The Devil of Echo Lake by Douglas Wynne Read Free Book Online

tremulous.
    Buff laughed and slapped him on the back. “Over here.”
     
    *  *  *
     
    Allison sang the theme from the Twilight Zone after Jake told her the story. They were getting ready to leave the apartment for a night on the town, inspired by a blurb in the local paper that described the annual costume parade followed by fireworks over the cemetery. A town of artists and alternative health practitioners transplanted from New York City, Echo Lake was serious about its pagan holiday. Jake found this a little ironic considering what their forebears had done to the local witch just a few generations ago, but times had changed—so much so that the church was now a studio.
    “He was definitely playing with you,” Allison said. “A little Halloween fun at the new guy’s expense.”
    “You'd think,” said Jake, “but I really did hear the piano.”
    “Couldn’t there have been someone else there? Like that runner, Brent? Someone sitting under the piano, playing the note you heard, and then laying low while Buff spooked you out.”
    “I don’t think so. There was no place to hide up there.”
    “Well then, it must have been the naked witch,” she said, wide eyed and deadpan. “Didn’t that guy Occam say that the sexiest explanation is the most likely?”
     
    *   *   *
     
    The streets were crawling with children in masks and makeup, and while there were a handful of plastic costumes from the local drug store, the majority were homemade efforts, some profoundly creative. There was a girl draped in black veils through which a network of tiny white Christmas lights twinkled (Look, she’s the night sky!) and another who wore a framed canvas replica of The Scream by Munch, with a hole cut out for the child’s face.
    Jake and Allison went in their street clothes as spectators. It was a night that burned itself into Jake’s memory like a double-exposed photograph—a strange juxtaposition of impressions. Child ghosts draped in shimmering cloaks of translucent metallic fabric and parents wearing skull and ghoul face paint illuminated for a half a second among the tombstones and oak trees by the green fire of sparks falling slowly to earth through drifting clouds of smoke.
    Stop-motion war-zone visions of dime-store zombies running on the dewy grass over the real dead, the smells of gunpowder, lilac, and marijuana on the breeze. And in the midst of this dreamscape, the taste of his girl, here with him, more precious than ever, no longer a partner of convenience in a college town, but starting a life with him in this, their new home.
    By the time Jake's head hit the pillow at the end of the night, the ghost of Olivia Heron seemed like one more imaginary specter in a town crawling with them.
     

 
     
     
    Four
     
     
    Billy sat across a table from his high school buddy and ex-drummer Johnny Russo in a smoky corner of Angelica’s, Johnny’s restaurant in Babylon, home town of WBAB, the classic rock station they used to listen to in Johnny’s van in what now seemed like another life. Billy had stopped in just before closing time. The place was empty, except for the kid washing dishes beyond the brick archway with the batwing doors a few feet from their table.
    Billy tapped his cigarette into the glass ashtray at his elbow and asked, “How’s Angie?”
    “She’s good. I’ll tell her you asked. I’m awful sorry about your Dad, Billy.”
    “Thanks. We got the flowers you sent. Made me realize I have one true friend.”
    “You home for a while?”
    “No, I have to head upstate tomorrow, to a studio up there. I’m gonna rent a car and take in the fall colors on the way up. Driving helps me clear my head.”
    “Yeah? How is your head? I don’t know what it’s like to lose a parent so I can’t say I know what you’re going through, but I imagine it’s especially hard when it happens without any time to prepare.”
    “Yeah. He, uh, had one heart attack before this one—two years ago—and my mom got