Darkness, My Old Friend by Lisa Unger

Author:Lisa Unger
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307465191
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-08T22:00:00+00:00

chapter eighteen

It wasn’t as though she was in them. She didn’t feel what they felt, exactly. But her empathy to their various plights was so total that she took on a bit of the terror, the sorrow. Her own adrenaline would start to pump. She couldn’t read their thoughts, didn’t see through their eyes. She was the watcher. But she was neither omniscient nor omnipresent. Eloise had always felt, though she couldn’t say why or by whom, that she was shown a particular perspective. And sometimes this perspective was partial, and sometimes she was front and center. Oh, it was frustratingly inconsistent. She had no control over it. She was a spectator to some twisted game. She was forced to watch but unable to choose her view.

And in the case of Marla Holt, or supposedly Marla (because sometimes what she thought was one person was actually someone else), there was sound and blurry, distant visuals. Eloise could hear her ragged breathing as she raced through trees. Above her a night sky was riven with stars, visible above the reaching branches of dead trees. There were voices, male voices in the distance. But Eloise couldn’t hear the words. She could just pick up on the anger and fear in their tones.

Then the woman was bursting through a line of trees into a clearing. A large, sagging structure loomed ahead. She stumbled and slowed, as if she couldn’t run anymore; she was gripping her side against a cramp. Then she limped, casting a terrified look behind her, into the wide mouth of the structure. Was it an old barn, a dilapidated church, or a schoolhouse? Eloise couldn’t be sure.

Then there were two men. In the clearing they came to blows, and one of them was left lying on the ground, still and dark. The other man entered the structure. There was silence, silence until a wild scream tore open the night. Then it was quiet again. And when it ended, it was like waking from a dream.

She had to talk fast, write things down, because the details faded quickly. The edges started to curl back, and it lifted away in the air like burning bits of paper. What was left behind was fear and sadness, pain, loneliness—a little bit every time. Every time a little more, until after years of accumulation it filled her. And now it was all she was. She was like a miner who disappeared into the bowels of the earth, and every time she came back up into the sun, she brought a little bit of the blackness up inside her. It coated her lungs, her organs, her heart, suffocating her from within. And all the medicine in the world was only a stalling of the inevitable.

“The Holt house connects in the back to the Hollows Wood,” said Ray when Eloise had told him everything.

“Yes,” said Eloise. She remembered that from when she’d sat for Michael and Cara, too. Now the real-estate ads raved about how the properties backed up against state land.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.