Summer's End by Lisa Morton

Author:Lisa Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JournalStone Publishing
Published: 2013-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

October 28

Evening

I managed to get through the day somehow. In between interviews and answering e-mails, I packed last night’s clothes into a trash bag, drove to an alley thirty minutes away, found an open dumpster, tossed the bag in and came home again.

Night fell, and I drove to Dark Delicacies, a nearby genre specialty bookstore, for a signing. I didn’t like the idea of being out at night, but this wouldn’t be like walking across a large, empty campus; even if I had to park a short distance from the store, I’d be walking past stores on a heavily-trafficked street.

The signing was pleasant if under-attended (aren’t they all), and afterward I ended up walking with friends to a coffee shop two blocks away, where we gabbed over tea and dessert. For an hour or so, I was able to forget about goddesses and murder and pagan rituals, as we lost ourselves in the simple, mundane pleasures of gossip and jokes.

At 11 p.m. (how had it gotten to be that late?), the shop closed up and kicked us out, we said our goodbyes on the sidewalk, and I turned to head for my car, now parked several blocks away. It was late enough that the stores had closed, and few cars drove by. In the distance I could hear the ever-present sound of sirens (in an area as big as L.A., there’s always a catastrophe happening somewhere) and the thrum of freeway congestion.

I came to an intersection, and even though I couldn’t see any approaching cars, I waited for the crosswalk light to turn green—the last thing in the world I needed right now was for a hidden cop to nab me for jaywalking.

“I’m really sorry, officer, and—what? No, that’s not blood under my fingernails, of course not…” My rational mind assured me that there was no visible blood beneath the nails of the hands I’d scrubbed until they were raw and red, but I still wasn’t taking any chances. I waited.

The shop on the corner was one of those little cluttered gift shops, the kind that you glance in and you can’t imagine buying any of this kitschy nonsense and you wonder how they stay in business. Because it was Halloween, their front display windows were full of little papier mâché pumpkins (some were sprayed with glitter or even wore little aprons, which offended my highly-honed sense of Halloween decorum), cute witch and cat figurines, and gingerbread-scented candles. There were Halloween salt shakers and mugs and hand towels.

Near the bottom was a jack-o’-lantern that made me stop and stare. It was white, almost the size of a real pumpkin, and lit with some sort of reddish glow from within. It also bore one of the most grotesquely carved faces I’d ever seen—eyes with knitted brows, a huge snaggletoothed grin, and two slits for a nose. It didn’t begin to match the other items in the window, all of which would have been more at home in an Anne Geddes photo book than a Stephen King novel, and it was the only piece that seemed to be lit.

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