Spirit by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

your loss,’ he told mommy. Then he said, ‘Wonderful house.’
    â€˜Thank you,’ said mommy.
    Father came up and said, ‘Glad you could make it.’
    â€˜Wonderful house,’ Humphrey repeated.
    â€˜Seventeen-sixty-one,’ said father.
    â€˜As much as that? I thought Connecticut prices were coming down.’
    â€˜Excuse me?’ said father.
    Outside, in the snow, more cars were silently arriving, in plumes of exhaust. Big black Buick Eights and Chrysler Imperials and Packard sedans, nose to tail. There was a sporadic slamming of doors, and then the funeral guests began to make their way towards the house. Elizabeth and Laura had to stay in the hallway to greet them, while Seamus collected their coats and hung them up. Seamus was seventeen with carroty hair and a face like one of his mother’s rising loaves. Mommy said that Seamus had been stricken with meningitis when he was six, which had left him fanciful and odd; but Mrs Patrick said that he had been kidnapped by leprechauns for a month or two, that was all, and that when the leprechauns had brought him back he had seen sights and danced dances that no human being had ever seen or danced before, and that was what made him the way he was.
    Elizabeth liked him and didn’t mind it when he sat in the corner listening intently while she read
The Snow Queen
, but she was always a little afraid of him. He would say things like, ‘Brilliant umbrella, sir,’ over and over again. Or, ‘Forward with fences, that’s what I say, forward with fences.’ Or else he would quote whole pages of
The Snow Queen
, with extraordinary emphasis, like somebody speaking in Finnish. Laura adored him and thought that he spoke just as much sense as anybody else.
    At a quarter to eleven, father told Elizabeth to close the door, because everybody was feeling the draught. The living-room was crowded with guests, and the fires were crackling, and Seamus was taking round trays of sherry and cheese straws.
    Just as she was about to close the door, Elizabeth saw a whale of a Cadillac arriving through the snow. It parked a little way away from the rest of the cars, and for two or three minutes there was no sign of anybody climbing out. ‘Lizzie!’ her father called her. ‘Close the door now, will you, for goodness’ sake?’
    â€˜Somebody’s coming,’ said Elizabeth.
    Her father came up behind her and peered through the crack in the door. The snow was falling so furiously that it was almost impossible to see anything at all. The door of the Cadillac opened and a stocky wide-shouldered man in a wide-brimmed hat climbed out, and started to trudge to the house.
    â€˜Well, I’ll be damned,’ said her father, and he never, ever said ‘I’ll be damned’, at least not in front of her. ‘It’s Johnson Ward.’
    â€˜Who’s Johnson Ward?’ asked Elizabeth.
    Her father laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘A writer, sweetheart. You’ve met him before but you probably don’t remember. He’s one of the greatest writers that ever was, in my opinion. He wrote a very famous book called
Bitter Fruit.
’
    Elizabeth didn’t know what to say about that. She had met a few writers – a nervous, chainsmoking young man called Ashley Tibbett, who had written some essays about rural life in the Litchfield Hills, books so skinny that they looked as if they didn’t have any pages between their covers. And Mary Kenneth Randall, a serious, harsh-voiced woman with thick ankles and thick sombre clothes and hair like a scouring-pad, who had written two huge novels about objectivism, whatever that was.
    But as far as Elizabeth had been able to tell, writers didn’t care for children very much. Writers talked about nothing except themselves, and they seemed to regard children as competition. Ashley Tibbett hadn’t even been able to look at them, and Mary Kenneth Randall had