Daughter of Darkness by Charles L. Grant

Author:Charles L. Grant [Grant, Charles L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: YA horror
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2015-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

“Be home by nine o’clock,” her mother warn­ed as Cass struggled into her windbreaker and hur­ried out the door. “Nine o’clock, or I’ll have your father come looking.”

Cass turned and smiled a solemn promise, waved, turned again, and raced to the corner when she saw Meg waiting under the streetlight.

For a change the evening was clear, cool, more like early October than two weeks before Thanksgiving. Porch lights were warm and amber. An intermittent breeze chased leaves across the sidewalk and into the gutter, and carried on its back the pleasant tang of burning leaves and the comforting smell of wood-smoke spiraling out of chimneys.

Unlike the newer, more expensive homes back where the Lanborns lived, the houses were old, small, usually brick or clapboard, built close to­gether, with small front yards and lots of trees and flowers. Fences or tall hedges separated the proper­ties side and back. Large, broad-crowned trees lined the sidewalks. It was like most of Ashford, which it­self was not a big town, not a small town; close enough to the city for a day trip or a night at the theater, but far enough away so that all the city’s problems seemed to happen in another country. It had a park in the center, two high schools, and a large shopping district.

Nothing special.

Just a town.

Certainly there was nothing sinister here; nothing dangerous.

But Cass wasn’t totally convinced of that.

Meg wore a Giants football jacket a size too large, a long muffler whose fringed ends were tossed back over her shoulders, and a dark red beret tilted on her head, her blond hair wound into a single braid that hung down her back. “So,” she said, “you going to tell me what’s going on?”

A look was all the plea for belief Cass allowed her­self before she explained what had happened during the dodgeball game, and what had happened after­ward. She kept her voice steady, doing her best to keep each event in its proper order. But she also tried to give Meg a clear sense of what it had been like, there in the echoing locker room, steam-smoke all around her, sounds muffled and finally gone, and the final, absolute certainty that she wasn’t alone.

It made her shiver all over again.

Then she told her about last Sunday afternoon, what Lin had said to her; and she recounted her con­versation with George that night.

“And you know that’s not like him,” she said. “I swear, it’s almost like he doesn’t want to come home.”

Meg kept her head down.

A cat screamed angrily in someone’s backyard; an­other cat responded to the challenge, and for a while the night was filled with the harsh yowls and shrill shrieks of a full-blown back-fence fight.

When it was over, as quickly as it had begun, the night was silent.

Meg still didn’t answer.

Cass, however, didn’t push for a reaction. Instead, she hunched her shoulders against the light wind and watched the neighborhood change, from old but well kept to old and slowly dying. The houses were

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