You Will Never See Any God: Stories by Ervin D. Krause Read Free Book Online Page B

better. It was a kind of contest now, a contest of wits and observation that it had not been before. He caught his breath and then doubled back, and turned and went down the hill away from both the Stark place and his own, making firm tracks, and when he reached the bottom where there were trees and grass, he walked carefully and lightly up to theroad, and then crossed the road, brushing out his tracks behind him. After he crossed the road he was in their own pasture again, and he walked quickly up the hill to the house.
    He did not go down to the Stark place for several days after that, but finally something drove him back; it was a curiosity, a compulsion. He wanted to know about Stark, about the lighted backroom; he wanted to see again and watch again and he wanted to feel the fear and tenseness and the terror. He knew he wanted that—the terror and the disgust, and yet somehow he hated it too; he wanted to feel the hatred and shuddering disgust burn through him, and still he wanted to destroy it. It was this that drew him back; it was something like the pleasure of hunting, of fearing to kill something and still wanting very much to kill; it was like the sweet feeling of bringing death—death to something that shouldn’t or needn’t live except as a target for a rifle.
    He chose his vantage point differently this time, moving between two box elder trees, protected from the yard by the battered sway-sided hump of a collapsed garage, but still able to see the yard quite clearly. He was only a few yards from the backroom where the light came on and then, that evening, the front door slammed and he saw Stark moving, lantern and pail in hand, to the barn, his legs throwing great grotesque shadows as he moved.
    After he had passed out of sight, the boy moved, with the lightness of smoke, across the weed-patch yard to beside the yellow window. He tried the window but it was tight, locked from the inside. The boy hesitated. He knew he must see the room, see what was there. Again he felt the swift thrill of terror and excitement, if he should be seen or if he should get caught, come face to face with the lavender scar and the redrimmed eye. He circled the house and waited to see if Stark was anywhere in sight, but then he saw the lantern swaying down in the yards. The boy moved soundlessly across the porch and swung open the screendoor. The kitchen was dark; he knew it was the kitchen by the soured odor of the cream separator and by the heavy smell of fried potatoes. He went quickly through the room and through another one to the room with the lamp. He stopped and looked about him. It was only a bedroom, quite neat and clean, with a bed and a dresser and a chest of drawers. The lamp stood on the dresser and beside it were some slender books, a half dozen or so, with titles the boy had never seen before, and there was a picture, too, of a family. The boy looked at it; it was the only thing to look at in the room. It was an old picture, taken years before, quite yellow now. The man sitting rigidly in the straight chair with arms folded across his chest had on a stiff celluloid collar, and the woman had a frowzy, tormented look on her face. In the picture, too, were a boy and a girl, the boy younger, both plain, vacant-faced children, like any other boy and girl. And on the picture, written very faintly, but carefully, too, as if it had been written a long time before, above the man’s head were the words “Ezra Stark, Sr., died 1938,” and above the woman’s “Mathilda Stark, died 1943,” and “Carl” beside the boy, and “Harriet” beside the girl. He did not know why the picture was there, and he did not really care.
    The boy surveyed the room again. He was genuinely disappointed. He had expected something of a purpose perhaps, overwhelming and evil, a mad old woman, an opium den, a room full of glowering icons, but instead there was only the single dull picture. He turned to go when he caught the swift light sound of