Tooth and Claw Read Online Free PDF

parents weren’t at home. They were three hundred feet away, in the tavern, with Grace and the rest of their good-time buddies. A few dispirited snowflakes sifted down out of the sky. He made himself a sandwich of peanut butter and sliced banana, then went into the tavern to see if his parents or anybody else there was in that phase of rhapsodic drunkenness where they gave up their loose change as if they were philanthropists rolling down Park Avenue in an open Rolls-Royce. One guy, hearty, younger than the rest, in a pair of galoshes with the buckles torn off, gave him a fifty-cent piece, and then his father told him to get the hell out of the bar and stay out till he was of legal age or he’d kick his ass for him but good.
    The next morning was even colder, and Jimmy’s brother was up early, shivering despite the rancid warmth generated by his three brothers and the cheap sleeping bag advertised for comfort even at five below zero, which might as well have been made of shredded newspaper for all the good it did. He put the kettle on to boil so they could have hot tea and instant oatmeal to fortify them out there in the wind while they were waiting for the school bus to come shunting down the hill with its headlights reduced to vestigial eyes and the driver propped up behind the black windshield like a blind cavefish given human form. The house was dark but for the overhead light in the kitchen. There was no sound anywhere, nothing from his parents or his brothers and sister, everybody locked in a sleep that was like a spell in a fairy tale, and he missed the dog then, if only to see it stretch and yawn and nose around in its dish. The kettle came to a boil and he’d actually put three tea bags in the pot and begun pouring the water before he realized that something was wrong. What was it? He strained his ears but there was nothing to hear. Not even the tick of the stove or the creak and whine of the house settling into the cold, no sound of stirring birds or tires revolving on the blacktop road. It was then that he thought to check the time.
    There was a clock built into the stove, foreshortened hands painted gold behind a greased-over plastic lens. It read 3:35 A . M . Jimmy’s brother could have kicked himself. He sat in the kitchen, shivering, and had a cup of tea, wishing it would snow so they’d call off school and he could sleep all day. After a while he decided to buildup the fire in the living room and sit there on the couch and terrify himself with
Dracula
—he was halfway through, though he’d started it at Halloween—and then maybe he’d drift off for a while till it was time to get up. He shrugged into his coat and went to the kitchen door, thinking of the punky wood he and Jimmy had stacked in the shed over the weekend.
    But then—and I was ahead of him here, because you’d have to be as blind as a cavefish yourself not to see where this was going—the storm door wouldn’t give. There was something there, an immovable shadow stretched long and dark across the doorstep, and it took everything the brother had to wedge the door open enough to squeeze out into the night. And when he did pull himself out into the cold, and the killing, antipathetic breath of it hit him full in the face, he willed the shadow at his feet to take shape until he could distinguish the human form there, with her dried-out skin and fixed eyes and the dirty scraggle of gray-black hair.
    “Grace?” I said.
    Jimmy’s brother nodded.
    “Jesus,” I said. “And your brother—did he see her there?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. She was a drunk, that was all, just another drunk.”
    W E SAT FOR A MOMENT , looking past our drinks to the marina and the black unbroken plane of the sea beyond it. I had an impulse to open up to him, to tell him my story, or one of my stories, as if we were clasping hands at an AA meeting, but I didn’t. I made a clucking sound, meant to signify sympathy and understanding,