The Devil Walks in Mattingly Read Online Free PDF Page B

Jake? Always ask my customers if their jar’s for rememberin’ or forgettin’.”
    Phillip echoed in my head
    (You’re a dead man and he’s coming and you’ll remember true, because I want an end)
    and I tried to push him away, tried clinging to the beliefthose dreams were no different from any others, mere ramblings of an unsettled mind. I tried to tell myself there was no he coming, I was in no danger, and that the end Phillip spoke of was merely a deep-seated desire to lay down my own guilt.
    I tried. And I may have even believed it. But I didn’t believe it much.
    What I did believe was that Phillip had been wrong about one thing. There was no need for me to “remember,” because I’d never forgotten what I did to him along the riverbank that day and never would. I wore that memory like a heavy chain around my heart. I pressed on it as one would press on a bruise to see if it still hurt.
    I turned and said, “Forgetting.”
    Hollis nodded as though mine was the usual answer.

4
    Few people knew of Charlie Givens. Those who did agreed that not only was he born to trouble, but the sole purpose of his head was to keep rain out of his neck. Yet even Charlie’s leaden mind understood the dangers involved in his monthly trips to visit Taylor Hathcock in Happy Hollow.
    It wasn’t so much that most all of the Hollow was either lifeless or empty, or even that everyone in the county knew every inch of that dark wood was accursed. It was the eyes. Charlie could never step past the rusty gate without feeling those eyes on him. Watching. Waiting. He didn’t know exactly what that steady gaze watched or waited for (nor did Charlie ever ponder what devilry lay behind it), but there was a certain comfort in those unanswerables. Ignorance may not have equaled bliss down in the world, but it certainlycounted for protection in the Hollow as far as Charlie Givens was concerned.
    And sometimes it was worse. Sometimes those eyes were accompanied by shadows that danced among the dead trees and whispers that sounded like tired groans in the stale wind. Charlie softened his fears in such circumstances by tipping into the beer he brought along. There had been occasions when two cans would be missing by the time he reached the cabin. That day Charlie was on his fourth. That’s how bad the eyes were.
    Nor was the going easy. Taylor once told him eight miles stretched between the gate that marked the Hollow’s entrance and the ridgetop where he lived. Charlie believed that distance closer to twelve. Add the groceries he carried to the steep hills, thick patches of briar and thistle, and rocks that could either cut a man to the bone or snap him all together (not to mention the added burden of Charlie’s own 230 pounds, most of which currently swung free and easy from the top of his camouflage shorts), and the result was nearly three hours of travel into hell itself.
    But travel he would and always had, because Taylor was a friend. Even in Charlie Givens’s world, that counted for something.
    By the time he crested the final hill, Charlie was sure if the eyes didn’t kill him, his overtaxed heart would. Brittle oaks withering in the dusty ground yielded to the camp, which amounted to little more than a one-room shack surrounded by an ever increasing pile of scavenged junk. Here in the Hollow’s heights, the eyes fell away and turned their gaze elsewhere. A gentle breeze fell through a set of wind chimes fashioned from empty beer cans, filling the air with eerie clicks. Aside from those, the world was silent. It reminded Charlie of how death must be—not an end of something bad and certainly notthe start of something better, just an always with the sound turned down.
    He paused to drink from a barrel of water. A small path led from there to a high place along the ridge. Charlie followed it and found Taylor sitting on a large rotting log, scanning the valley below with a broken pair of binoculars. The spring sun had already bronzed