The Untimely Resurrection of John Alexander MacNeil by Lesley Choyce

Author:Lesley Choyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

it must have been near midnight when I heard the floorboards groan. Often in an old house like this, you hear sounds — creaks and groans through many nights, but this was the familiar sound of human weight on those floorboards. I rarely locked the door so anyone could have just walked in and sometimes did. But I woke remembering Evie was sleeping here in Eva’s old sewing room. I stopped breathing and listened.

Nothing at first. Then the sound came again. Thinking that Mason maybe had come into the house for more water or some other reasonable purpose, I half convinced myself it was nothing to worry about. But instead of calling out his name, I slipped out of bed, threw on my old housecoat, slid my hand across the wall until I found the doorframe and then the light switch on the other side. I flicked it on.

The guy stopped dead in his tracks, the bright light shocking him.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, not wanting to raise my voice and wake Evie.

Before me was a young man with long straggly hair wielding some kind of a knife. He had a nearly cross-eyed, crazed look in his eyes.

“Go back to bed, old man,” he spit at me.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“Just go back to bed, Grandpa. You don’t want to fuck with me.”

“No, I probably don’t. But you’re here in my house and I didn’t exactly invite you.”

“Back off and don’t do anything. I just want money. Tell me where to find it.”

I kept my eyes locked on him but didn’t make any moves. He had a knife. I had nothing but a pair of ninety-year-old hands. The look on his face was something I was not at all familiar with. Desperation, nervousness, fear even, but something much more. The tortured face of a young man on some kind of drugs. It was starting to filter into my brain that this was maybe the same guy who had burst into the pub demanding money. What was it they said he was on? Meth? Whatever the hell that was. They said he was not to be messed with.

“I got maybe sixty bucks in my wallet,” I said. “Let me get it.”

He thrust the knife forward into the air as I inched toward the old desk where my wallet sat. I fished out the three twenties and waved them at him. He grabbed them and stuffed them in his shirt pocket. “Don’t be an asshole, old man. You’ve got more stashed around here somewhere. I hear you have money hidden away.”

“You hear wrong, son. Now leave and I won’t call the Mounties. I’ll just call this a case of charity under duress.”

“You call it what?”

“Charity.”

“Don’t fuck with me. I told you that. What else do you have here?”

The truth was I didn’t have much of anything worth stealing. Never did. Some cash in the back maybe but no mattress stuffed with savings. Not a single item in the house worthy of theft for a drug addict.

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