Night Relics Read Online Free PDF Page B

and purring loudly. A neighbor was feeding it, but it was used to havingthe run of the house. Peter stooped to pet it, then blocked the door with his leg and slipped inside. If he let Tully in he’d
    be chasing the cat around the house all morning.
    “Relax,” Peter said to it. “You’ve only got a week to go and you’re back in. For me there’s no end in sight.”
    He closed the door behind him. The house smelled and sounded empty, nothing but dusty echoes. With no idea what he was looking
    for, he wandered from the service porch into the kitchen. A glass pitcher half-full of lime Kool-Aid sat on the kitchen table
    alongside two nearly empty glasses, a plate speckled with cookie crumbs and a single broken Oreo, and a dealt-out deck of
    playing cards.
    Crazy Eights. It was David’s favorite game, and the three of them had played countless hands of it, drinking green Kool-Aid
    and eating Oreos, arguing off and on about the wisdom of dunking the Oreos in the Kool-Aid and whether you ought to unscrew
    them first and eat the center and then dunk either half separately, so that you seemed to have two cookies instead of one.
    Suddenly hungry, he opened the cupboard and searched for the open package of Oreos, but he couldn’t find it.
    How could it still be going on without him? Peter was a part of it, part of the ritual. It was Peter who had always made the
    Kool-Aid.
    Well, now somebody else was making it. He carried the glasses and pitcher to the sink and rinsed them out. He could play out
    that part of the ritual anyway. It wasn’t like Amanda to leave dirty dishes on the table—an open invitation to ants.
    He went out into the dining room and then into David’s room, which was almost appallingly neat. Books and toys were carefully
    arranged on the shelves that Peter had built when David was—what? Two? He sat at the foot of the bed, looking around at the
    posters on the wall and at the airplane models and sets of high-tech building blocks. Over one of the headboard bedposts hung
    a wooden heart on a string. Peter and David had cut it out on the band saw fiveyears ago, when David was on his Oz kick. The only sign of disorder in the room was that the closet door stood open, blocking
    some of the sunlight that shone through the window.
    Peter gave the wooden heart a shove, so that it swung back and forth like a pendulum. It dawned on him that he was chasing
    ghosts, driving like crazy out of the hills in order to wander around the empty house. What did he expect to find? A clue
    to what? Outside, the wind blew past the lonesome willow tree in the yard, making the branches sway. He sat daydreaming for
    a moment, nearly hypnotized by the easy dance of the slender willow branches.
    Then, in a rush, he was struck with the uncanny notion that he had seen this very same thing before—early this morning. Except
    that his predawn hallucination had been even more real, if that were possible, with its kitchen sounds and smell of charcoal
    smoke. Now, except for the swishing of branches beyond the window, all was quiet, and the only smell in the air was the faintly
    dusty odor of a closed-up house.
    He was looking at the tree from the same angle, from underneath, looking up at the silver-white undersides of the leaves.
    It was a different season and a different wind, and the shadows were wrong, but what he had seen that morning had clearly
    been a view of the backyard willow tree as seen through David’s bedroom window, through David’s eyes. It had been something
    almost telepathic, like a borrowed memory—David’s memory.
    The wind picked up outside now, and the sunlit willow branches flailed away, showering the air with leaves. He stood up. It
    was time to go. There was no use drowning himself in memories and regrets.
    He stepped across and swung the closet door shut. Sitting behind it, where it had been hidden by the open door, was a piece
    of canvas luggage. It was David’s overnighter, the zipper open, the bag full of