Cemetery of Angels Read Online Free PDF

two decades of her working life.
    She fished through her purse, pushing aside two open soft packs of Marlboros and three in progress packs of sugar-free gum. Then she found the right key. “I think,” she said, “this might be exactly what you’re looking for.”
    With those words and all the rosy promises contained therein, Esther smiled to her customers who had flown in from the East, Bill and Rebecca Moore. Then she held aloft the key that she had picked up from the lawyer’s office half an hour earlier.
    “Something told me,” she said in a salty, chipper tone. “Some little inner voice that Essie always listens to, that’s what told me. It said that you should see this house right away, Mr. and Mrs. Moore. Let’s see if Essie is right.”
    Then she turned the key in the drop bolt lock to the front door at 2136 Topango Gardens. It was the sixth house the Moores had seen on that warm afternoon in early July. Real estate overkill was starting to set in for the day and Essie knew it.
    The drop bolt fought her. But then the rusty innards of the locking mechanism gave a little shudder. As Essie persistently jiggled the key with her arthritic sixty-two-year-old fingers, she could feel something like a small pulsation.
    Then the key moved grudgingly clockwise and the tiny tumblers gave way within.
    The resistance expired, like little grasping fingers losing their grip.
    “There!” Esther said. “We’re going to be the first people to see this house since it came on the market yesterday. Judge it not for what it is. Judge it for what it can be.”
    Bill Moore grunted something noncommittal. His wife, Rebecca, was more optimistic.
    Esther reached to the doorknob and turned it.
    The front door of 2136 Topango Gardens gave a few inches, accompanied by a hesitant creak. Then the real estate broker pushed the door and it, like the lock, abandoned its fight.
    “No lock can keep me and the Moores out of this house,” Essie proclaimed. Bill and Rebecca Moore watched as daylight flooded onto the bare floorboards that had waited beyond the front door. Bold sunlight, reflected off an untidy front lawn of brown grass, attacked the shrouded darkness within the building.
    Two unsettled worlds collided: a conflict in an unfathomable, misunderstood universe where time did not exist. Somewhere within the house, something stirred from a long, dark narcosis of sleep. A blast of tomb-scented mustiness, a hostile cold from an undisturbed basement, an anti-valentine from another world, rose from God-knows-where to confront the intruders. But no human could see it. Not yet.
    “There,” Essie said, opening the door on the faded dwelling in West Los Angeles. “Maybe this is a place you can call home. But as I warned you, you must use your imagination. This is a wonderful house. It has a soul. But it’s been sadly neglected.” She paused. “Well, Mr. Moore, you’re an architect. You can see that for yourself.”
    Essie recoiled from the mustiness of the place. An aroma of stale agedness accosted them. It gripped them the way fog grips a city, and then brushed past them. They thought they could feel something cold as it wafted by. Essie stepped forward.
    “Wow! What was that?” she muttered. Bill and Rebecca followed.
    “What was what?” Rebecca answered.
    “Nothing. The lady who lived here for many years passed away just before Christmas of last year,” Essie said, leading them in. “Judith Dickinson was her name. Lovely woman. I’m sorry she’s dead. Well, actually,” she added with a wink, “I’m not sorry because I’m going to do her a favor and sell her house to some nice people.”
    Mrs. Lewisohn flicked a light switch, but the power was down.
    “This building has been tied up with the estate lawyers since then,” she said disgustedly. “I’ve been wanting to put it on the market ever since Mrs. Dickinson died. But of course I got no cooperation from ‘Nickels, The Lawyer.’”
    “Who?” Bill Moore asked,