Rook & Tooth and Claw by Graham Masterton

Author:Graham Masterton [Masterton, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 0330396536
Publisher: PFD Books
Published: 2013-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

TOOTH AND CLAW

The second in the new Jim Rook Series

Graham Masterton

Chapter One

He came out of the kitchen to find his dead grandfather sitting in the green armchair on the other side of the room. His grandfather was wearing the same clothes that he had worn on the last day that Jim had seen him: rolled-up shirtsleeves and maroon suspenders. The early-afternoon sunlight turned his glasses into polished pennies. His tobacco-stained moustache bristled like a yard-broom.

“Hullo, Jim. How’re things?”

“Grandpa?” said Jim. He was holding a can of Schlitz in one hand and a Swiss cheese sandwich in the other. His tortoiseshell cat tangled herself between his ankles and almost tripped him up.

“What’s the matter, boy?” his grandfather smiled. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Jim put down his beer and his sandwich and approached his grandfather until he was standing close enough to touch him. But he didn’t touch him. He didn’t know much about visitations, but he knew enough to realise that – if they made any kind of physical contact – his grandfather would instantly vanish. Visitations were nothing more than light and memory, mixed.

The sun shone across his grandfather’s face, illuminating his grey-green eyes, the wrinkles of his neck, his white hair cropped as it always used to be cropped, by the barber on Main Street, in Henry Falls. He had the same dark mole on his upper lip.

“You don’t need to be worried, boy. I just came to pay you a friendly visit. Thought we could talk about the old days, and maybe the new days too.”

Jim pressed his hand against his chest. His mouth was as dry as a tray of cat-litter and his heart was thumping. “I never thought that I would ever see you again,” he said. “Not sitting here in my apartment, anyway. Not to talk to.”

“You’ve got the gift, Jim. You can see anybody, live‘n’kicking or dead‘n’gone. You know that.”

“It just takes some getting used to,” Jim told him. Then, “Listen … how about a beer?”

His grandfather ruefully shook his head. “Being here is all I can do,” he admitted, “and that’s not easy. Beer … hunh, that’s a pleasure of the past.”

Jim dragged across the other armchair, a dilapidated brown affair with its yellow foam stuffing trying to burst out of it wherever it was worn. “So tell me,” he said. “What’s it been like? Do you still see grandma? I mean, is it like heaven, or what?”

His grandfather smiled. “I guess you could say it was heaven, in a way. Every day is different. Sometimes you wake up and you’re nine, and it’s summertime, and the sun’s shining. Other days you wake up and you’re old and sick and the rain’s running down the windows and you wish that you could die for a second time.”

“And grandma?”

The old man shook his head. “I don’t see her too much. You see, what you do when you die is pretty much try to settle up your unfinished business, the things you couldn’t do when you were alive, or maybe the things you failed to do.

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