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

it and wiped his mouth with a sleeve. "I'm not nuts about it, Fel, I'm just curious, that's all. I mean, he does it every day the minute the weather gets warm or it doesn't look like it's going to rain. Every day, like he was some kind of robot. And I never once—never once, I tell you—have seen one single kid playing there with those things."
    "Wrong," she said with a grin, pouring the congealed mixture into a four-gallon pot of'hot dark tea. "You're wrong, Art." She stirred the steaming liquid with a wooden spoon. "There've been some."
    "All right—some," he conceded. "But is it enough to—"
    "Oh, come on, drop it, Art," she said wearily, pushing him away from the stove. "Just drop it, all right? It's too hot and I'm too tired and whatever Cal Schiller wants to do with his own spare time is his own business. Right?"
    Well... maybe, he thought sourly, and spent the rest of the evening in front of the television, watching a ball game that didn't interest him, drinking the iced tea without tasting it, and wondering what in hell had happened to his life that it should be so boring, so empty, that he was forced into uncovering mysteries whose solutions were so obvious he didn't want to know them. Hell. A hundred years ago, when he was single, he would have challenged the heat and the summer and the month and the world. Now he only sat and pouted and didn't give a damn at all that the man who just slid into third base was so safe the umpire should have been lynched on the spot. Hell. And it wasn't until nearly midnight that Felicity finally teased him out of his sulking and into their bed.
    That night, shortly before dawn, old Ellie Nedsworth's Siamese tom died; her daughter found its left hind paw in the gutter, gouts of bloodstained tan fur scattered all over the street.
    Almost without realizing it, Art found himself emerging as the neighborhood's leader. He organized a block search for signs of a dog pack, spurred by reports—though vague and unsubstantiated—that one was in fact roaming through the village. There had been incidents of children being bitten after sunset, and at least two young runaways were thought privately to have been killed by the night-marauding animals. And though they were given every cooperation by Chief Stockton and the police, Art and his neighbors finally decided that Western Road, at least, was not being terrorized by something out of a B-movie's nightmare.
    There were, however, no alternatives given.
    "Great White Hunter," Felicity said when he finally returned home an hour past dark. "The stupid cat was hit by a car and dragged. Lord, Art, you've seen it before." She grinned and pushed a strand of hair back from her forehead. "The story really is that everyone here except Cal wants to be in Ellie's will when she dies."
    He opened his mouth to protest, saw the look on her face and grinned sheepishly. She could very well be right—about the cat. The other rumors were, as rumors tend to be, convenient, especially during a summer as boring as this one had turned out to be. And now that he looked back on it, tramping through gardens and vegetable patches, poking in alleys, and beating the brush around the pond in the park seemed more foolhardy than brave, far more romantic than practical. It was, he thought, almost as though he were actually wishing there was a pack so he could prove his manhood.
    Felicity took care of that, however, when she stripped off his trousers.
    But when they were done, entwined and dozing, he could not help listening to the night and imagining himself fending off a horde of slavering beasts with blood on their fangs and his name in their growls.
    The following day, as though in punishment for his imagination, was the first in a debilitating sequence marked by temperatures that remained well into the nineties. The bus was hot and stifling, the riders and driver cranky, and he and Felicity entered into another of their rounds o£ increasingly harsh bickering.
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