Helltown Read Online Free PDF Page B

the sand’s been raked.”
    “Well, a baby ghost didn’t leave its shoes here, Jen.”
    “Doesn’t this bother you, Steve? Seriously—look at them! They’re just here, in the middle of perfectly undisturbed sand.”
    “Ow!” The flame had winnowed its way down the matchstick to Steve’s fingertips. He tossed the match away. He lit another and said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
    “I’ve seen one before,” Jenny stated.
    “Where?”
    “In my bedroom.”
    “When?”
    “A long time ago. I was just a kid. I woke up in the middle of the night, and a face was staring in my window.”
    “Maybe it was a neighborhood perv?”
    “My bedroom was on the second floor.”
    “Did your bedroom face the street?”
    “It did, as a matter of fact.”
    “Maybe it was the reflection of a streetlamp?”
    “I don’t think there were streetlamps on my street.”
    “It could have been anything, Jen. That’s the thing with ghosts and UFOs and stuff like that—just because you can’t immediately explain them doesn’t mean they’re real.”
    “It doesn’t mean they’re not real either. I’m simply keeping an open mind.”
    “I’ve spent the last year cutting open dead people and sorting through their insides. I’ve yet to find any evidence of a lurking spirit. Have you?”
    “We share different metaphysical beliefs. Let’s leave it at that.”
    “Not so fast,” Steve said. “I’m having a hard time believing an intelligent person such as yourself, a future doctor no less, believes in the boogie monster.”
    “I don’t believe in the boogie monster, Steve.”
    “You said you saw something peeking in your window. That’s what boogie monsters do, isn’t it?”
    “I said a ghost. They’re two very different things.”
    He shrugged. “Okay, a ghost, whatever. But can you tell me why a ghost would want to peek in your window? I mean, you’d have to be a borderline megalomaniac to think something made the effort to cross dimensions just to spy on you when you were sleeping.”
    “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.”
    “Shakespeare’s not going to bail you out of this one, babe.”
    Jenny cocked an eyebrow. “Babe?”
    Steve frowned. “What?”
    “I’m not a ‘babe,’ thank you very much.”
    “Jeff calls Mandy babe.”
    “Maybe Mandy likes being a babe, but I haven’t spent the last year of my life, studying eighty hours a week, to become someone’s possession.”
    “Possession?”
    “Calling a woman a babe diminishes her to a younger and therefore more controllable state—so, yes, a possession.”
    “So what am I supposed to call you?”
    “There are plenty of other terms of affection that don’t have the same degrading connotations, but I can’t help you there. It’s your job as my partner to choose one. You have to think of something that represents the complexities of my personality.”
    “I’ll give it a hard think, princess.”
    “And it shouldn’t be condescending.”
    Steve and Jenny continued to the far side of the bridge. When Steve emerged from beneath it and was standing erect again, he stretched his back, popping a joint in the process.
    Jenny, still crouching next to him, cupped her hands to her mouth, and shouted: “People! There’re some rad baby shoes under the bridge, if you’re interested!”
    “We’re shaking!” Jeff called back.
    “For real!” Jenny replied.
    Austin said something, though Steve couldn’t hear what he said.
    “Nice friend you have,” Jenny said.
    “What did he say?” Steve asked.
    “Not something I’d care to repeat,” she said, and started up the bank.
    Steve followed, grasping shrubs and saplings for purchase, his glasses bumping against his chest on their cord. At the top, parked on the shoulder of the road, Jeff’s BMW was exactly how they’d left it: dark, empty, clearly not idling.
    “So much for the legend,” he said.
     

     
    The night was cold and getting colder, and Noah wished he’d brought a