Resurrection House Read Online Free

don’t we get you two back in bed, huh? Just a case of the jitters. I’d call it a bad dream if you’d been asleep,” he said.
    Mom turned back to her papers. “Go on to sleep, now. And I don’t want to hear you again tonight. This is what you get for staying up to watch that drivel on television.”
    We kept quiet going upstairs so we wouldn’t wake Matty. I jumped into bed and slipped under the covers while Dad tucked him in. He pulled my comforter around me, rubbed my head and said goodnight.
    “Too darn cold for anyone to be out there tonight,” he said. “Sleep tight, now.”
    I tried, but when I shut my eyes I saw the dark man’s face and knew Mooncat Jack didn’t feel the cold. He stood in the night like a stone figure, wrapped in his thick black coat and knit cap, an otherworldly burglar whose pale face gleamed with moonlight, his eyes like bottomless holes, his mouth a gaping emptiness gated by rotten teeth. Nothing would make him leave. Time meant little to him. He would wait—like Joey Reagan said—until no one was watching, and then he would make his move.
    Unable to sleep I rose shivering and crept to the window, hoping to reassure myself. The empty backyard was a chessboard of light and dark figured by the barren picnic table and the row of shrubs along one side of the lawn. Nothing stirred. No one near the garage or down by the stream, no one in the driveway or lingering by the Pamplas’s house. And when I had watched the stillness and seen nothing move but the wind-swayed branches, I felt sleep tugging and thought of my warm bed.
    I wish I had climbed into it a second sooner.
    The sound of crunching snow crashed through the silence and paralyzed me. Footsteps broke the crusty veneer, their noise climbing on the wind as the thin lamination of ice snapped with each step. A shape wriggled loose from behind a thick tree trunk in the woods and drifted down along the bank toward the stream. The figure splashed into the frigid water and stood there, fluid swirling around his legs like snakes on the trail of mice, his head lifted to drink in the starlight. His face glowed as he eased open his jaw to expose the guttering chasm of his mouth and stretched his arms wide, ready to deliver a chilling embrace.
    My bladder twitched and I struggled to hold back the flood pressing against it. I knew he could see me.
    Mooncat Jack bowed forward like a dancer and breathed a whisper that floated like a dream in the empty dark, rising and falling, twisting, rolling through space until it tinkled rudely through the glass to rattle in my ears.
    He called my name.
    I scrambled away, tripping over my baseball glove and falling onto a pile of prodding action figures. Matty jumped awake when I screamed in pain, and before I could clamber back into bed, Mom came running up the stairs and turned on the light. Dad wasn’t far behind her. I tried to apologize, but Mom shut me down with a cold stare every time I opened my mouth. I wanted to tell her about Mooncat Jack. She sat a couple of minutes with Matty, stroking his hair until he fell back to sleep. When she left I asked her to leave the hall light on, but she said it would keep Matty awake. I tried once more to explain, and she stopped in the hallway, her body tense and her eyes piercing.
    “Well?” she said.
    I wanted to tell her how he said my name and the sound of the words had been so frigid it felt like my heart had stopped pumping blood through my veins. But I knew she wouldn’t believe I had really heard a thing.
    “Nothing,” I said. A spark of anger flickered in my heart. If it were Matty who had something to say, she would listen, and if it weren’t for him, then she’d have to listen to me.
    Mom left, and with the blankets wrapped tight around me, I waited half the night for sleep to come.
    Bleary-eyed and cranky I struggled through school the next day. At recess I looked for Joey Reagan.
    “Man, did you hear about Tommy Smith and Brian Corey?” he