Darkness Under the Sun Read Online Free PDF

being a dinner guest in the main house now and then was another advantage of renting the apartment.
    Howie left the house by the back door, locked it behind him, and stuffed the key in a pocket of his jeans. He switched off the Eveready because the full moon frosted everything.
    He walked rapidly toward St. Anthony’s graveyard, but he didn’t run. Running could get you killed because it fanned the flames. He wasn’t on fire, of course; but for a long time he had not been able to run also because of the skin grafts, which were delicate. Scars were tougher tissue than ordinary skin, and here and there, where scars and skin met, sudden extreme stretching, like what occurred when you ran flat-out, could cause dermal cracking and maybe a deadly infection.
    Mr. Blackwood said he would probably sleep until nine o’clock. Howie didn’t want to risk waking him, so it was a few minutes before ten when, in the alley behind the old Boswell building, he knocked on the door through which Ron Bleeker had earlier attacked him. The first thing Howie would do was apologize for not being able to wait until breakfast. He was usually very patient. Having to recover from serious burns taught you patience. But if Mr. Blackwood had dreamed a decision about the apartment, Howie just had to know. If the big man stayed in town for a couple months, above their garage, it would be the second biggest thing that had ever happened in Howie’s life, and certainly the best.
    Mr. Blackwood didn’t respond to the knock, so Howie rapped his knuckles harder against the door and said, “It’s me, sir, it’s Howie Dugley.”
    Maybe Mr. Blackwood was sleeping deeply. Maybe he had gone out for a walk or for a late dinner from some take-out place.
    Howie tried the door. It was locked.
    He walked back and forth in the moon-washed alleyway, trying to decide what he should do next. Going into the building without an invitation from Mr. Blackwood didn’t seem right. On the other hand, it wasn’t Mr. Blackwood’s building, even if he was camping out there. Besides, that morning, Howie entered without an invitation and encountered his new friend on the roof; and that had gone well. Mr. Blackwood had been glad to see him.
    The corroded piano hinge protested, but the basement window pushed inward, and Howie slid feetfirst into that darkness. He switched on the Eveready and made his way toward the stairs, calling out as he went, “Hello? Mr. Blackwood? Are you here? Hello? It’s me, it’s Howie.”
    When he reached the ground floor, the large room with all its columns felt bigger at night than in the daytime, immense, vast, as though the darkness stretched on for miles in every direction. Even with the light of the full moon, the dust-covered high windows were barely visible, and looking up at their pale panes, Howie felt as if he were in a dungeon.
    His small flashlight didn’t penetrate far into the pitch-black realm of the former department store. In fact it was less effective than usual because its batteries had lost some of their charge, which he hadbeen too excited to notice until now. The beam was less white than yellow, no longer crisp but fuzzy.
    “Mr. Blackwood? I’m sorry to bother you. It’s me, Howie.”
    His voice wasn’t right, so changed that it almost might have been the voice of another boy. It seemed smaller now than earlier, thinner, and it echoed off the distant walls differently from the way that it sounded in this same space before.
    Because Mr. Blackwood had said he kept his gear near the back door, Howie moved in that direction. He no longer called out to his friend because the smallness of his voice made him uneasy.
    He found the gear a few steps to the right of the back door. A sleeping bag rolled tight and secured with straps. A backpack with the top-pocket flap unzipped and standing open. Two fat, half-melted candles were fixed to the floor in puddles of hardened yellow wax.
    Beside the candles were the photographs that Howie