In Darkness Waiting by John Shirley & John Shirley & John Shirley & John Shirley

Author:John Shirley & John Shirley & John Shirley & John Shirley [Shirley, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: In Darkness Waiting
ISBN: 9781627933131
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2013-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

“So you’re saying,” the sheriff broke in, “that you saw this girl Elizabeth Cummings, this Tetty, come to your house. When? Three in the morning?”

“Around there,” Conway answered evenly, shrugging.

Dawson nodded and paused to sip coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He had turned in his swivel chair toward the window blinds; bars of light and shadow fell across his face and chest.

Perry almost smiled, thinking he looked like an oldtime prison convict.

The skinny, hard-eyed deputy waited quietly in the doorway, arms crossed as he leaned on the jamb. The plastic name plate under his badge said, G.N. Lancer, Deputy Sheriff. His face was a mask of affected authority; it was a television caricature, to Perry, but he decided that there was nothing funny about such a man.

“Trouble is,” Dawson was saying, “coroner says that girl was dead already, by the time you said you saw her.”

Perry glanced at Conway, who shifted in his seat, as if having difficulty arranging all that gangly length comfortably. But he seemed calm. His smile deepened a little, and he flicked his eyes toward Perry, who glimpsed again that nitrogen-cooled, dry-ice presence in Conway’s eyes.

Perry shivered, and once more tried to speak. He could even visualize what he would do: he’d stand, bang on the desk with the flat of his hand, and say, Listen, Dawson, there’s something that’s like an insect born out of a man, and it’s been biting people and changing them. And one came to me last night and this kid Conway knows something about them, and maybe he’s communicating with them.

Oh, no. Even if he could speak, it would be a mistake to put it so bluntly. They’d naturally think he was crazy, and maybe assume it was he who’d strangled Conway’s sister Ella and tossed her in the lake, and gouged out Tetty’s eye, and cut off that woman’s head, and—

But he had to tell them something.

Maybe just what had happened to him, from the beginning. If he could just begin to talk about it, he could find a way to make them believe he wasn’t hallucinating.

He resumed the struggle, then shook his head, it was as if someone had shot Xylocaine into his vocal cords.

“Trouble is,” Conway said, smiling, using Dawson’s phrase in mild mockery, “I couldn’t be sure what time it was. I was asleep, and woke up all, you know, sleepy and bleary, and I just guessed what time it was.” He spread his hands. “Guess I was wrong about the time I saw her. But I saw her.”

“And it was you who found your sister’s body in the lake in the morning. Now you say after you saw Tetty you didn’t go back to sleep. You lay in bed for maybe hours, worrying about it, thinking the last time Tetty was around she poisoned you. Now, if it was me who had worries like that, well, I’d for sure just take a little walk down the hall and check on my sister. So why didn’t you? You couldn’t sleep anyway.

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