The Loveliest Dead by Ray Garton

Author:Ray Garton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2005-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Jenna brought home chicken in a bucket for dinner. In spite of her reassurances on the phone, Miles looked deeply worried. She explained to him exactly what had happened and assured him that Dad would be home tomorrow.

“But he’ll be groggy for a while,” she said, “because he’ll be taking painkillers. So you’ll have to be the man of the house for me, okay?”

“Okay. Can I sleep in your bed tonight?”

Jenna laughed, but it was a tense laugh. Miles’s request reminded her of the fat man he claimed to have seen in his bedroom. Jenna wondered if it was connected to the thing Dwayne claimed was sharing the house with them. “We’ll see,” she said.

After dinner, Jenna did the dishes by hand because she wanted time to think. Her mother had not asked about Dwayne or what had happened that afternoon, although she had cleaned the shattered glass animals off the mantel and the blood from the carpet. But she would bring it up eventually, when they were alone and Miles was out of earshot. Jenna had no idea what she would tell her. She could not imagine Martha keeping a straight face while listening to Jenna’s story.

Mrs. Frangiapani says it’s nothing to worry about, she thought, Ada says it’s a poltergeist, Kimberly thinks it might be demonic, and Dwayne says it’s something sick and evil. Who’s right? Whom do I believe?

It seemed even experts on the supernatural could not agree on much of anything. She regretted not taking Mrs. Frangiapani’s advice in the first place, as Kimberly had told her to, and dropping the whole thing. Maybe if she’d ignored it, it would have gotten bored and gone away.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the freckled face of the redheaded boy in the blue hooded jacket, the boy she had mistaken for Josh—knowing it had not been her son left a dull ache in her chest—then the boy’s round, cherubic face collapsing into the decayed corpse’s skull she had seen before he’d disappeared. Something had made the air cold and had destroyed the glass animals on the mantel.

I don ‘t know what you ‘ve got in that house, but I wouldn ‘t let it near my kid if I were you.

Martha never mentioned it. She spent the evening watching television with Miles. Jenna made herself busy around the house, did a couple loads of laundry, and called Kimberly on the phone and told her everything that had happened.

“Maybe you should call a ... I don’t know, a minister,” Kimberly said.

“You mean, like a priest?”

“Minister, priest, rabbi, take your pick.”

“But I don’t believe in that stuff, either.”

“Maybe you should start adjusting what you believe to fit what’s happening around you.”

Jenna laughed, but it was a sad sound. “All I know is, I wish I hadn’t gotten myself started on this stuff.”

“Then just focus on what’s important, like Mrs. Frangiapani said. Especially now that David’s hurt himself. That’s awful, Jenna. At least he’ll be covered by workmen’s comp.”

She sighed. “I don’t know what we’re going to do now that he can’t work.

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