She Wakes by Jack Ketchum

Author:Jack Ketchum
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Thrillers, Horror, Fiction, Suspense, General
ISBN: 9780843954234
Publisher: Leisure Books
Published: 2004-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS

Linda McRae was roaming the sparsely wooded hillside above the campsite gathering sticks and twigs for their fire when she saw the woman in a copse of trees.

She had just rolled over a promising-looking log but it was all rotted underneath-there were maggots under there, dirty-looking pale white things. So she stomped them. And then got mad at herself.

Because look what she’d done to her sandals.

Revulsion and the fact that she’d just killed something again made her almost want to cry. She didn’t know why she had the urge to stomp on things, to break things. She wasn’t a bad person. It just happened. Will said she was angry at her parents and that was why. Sure she was angry. But so was Will and you didn’t see him smashing stuff all the time.

She scraped her sandals along the sandy earth.

Then she looked up and there was the woman.

A really lovely woman dressed all in white, in some white flowing thing, and it was almost perfect, the woman standing on the hillside amidst all these tender young trees, a picture-book image of some beautiful Greek goddess, so beautiful it made her catch her breath for a moment. She wished Will were here to see her. She wished she had a camera. She wished…

The woman smiled at her.

The smile was so…physical! Like a push!

It jolted her. She dropped the load of twigs and sticks she was carrying. And then felt foolish. She knew she was blushing.

The woman laughed.

And that was better because then Linda could laugh too and it wasn’t so embarrassing to be blushing anymore. Probably the woman was used to reactions like that, as lovely as she was. Maybe she got them all the time.

The woman nodded. Come on up.

They were leaving tomorrow. She didn’t really need to make new friends but it was hard to resist her, an older woman that drop-dead gorgeous who seemed at least passingly interested in her-and what could she do now anyway, after staring and then dropping the wood and everything, just ignore her?

“Hi,” she said. And walked up the hillside.

The woman did a sort of half-turn, still looking at her and Linda could almost see the soft outlines of her body through the flowing white material. And she did look like a goddess standing there, like something out of a movie and she resolved to tell her that no matter how embarrassing as soon as she got up there even if it did sound kind of funny because seeing her so lovely was making her heart pound and bringing tears to her eyes, it was that moving, she was actually almost crying again just like before.

She wondered for a moment why that should be.

She hadn’t hurt anything.

Will was damn near ready to call out the troops when he saw her coming down the hill.

By then he had the fire going. Just a small fire because fires on the beach were illegal. But he was going to need some more wood.

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