Lost Echoes Read Online Free PDF Page A

who had turned and opened her mouth to speak, had a red cord around her neck. Then it came to him that it wasn’t a cord at all. It was a cut. A fine line growing wide.
    The red beads came unfrozen and flew about, and she stumbled forward, and the man grabbed her, and slung her against the jukebox. She tried to get up, a hand at her wound, but he slashed across her throat again, cutting her hand, severing the tip of one of her fingers. When she jerked her cut hand away, she fell, one hand on the jukebox.
    She looked up. Her dark eyes narrowed. Her expression was like the one you had when you found you’d put your hand into something you’d rather not touch.
    Loretta continued to sing.
    The man leaned forward, hooked the knife under her left ear, and pulled hard and slow under her chin, along the now thick red line he had made, pulled the knife almost all the way to the other ear.
    Her head sagged, knocked against the jukebox.
    Her eyes went flat and dead as blackened pennies.
    Blood was everywhere.
    The man stepped back and Harry could see his face, but just for a moment, because the shadows that had made him came apart and fled in all directions and the man was gone. It was the same for the woman, a flutter of darkness, and she was out of there, and the song went with her, as if the words were being sucked down a drain.
    Harry was left with the tight warmth and the light. Then the light faded and it got cool and his head exploded all over the place in bursts of color. He ended up finally in grayness, then blackness.
     
    “Harry, you all right?”
    It was Kayla. She was holding her arm under his head, and she was leaning over him, her long blond hair dangling around his face like a curtain, and he could smell that fine shampoo smell, the overdose of perfume, and for a moment he thought the ghosts that had jumped on him, filled his head, sick and ugly as they were, might be worth it just to have him end up with Kayla’s arm behind his head.
    “I saw the ghost,” he said. “More than one.”
    “We didn’t see dick,” Joey said.
    “You had to. The woman…the knife.”
    “Dick,” Joey said.
    “Kayla?” Harry asked.
    “Dick,” she said.
    “I saw it. I tell you, I saw it.”
    “Dick,” Joey said. “There was dick. You fainted, you sissy.”
    “No, you’re not,” Kayla said. “You got hot. It’s hot in here.”
    “Sissy,” Joey said.
    “Tell me about it,” Kayla said.
    He told them.
    “Sometimes some people see ghosts that others don’t,” Kayla said.
    “We’d have seen it,” Joey said. “There was ghosts, we’d have seen them. What’s wrong with our eyes, huh?”
    Harry sat up, hating to lose Kayla’s arm at the back of his neck. Hating it a lot, but feeling he had to do it, had to sit up, try and look a little less wimpy.
    “I saw that on TV,” Kayla said. “Some people see them, some don’t.”
    “You seen that on TV, did you?” Joey said. “Where’s that? The Sissy Channel?”

 
    7
    “Cut from ear to ear?” Kayla asked.
    Harry nodded.
    “Wow,” she said.
    They were sitting on Harry’s porch, day after the night of the big event. Joey was not around. Harry was glad of that today. He didn’t need reinforcements for this.
    “Thanks for pretending to believe me,” he said.
    “You’re welcome…. Wait a minute. I’m not pretending.”
    “Really?”
    “I believe you believe it.”
    “Then you don’t believe me? Which is it, Kayla?”
    “I don’t think you’re lying to me, but I think you might have dreamed it, fainted from the heat, hit your head, dreamed it. We didn’t see anything.”
    “I thought you saw on TV how one person could see it and another couldn’t. Saw it on the Sissy Channel.”
    She laughed and punched his arm. Hard. It really hurt. He rubbed it.
    “Sorry,” she said.
    “You never know your own strength…. But you don’t believe I saw a ghost?”
    “It’s just hard to accept.”
    “You went to see a ghost.”
    “Sure. It was fun. But I