All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By by John Farris Read Free Book Online Page B

moments, like an affliction of mirth. "Stones and hoptoads and ice cubes have rained down from a clear sky. A little bitty bit of a meteorite, traveling who knows how many billion miles through space, hit a house in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and burned up a fat woman in her bed. So I have heard from my granddaddy, who collected such curiosities."
    Nhora drew breath censoriously and it was then I knew, watching the downcast almond eye in the candled side of her face, that she didn't much like Everett John Wilkes. "What causes little boys to die screaming, when there's nothing wrong that anyone can see?" Plainly she was still brooding about the naked ten-year-old boy in the grimy bed sheet who had died before the doctor could be of any use to him, body warped in a back-breaking curve, lips pulled taut in a cur's grimace, coughing blood from his herniated throat.
    Evvy shook his head politely. "I wouldn't know, Miss Nhora," he said, his politeness thereby made insulting but perhaps playfully so, as he invoked an image of old-fashioned darkie servitude. She was, after all, Boss's widow, an inheritor, although ownership of Dasharoons and other businesses had passed on to me.
    Nhora drank from her wineglass and turned somberly to me. "I went to visit the boy's parents this morning, to tell them how sorry I was. Jimmy. His name was Jimmy. And do you remember the other boy, the older brother? That's Custis. We took a long walk together, up along the ridge where it happened—the back side of Railroad Ridge. Saturday, Custis was doing some plowing in the field that lies below the ridge on the other side of a little creek. He saw Jimmy before he heard him. When he got to Jimmy, he said, Jimmy was nearly hysterical, but not yet in such terrible pain that he couldn't speak. Jimmy tried to explain. He'd been up there picking wildflowers for his mother, who is bedfast, when something on top of the ridge came out of the woods at him."
    "An animal?'
    "No. Nothing animal or human. Just light, a brilliant ball of green light, and a wind. The wind was so powerful that it tore off all his clothes and blew him a dozen feet from. where he'd been standing. Custis found a few pieces of overall, some brass snaps. Nothing but rags."
    "Probably he sampled some mushrooms that gave him such a burning bellyache he thought—"
    "No, Sshamp, listen! Custis showed me the place where Jimmy liked to pick flowers for his mother. Everything is dead there, in an area nearly fifty feet across. Dead, ashen, leaves stripped from the trees, bushes withered and shrunken, the grass brown—not spring there but autumn, after cold comes, the killing frost."
    "Not unusual to find a small area like that inside a healthy stand of trees," Evvy pointed out. "Lightning does it."
    "But lightning causes burns, it blackens where it hits, even the skin of someone struck by lightning will turn black. Jimmy wasn't marked. I believe he was telling the truth about what happened to him. And it was nearly the same time as the wedding—"
    Nhora shifted her gaze and bared her teeth, dropping the wineglass. She uttered a yowl that unnerved me. Evvy and I looked at the French doors that opened onto a small terrace. A tall man stood just outside the doors staring boldly in at us. He was wearing a slicker and a dark slouch hat that dripped rain. There was enough light from the glow of candles within to illuminate his deep eyes, cruel but intelligent. He looked at Nhora and looked at me with a crooked smile that ran up one side of his face like an emblem of self-torture.
    When Evvy Wilkes's chair crashed backward to the floor, the intruder faded away. I got up more slowly. Evvy reached the doors in a couple of bounds and threw them open as General Bucknam came running from another part of the house. Both men went out into the rain. We heard voices and saw flashlights. Nhora sat very still, white in the face. I put a comforting hand on her arm.
    "Just a yokel, I think. A curiosity