Shiver by Michael Prescott Read Free Book Online Page A

should never listen to the news. The things that went on today were too awful. It was better not to know.
    Still, she couldn’t help thinking about that killer. His three victims had all been women in their twenties or thirties, and they had all lived on the Westside—her part of town. Unconsciously her hand strayed to her neck, as if feeling her head to confirm that it was still attached.
    She reminded herself to double-check the locks on her front door and windows before she went to bed tonight. Of course, she always double-checked them anyway.
    A sign marking the Avenue of the Stars glided into view. Flashing her directional signal, she turned right. She checked the dashboard clock. Eight-forty-seven. She would make it easily. Not that it would be any big deal if she were a few minutes late. Except she hated being late, because she always made such profuse apologies for it. She couldn’t seem to help herself.
    “God, what a wimp,” she said aloud, sighing.
    She wished she weren’t so ... so damn timid. She wanted to be strong and confident and free, yet it seemed she felt safe only when alone in her apartment with the door locked, huddled in her hidey-hole like a rabbit in its den. The city scared her; it was so big, so loud, so full of senseless violence—like that serial killer with his hacksaw and his heads. But she couldn’t fool herself, couldn’t place all the blame on L.A. and its craziness. She’d grown up in the suburbs of Cincinnati, and she had been afraid there, too.
    A headache was coming on. Suddenly the car was stuffy and too warm. She thumbed a button on the dash, and fresh air jetted through the vents, cooling her face. She felt a little better. But the bad thoughts, the unwanted, unkind, unsparing thoughts, still pressed in on her.
    She was afraid of life. It was that simple. Her fear had stunted her, crippled her, cut her off at the knees and left her half a person, an invalid wary of human contact, shunning closeness and intimacy, avoiding love or simple friendship. So she’d learned to live through books and videocassette movies and crappy TV shows, which offered an escape of sorts—but she knew they were an escape to nowhere, a dead end.
    For the most part she could brush aside that knowledge and go on sleepwalking through her days; but sometimes, late at night, when darkness had fallen like a hush over the earth and she lay awake, unable to sleep, in an apartment that had become a cage of shadows, her mind turned restlessly to the life she wasn’t living, the chances left untaken and the things left undone, the years of her youth passing by, never to be hers again. She would press her face to the pillow and listen to the slow rhythms of jazz playing low on her bedside radio, a lonely saxophone crying for her in its mournful voice, as she thought of the city beyond her four walls, the great sprawling expanse of lighted streets and glass towers, of nightclubs where couples danced till the sky ran red with dawn, of neon signs aglow with promise, beckoning her—all the mysteries and wonders of this city she hadn’t dared to know. She felt old on those nights; she knew the hollowness of a life lived only in dreams.
    Those bad nights would pass, as would the nagging sense that she was living her life with blinders on, imposing a kind of tunnel vision on herself, moving through the blur of her days without risking a glance at anything she hadn’t seen before. But the fear, the constant tension twisting her gut, would remain.
    How long could she continue this way? How many more years would she waste, hiding from the world, eating dinner alone and talking to herself and watching too much TV? Would she still live as she did now when she was forty? When she was sixty? Was this the shape the rest of her life would take?
    “No,” Wendy whispered, chilled by the thought. “No, I won’t let it be like that.”
    She sat up straight at the wheel. A wild notion seized her. She would not go to work