Winter Tides by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

smell of gardenia blossoms on the night air and the sound of a moth fluttering against the lamp globe on the porch ceiling. The fog was heavy out on the yard and street. He sat forward, realizing that he must have been asleep for some time. He was cold despite his jacket, and the book he had been reading lay open on his lap.
    As ever, in his mind the last fragments of the dream fell away as the tide of sleep receded, but now he found himself still listening to a sound that came to him from out of the foggy night, like brush strokes on a drum skin at first, or like the soft pacing of someone dragging their shoe soles out on the wet sidewalk, and he knew that he had been listening to the pacing even in his dream, mixed up in the sound of the ocean and breaking waves. His heart raced with the realization, and he was instantly filled again with the certainty that something was pending, that something was about to be revealed to him.
    And then, as if she had in that moment appeared from within a veil of fog, a woman stood looking at him on the front walk, her features unfocused in the murk so that she seemed almost faceless, her dark amorphous clothing misty beneath the streetlamp. Her hair was long and black. Momentarily her features nearly coalesced in the heavy mist, and he was struck with the feeling of vague recognition, but then a window seemed to open in the fog, and just as quickly as she had appeared, she disappeared. He heard the footfalls scraping again on the wet sidewalk, but even they sounded dreamlike, as regular as a heartbeat, and abruptly they fell away, and the night was silent around him.
    He got up from the chair and descended the concrete porch steps to the front walk, and it seemed to him that there was cool air rising from the concrete like an upwelling of ocean water drawn to the surface by a passing wave. He smelled smoke on the wet night air, just a trace of it that lingered for a moment on the lanquid breeze and then was gone. The sidewalk and the street were empty. The street-lamps cast misty circles of yellow light on the curb and the grassy parkway. Moisture from the telephone lines dripped slowly onto the driveway, and now that he was out from under the shelter of the porch, he could hear waves breaking along the distant beach.
    To satisfy an uneasy curiosity, he walked toward the corner. The neighboring houses were dark, their porches and driveways empty. He crossed the street at the end of the block and continued on, heading down toward the ocean, which was six blocks away. It seemed to him that she must have disappeared in this direction, although he couldn’t quite say why, since she had merely vanished from where she had stood, and might just as easily have ascended into the clouds.
    The entire episode began to seem unreal to him, and it dawned on him that she might simply have been a waking hallucination, a trailing remnant of his dream. He turned around and headed home, realizing that he was merely chasing phantoms. It was time for bed—past time. His house loomed into view, the living room light shining out onto the porch. Through the screen door he could see his coffee cup on the table next to the couch. A folded-open copy of
Fine Woodworking
magazine lay on the floor alongwith the disassembled parts of an old wooden carpenter’s plane that he was restoring. He climbed the steps, picked his book up from the chair, and went inside the house, where he shut the door and bolted it. For a few more moments he peered out through the blinds, listening to the quiet night and watching the foggy, empty street.
    He walked to the library table that sat against the back wall of the room, opened the single drawer, and reached far into the back of it, in among a scattering of old photographs, finding the beaded bracelet that he had kept in the years since Elinor’s drowning. He couldn’t say why he hadn’t given it back to the drowned girl’s mother, to Elinor’s mother, that morning on the beach.