Gathered Dust and Others by W. H. Pugmire Read Free Book Online

to keep their smiles, I detected something secretive and unspoken in the way they tried not to look at me, the emotions they were determined to conceal.  I saw it, underneath their curving lips and in the shadows of their eyes.
    Young Carter blinked at me.  “Well, I promised you dinner.  Let us depart.  Will you join us, Julia?  No?  My dear, I never see you eat!  However do you nourish yourself?”
    “My art sustains me, Randy.”  She looked at him for one mysterious moment, and then she turned her eyes to mine, and I imagined that they contained some secret that I was somehow supposed to understand.
    IV.
    Our taxi brought us to my haunted house, and we sat for some few silent moments before I opened the door.  “Would you care to come in?”
    “That would be amazing!”  Randolph enthused, taking out a billfold and paying the driver.  We stood and watched the cab drive away, and then he turned to peer into the graveyard.  The moon was very high above us, and the wooded area of the cemetery and the forested hills beyond it swayed softly in the evening wind.  From somewhere among the trees or tombs something cried in eerie ululation.
    “That’s odd,” I spoke.  “I’ve never witnessed any birds in that place, day or night.”
    “Was it a bird?” asked the lad’s faraway voice.
    I shrugged and turned to walk the path to the porch steps, with Carter behind me as I climbed them to the door, although he paused momentarily to tilt his head and watch the gargoyle that Harrod had attached to the building’s roof.  I unlocked the door and waited for him to preceed me inside, and then I took his jacket and hung it on the coat rack.  “Come on into the library.  I’ll just pop into the kitchen; I have some excellent coffee.”  Entering the library, I motioned for him to either sit in one of the many comfortable chairs or prowl so as to study titles on the shelves that had been built into the walls; then I left him and went to the small kitchen, where I brewed coffee and selected a variety of cookies.  From some distant place outside I heard a repetition of an inhuman cry from Old Dethshill Cemetery, and as the coffee was brewing I opened the door leading outside and stepped onto the stone walkway.  I listened – and when the queer cry came again I parted my lips and uttered a replication of the sound.  The air seemed to grow a little chilly as the sky darkened and the earth rumbled faintly with some deeply buried hill noises beyond the field of death.  How strangely one’s imagination can play with one.  I imagined that night’s silence transmuted, became quiet yet attentive – like an animal observing its prey.  The bubbling of percolation came from the kitchen, and I returned inside and shut the antique door, yet I could not shake off a brooding sense of disturbance.  “How the horror writer’s imagination loves to spook itself,” I told the cookies, chuckling.  Preparing the tray, I picked it up and returned to the library, where I saw my guest return one book to a shelf and remove another.  He turned to glance at me as I set the tray on a small table, and then he opened the book.  We watched the particles of debris that fell from it to the floor.
    “That’s the third book I’ve opened that has dirt between the pages.  What the hell?”
    I shrugged.  “Both Harrod and Uncle Silas were wont to take books into the graveyard.”  I pointed to a framed newspaper photo on one wall of the horror host in ghoulish garb, posing with an edition of Blackwood as he perched upon a tombstone.  “I think perhaps one or both had a habit of sprinkling cemetery sod into the books.  It’s certainly strange.”
    Carter returned the book to its place on the shelf and sauntered about the room.  “There’s a lovely ambiance here, what with the soft light, the antique furnishings, and that delicious aroma of old books.  I can understand why you don’t like leaving this realm.  However,