Poison Sleep by T. A. Pratt Read Free Book Online Page A

twenties, early thirties, probably a bit younger than Marla herself—except, of course, she had to be older—with a pleasant smile and startling violet eyes. Not exactly pretty, except for the eyes.
    “You’ll be safe here,” Genevieve said. She patted the bench beside her.
    Marla remained standing. “I didn’t realize I was in danger.”
    The woman cocked her head as though listening to something far away, and for a moment Marla thought she heard the distant strains of some pop song on a tinny radio, but then the wind snatched it away. “He’s passing by now, but you should probably wait a while.”
    “Who’s passing by?”
    “He…he’s dangerous,” she said. “He’ll hurt you. He likes that. Hurting women. You aren’t safe. I don’t mind giving you refuge. I owe you, after all; without you, I—” She broke off abruptly, touching her forehead in a chillingly familiar gesture. Marla’s mother had suffered from migraines, and she had touched her own forehead that way just before the bad ones started. “You helped me?” the woman said, more a question than a statement, more to herself than to Marla.
    “I don’t think so,” Marla said, but then a memory rose up, the sort of drifting blurry remembrance she associated with dreams. “Did I see you lying in the snow, just a little while ago?”
    “It never snows around me,” she said, still rubbing her forehead. “I don’t like snow. Bad things happen in the snow.”
    “Bad things happen everywhere.” Marla took off her coat and hung it over her arm. The heat here, gods! Like being back in Indiana at the height of humid summer, what her mother had called three-shower weather, because you needed to take at least that many showers a day just to feel clean.
    “You should go now, before I have a nightmare,” Genevieve said. “The danger’s past, you’ll live to see nightfall. You have to live, to help me, or…I’m not sure…it’s uncertain….” She shook her head. “This is going to be a bad one,” she said apologetically.
    The wind picked up, howling through the square, and this time it came cold, chilling the perspiration on her skin. Marla started to put her coat back on, but the wind tore it from her grasp and sent it flying into a tree. Genevieve held her hands up, as if to ward off something, her hair blowing across her face and hiding her features. Marla’s own hair, cropped short, gave her no such problems. She squinted into the wind, until all the leaves were torn from the fruit trees, whirling through the square, striking Marla in the face. She crouched, sitting on her heels and covering her face with her hands, until the leaves had all blown away. When she looked again, the canvas-covered buildings were rippling. Long tears appeared in the painted fabric, swelling slits that revealed blackness. The canvas shredded into tatters, streamers blowing out to reveal the frameworks underneath. These weren’t buildings at all, just skeletal constructions….
    Literally skeletal, Marla saw, and that chilled her more than anything else she’d seen in this place. Instead of steel girders or wooden beams, the buildings were made of bones, like macabre box kites. With the canvas torn aside, the white length of gigantic femurs and spines were exposed underneath, with bits of flesh clinging to the knobby ends. These buildings were built from the bones of giants and leviathans.
    Except they aren’t built from
anything.
They’re just manifestations of a poor sick woman’s mind.
Marla shouted, though her words were torn away by the violence in the air, “Genevieve! I can help you! Come with me, I’ll take you somewhere safe, back to your room—”
    Genevieve wailed into the still-rising wind.
    Marla looked beyond the square and saw a black tower in the center of the street, which had been empty before. The spire’s height disappeared into the heavens, and it cast a long shadow—a shadow that seemed to have as much substance as the