Darkness Under the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

had brought from home earlier in the day. The photo of the house and the one of the garage shaded by the ancient beech tree had each been torn into four pieces.
    Only the picture of Howie’s mother and sister remained intact, and it lay next to the extinguished candles, as if Mr. Blackwood had been studying it in the flickering light. Howie picked it up. He slipped it into a hip pocket of his jeans.
    He wasn’t a snoop. He respected other people’s privacy, but he couldn’t help noticing that the toppocket of the backpack, from which the flap was peeled back, contained packets of photographs held together with rubber bands. They were those thick, white-bordered snapshots taken with an old Polaroid.
    In a half-trance similar to the one that had overcome him when he had stepped through the nearby door into the alley, leaving Ron Bleeker to learn the new rules from Mr. Blackwood, Howie reached for one of the groups of photos. Strangely, the hand with which he picked up a packet of Polaroids did not look like his hand: It seemed thin, insubstantial, like the ectoplasmic hand of a ghost in one of those stories about séances that Mrs. Norris, their tenant, had liked to tell. Howie felt as if maybe he were dead already and just didn’t know it, the way that haunting spirits sometimes didn’t realize they were ghosts.
    He stripped the rubber band from the Polaroids. In the jiggling beam of the flashlight, he saw that the top picture was of a pretty girl with blond hair and green eyes. She looked very unhappy. No. Not unhappy. She looked frightened.
    The second photo was the same girl wearing scary makeup for Halloween. Her face was supposed to look as if it had been slashed several times, and the makeup was convincing.
    In the third picture, a pretty girl with brown hair looked scared, too. The fourth shot was of the same girl stripped naked and lying on her back. Things had been done to her body that were not makeup.
    The loose photos slithered through Howie’s fingers and spilled across the backpack. The flashlightshook loose of his hand and struck the floor with a hard, cold sound.
    An instant later, he thought he heard something elsewhere on the ground floor, off in the gloom, a metallic sound, perhaps the steel toe of a boot scraping across a floor tile.
    Heart knocking hard against his breastbone, breath caught in his throat, Howie snatched up the flashlight and backed away from where he thought the sound might have arisen. But sound was tricky in such a big dark space, and after he took a few steps, he thought maybe he had misjudged the source. He changed direction—and within a few steps, he bumped into something, someone, spun around. With the flashlight, he found Ron Bleeker’s body suspended from a huge knife that pierced his throat and pinned him to the wall, his chin held high by the handle. Something had been jammed into his mouth, something big enough to make his cheeks bulge grotesquely. Duct tape pressed his lips shut. His eyes were open wide, he still had his eyes, but his ears were missing.
    In memory, Howie heard his voice and then Mr. Blackwood’s:
    You had surgeries?
    Nope. Don’t want any, either. I’ve got a thing about knives .
    You’re scared of being cut on?
    Not scared. I just have this thing about knives .
    Suddenly Howie was at the rear entrance, although he didn’t remember stepping away fromRon Bleeker’s corpse. He disengaged the deadbolt, yanked open the door, and plunged into the alley, certain that one of those shovel-size hands must be digging toward him through the dark air, inches from the back of his neck.
    In the night, under the moon, he staggered three steps, turned, and though no one loomed behind him, he cried out because he had at last gotten his breath and found his voice. He almost screamed for help, but realized at once that he couldn’t afford to waste a moment explaining this to anyone. He was the only help that his mother and sister could count on, small as he was