Draw the Dark Read Online Free Page A

catching up to me, or perhaps my subconscious picked up on yet another tumbler falling into place. But when I heard about that dead baby, there was this sensation of something going
click
in my mind, almost the same as when I drew, only not as nice. I knew, without knowing how, that the baby and the weirdness I’d done at Mr. Eisenmann’s barn were somehow connected. Winter was too small, the history too intertwined for all of this not to be. I had no idea
how
these two things could be connected, but they were. My problem was I couldn’t talk to anyone about my feelings. Heck, I wasn’t even sure what they were. Even if I had, I’d probably have sounded pretty crazy. Considering that’s how most people saw me anyway, maybe that would’ve been par for the course and there’d have been no harm done.
    But. Even now, I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d spoken up just a little sooner. If I had, maybe a couple other people wouldn’t have gotten killed. I don’t know that for sure, but I think so.

    I didn’t go back to school, but Uncle Hank didn’t take me home right away either. He got tied up and eventually had one of the deputies drive me out. The deputy was new, and I didn’t know him.
    “What about my bike?” I asked as we walked to his cruiser. “It’s still at school.”
    “Sorry, kiddo, I got my orders,” said the deputy.
    After that, we didn’t have anything to talk about. He stared straight ahead, and I looked out the side window. People on the sidewalks turned to watch as the cruiser went past, and some elbowed each other and pointed or started nodding and chattering to each other.
    By then, I was getting really scared. Eisenmann said I was crazy. Worse, I was deranged, I would go postal. But was he right? My idea of crazy was like Renfield in
Dracula
. You know, eating flies and talking to people who aren’t there and spouting gobbledygook. But I wasn’t like that at all. I mean, yeah, I was strange and different and people looked at me funny or made excuses not to hang around when I walked into a room . . . but it wasn’t the same thing.
    Only what if it was?
    I thought about the muttering in my head. Was that the way voices started up, the ones that schizophrenics got? So maybe I was already way far gone....
    When I got home, I couldn’t go to my room. I was too restless to sit still. For once, I didn’t want to draw. Maybe I was afraid to. But I had to keep moving, pacing a circle around and around the living room the way caged tigers do in the zoo. I found my iPod and tried listening, but after maybe five minutes, the music was irritating and I shut it off.
    It occurred to me that this was what it would be like in jail, pacing miles and miles in my cell. For years and years and years ...
    My chest got all tight, and my face flushed so hot I started to sweat, and I burst into tears. I just stood there, shoulders heaving and tears streaming down my face, gulping sobs in the middle of the living room—which we don’t use except for company. There are a lot of Aunt Jean’s things in here, and her pictures are everywhere, like some kind of creepy mausoleum. I could feel her eyes on me then from those pictures, and I got all limp. My legs wobbled and my knees gave out, and I sort of flopped to the floor. I groveled and sobbed the way a truly evil person does in all those movies when everyone knows he’s going to hell and there isn’t a damn thing he can do about it. I deserved everything bad that was going to happen because Eisenmann was right. I was nuts and I had gotten my aunt killed and made my teacher go insane, and weird shit was coming like thunderheads on the horizon, and if my mother had gone away, it was for a good reason—and probably on account of me.

    I woke up in a sweaty ball on the living room carpet, drool on my right cheek. My clothes were moist and I could smell myself. At least, the muttering was gone.
    I stood under a shower so hot my skin got boiled-looking and