Shadows Fall Away Read Online Free PDF Page B

the house. I scanned the room. No TV. No video game to pass the time. I didn’t think there’d been a TV upstairs either. I supposed Aunt Agatha’s friend was going all out with “keeping it real” for his favorite historical era. There was a high-backed leather chair with a couple newspapers on a table beside it. If I was lucky there’d be an international edition of the New York Times or something soI could catch up on the baseball scores. The Pirates had actually been winning more than losing when I left home. I’d been looking forward to ditching the guys and sneaking into a couple games during one of the August home stands.
    Settling myself in the chair, I picked up the top paper. It looked weird. The print was strange the way a page from an old typewriter looked compared to a computer printout. The articles seemed downright odd in the way they were written.
    This didn’t make any sense, even considering it was the London Times and not the New York Times. Then I noticed the date: 5 August 1888. That Percy guy’s recreation would have to be complete. I skimmed quickly through the other papers.
    They were sequential, going back several issues.
    All dated August 1888.
    But somehow they didn’t have the feel of the antique papers my mom collected for her research. Newspapers only a few years old turned yellow and brittle. And these were supposed to be over a hundred years old? I shrugged it off, deciding they must be reproductions. But somehow, part of me didn’t quite believe that.
    An odd clop-clopping sound in the distance caught my attention and I slowly recognized it as the sound of a horse just like the county cops back home rode in the parades my dad used to take me to when I was little. I got up, went to the window, and pulled aside the thick drapes. The house appeared to face a park, but the streetlights were bathed in such a thick fog it was hard to see much.
    I dropped the curtains then tore them open again, that feeling of something not being right nagging at me. It was what I didn’t see that bothered me. No CCTV cameras, no cars, no glow of the city lighting up the fog. Even at four in the morning, there should’ve been some sign of the real world out there.
    I heard the horse again. Turning away from the window, I followed the clip-clops towards the back of the house, pausing only briefly in front of the door marked “Surgery.”
    I tried to remember the dream. I’d heard a man’s voice say something about a surgery…
    But nothing else would come so I went through the door at the end of the hall and then down a few stairs to the back door. Behind me, another short set of stairs led down to some room with a well-worn but very clean wooden floor. I heard the rattle of glass outside, then the noise of the horse again. Retreating this time.
    Working the lock and the latch, I slipped out to find myself in an alley behind the house. I stood beneath the dripping eaves of the roof. It was no longer raining.
    The smells caught me before my eyes or brain registered what I was seeing.
    I smelled horses, and the dank smell of rotten eggs. The alley was dimly lit by a light somewhere on the street and it was difficult to make out details but, there was a shed with a carriage and horse stall at the back of the house. And the next house. And the one on the other side. And the ones across the alley.
    Down the alley stood a milk wagon, a big white horse stamping impatiently as it waited for the milkman to return. That had to be the clopping around I’d heard.
    Away to my right, I made out tall chimneys spewing thick clouds of smoke.
    But except for the chuffing of the horse and the clink of glass bottles, the place was virtually silent.
    I looked up.
    No tangle of electrical or phone wires. No moon. There had been a full moon last night, hadn’t there? I was sure I’d seen it before heading to the wax museum with Aunt Agatha.
    I rubbed my eyes only to find the scene unchanged before me. I tore at the cloth