Sleep of Death (Charlotte Westing Chronicles) Read Free

jumping at shadows. But now I have to make the choice. The vision might reveal useful information, but it might just reveal an especially grisly car accident twenty miles out of town. Either way, if there’s someone or something watching me—something like Smith—going into a trance in the middle of art class might tip my hand.
    My fingers are starting to shake with the effort of holding this foretelling back while waffling over whether I should, and the pain is starting to make my stomach churn. The admission rises in my head that maybe I don’t actually have a choice with this one. Another consequence of letting visions come a lot these days; it’s harder to resist them. Like exercising a muscle, the more frequently I hold my visions at bay, the easier they are to fight. But the last time I found it totally impossible to prevent a vision, I was being stalked by a parasite who murdered children to get to me.
    This day just keeps getting better .
    The conversation buzz in the classroom is rising as lunch break draws near, and I hope no one will notice as I lay my head on my arms on the desktop, close my eyes, and surrender to the vision.
    The storm in my head abates for a moment when I stop resisting, but abruptly it’s growing again, rising, a tornado in my skull, sucking the wind out of me and pummeling my brain, causing every muscle in my body to tense.
    The last vision I had that was this strong was—
    Was …
    Was.
    The curtain over my second sight—the lid of my third eye—feels heavy and my vision-self blinks as if waking from a very deep sleep. I’m standing in the foyer of a nice house. A really nice house— like Linden’s , I think, then scold myself. This is not Linden’s house. Focus . A dull throb reverberates through my head as I try to get my bearings. I turn and look behind me at the front door of the house. Or front doors , rather. Beautiful French doors, eight or nine feet tall with a circular glass design and wrought-iron swirls and curlicues covering every inch. The ceilings vault high above me and the walls are painted in complementary shades of taupe. The curved staircase is totally gorgeous, with a honey-brown wooden handrail winding up to the second floor, with intricately beveled railings wrapped with fake ivy.
    Despite the lovely scenery I know there’s something important here and I wait for the tell-tale pull, the force that centers somewhere deep in my stomach and feels like a rope tied about my waist, tugging me wherever I need to go. It seems reluctant to show up, somehow, but after a good minute it finally does and my feet carry me up the stairs into the master suite—or anyway a collection of rooms big enough to give me that impression. The first room I walk into is this sitting room thing and I can see a huge closet and bathroom off to the left. To the right the room is L-shaped and I walk around the corner.
    In the vision I fall to my knees, stomach clenched and roiling.
    The red is everywhere. Splattered on walls, dripping onto the carpet, even the sliding glass doors that look like they open onto a balcony are striped with spattered blood. The tug at my abdomen grows urgent, so I take several deep breaths and force myself to rise to my feet so I can take a few staggering steps toward the bed where two people lie in a literal pool of blood. A man and a woman. The owners of the house?
    Through the gore I can see what appear to be stab wounds , dozens at least—dozens each . Arms, legs, jagged holes in their bedclothes. Whoever did this stabbed them over, and over, and over.
    I’ve seen enough.
    In the vision I back away—step-by-step, almost running in reverse—but in my mind, I’m drawing a curtain over my second sight.
    And sitting on a tall stool in the art room again.
    “Charlotte, Charlotte?”
    Someone is shaking me gently by the arm. I jerk upright a scant few inches, glad to recognize my teacher’s voice. “Mr. Fredrickson,” I mumble, through still-clenched