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along the glassy surface of the highway. Several times he had to swerve around
tangled vehicles, many of them burned-out, blackened shells.
Once something darted from the blizzard, right in front of him, making him
drop the bike with a jarring crash. There was the momentary flash of vast bulk
and towering horns. His nostrils filled with rank, bitter scent.
The moose, or whatever it had been, vanished as quickly as it had appeared,
and he hauled the bike upright and moved slowly eastward through the numbing
cold.
When he saw the sign, it seemed like something out of a dream, and he stared
at it uncomprehendingly.
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Mystic Home of the Historic Seaport.
Pocked with bullet holes, the sign was leaning drunkenly to the left, a
battered remnant from a different world.
The bike was beginning to cough, struggling under the wintery conditions. He
blinked, then said slowly, barely getting out the word, "Melville Avenue. One
hundred and eight. One zero eight, Melville."
His lips were blue and his teeth wouldn't stop chattering. The Norton was
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0-%20Earthblood.html meandering from side to side, the back wheel barely
retaining any purchase. Mac could see a tremulous vision of the house and
where it was, locked into his memory. But in the whiteout conditions nothing
made any sense.
Nothing was making& sense.
THE LEAVES WERE fire tipped, running a whole range of colors. Green shaded
into gold into orange the bright tints of death. It was a wonderfully balmy
afternoon in late fall, with the sun beginning its slow decline. The water was
tumbling in gentle white foam over lichen-coated boulders, down into dark
pools.
All seven of Henderson's children were playing happily together. He lay back
on the soft turf and named them on his fingers, from the oldest through to the
youngest.
"John, twenty. Paul, eighteen. Pamela, seventeen. Helen, nine. Jocelyn, seven.
Jack, six. And little Sukie, just four."
His first wife, Jeanne, lay on his right, wearing a skinny T-shirt in dappled
colors of red and yellow. Though she was a couple of years past forty, she'd
kept her figure well.
Angel, his current wife, lay on the other side, nibbling on a chicken leg. A
can of beer stood open on a flat rock at her elbow, and beyond that was all
the detritus of the big family party.
"We've done well," she said, following his eyes, down to the river, rubbing
her hand through her tangled blond hair.
"Yeah."
The water was frothing, white& as snow as ice as ivory& as parchment as death.
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MAC KNEW that he was on Melville Avenue. The white frame houses, with
balconies and turrets in the best Victorian Gothic style looked like houses on
Melville Avenue.
The dead trees and bushes were weighed down with fresh-fallen snow, their pink
color almost buried in whiteness.
The Norton wasn't there anymore.
Mac shook his head, puzzled.
He had a vague impression, an image in his mind of a tumble, a sliding into
the ditch, as if he'd been a spectator and it had happened to someone else.
"Did I?" he said, unable to catch the sound of his own whispering voice.
Now he was walking, the heavy pack dragging in the snow that rose to his
ankles, leaving a meandering furrow up the side street.
The children were laughing, their voices blending and merging until they began
to sound like the banshee howling of the blizzard wind.
There was ice up his nostrils, uncomfortable. His feet didn't belong to him,
nor did his hands. The cold had whipped the skin raw across his cheeks, and
his eyes kept watering.
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Watering and freezing, freezing and nearly closing, closing for good, maybe.
HE HEARD VOICES chattering around him, but Mac wasn't sure if he was dreaming.
If he opened his eyes he could find out, but that would involve a huge effort
and he wasn't quite ready for that.
Not yet. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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