Lasher Read Online Free PDF

went down the alley, caught the can by its handle, and what do you know, it rolled. How efficient! And then she climbed on top of it, knees first, then feet crushing down the flexible blackplastic lid, and she pried open the green shutters, and pushed at the sash.
    Up it went, just that easy. It didn’t jam until there was an opening quite big enough for her to get in. She was going to get her dress dirty on the dusty sill, but it didn’t matter. She gave herself a boost with both hands, and slipped through the window, and all but tumbled to the carpeted floor.
    Inside First Street!
And it had been a slam dunk! For one second she stood there in the little bathroom, staring at the glimmering white porcelain of the old toilet and the marble top of the washstand, and remembering that last dream of Oncle Julien where he had taken her to this house and together they had climbed the stairs.
    It was hazy now, as dreams always get, but she had written it in her computer diary under \WS\DREAMS\JULIEN as she did all the dreams in which he came to her. She could remember now the file, which she had reread many times, though not the dream.
    Oncle Julien had been playing the Victrola, the one that Mona was supposed to have, and he had been dancing about, in his long quilted satin robe. He’d said that Michael was too good. Angels have their limits. “Pure goodness has rarely defeated me, you understand, Mona,” he had said with his charming French accent, speaking English for her as he always did in her dreams, though she spoke French perfectly, “but it is invariably a nuisance to everyone else but the person who is so perfectly good.”
    Perfectly good. Mona had typed in “Perfectly Scrumptious, Perfectly Delectable, Perfectly a hunk!” Then she’d gone and made those entries in the file marked “Michael.”
    “Thoughts on Michael Curry: he is even more attractive now that he has had the heart attack, like a great beast with a wounded paw, a knight with a broken limb, Lord Byron with his club foot.”
    She had always found Michael “to die for,” as the expression went. She hadn’t needed her dreams to tell her, though they did embolden her somewhat, all that drama of Oncle Julien suggesting it to her, that Michael was a splendid conquest, and telling her how when Ancient Evelyn was only thirteen—Mona’s age—Oncle Julien had bedded her in the attic at First Street, and from that illicit union had been born poor Laura Lee, the mother of Gifford and Alicia. Oncle Julien had given Ancient Evelyn the Victrola then and said, “Take itout of the house before they come. Take it away and keep it…”
    “…It was a mad scheme. I never believed in witchcraft, you must understand, Mona. But I had to try something. Mary Beth had started to burn my books even before the end. She burnt them on the lawn outside, as if I were a child without rights or dignity. The Victrola was a little voodoo, magic, a focus of my will.”
    All that had been very clear and understandable when she dreamed it but even by the next day the “mad scheme” was largely lost. OK. The Victrola. Oncle Julien wants me to have it. Witchcraft, my favorite thing.
    And look what had happened to the damned Victrola, so far.
    He’d gone to all that trouble in 1914 to get it out of the house—assuming that sleeping with thirteen-year-old Ancient Evelyn had been trouble—and when Ancient Evelyn tried to pass on that Victrola to Mona, Gifford and Alicia had had a terrible quarrel. Oh, that was the worst of days.
    Mona had never seen such a fight as happened then between Alicia and Gifford. “You’re not giving her that Victrola,” Gifford had screamed. She’d run at Alicia and slapped her over and over, and tried to push her out of the bedroom where she had taken the Victrola.
    “You can’t do this, she’s my daughter, and Ancient Evelyn said it is to be hers!” Alicia had screamed.
    They had fought all the time like that as girls, think nothing of it,