Tales from the Nightside by Charles L. Grant Read Free Book Online

he lifted a bundle from the pavement and placed it gingerly in the van.
    "Great way to start the day/' Felicity said from the doorway, arms folded loosely over her chest.
    "From what I can tell it was Kenner's setter," Art told her with a nod toward the people now slowly dispersing. "Looks like he ran into a big one this time, the dope."
    "Y'know, that's right in front of Calvin's house, Art. Why don't you go up and see if he knows what happened?"
    He shook his head without bothering to consider it, and Felicity shrugged before blowing him a kiss and vanishing inside. He stared a few moments longer—until the patrol car drove away—then slipped his hands into his pockets and headed for the bus stop three blocks distant. Later, he thought; maybe I'll see him later.
    Probably not.
    It wasn't that he didn't like Cal Schiller—they really didn't know each other well enough for feelings one way or the other—but the old man was part of a mystery Art did not think he could handle this early in the morning. Just as Felicity found the engine of their station wagon something akin to an alchemist's child, he could not help but puzzle over the territory Schiller had apparently claimed for himself.
    Not that there was anything unusually special about the mock English Tudor on the corner lot. It was like more than one other home in Oxrun Station, yet unlike any others. Its lawn was a carefully tended green, pocked with bee-luring clover in the spring, browning toward the end of September, and shaded by red maples and willows when the sun and rain worked properly. And, like every other lawn on Western Road, it was mowed by one of the high school students who worked the street for spending money during the summer.
    By the broad front stoop, however, was a gleaming blue tricycle, and beside that a silver skateboard elegantly designed for maximum speed. A large striped beach ball was generally set in the middle of the lawn, and down the side by the back corner was a sandbox nearly four by four that was always, as far as he could tell, covered with a bright red square of wet-shining canvas. A swing- and-slide set in the backyard, chrome and polished.
    Nothing at all out of place for Western Road in Oxrun Station in the middle of the summer.
    But Schiller, so far as Art understood, had never been married, had no nieces or nephews who descended on him for the weekend, nor went out of his way to lure the neighborhood children past the redwood picket fence. Yet every morning, as Art walked toward his bus stop, he could see the old man setting out the toys one by one, muttering to himself and smiling. Never looking up. Never waving a greeting.
    For no reason at all it spooked him. And for no reason at all, in the year since Schiller had moved in, he had not once found the courage to ask him straight out what he was doing. No reason at all.
    "I can't stand it," he told Felicity one evening in late August. It was a week after the Kenners' setter had been killed, two days after the boy who mowed Art's lawn was reported missing by his parents.
    "You can't stand what," she said, leaning back against the sink and putting her hands on her hips.
    "Calvin, that's what."
    "What, again?" She shook her head at his folly and pushed off to the stove where she was making enough iced tea to last them several days. As she sliced the lemons and squeezed the juice into a bowl already filled with sugar, orange rinds, and wedges of fresh plums, he sighed and left the table, stood beside her with an arm loosely around her waist.
    “All right," he said, "so it's crazy."
    "No. You are; it isn't."
    "Thanks a lot."
    She licked lemon juice off her fingers and shuddered. "I'm not the one who's nuts about an old man who just happens to like kids, you know. Would you like him better if he were something like a W.C. Fields? You want him, would it make you feel better if he chased the brats with a cane or something?"
    Art had his hand slapped for swiping a plum. He bit into