garfield. I know him. He’s a friend of my little brother,” said Chris, and then turning to me, “Hey, man, I’m going on out on a delivery run. I’ll take you home, all right?”
    The old lady let it go and went inside. Chris shut the door of the van, sealing up the stacks of long white boxes and bouquets wrapped in heavy