The Dead Room by Heather Graham Read Free Book Online Page B

here with the kids,” the husband said.
    â€œYou might notice that the street is pretty deserted,” Joe said politely.
    â€œAre you a cop?” the wife asked.
    â€œI was.”
    â€œI read in the newspaper that there have been unexplained disappearances in this area,” the wife said.
    â€œAre we prostitutes?” the husband hissed.
    â€œI want to go,” the wife insisted.
    They moved on, looking back now and then to see that they weren’t being followed.
    â€œCatch a taxi down the block—they’ll be going north,” Joe called.
    Then he put the house and its memories behind him and started down the street in the opposite direction, shrugging his shoulders, as if he could shrug away the feelings that seized him every time he came to Hastings House.
    Strange. He felt as if the house itself were beckoning to him.
    As if something—some one? —inside was calling him back, unwilling to let him go.
    He gritted his teeth and moved on. He wasn’t given to fantasy. The real world was tough enough.
    Still, he stopped halfway down the block and stared back at the house. Then, almost angrily, he moved on.
    A house simply could not call out to him, as if asking for some kind of help….

3
    I t was evening when they arrived at Hastings House. To the left there was a large pit, along with the partially demolished miniskyscraper that was being torn down to be replaced by a megabuilding. Downtown was coming back in a big way.
    To the right—beyond a narrow expanse of grass, the only evidence that there had once been many residences in the area—stood an office building/apartment complex built in the 1940s. The sun was falling, and, if Leslie narrowed her vision, she could almost imagine what this very small spot in the world might have looked like in the past.
    But then she began to hear the angry beeping of horns, the sudden blare of rap music, a shout, the click of heels on pavement…this was, after all, New York. Even on a lazy Sunday afternoon, this was the piece of granite where so many people had decided they had to live. The center of the universe, in the minds of so many. She smiled. With all its sins and dirt and mixture of good and evil, she loved the city. Rebel she might be, but she loved New York.
    And it was good to be back.
    â€œHey!” the cabbie interjected, breaking her thoughts. With an accent only on the single syllable, she wasn’t sure just what part of the world his speech denoted. “Somebody gonna pay me?”
    â€œOh, yes, right,” Professor Laymon said. Leslie didn’t even turn around. She felt Brad at her shoulder as she stared at Hastings House. What would it offer up to her now? Now that she was who she was—now that she was changed?
    She felt Brad’s hand on her shoulder. “It’s a house,” he said softly. “But if you’re the least bit uneasy, there’s no reason on earth for you to stay here.”
    She turned, smiling at him. “I want to stay here.”
    â€œIt won’t bring Matt back to life.”
    â€œI know,” she said, looking back toward Hastings House.
    The house was beautiful. Two stories high, and all the outer over-the-centuries additions had been ripped away and its facade had been restored to the Colonial-era style in which it had been originally built. Even downtown, there were few buildings to compare with it, other than St. Paul’s Cathedral and Fraunces Tavern. It had been given a white-picket fence—higher than it would have been when the house was built, and even as the sun set, the alarm wires around it were visible. A sign on the gate advertised the house’s historical importance, and announced visiting times and admission prices.
    It looked just as it had the last time she had come here.
    The damage from the blast and fire had been repaired.
    And since it was Sunday, after five, there were no lingering tourists. The horn blasts and