Lords of Salem by Rob Zombie Read Free Book Online

still were the old saltboxes from the colony’s early years, high on one side and low on the other, with very few windows, and these filled with a series of small diamond-shaped panes. On these streets, you could see the whole history of Salem’s past and imagine the original colonizer standing shoulder to shoulder with their descendants, and could even convince yourself, if you were standing in the right place, before the right house, that the past was not past after all.
    There was little about the house on the outside to suggest what Heidi Hawthorne’s apartment looked like on the inside, or to give any clue to the kind of person she was. Outside it seemed a typical mid-Victorian house on a quaint street in this perfectly maintained and varied historic neighborhood, though this particular house was slightly less perfectly maintained than the others around it. The white paint had faded and the drab green shutters gave the house a less vibrant feel than the others. It wouldn’t be long before the paint started to peel and the landlord would be paid a visit from the Salem Historical Society, reminding her that a responsibility to the community came with owning a historical home and encouraging her to properly maintain it unless she wanted a fine.
    Inside, Heidi’s apartment was anything but historic. The wall behind her bed was covered with a mural of a wasted-looking Keith Richards, with Richards leaning against a sign proclaiming “Patience Please. A Drug Free America Comes First!” The bed was overwhelmed with pillows, with the blankets disarranged and curled up around her.
    She was lying facedown in it. Her hair was bleached white and dreadlocked and hid her face. Her slender bare body was covered with vibrant tattoos, a swirling water scene complete with fish and octopi crawling in a sleeve up one arm. The other arm was all skulls, outlined in black and rendered gold, chewing on one another and deliberately smearing into one another. An image of leathery,tattered bat wings ran along her shoulders and hung folded down her back.
    Her dad would probably roll over in his grave if he had a chance to see her tattoos. Her mother told her this sometimes—not to be mean, really; she just couldn’t help herself. And perhaps because she thought that it might keep Heidi from getting more tattoos. The first one she’d gotten she’d kept hidden from her mother for weeks, only wearing long-sleeved shirts when around her, but then her mother and she had accidentally crossed paths downtown and that was it. And her mother had been more upset that Heidi had hidden it than about the tattoo itself, so Heidi stopped hiding it. Though there were things she still hid from her mother.
    But I wasn’t a bad kid , Heidi thought. No, she’d been pretty much normal, maybe slightly geeky at first, but that all had changed as she got older and grew into her looks. Over the course of her freshman year, she went from being the kind of girl who didn’t get noticed to the kind of girl who got almost too much attention. Yet the way it happened made her mistrust it, made her always think that it was just a fluke and that from one day to the next people could stop paying attention to her again.
    When the clock radio clicked on, blasting metal, Heidi roused herself and rolled over long enough to turn down the volume. Her body was svelte yet shapely. She hadn’t bothered to wash off her dark eye makeup from the night before and it had run a little.
    She reached over and turned the alarm off and then pulled herself up to a sitting position. On the bedside table was a pair of cat’s-eye glasses, which for a second her hand groped for and then found and put on.
    She sighed. Another long night. She’d planned to have just one drink and then come home, go to bed early so she’d be up and rested by the time she had to go to her shift at the radio station late in the day. And now it was already midafternoon. She remembered the one drink, but then