The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree by S. A. Hunt Read Free Book Online Page B

my mother this morning), and let myself in. To my chagrin, the power bill had been due when my father passed, and so it went unpaid and now the electricity was off.
    I was standing in the foyer, a cavernous front room where a flight of stairs curled along one wall to a balcony overhead.
    I swept the cellphone over the accumulations of an old man’s lifetime as I forayed deeper into the house, walking past an antique grand piano into the living room. The faint smell of habitation came to me, the camphor of cough drops and the dank, sweet yeast of age. There, a sofa with an avocado-green linen slipcover tempted me with its soft embrace.
    I refused and kept moving, past my grandfather’s roll-top desk and the Magnavox boob-tube with foiled rabbit ears. I went into the kitchen, passing between bookshelves crammed with names.
    Simmons, Lumley, Barker, Koontz and King epics and haunters. Ragged decades of National Geographic, appliance manuals. Ludlum, Grisham, and Clancy thrillers. Obscure horror and fantasy from the 70s and 80s. My light passed over the spines of the books and a wistful frisson marched up my spine at the sight of so many recognizable pseudonyms.
    The kitchen was spotless in relation to the rest of the house. The air was pungent with an acrid citrus aroma. My mother must have cleaned it after I’d left. Dry dishes were piled in the drain, silverware gleaming in my searchlight.
    The fridge was empty, the door ajar.
    There was an open padlock on the cellar door, installed years ago to keep me from taking a header down the stairs (as a child, of course). The key didn’t work on it, so I opened the door and made my way down the creaky steps into the damp darkness of the basement.
    The floor was painted with some gray sealant that kept the cellar dry and clean, so there wasn’t much of an odor. I turned this way and that, looking for locks that might perhaps fit the key now resting in my pocket. A chest freezer stood open to my immediate left, devoid of contents, dry and warm.
    I felt a small twinge of guilt at not participating in the clean up, which I would have done, had I gotten to Blackfield soon enough. I continued investigating the cellar, wondering who my mother had gotten to help.
    In a back wall, beyond a minefield of heirlooms, furniture, and dubious appliances, was a padlocked door. I picked my way through the silent forest of chair legs, cheap paintings, space heaters older than the kids working at Jackson’s, and shuffled between a decrepit bookshelf and a very dirty armoire until I stumbled into a small space littered with dead pillbugs and cottony cobwebs.
    The key did not work on the padlock. I sighed in disappointment. What was I even doing? What made me come looking for a lock, anyway? What was I looking for?
    Was it some Great Secret, some hidden inspiration, some foul and lurking deed that my father had hidden away from the world for decades until I came along and dragged it screaming and kicking into the light of day? My deformed twin brother, locked in some dank oubliette behind a bag of Christmas decorations and my father’s teetering collection of funk vinyl and issues of Hustler 1987-1994?
    I sneezed, bracing myself against the door, and noticed that the padlock wasn’t locked, just inserted into the hasp and rusted solid. I twisted it, jerking it this way and that, until it broke in a shower of corroded brown steel. An eldritch breath of cold, wet air seeped through the crack like fog creeping over the ground in some old-timey vampire movie.
    I pulled the door open and shined the cellphone inside.
    A crawlspace full of white mildew, dirt, and rotten material. I could see the underside of the front porch and the retaining wall that ran the exterior length of the platform overhead. I forced the door shut and turned around, and screamed like I’d been goosed.
    I was not prepared for the shock of turning around and finding myself standing face to face with Hugo Award nominee Ed