Leave the Living by Joe Hart Read Free Book Online Page B

his mature mind when he’d discovered art and come up with the idea of creating it within everyday objects and surfaces. There had been no warnings or significance to the pictures he saw over the years, just random lines forming landscapes or the gentle curve of a figure where others only saw blotches of paint. But the face within the heating element stirred something inside him. It shifted there like a snake curling itself comfortable in the bowels of some dead thing.
    All at once, the fish house walls were too close, the air too warm. He needed to get out, out of the cloistering space that darkness had set claim to. With trembling fingers, he found his father’s coat and shrugged it on, pausing only to button the first several snaps. He fumbled with the gloves and almost left them there when he dropped one, sure if he tarried much longer in the dark, the glow would return to the cooling element on its own, the face rising into life to stare out at him with unbridled malice. Mick struggled to find the zipper to the door and finally closed his fingers around it, tearing it upward in relief.
    The air struck him and washed away the warmth like a cold douse of water. It peeled the heat from him and sent it sprawling away in the clutches of the wind. Even in the short time that he’d been inside the fish house, the day had drawn down even more, the light in the west barely a veiled glow of gray behind the skeletal trees. He made to take a step forward and stopped, gazing through the blowing snow at the encrusted ice.
    The wind had washed his tracks into mere depressions like some bleached ocean licking at a pale beach. He could see his trail that spanned the gap between where he’d moved the house from its old location and to where it sat now. But that wasn’t what froze him where he stood as if the temperature had suddenly plummeted a hundred degrees.
    A second set of tracks lay beside his own, much fresher and more distinct, as if whoever had walked there had done it only seconds ago. The prints came toward him and ended at the door of the fish house in two deeply set holes. There were no tracks leading away.
    And it was only after the shock had receded of seeing the prints that he realized whoever had made them was barefoot.

 
     
     
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    The wind shoved at his face, trying to hold him back, to keep him on the lake. Mick struggled against it, his lungs burning, mouth open as he sucked the freezing air in.
    The tracks followed alongside his own as if someone had walked next to him, unseen, the entire way. They didn’t deviate where he’d stopped and muddled the snow at the first location of the fish house but instead continued in a straight line to where the hut sat now. He told himself, as he hurried in the direction of the house, that no man could withstand the touch of snow and ice against his bare feet for the length that the tracks stretched. He had repeated this fact over and over as he traced their depressions, clearly seeing the individual toe marks in front of the sole. He had even stopped to call out several times into the frigid tempest, his voice lost in the whirling eddies of snow, drowned out by the storm’s overpowering scream. But when the steps became farther and farther apart, much longer than the stride any man could take, he began to run.
    Mick tried not to look at the prints as he rushed toward the nearing bank, its trees emerging from the curtains of snow, their branches shushing in the wind, almost seeming to tell him to quiet his assumptions, to calm his fear, but it did nothing to slow his pace. He pelted onward, not looking down now and running like something pursued him. Maybe something did.
    The trees loomed over him, and he jogged past their reaching branches, snow tossing up from his boots as he ran. The hill leading up to the house looked impossibly tall. Adverse to his impression of it when he’d arrived, the slope now seemed to go on forever and he was a