Fiendish Deeds Read Free

house.
    A branch perhaps? Or something else. Something that wanted in….
    She threw off the blankets and crept to the window to peer into the night. It was now stormy outside, the lights of Darlington vanished behind a boiling mist. She scanned the inky darkness along the side of the house—then spotted the source of the ceaseless scraping. It was only a tree, she confirmed. Oh well.
    Tiptoeing across the chilly floor, Joy kicked the rug up against the bottom of the door, then quickly jumped back in bed. She put the light back on and opened the book where the length of red ribbon marked the page she had left off.
    “The Terrible Town on the Hideous Hill.”
    Her favorite story. How much the town reminded her of Spooking!
    And whether it was due to the foreknowledge of the horror to come or just her icy feet, Joy shivered deliciously.

CHAPTER 2
    S een through the heavy rain pouring across the windshield, the old shop swayed back and forth as if alive. As if in anguish, bewailing its abandoned state, pleading for someone—anyone—to flick on the lights and fire up its boiler, to begin the dirty chore of wiping away a decade of grime from its front window.
    The rivulets of rain parted and the shop’s pitted sign became momentarily distinct:
    LUTHIER LORENZO
    Beneath that, another sign:
    FOR SALE
    The man at the wheel stared, face blank, as memories played to the sound of the idling engine. He saw himself standing on the step in rubber boots, a shovel over his shoulder, grinning as he inhaled the sweet scents of autumnal decay. He heard the sound of his father gently hammering a fret in place with a mallet. Above he saw his mother, a ghost in the window, waving him off to work.
    Then the vision disappeared, and all that remained was the filthy, dilapidated shop. He clenched his teeth. How he now hated the place and its cramped little second-floor apartment. It needed to be put out of its misery.
    The car growled impatiently—a low, throaty noise befitting the huge engine that surely lurked under such an enormous hood. The man put the black car into drive and made a U-turn. The thick tires hissed on the slick road and the chromed grill shone like a bared set of teeth. He headed a short way back the way he had come, pulling onto the muddy patch in front of the cemetery gates.
    The car stopped growling. The man got out, sheltered from the rain under a wide black umbrella. The galoshes protecting his shiny shoes sank in the mud as he entered.
    This time, he needed no fleeting visions of yesteryear. Everything was just as it always was, the same old ghosts rising up almost visibly from their graves. In their familiar company he recalled all the wasted hours, blistering his hands and breaking his back within these long stone walls. Tending and fussing over the horror of a place like it was some sort of royal garden. Living without ambition, up to his waist in muck and digging himself in deeper. How foolish he’d been.
    But no longer, he told himself. Today he strode the avenues of the dead in a suit and tie.
    He recalled his conversation with the grave-digger down in Darlington—a kid really, with a pierced eyebrow, busy scooping enormous clods of earth with a backhoe. He gave the grave-digger a good story, that he was a nephew wanting to pay his respects to his beloved Uncle Ludwig, except his crazy old aunt wouldn’t tell him where her husband was buried. Any chance he knew where to find him?
    “Yeah, but the dude—your uncle, I mean—went in up the hill in that creepy old graveyard,” he had answered. “Man, I even had to dig the hole with a shovel ’cuz I couldn’t get this stupid thing in,” he added, slapping a hand loudly against the frame of the backhoe. “Anyway, he’s buried pretty much right in the middle, by some big stone angel swinging a sword. You can’t miss it, dude,” the grave-digger said finally, before popping his blaring headphones back on.
    “Thanks, dude ,” the man said, smirking as the