The Altar by James Arthur Anderson Read Free Book Online

your Dad on the radio this afternoon?”
    Todd suddenly looked up at him as if he’d just come back from another world. He looked into his father’s eyes for a long moment, and Erik realized that his eyes looked like those of a man, not a little boy. Then he spoke in a soft, trembling voice.
    “The stone bled.”
    “What?”
    “The giant stone. In the woods. I hit it with my hammer and...it bled. The stone bled.”
    Then he broke out in a fit of sobbing and returned to being a 10-year-old boy again. Vickie rushed to his side to hug him. She spoke soothingly, trying to calm him down.
    “Did you dream about a stone?” Erik asked.
    “No!” he said, meeting his father’s eyes. “It wasn’t a dream. It was real! The stone bled and it was real!”
    “It’s ok,” Vickie said. “Whatever happened, it’s over now. Come on. Let’s go to your room. I think you should get some rest.”
    Trembling with a dreadful nervousness of his own, Erik watched them go up the stairs.
    “Ever since he saw that damned Indian,” Erik muttered to himself.
    And as he remembered Dovecrest’s piercing, black eyes, the hair on his own back tingled with the electricity of fear.
    -2-
    Erik arrived at the radio station at 11:30, a half hour before he was scheduled to go on the air. An attractive blond receptionist ushered him into a small waiting room where he sat down and pretended to thumb through an old Time magazine.
    He found that he couldn’t concentrate on either the magazine or what he’d planned to say for the two-hour talk show. He was too worried about Todd.
    As if the kid’s terrifying experience hadn’t been bad enough, he’d managed to pick up a nasty cold as well, helped along, no doubt, by last night’s unseasonably cool and damp air. At least the boy had finally told Vickie what had happened—or what he thought had happened, because the story was too farfetched to be true. He’d claimed to have found a huge rock in the woods, right in the middle of an open field. The rock had “called out to him” somehow, and he’d hit it with his geologist’s hammer. Then, the thing had begun to bleed.
    Todd had screamed—which was what Erik had heard from the house—and had run off blindly into the darkness before the stone could get him. The kid was convinced that the thing was alive and was “after him,” as he said it, and would do something terrible to him once it caught him. The next thing he’d known, he had run straight into Johnny Dovecrest.
    The story had obviously been the product of his son’s overactive imagination, coupled with the beginnings of the cold he was now suffering from. The darkness and the eerie atmosphere were enough to frighten anyone. Dovecrest’s bizarre visit on the night they had moved in and his insistence that they hang up his magic talisman only added strangeness to the situation. And the tempered edge of the geologist’s hammer had been neatly broken off, which made Erik wonder what had happened out there.
    Still, the real problem wasn’t what Todd thought he had seen. The problem was that the kid believed it, despite its impossibility, and the belief triggered the fear. When Erik looked into his son’s eyes he had seen his terror, seen his belief in that horrible vision. Nothing either he or Vickie could say would change that belief or eliminate his irrational fear. No amount of explanations would satisfy him—according to Todd it had happened and that was all there was to it. And before he had left home, Erik noticed that Vickie had hung Dovecrest’s charm on the back door.
    Erik sighed. He doubted that his son had slept for even a single hour last night—and God only knew if he’d be able to sleep tonight.
    Well, at least it happened during the summer and not in the middle of the school year, he thought. Still, if things didn’t improve, his son would be a prime candidate for counseling.
    The sound of an opening door interrupted his thoughts as Steve Harvey, the WKRI talk