The Vanishing by Bentley Little

Author:Bentley Little [Little, Bentley]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horror, Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Andrew barbecued hamburgers for dinner—they’d bought ground beef and buns from the market in town, taken extra condiment packets from the fast-food joint where they’d had lunch—and afterward he and Robin sat out on the porch, watching the kids run around the tall wispy meadow grass that grew in the open space between the cabins and the lodge. The kids had been joined by the children of the guy from Nevada, as well as two boys and a girl from town. All seven children were playing freeze tag, and Andrew smiled down at them as he saw how much fun they were having.

Robin sat next to him, quiet and subdued.

Tomorrow, they were supposed to pan for gold. It was strictly a tourist thing to do. A guy dressed up like a forty-niner would lead them and a group of other vacationers to a selected spot on a local stream, demonstrate a few panning techniques, then let them see what they could turn up. But Robin didn’t want to go. She was afraid to go into the countryside, scared to venture past the boundary of the town.

He understood her apprehension. But he didn’t feel it. And though he told himself that if he had known the details ahead of time they never would have come, he wasn’t sure that was true. Because he almost felt more at home here than he did at home. This land and these communities inspired within him a calmness, a serenity he had not known before. It was something that had translated itself to him through the black-and-white photos in that old Sunset guidebook, something that had grown stronger when he’d started researching the gold country online. But he hadn’t realized until they’d arrived, until they’d moved into the cabin and spent a full day here, just how much he would love Northern California, just how fully in tune with this land he was.

How to explain that to Robin, though, with her traumatic memories of the past?

He wasn’t even going to try.

Andrew reached between their two chairs, grabbed her hand and held it. ‘‘Are you all right?’’ he asked, looking at her.

She nodded, attempting a smile. ‘‘I’m fine,’’ she said.

The kids came in a little while later, when the sun started going down, and the whole family watched an old Godzilla movie before going to bed. Andrew didn’t know whether it was the altitude or the excitement, but they seemed to go to sleep a lot earlier here than they did back home. This was the third night in a row that they were all in bed well before ten.

He fell asleep almost the instant his head hit the pillow and woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, groggily feeling his way out of the bed and across the bedroom to the hall, where the light from the bathroom illuminated his way. He was vaguely aware of a noise outside, and he thought it sounded like a cat, but he didn’t care enough to check.

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