Whisper in the Dark Read Free Page B

the tree came through the windshield.
    There were, I know, lots of rumors about me at school. Rumors about why I have this one dead hand. (Nerve damage from getting my hand crushed in the wreck. The doctors say it might heal itself or never get any better.) Rumors that my whole body is covered with terrible scars. (It isn’t.) Rumors about my being an orphan because of some kind of tragedy. (You know about that.)
    Sometimes people even ask me. Like that reporter who wrote the story about an Indian girl, one of the last descendants of Canonchet, winning the interstate cross-country meet. But I never answered questions about the rumors. I just changed the subject or didn’t say anything.
    I was afraid that was what Roger was going to do that day on the track. Ask me about my hand or my scars or my mom and dad.
    “Hey,” he said, looking over at me as he stretched his quads.
    I braced myself, waiting for the question. But he didn’t ask it.
    “I was watching you run yesterday. Want torun with me?” he asked.
    “Okay,” I said.
    By the end of that week, I’d discovered that talking with Roger was as easy as running with him.
    When I found out he was as nutty about horror stuff as I was, that his mom even taught Gothic fiction, I felt like jumping in the air to give anyone close enough to me a high five. Sweet. Best of all, Roger didn’t mind listening to me; in fact, he even seemed to like to hear me talk. And he didn’t make things all boy-girl complicated like a lot of other guys would. Even though I’m self-conscious about the fact that my left hand is like a carved piece of wood, Aunt Lyssa says that is not the first thing people notice about me. What they see, she says, are my eyes and the shape of my face. My mom looked a lot like I do, but the blend of Dad’s Indian blood with her Sicilian fire (as Aunt Lyssa puts it) makes me look like an exotic model. That gives some guys the wrong idea until I set them straight. But not Roger. He’s always seen me as a regular person, and that’s why I can see him as a friend, my very best friend.
    While I pulled on my running clothes and mysneakers, I didn’t do what some people do when they’ve been scared. I didn’t try to focus my mind on bunny rabbits or kitty cats or Disney cartoons (which, quite frankly, I find to be truly scary). Instead I mentally ran through the whole catalog of scary creatures from Narragansett tales: Cheepi, the Evil One; huge black dogs; headless ghosts; cannibal skeletons; underwater snakes; monster birds. We even have a story about the devil on ice skates. I thought about all those different creatures that Grama Delia made come alive for me in her wintertime tales, so alive that I only had to close my eyes to see them. And especially I thought about how each and every one of them ended up defeated or thwarted in one way or another.
    Like I said, monsters are one of the reasons Roger and I became so close so quick. They are his favorite thing too. We both like them because the best monster stories—not just the ones that Grama Delia told me about, but even some of the newer ones in books and movies—always have rules and a certain kind of supernatural logic to them. First there’s the battle between good and evil, then there’s the idea that good can always find some wayto win. That’s usually linked to the fact that, powerful as any monster might be, it always has at least one weakness. That was even true of those scary creations of poor old neurotic HPL, the “ghoul-haunted master of the macabre” (as Roger’s mother calls him). A kid can take comfort in that, knowing that even a little child can find a way to overcome a big old monster. “The reassurance of juvenile empowerment.” That’s how Roger’s mother explains it in her lectures.
    A rumbling sound came from down the road. A construction crew had been there for the last two weeks, doing some kind of excavating for a new sewer line or something. Aunt Lyssa had been