Night Chills Read Free Page A

inconceivable before he had been hired.
    Yet there were times when he felt like a child again, humiliated by other children, the brunt of a joke he could not understand. His boss at the mill, Ed McGrady, the chief watchman on the graveyard shift, was a pleasant man. He was incapable of hurting anyone. However, he smiled when others did the teasing. Ed always told them to stop, always rescued his friend Buddy—but always got a laugh from it.
    That was why Buddy hadn’t told anyone what he had seen Saturday morning, nearly twenty-four hours ago. He didn’t want them to laugh.
    Around that time he left the storage yard and walked well off into the trees to relieve himself. He avoided the lavatory whenever he could because it was there the other men teased him the most and showed him the least mercy. At a quarter to five, he was standing by a big pine tree, shrouded in darkness, taking a pee, when he saw two men coming down from the reservoir. They carried hooded flashlights that cast narrow yellow beams. In the backwash of the lights, as the men passed within five yards of him, Buddy saw they were wearing rubber hip boots, as if they had been fishing. They couldn’t fish in the reservoir, could they? There were no fish up there. Another thing ... each man wore a tank on his back, like skin divers wore on television. And they were carrying guns in shoulder holsters. They looked so out of place in the woods, so strange.
    They frightened him. He sensed they were killers. Like on the television. If they knew they had been seen, they would kill him and bury him out here. He was sure of it. But then Buddy always expected the worst; life had taught him to think that way.
    He stood perfectly still, watched them until they were out of sight, and ran back to the storage yard. But he quickly realized he couldn’t tell anyone what he had seen. They wouldn’t believe him. And by God, if he was going to be ridiculed for telling what was only the truth, then he would keep it secret!
    Just the same he wished he could tell someone, if not the watchmen at the mill. He thought and thought about it but still could not make sense of those skin divers or whatever they were. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more bizarre it seemed. He was frightened by what he could not understand. He was certain that if he told someone, it could be explained to him. Then he wouldn’t be afraid. But if they laughed ...Well, he didn’t understand their laughter either, and that was even more frightening than the mystery men in the woods.
    On the far side of Main Street, the cat scampered from the heavy purple shadows and ran east toward Edison’s General Store, startling Buddy out of his reverie. He pressed against the windowpane and watched the cat until it turned the corner. Afraid that it would try to sneak back and climb up to his third-floor rooms, he kept a watch on the place where it had vanished. For the moment he had forgotten the men in the woods because his fear of cats was far greater than his fear of guns and strangers.

PART ONE
    Conspiracy

1
    Saturday, August 13, 1977
    When he drove around the curve, into the small valley, Paul Annendale felt a change come over him. After five hours behind the wheel yesterday and five more today, he was weary and tense—but suddenly his neck stopped aching and his shoulders unknotted. He felt at peace, as if nothing could go wrong in this place, as if he were Hugh Conway in Lost Horizon and had just entered Shangri-La.
    Of course, Black River was not Shangri-La, not by any stretch of the imagination. It existed and maintained its population of four hundred solely as an adjunct of the mill. For a company town it was quite clean and attractive. The main street was lined with tall oak and birch trees. The houses were New England colonials, white frame and brick saltboxes. Paul supposed he responded to it so positively because he had no bad memories to associate with it, only good ones; and that could not