The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,43
sat out back, drinking that brown rabbit spit alone because no one would come by our place knowing what we had buried there. When he finally hanged himself in the barn it was a mercy. When hard times came a few years later some people say it was Leon Simms that poisoned the land, but I’ll always know it was Hoyt.”
In the long silence, water overflowed Miss Mary’s twitching eyelids and ran down her face. She licked her lips, and Patricia saw that a white film coated her tongue. Her skin looked thin as paper, her hands felt cold as ice. Her breathing sounded like tearing cloth. Slowly, Patricia watched her bloodshot eyes lose their focus, and she realized telling the story had set Miss Mary adrift. Patricia started to pull her hand from Miss Mary’s, but the old lady tightened her fingers and held firm.
“Nightwalking men always have a hunger on them,” she croaked. “They never stop taking and they don’t know about enough. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and never know how to stop.”
Patricia waited for Miss Mary to say something else, but her mother-in-law didn’t move. After a while, she pulled her hand from Miss Mary’s cold fingers and watched the old woman fall asleep with her eyes still open.
A black wind pressed down on her house.
THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
July 1993
CHAPTER 12
Deep summer suffocated the Old Village. It hadn’t rained all month. The sun cooked lawns to a crunchy yellow, baked sidewalks white-hot, made roof shingles soft, and heated telephone poles until the streets smelled like warm creosote. Everyone abandoned the outdoors except for the occasional midafternoon child darting across spongy asphalt streets. No one did yard work after ten in the morning, and they saved their errands until after six at night. From sunup to sundown, the whole world felt flooded in boiling honey.
But Patricia wouldn’t run errands after the sun started to go down. When she had to go to the store or the bank, she raced to her sunbaked Volvo and blasted the air conditioner while sitting miserably on the scorching front seat until she could tolerate touching the burning hot steering wheel. She insisted that Blue take the garbage cans out to the street before dark, no matter how much he complained about dragging them to the end of the driveway under the relentless, burning sun.
After sundown Patricia stayed close to home. When Korey or Blue got picked up for sleepovers, she watched from the front porch until they got into the cars, closed the doors, and drove safely off the Cruze. Even when their central air conditioning finally broke and the air-conditioner man told them they should have called earlier and it would be two weeks before he could get parts, Patricia insisted on locking every window and door before they went to bed. No matter how many fans they had running, every night, everyone sweated through all their sheets, and every morning Patricia stripped every single bed and made them up again fresh. The dryer ran nonstop.
Finally, James Harris saved their lives.
The doorbell rang during supper one night and Patricia went to answer, not wanting Korey or Blue to open the door after dark. James Harris stood on her porch.
“I just wanted to check in and see how everyone was doing after the big scare,” he said.
Patricia had thought she might not see him again after she’d overreacted the night the man got on their roof and shouted at him, as if he were the danger rather than the person trying to get into the house. She’d felt ashamed to think the worst of someone for no reason, so seeing him on their porch as if nothing had happened filled her with a profound sense of relief.
“I’m still kicking myself I wasn’t here,” Carter said, standing up from the table and shaking James’s hand when she led him into the dining room. “Thank God you came by. The kids say you were the man of the hour. You’re always welcome in our home.”
James Harris took this literally, and Patricia soon found herself listening for his knock as Korey ate the last roll or Blue complained that he couldn’t possibly finish his zucchini in