Ask the Dark by Henry Turner Read Free Book Online Page B

them mittens with me, and I pulled’m out’n threw’m crost the room, laughing at how dumb I was, going in a house and finding all them jewels, and coming out with just a pair of old mittens.

Chapter Nine
    I dreamed all night about being in that house and that dark clump of a man crouched down just a yard from me, him on his knees and them jewels in ’s hands shining through even though there weren’t no light. Gave me the horrors like I never known. Marvin was right to worry ’bout me slippin’, and that’s what I’d done, slipped so bad I almost got caught, which with everything else going on right then really would have done me. ’Cause if I’d got caught, who gonna make the forty-eight thousand?
    So the next few weeks I mowed lawns every day just to keep my ass out’f trouble. Some days I went out on jobs with Richie Harrigan, hauling things, and I also went around with a boy I know, Sam Tate, who got a paper route and don’t mind if I take over for him now and again. Every day I was at houses asking for work, ’specially old houses and beat-up ones, and ones that ain’t never been cleaned or cleared, so’s when I come to the door I could say to who answered just what work I could do for’m. And what with also making deliveries with Marvin and driving round with Richie, I was all over the neighborhood, seeing every house around, more than any cop or even one’f them government agents they said was going door to door. But I weren’t making nobody nervous askin’ questions ’bout Tommy Evans and Tuckie Brenner, and getting’m all on edge like maybe they was suspected, ’cause I ain’t no cop, that’s for damn sure. I was just asking for work, but doing that every day I saw hundreds of houses, and also peeked around sly when nobody was looking, trying to see if there was anything extra around I might grab if the time was right, you get me?
    Another thing I done was keep my eye out where stores was, ’specially when I was out near downtown with Richie. I was lookin’ for places that might be good for settin’ up my daddy’s fruit stand, hopin’ if I could find a place good and cheap Daddy’d get excited and maybe start to plan it for real.
    But this all come to something else, too. ’Cause later on, when I really started trying to find out who took them boys, I thought about all them weeks I’d spent looking for work, and things that didn’t mean much then started risin’ up different and darker than I’d known when I first seen’m.
    Lookin’ for work was harder than you might think, ’cause a lot of them folks I asked thought I was foolin’, me being the same boy who maybe they caught a year back soapin’ their car or chuckin’ eggs, or thought maybe I’d lifted something off their porch or outta their garage, which sometimes was true and sometimes not. But I went ahead and asked all the same, ’cause I needed that money and didn’t care how embarrassed I got. Felt good keeping busy, some days going at it twelve hours, not stopping till I was fall-down tired. I didn’t think nothing ’bout what I seen that night in the dark house, days went by and it all slipped my mind, till even the scare went away.
    Then come a day when it all came back to me, even stranger than it was before.
     
    One house I knew needed work was the big old place down Church Lane, that dead end off Denton Avenue, and I went over there thinking that house ain’t had its gutters cleaned for years ’cause the lady living there never went out the house and had Marvin bring her drugs and groceries, both.
    End of Church Lane is where the woods begin and there’s that big hill behind the house all covered with scraggly bushes and busted trees like after a storm. House is the one that’s all gray, with them towers coming off the roof shaped like cones, and they’re black, and the shingles ain’t just flat and square but shaped in little round chips and sort of pretty, and the whole house would be pretty too