“Look, let me turn on the light…”
“Come on, Mom, what’s going on?”
She huddled into herself, turning away from him so that he couldn’t even see the silhouette of her face. “You shouldn’t be in here, Mike, you know Vic doesn’t like you to be in the living room.”
“Mom, if you’re sick or…hurt…then we need to get some help—”
She made a sound and it took Mike a moment to realize that she had laughed. A short, bitter bark of a laugh. “I think we can all agree it’s a little late for that,” she said in a faux light tone that was ghastly to hear.
“Mom?”
“I’m okay. Just leave me alone, Mike. Just go to your room. Do your homework.”
Mike stood there, uncertain. “Well…can I fix you something? Are you hungry?”
She turned farther away from him. He thought he heard her say “Yes,” but he just as easily could have imagined it.
“How about some tea? You want me to make you a cup of tea?”
“I think I heard her say go to your room,” Vic said from behind him.
Mike cried out and jumped as he turned. Vic stood there in the kitchen hallway, arms folded, leaning one shoulder against the wall. He was wearing a tank top and jeans and his arms and chest were cut with wiry muscle.
The moment hung in space and Mike waited for the first blow.
“Now,” Vic said. His voice never rose above a conversational tone.
Mike half turned. “Mom…?”
“Do as you’re told, Mike,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
Mike turned back to Vic, who was not looking at him; instead Vic was staring into the living room at the figure hunched over in the dark.
“Go on,” Vic said and still there was no heat, no edge to his voice.
Defeated by confusion, Mike nodded and backed away, then turned and ran up the stairs. In his room he crouched by his bedroom door, listening through a crack for any sound of yelling, of hitting, of a fight resumed. But everything downstairs was silent.
After twenty minutes Mike closed his door.
Chapter 20
(1)
Newton sat for over an hour on the hard bench at the Warminster train station, chewing butter-rum Life Savers and drumming his fingers. A paperback book on vampire folklore was open on his lap, but he was too jittery to read. Commuters looked at him with his rumpled outdoor clothes and his razor-stubbled face and assumed he was homeless and gave him a wide berth. Newton was aware of their stares, but didn’t care. In the three weeks since Little Halloween and the trip down into Dark Hollow he hadn’t slept more than three hours at a stretch. Insomnia kept him up, too much coffee jangled his nerves, and when he did drift off the dreams kicked in. It was better to be sort of awake and wasted than to be asleep and at the mercy of his overactive imagination.
For the hundredth time he looked up at the wall clock above the ticket booth. Just shy of three o’clock. Jonatha Corbiel was nearly half an hour late. As each northbound train pulled into the station he stood up and searched the faces of the debarking passengers. Jonatha had given him only a vague and sketchy idea of what she looked like. “I’m tall, dark, and top-heavy.” Amused and intrigued by her description, he conjured images of a leggy beauty with a deep-water tan and a grad-student’s wire-framed glasses. Something like a brainy Jennifer Tilly or a scholarly Jennifer Connelly with olive skin. Maybe someone with the delicacy of a Maggie Gyllenhaal but with lots of wild curling black hair, dressed in the jeans, flannel lumberjack shirt, and Dr. Martens that comprised the dress code of the understipened Ph.D. candidate.
Thus self-conditioned, he was totally unprepared for the woman who suddenly loomed over him like a skyscraper. He had seen her get off the train, but had not even thought that she might be Jonatha despite the fact that she did, indeed, fit the description of tall, dark, and top-heavy. She smiled down at him and in a thick Louisiana accent said, “Let me guess. Willard Fowler Newton, or what’s left of him?”
He stared up at her. “Uh…Jonatha…?” he stammered, rising.
“In the flesh.”
He goggled. Jonatha Corbiel was certainly tall, and at six-one she towered over Newton’s five-seven. She was certainly dark: her skin was an exquisite and flawless blue-black, as richly dark as that of her Ashanti ancestors. And she was certainly top-heavy, with large breasts straining at the fabric of her faded gray U of P sweatshirt, distorting both letters. Standing at his full height his eyes came to just above her chest and try as he might, he could not help but stare.
“Might as well get it over with,” Jonatha said with tolerant amusement.
“Er…what?”
“I have really big boobs. Take a good look and get it out of your system.”
His eyes leapt immediately away from her chest and up to meet hers, which were filled with humor. He felt his skin ignite to a fiery red.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “You must hate that.”
“I’ve been used to it since I was fourteen.” She looked around. “Where are your friends?”
“We’re meeting them at the diner. Couple blocks from here. My car’s over there…” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the parking lot and reached for the small suitcase that stood next to her. She let him carry it, but opted to hold on to her laptop case, which she wore slung over one shoulder.
“Let’s go, then.” Her tone was on the affable side of matter of fact, and he turned and led the way to the lot, trying not to cut looks at her as they walked. Jonatha Corbiel was a knockout and Newton had no experience at all around women of that level of beauty. None at all. In the thirty yards between the bench and his car he managed to bang his knee into the
“I…really want to thank you for coming up here. I know it’s a lot to ask.”
She shrugged. “I’ve had it on my list to visit Pine Deep at some point.” She smiled and held her hands out like she was reading a movie marquee. “Pine Deep, Pennsylvania: The Most Haunted Town in America. To a folklorist that’s like the mothership calling me home.”
“The charm wears off once you live here for a while.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’m interested in this book you’re writing on vampire and werewolf legends in Pennsylvania. I don’t think anyone’s ever done a folklore book as specific as that for this area.”
“Seems to be a theme with us,” Newton said dryly.
“In the last ten years I’ve done over fifty field investigations of reported vampirism in eleven states, and fourteen of werewolfism. You’d be amazed how often these things are reported. All of them were duds, dead ends.
