The Woman Next Door Read Online Free PDF

people; they were fastidious. Private and fastidious. Not the kind of people who enjoyed surprise visits by new neighbors.
    "Let's go, honey," he said. "They're obviously not home."
    "They're home." Quick, certain.
    And Tim heard the doorknob being turned. He put on his How are you? smile, though he despised it, and looked down at Christine. He saw that she was smiling in the same way. It pleased him.
    The door opened.
    She was not what Tim had imagined. He had imagined someone thin and pale and with something unmistakably authoritarian, or aristocratic, about her. This woman might have been dowdy were it not for a kind of cold sharpness around her eyes and mouth. Her dark-brown hair had just begun turning gray above her forehead and around her temples, and her skin suggested too much time indoors. "Hello," she said. (Tim detected a whisper of tightness in the voice; he thought he knew what it would sound like in thirty years—a high-pitched crone's screech, grating and insistent.) "You're my new neighbors, aren't you?" she continued. (Her tone of condescension was obvious.) "I'm afraid my husband's not home. He's at work. He's always at work." (And her breasts were huge, hard-looking. They hugged her black cotton housedress in a way that would have been appealing on any other woman; on her, they were merely big and hard-looking.)
    "Hello," Tim said. "I'm Tim Bennet ."
    She offered him her hand. "Marilyn Courtney."
    He took her hand, noticed that her flesh was soft and cool; it seemed an anachronism. He nodded to his right. "And this is my wife, Christine."
    The woman withdrew her hand and offered it to Christine. Christine took it; her smile brightened. "I'm very happy to meet you, Mrs. Courtney."
    "Please call me Marilyn."
    "And call me Christine."
    Tim—as if in prayer or thanksgiving—lowered his head momentarily and closed his eyes. Somehow, he could read it in the way Christine spoke, in the way she smiled, in the few words that had passed between her and this woman, she had come back to him, had rid herself of the thing—the vampire—that had been slowly draining her these past six months.

Chapter 4
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    S onny Norton was a tall, stocky man in his middle thirties who walked as if he were constantly hurrying somewhere—legs stiff, shoulders thrust up, arms straight and swinging in precise arcs. He had a long, angular face, reminiscent of the Easter Island stones; his eyes and the set of his jaw had that same studied blankness.
    The "pictures" he saw had never scared him too much—they had never actually hurt him—but they had made him wonder and worry about himself, because (his sister, Irene, had told him) they meant that he was not only slow but also crazy. Sonny had been able to memorize Irene's exact words, since she used them so often: "You tell people about these things you think you see, Sonny, and they're not going to like you. They're going to say, 'Look at him, he's not only stupid, he's crazy .'" Sonny hated that word— stupid . It was a mean word, meaner than the word slow , which Dr. Fenaway liked to use. Other people liked to use retard . "He's the local retard," Sonny had once overheard George Fox say, as if being slow meant he couldn't hear, either. "But he's okay. He'd cut his right arm off for ya if ya needed it. It just makes me a tad uncomfortable having him around, if you know what I mean." And Sonny thought maybe he did know what George Fox meant, but he wasn't sure.
    Sonny had heard about the new people in Cornhill. He remembered that someone had told him the names of the new people—their last name, anyway, but be couldn't remember what it was. Names meant very little to him. They were always hard to remember, and he found it difficult to understand why other people put so much importance on them. A person's face was important, and his smile, his tone of voice. You learned a lot from those things. But you learned nothing from a person's name. Sonny had