Bloodstone Read Online Free Page A

waiting for something to happen. Each day his restlessness would increase, and he would begin to get the strangest urges, the need for movement, for escape, for confession. He shared his secrets with the voices in his head. It was as if he could hear someone whispering back but was not quite able to make out the words. These words were important, he was sure, and the fact that he could not hear them drove him crazy. If only he could understand, he would have a plan. He would have something to get him out of bed in the morning.
    Finally he knew he had to move on. Down the coast, perhaps to Los Angeles or San Diego. Or maybe he would go east, yes, that seemed the thing to do. He would quit the job at the restaurant, take what little cash he had, pack up his few things and get in a car, any car, and he would drive until he found a place that felt right to him. Once there he could find a job (he wasn’t picky, anything would do), a place to live, and then he would start listening for the whispers. Perhaps they would never come again.
    That night he dreamed he was standing just outside a large circle of people in the darkness. A fire raged within the circle and the people were chanting in low voices. The firelight played about their features, making them seem like panes of rippling glass. They danced; their faces as they turned towards him took his breath away, as if he were looking straight through their skins and into their souls, at the animal in them. Their chanting seemed to take shape in the air around them, to become almost palpable in the smoke, to slide and slither like snakes about his ears. And yet he seemed on the verge of hearing for the first time all the secrets that had been dangling just out of his reach.
    As he stood transfixed, unable to move even a single muscle, he heard a voice calling to him— You must come, William. You must come home .
    The oddly powerful dream stayed with him the next morning as he packed his things, and kept playing through his mind even as he got into the old Volkswagen he’d bought just days before from the owner of the restaurant. He did not usually remember his dreams for more than a few minutes, if at all. This one did not seem to be a dream at all, but a memory. He got as far as Salt Lake City without stopping, driving from dawn to dusk and into the night, and stayed in a small motel on the outskirts of the city near the great salt flats. He could smell them through the open window as he lay in his room that night and listened to the sound of rock and roll coming from the nightclub across the street. It drewhim out into the night, walking across the empty parking lots, past the backs of the dark stores and rows of neat suburban houses. In Salt Lake City everything seemed so quiet and clean. He wasn’t sure he liked it. The streets of San Francisco were raw and dangerous at night. But there was life on those streets; here, the world seemed like an old man drawing his last breath.
    As he stood looking out across the vast white stretch of salt it began to take on features in the dark, as if a face were traced there just under the surface. He heard the whispering again, stronger now. Dead men walking , he thought he heard it saying. But that didn’t make any sense, and he turned away. There were no faces floating in the salt flats, and no voices. He was losing his mind.
    What seemed like thousands of years ago, his life had been on some sort of track, he had had a purpose. His adopted mother, who had finally lost a long bout with cancer a month before his seventeenth birthday, had always told him that the most important thing was to go to school and search out your future. Find what interests you and you’ll figure the rest out later. Nobody ends up doing what they set out to do; lawyers become firefighters, singers end up running restaurants, beach bums make a million in the stock market, brokers turn into beach bums.
    And alcoholics turn into killers. Education had done nothing