Saltar's Point Read Free Page A

the manor as Randall drove closer. Long tendrils of shadow grew outward from the manor enveloping his Jeep. He began to shake involuntarily. A wave of nausea ran through him. His heart hammered at his ribs.
    Calm Randall. Calm.
    He had stepped foot inside the manor only once before and the overwhelming feeling of dread hung over him like a heavy blanket, suffocating. Randall stretched his lungs with a deep breath. The anxiety he felt subsided a bit and he felt foolish. Still, he hated the Porter place, despised it really. It held such vulgar memories. It was the last place he had seen his mother, well not his mother really but the cold dead slab of a thing that had once been his mother, fake rosy red patches on her cheeks. He visualized his mother laying there, an empty husk, this earthly vessel that was no longer his mother but a painted up jezebel with blushing rouge and overdone makeup. His proud mother never would have worn her makeup like that when she was alive but the mortician had said: “the dead lack color; this is what makes them look best.” But his mother was full of color, so full of life! And as he bent over her he could almost hear her pleading. “Randall please! What am I doing here? I don’t belong here. Get me out of here Randall please!”
    He had watched friends and relatives walk by to pay their last respects. Stoic and somber they appeared in a barrage of black. To Randall it seemed like disrespect, the indignity suffered at the end of one’s life, laid bare for all to see with nothing to hide, no secrets kept for one’s self.
    Randall rubbed his hand across his brow. The Porter place was nothing but a house to be sold, a residence in need of owners and the sooner he sold it the sooner he could be rid of it. But oh, did it have a sordid history! And Randall knew it all. He had researched it. He knew it better than he would admit, and as he thought about it the memories flooded through him.
    Rupert Porter had served as town mortician for just shy of twenty-eight years, until the large crematorium and funeral home in Bremerton a mere forty miles away undercut his modest fees, drying up his business and forcing him into early retirement. People didn’t bury their friends and loved ones anymore they merely discarded them, cowing to the death merchants peddling discounted one-way tickets to the world just beyond this one. It wasn’t more than eighteen months after his retirement that Rupert Porter bought his own one-way ticket, his heart stopping quietly while he slept. Now the kindly man with the caring eyes and soft-spoken English accent who had brought so much peace to grieving families was finally at peace himself. There was a morbid irony about it. Porter left behind no surviving relatives. Who was to bury the man who was supposed to bury them all?
    The Porter place had sat vacant since last spring. Erected in 1902 it was originally called Talcott Manor after the man who built it. George C. Talcott a well renowned amateur archeologist and wealthy businessman headed out west from Missouri with a desire to line his already ample pockets with gold spun from the timber industry. Construction of the manor had taken a little over a year with two dozen men working around the clock.
    On the outside it resembled a large Victorian mansion. Four large columns spanned from the roof to the porch below. Painted brilliant white, the many windows were adorned with black shutters that created a simple yet striking contrast. There was an air of sophistication about it despite several obvious flaws. Paint had begun to fleck around the edges of the shutters and hard edges. The once beautiful garden was overcome with weeds and creeping ivy. A gilded iron fence guarded the house on three sides but the gates had long since rusted off their hinges, leaving the manor exposed to the road. Despite all that, it maintained a demure and humble appearance from the outside.
    The inside however, was a labyrinth of rooms and