Charnel House Read Online Free PDF Page B

mark the old driveway. After he’d gone a hundred feet he stopped, certain that he’d missed it. That, or his memory had gone the way of his job. He turned the wheel to the left so he could pull a U and cruise back up, and as the headlights swept across the forest he saw the space he’d been looking for. The weeds were tall and the briars thick, but the path looked clear enough. The real question was going to be the mud, and whether he’d be able to make it up to the house or end up stuck on the side of the hill with the body of some kid in his trunk. He didn’t want to think about that particular call to AAA.
    Gravel crunched under the tires as the Prius left the road, and undergrowth scraped at the bottom of the car like fingers reaching up from a grave. Each time the tires found a dip or bump the Mylar crinkled and crackled behind him as the body shifted. The old driveway had been well laid over seventy years before, and the car did not slide as it climbed. Gradually the incline flattened into a plateau and the trees thinned. High clouds fled to the northeast, chasing the rain, and wan moonlight bathed the top of the hill. As the ground leveled out, the driveway hooked to the right and when Garraty rounded the curve, he got his first look at the house.

5
    Sheltered from most of the glare of the headlights by the grove of trees that had grown up around it, the L-shaped house stood just as tall as it had when Garraty was a boy. All he could see from here was one gabled end, the crumbling spire of a chimney bisecting its central axis. The shiplap siding shone dull gray through the green leaves, and the rusted roof looked black in the light. As Garraty looked up into the two obsidian rectangular windows that flanked the chimney like eyes, absently rubbing the spot on his chest where the broken bone had poked him, he couldn’t help but feel like the house was looking back down at him. He shivered. This had not been one of his better ideas.
    He pulled the car closer to the house and shut the engine off, acutely aware that if anyone had been looking up here from below, they might have seen the lights climbing the drive if the fog had thinned enough in town. Probably no one was stupid enough to come up here and investigate—nearly every kid who grew up in Belleville knew the stories about what happened to the Barlowe family and those three little kids in the forties—but if someone called the cops, well, they might just pay a visit. They were paid to do shit like that. The sooner he got out of here, the better.
    Garraty opened the car door and stepped out. Before he’d gone ten steps he stumbled over a something hidden in the grass and almost fell. Jesus . A broken ankle was just what he needed right now. An image rose in his mind of him lying on the ground screaming, one foot dangling as loosely as the boy’s hand had. Sure, he might be able to crawl back to the car, might even be able to drive over to the hospital in Decatur without further injury, but then what? A couple of hours in the ER waiting for them to set the broken bone while the boy lay out there in plain sight, staring up at the lift gate with those flat dull eyes? Say, doc, could you send one of those orderlies out to my car to pick up a little biohazard trash for your incinerator? Better make him a burly one, it’s a real dead weight.
    Again he felt the urge to bray laughter, and again he bit it back.
    Garraty picked his way back to the Prius and got the Maglite and thumbed it on. Much better. He played the beam around where he’d tripped and spotted a rusted bike frame, its tires long rotted to crumbles. Jesus, I really was lucky I didn’t break an ankle. Nothing else to see but the weeds, nearly waist high already and the hot weather still a few weeks away. He began to pick a path to the house, mindful of the pieces of lumber that lay scattered here and there, blown off the house by storms long since past. It wouldn’t do to step on a nail,