Rise the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

seemed laughable. It was an open, charming place with a wine bar and a coffee shop. A sign indicated that appointments with mediums could be made inside the gift shop, which was tended by a woman in her fifties dressed in a swirl of loose fabric, everything flowing and brightly patterned and billowing around her. She told him cheerfully that of course she could set up an appointment with Dixie. Bracelets with heavy stones adorned her left wrist; he saw she wore rings on every finger when she dialed the phone. The little gift shop sold the kind of cheap trinkets that did not seem likely to promote anyone’s belief in the legitimacy of the camp, making it feel more like a tourist trap than a place of heightened communication. He listened to the woman’s side of the conversation, and then she put the phone to her chest and said, “Are there any special issues you’d like to discuss? She’ll spend some time channeling the proper energy if she knows what to be open for.”
    Mark nodded as if that made perfect sense, thought about it for a moment, and then said, “Tenants.”
    The cheerful woman frowned. “Tenants?”
    “Yes. I have some questions about tenants.”
    “Can you specify an emotional connection you have to this question about tenants?”
    “Rage.”
    Her eyes narrowed and she seemed about to ask him something, but she held off, lifted the phone again, and said, “Mr. Novak has questions about…um, tenants, and he has issues with anger.” She listened for a few seconds, then said, “Good,” and hung up.
    “Dixie will see you this evening at seven.”
    “That’s great.”
    She took out a map and drew a circle and a square on it. “The square is us, and you’re headed to the circle. It’s easy to find, but there are two houses on the property. You’ll want forty-nine A, not forty-nine B.”
    Garland Webb had rented 49B once. Fortunately for Garland, Dixie Witte didn’t like record-keeping, and she dealt in cash. She’d never been able to recall whether he was present on the day in question. She also hadn’t volunteered his existence as a tenant until after the prison snitch turned up with his report.
    “I’m sure I’ll find the right place,” Mark said. “I assume the neighbors all have an uncanny sense of direction.”
    It was his first slip, the sarcasm bubbling forth already when he’d promised himself to contain it, promised himself that he would take them seriously, as Lauren had. Five minutes in town, and he was losing his footing.
    “This is a place of healing, Mr. Novak,” the woman said. “It’s not the place you think it is, which I can see in your eyes. You have much scorn for us. That’s fine, but it won’t help you. If you wish to open yourself to possibility here, you’ll be rewarded.”
    “I’ve seen some of this town’s rewards,” Mark said.
    “If that were true, you wouldn’t be a skeptic. But the reading will help, whether you’re open or closed to it. A skeptic walks out of a reading with doubt intact, but also with echoes.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind,” Mark said, and then he left the gift shop and walked through the hotel lobby and back into the humid day, glad to be out of the place. The breezes were gone and the sky was a flat gray and when a truck passed by, the dust it lifted fell swiftly back to earth.
    The woman in the hotel had felt too familiar to him, had stirred old angers. She was the sort who peddled bullshit statements that people could easily mold to fit their own situations. The crime of it, Mark thought, was that those people believed they’d been granted insight, not a fortune cookie. Mark’s mother had been good enough at that. Her favorite role was Snow Creek Maiden of the Nez Perce, a white woman passing herself off as an American Indian because so many white people believed that Indians were more spiritually in tune, never sensing the inherent racism there. She would dye her hair and skin and don traditional garb. The tourists