Darkness by John Saul Read Free Book Online Page A

or a fresh coat of paint on whatever had started looking shabby. By now it was simply assumed that Michael would be the last to leave, and that whatever anyone else forgot to do, he would take care of.
    For Michael, the job was the closest thing he could imagine to paradise.
    He’d always known there was something different about him, something that separated him from the other kids.
    At first, when he was Jenny’s age, he’d tried to be like them, tried to join in the spontaneous play of the rest of the children his age.
    But his classmates seemed to sense that Michael was somehow different, and as he’d grown up, he had yet to make a genuine friend, yet to find one single person whom he felt he could tell about the peculiar emptiness that yawned inside him like a vast chasm threatening to swallow him up.
    Over the years, he’d learned to pretend that he was like everyone else, laughing at the other kids’ jokes, pretending to have emotions he didn’t quite feel.
    And as long as he could remember, he’d been fascinated with the swamp and everything in it. By the time he was ten, and he’d begun to accept the fact that he was never going to make any real friends, he started going out into the wilderness by himself, poking around among the bayous, watching the animals and identifying the plants. To him, there’d never been anything frightening about the marshes and bogs, nor had he ever gotten lost. Although he knew that for most people the waterways—and the endless tiny islands they surrounded—were a confusing, even frightening, maze, he saw each island as an individual. He knew every bend in the bayous.
    Now, thanks to his father, he was being paid to spend even more time in the swamp, with its profusion of fascinating wildlife.
    This evening he’d decided to go frog hunting. The big bullfrogs were peaking this time of year, and he’d already set up a terrarium to hold half a dozen large ones. If he was lucky, he might even still find an egg mass. Then he would be able to set up an entire life-cycle exhibit. Taking a large bucket with a mesh cover, and a flashlight, he got into a rowboat and set out, handling the oars expertly and silently, so that the little boat slid through the swamp without disturbing anything around it. Within a few minutes the dense vegetation closed around him, and his ears throbbed with the soft symphony orchestrated by the insects and frogs that teemed in the wetlands.
    Then, slowly, he began to hear another sound, a sound that seemed to beckon to him. Obeying the call that drifted out of the swamp’s depths, he pulled a little harder on the oars.
    The boat slid faster through the water …

    Kelly sprawled across the bed in her new room and stared for a moment at the large fan that turned slowly above her. Enjoying the feel of its breeze on her skin, she looked around the room once more, still scarcely able to believe it was hers. It had windows on three sides, and her very own bathroom in one corner. And the best part was that there were two doors—one leading to the rest of the house, the other opening onto a small deck with a flight of stairs down to the backyard. Her grandfather had told her that it was supposed to be a guest room, but since it had turned out that he rarely had guests, he’d decided it should be hers. “Girls yourage need their own bathroom,” he’d told her. “That way you can spread all your junk around without getting in anyone’s way. But no sneaking out at night,” he’d added, glancing meaningfully toward the door to the deck. “I wouldn’t want your mom to make me nail that shut.”
    Kelly had blushed, wondering if her grandfather had actually been able to read her mind, and promised him she wouldn’t.
    Not that it was a promise she intended to keep, since she’d been going out in Atlanta whenever she felt like it for two years now. Of course, so far it didn’t look like there was anything to do in Villejeune anyway. As they’d come