Elsinore Canyon by J. M. Read Free Book Online

said Marcellus.
    She opened her mouth, then froze. “Promise you won’t tell anyone else. Both of you.”
    “Of course I won’t.” “We won’t.”
    “Okay. It—”
    The damn room went black again and a voice—a whisper magnified a thousand times—seared the air. “DO NOT TELL.” The bitch hurt my ears.
    “God damn,” Marcellus groaned.
    “Dana.” My voice floating, disconnected. “Do you hear it?”
    “DO NOT TELL.” God damn it, turn it down.
    “She means it,” I said.
    “Who does?” said Marcellus.
    “The ghost—Mrs. Hamlet!”
    “Who’s she talking to?”
    The blackness faded. Or didn’t. I sat in growing horror as the walls and corners peeled into view. The blackness wasn’t going in a blink this time. It was—how could it be? It was pulling away from the outer edges of the room, gathering in on itself. Fingers and sheets of darkness rolled inward, across the carpet, the furniture, into itself, to form a small cloud, that finally condensed on the floor in the shape of something like a pile of clothes. Then I realized: that was Dana. She was balled up on the floor, covered by that black thing, that layer of horror. I yelled crazily and I was about to spring on her when the blackness lifted. It was a smoking cloud floating over her face. She huddled on the floor and looked up, her mouth wide with fear. Rage made me tingle. Why had I led her to that hellish thing? I was the guilty one. I had swam in a pool of terror that afternoon and then brought Dana down here to drown in it. “GO!” I shouted at the thing. It collapsed into a speck, and— pop —it was gone. I wheeled raggedly to grab hold of Dana.
    “It’s all right,” she panted as she pushed my hands away. “She deserves it. She deserves a hearing. I’m only scared because the truth is scary.” She dragged some damp strands off her forehead. “I know it’s strange, Horst, but you’ve always been fair with strangers. Just be fair with this one.” Still on the floor, she looked towards the roof again with wondering eyes. “They didn’t teach us everything in Catholic school.”
    “DO NOT TELL.”
    Dana staggered up. “All right!” One second, two, three, four, five. No more voices. “It’s all right.” She looked at me and Marcellus, weaving on her feet. “Never mind.”
    “Never mind what?” said Marcellus.
    “Whatever I was about to tell you. Which was nothing.” She reached down for her cloak, and toppled onto it as if she was drunk. She burst into cold laughter. “Things have been hard for me lately, guys!”
    I tried to wrap her up. “Are you hurt, baby?”
    “Dig it, Horst!” she laughed. “Me not talking to you for six weeks, how fucked is that? But I really was that ashamed, I was trying to figure out what I did wrong.”
    “You haven’t done anything to me.”
    “Then I’m desolated. I’m desolated if you didn’t miss me or feel betrayed.”
    “I missed you.”
    “I felt so undeserving. And now that all that time has passed and I realize I was so wrong—” She finished with another snort of crazy laughter.
    “What?” said Marcellus.
    “Things are about to get ten times worse.”
    I stretched my hands out to help her off the floor. “Dana—”
    “I’m telling you so you’ll know. Don’t raise any alarms about me. No straitjackets, no exorcisms. There’s so much that’s so wrong, and I’ve got to work out my own way to fix it.” Her voice hardened. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to swallow their happy pills.” She bunched up her cloak, took my hands, and got back to her feet with a shaky breath. “Let’s go.”
    It was all she would say. My heart was a spadeful of cold mud when I left for Santa Barbara at sunrise. I felt I was abandoning her. What had I done, bringing her to that thing? What had we all seen and heard, what had taken hold of Dana, what could more of those horrid visitations do to her? I was ready to fly to her the minute she called, to do anything she asked.