Poltergeist II - The Other Side Read Online Free PDF Page B

life full of wonder.”
    Steve heard this on his way upstairs and almost stopped to say something, but he only frowned and kept walking.
    Carol Anne was concentrating hard on what her grandmother had said. “Will it help me be a ballerina?” she coaxed.
    Jess laughed and hugged the girl. “Sure will. Anything you can dream, you can be.”
    Carol Anne wasn’t sure she liked that, though. She knew her dreams only too well.
    Steve entered the bedroom and flopped down beside Diane on the bed.
    “Your mother’s at it again,” he said.
    “Hm? At what?” She was going through papers.
    “Diane, we’ve got to keep her from freaking out Carol Anne.”
    “She’s fine. Really,” Diane said, though she verbalized more than felt her words. “I have bad news, though. They’ve denied our claim again, Steve.”
    “What?!”
    Diane shook her head. “We never should have told them the house vanished into thin air . . .”
    He was outraged, but finally this was just one more failure on the pile of failures his life had become—and therefore hardly unexpected. “See? You tell the truth and what do you get for it? Nada.”
    Diane tried staying with her thought, rather than getting caught up in one of his increasingly self-pitying harangues. “They said if it disappeared, then technically it’s only missing.”
    “What do they think—it’s gonna return?! It’s been four years, Diane. It’s not coming back. I have a gut feeling about this. Tell them I’m positive . . .”
    “They say they sent an investigator out to the property and there was nothing there, not a board, not a nail . . .”
    “That’s what we told them . . . ”
    “But if the house had been destroyed by something we were covered for, like fire, explosion, natural disaster, whatever, there should be some remains, or evidence of the natural disaster . . .”
    “Yeah? What about supernatural distasters?”
    “And they seem to imply, though they never accuse, that since the property values obviously bottomed out in that area, as ‘evidenced by the surfeit of abandoned buildings in the immediate environs’ ”—and here she was reading from the insurance company’s letter while Steve silently sulked—“they seem to imply that they suspect we had the house moved, to collect the insurance.”
    “Moved! Moved to the Twilight Zone, is where it was moved! Tell them . . . Never mind. I’ll tell them myself. I’m filing our fourth claim.”
    “Good for you, honey.” Diane liked to encourage his take-charge moods. On the other hand, she still had to broach the subject she’d been leading up to ever since Steve had come in. “In the meantime,” she said, “we’re almost broke.”
    Steve visibly shriveled. “Hey, do we have to go through this again? We’re not exactly starving, you know.”
    “No, we’re not,” Diane admitted. “But I don’t like living off my mother, and I’d like a home of my own.”
    That pulled Steve’s plug. “That’s the difference between you and me, Diane,” he said, starting on a slow roll of sarcasm. “I enjoy downward mobility. I want to sell vacuum cleaners door to door the rest of my life. Being homeless and broke makes me feel upbeat. Patriotic. Proud!” This last word lifted him off the bed, and with gathering momentum he began to pace. “Like the way it used to be! Out in the streets with the people! Get the paints and brushes, Diane—we’ll make the car day-glo and hit the road together! That fabulous family whose house disappeared! Come one, come all! See the famous Freaky Freelings!”
    “Honey, you were never a hippie.” Diane tried to calm him with quiet patience.
    “Huh?” he said, losing the pace of his rhetoric.
    “You were never out in the streets with ‘the people.’ You always wanted to make money. The only reason you painted your van all those colors and grew your hair long was to impress Cookie Gurnich.”
    “Gur nick . Cookie Gur nick.” His eyes lit up at the memory.
    “Miss