Burn Scars, Eddie Generous [read full novel txt] 📗

Southern Ontario, Canada with his wife and dogs. His fiction has appeared—blah, blah, blah—Bishop got any dogs?” Freddy said.

“’Course he does,” Eric said. “Two of them, and a wife, and he lives in Southern Ontario, don’t he? All adds up, presto whamo.”

A second car pulled up to the neighbors’ place, driving much quicker, and parking by the nose of the police cruiser. This one was a beat up Buick with chrome accents and whitewall tires. A man got out and circled to open a back door. He was tall with glasses, had long hair and a black beard, but everything else was muddied by shadows.

“Guys, check this out,” Todd said, clapping the fingers of his right hand against his palm. “Heck’re they doing over there?”

“Salty blood spurted between the pursed lips of the overnight repairman as he buried his face in old lady Johnson’s—whoa! No way Mr. Bishop wrote that.” Freddy looked at the cover and then flipped to the story again. First time in his life, maybe, he wanted to read a story. Hell, if they brought out stuff like that at school, every kid would be on the road to becoming a pleasure reader. “No way he did.”

“Think I should take it into class and get him to autograph it?” Eric said, a grin on his words. He’d gotten a good enough look at the ghost skeleton and tossed the comic back onto the pile, and picked up a bulky plastic flashlight, then shined the yellow bulb on Freddy, who remained engrossed by the Gallery Magazine.

“Guys, check it out,” Todd said, really waving his free arm now. “For serious.”

“You gonna take this to school?” Freddy laughed as he spoke. “You got it stiff as Stanley Roper, bet the centerfold don’t even open. Might be that the sperm built themselves a civilization by now. How much squirt you dump in there?”

“Yeah, right. If it’s stiff it’s ‘cause you just greased all over it,” Eric said, blushing—a few pages had gone a bit stiff, accidentally on purpose.

A light lit inside the Talbot place. An upstairs window—not really upstairs since the split-level had the upper floor only about six feet from ground level.

“Something’s funny,” Todd whispered, talking to himself.

By the lawn, the cop and the other man dragged a third man from the backseat of the Buick and onto to the driveway. He was out of it. They laid him flat and he flopped, his left arm flailing a little slower than the rest of his body in a way that suggested drunk rather than dead. The second man rushed back to his car and turned a key in the trunk’s lock. The lid came up and sat on hydraulic arms. He pulled out a red jerry can and hurried over to the cop. They were talking, but the treehouse was too far to hear what they were saying.

“Guys,” Todd hissed, waving hard, trying his damndest to read the distance-fuzzied lips.

“Don’t get your undies in a twist,” Freddy said and lowered the Gallery.

Finally, the guys joined Todd by the window. Eric crawled in close and sat on his knees, pushing Todd sideways, though not hindering his view any. Freddy leaned over Eric, one hand on the window frame. They quieted and clicked off flashlights, instantly, on instinct, like they sensed something untoward pending.

“That’s Leroy Talbot,” Eric whispered, pointing to the man passed out on the driveway. “I’d bet my left nut on it.”

The cop and the other man forced their way through the front door.

“That was Willie’s cousin. You know; that real dweeb in thirteen, always talking about this cop and how he’s gonna get him a job even though he just moved here. Willie didn’t just move, you know… The cop’s his cousin. That other guy, I’ve seen him, but I don’t know,” Todd whispered.

Way down below, Leroy rolled sideways and vomited with a great, whooping gag, releasing a deluge of fluid that shined beneath the street lamp. He didn’t awake, only shifted a little. Another light lit, this one in the basement of the house. Something shattered, loud enough to carry through a wall and into the treehouse.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be seeing this? I mean, you ever see those movies with the mob guys and the witnesses?” Freddy said and the other boys looked at him.

“Like, what? You think Willie’s cousin is crooked?” Eric said.

That sounded right, given what they knew of Willie. Without another word, they scrambled through the trapdoor and down the rope ladder. Their feet were steady and sure on the damp lawn, swishing and kicking a gentle spray of the first hints of dew. Eric held open the back door so it wouldn’t slam and ushered the others in, slipping off his shoes as a silent example.

They were only in the basement ten minutes before Eric’s father told them to get their butts upstairs. Pronto.

—

Rebekah Talbot stretched out on the brown corduroy couch they’d inherited from her grandmother—mother’s side, only one left—and fingered a loose button that dangled like a breached eyeball. The entire mismatched living room set had seen better days, but it did the job and wasn’t as if anybody was about to judge her by her parents’ interior design options—most of her friends had hand-me-down furniture, new stuff stuck out like cherry lipstick on a nun.

A boy named Riley Townsend had just left her side half an hour earlier and she was feeling good and loose on pot and Pabst; all the hand stuff and making out didn’t hurt the relaxed vibe any either. Though kissing too much made her feel empty and weak in the head, fluttery enough that she’d have to walk with her hands out if she got the urge to go anywhere. Unlikely.

On TV was an old, British horror movie about Dracula, and the only reason she caught that much were the