The Painted Darkness by Brian Keene, Brian James Freeman Read Free Book Online Page A

branches, which smacked at him like the heavy fists of the biggest bully at school.
Then his memories collided with a wall of darkness.
Henry rolled over, blinking until the blurry winter light stopped spinning. He was deep in the snow bank at the base of the tree. He stared into the gray and blue sky, bewildered, watching the clouds gliding to the east.
Henry had lost his gloves somewhere along the way, and his entire body ached, and his heart was racing, and he was breathing hard—and best of all, he was alive!
Henry spotted the jagged hole in the floor of the tree house high above. He thought about the skeleton he had imagined for a moment, the one wearing a yellow rain slicker and boots. He slipped his hand into his pocket and touched the necklace. The cool metal kissed his sweaty flesh. That, at least, had been real.
There was something else, too, from before the fall. Something beyond the clearing. Something moving, darting through the bushes.
Rabbits! Henry thought, pushing himself to his knees and climbing out of the snow THE PAINTED DARKNESS
mound that had miraculously broken his fall and saved his life.
    Henry started across the clearing, moving slowly at first, gingerly testing his legs to confirm they were okay. He felt a warm wetness on his face; he touched the cut above his eye. He dug into his pocket where his mother always stuffed a couple of tissues so he could blow his nose instead of sniffing, a bad habit he hadn’t broken yet. He dabbed at the wound as he approached the edge of the clearing.
    Henry pushed through the bushes and stepped onto a narrow path near where he had seen the hundreds of rabbits. The sight had been surreal and beautiful. There was no sign of them now, but their tracks remained in the freshly fallen snow.
    Ahead of Henry was uncharted territory. He had never traveled in this direction before and he had no idea what might be waiting for him.
    Henry studied the path, a snowy opening between the bushes and the trees. He remembered the warnings about the dangers of the forest and traveling alone. Bad things could happen to little boys who wandered off the marked trail. He had heard the stories.
    But those rabbits….
Henry closed his eyes and saw them again. He wanted to discover where they had been headed in such an organized group. And why?
Yes, the forest could be dangerous, but he had survived that amazing fall, right? What could be worse than that? How could there possibly be anything more dangerous than that?
Henry glanced back at the dilapidated tree house, then turned and followed the rabbit tracks deeper into the woods.
THE PRESENT (7)
Into the Cellar Again
W

hen Henry returns to the kitchen, the
    house is eerily void of the strange sounds he heard earlier. He doesn’t go straight for the cellar door, though. He wants to get something to light the way…and maybe a weapon, too, in case one of the rats is rabid.
    Henry removes the child safety lock on the cabinets under the kitchen sink. There are cleaners and rags and sponges, along with a heavy Mag-Lite. There are no real weapons in the house. He grabs the flashlight and relocks the cabinets—ever mindful of the need to keep the cleaners and poisons locked away from Dillon’s curious hands—and then he makes his way to the cellar door.
    Henry pushes the door open, peeks around the corner into the darkness. He hears nothing. He sees nothing but the dark. The glow of the flashlight he dropped earlier is gone.
    He points his Mag-Lite to cut through the gloom, illuminating a small patch of the dirt floor. He moves slowly down to the cellar, one step at a time, carefully listening and watching.
    When Henry reaches the third step from the bottom, he quickly crouches and uses the Mag-Lite to search the cellar. The boiler is dark, silent. The other flashlight has been pushed into the far corner. The lens and bulb are shattered and coated with blood.
    The blood is not human.
Surrounding the broken flashlight, littering the base of