Shivers Read Online Free

approximately an hour, but his thoughts kept returning to the derelict. Now that he thought about it, most of the bums who had hung out in this section of the city had disappeared. Other people might have assumed it was the advent of cold weather that had driven them elsewhere, but Eric knew better. He had worked in this area long enough to know that that wasn’t true. When winter came, they would just huddle up with a bottle somewhere, the alcohol warming them and pickling their brains to beyond the point where they could distinguish heat from cold. Of course many of them died. But not all. Not this many. And they were almost all gone now. Poor souls.
    He was about to descend to the subway when an old sot approached him from behind the darkness of an abandoned car in the alleyway. “Fifty cents, mister? Got fifty cents?”
    Was this the last remaining tramp? Eric wondered. He almost laughed at his own suspicious mentality.
    He was almost sure that he had seen other figures back there in the shadows, nestled in alcoves, hiding next to garbage cans. But they’d darted out of sight—with a speed too fast for any derelict—before he could make certain. Perhaps they’d been figments of his imagination, products of his worsening eyesight. Well, at least this one was real.
    “Fifty cents, please?”
    Eric dug into his pocket for change. A quarter and two dimes. Well, it would have to do. Even as he handed the money to the man he knew it was more an act of futility than of kindness.
    “Thank you, mister. God bless ya. God bless ya.”
    There was something odd about the man. Beneath the smelly rags he wore for clothes, behind his dead, almost unseeing eyes, there was something there. Instead of the blank expression, the vacuous gaze of the typical drunk, there was a palpable feeling, an emotion made up of equal parts confusion, loneliness, and terror. They stood there at the top of the stairs staring at each other, both waiting for the other to speak. The drunk wanting and needing explanations; Eric waiting to hear the man before him give voice to the unspeakable horrors he had witnessed. Why could neither of them speak?
    Eric turned away and started down the steps. Before he had gone even halfway, the drunk called out.
    “Where are they?” he said. “Where have my friends gone?”
    Eric turned back, saw the look of horror on the old drunk’s face, read his feelings and emotions, arid almost reeled. He started back down the stairs again, practically running toward the token booth. He quickly bought a token, raced through the turnstile, and just made it onto an uptown train.
    He found a seat. He glanced out the window behind him as the train left the station, and saw that the drunk had followed him down the stairs, and was even now staring at him from the other side of the turnstile. The sight chilled Thorne’s blood. He pressed his hands over his eyes and did not remove them until the train had arrived at the next stop.
    Amid the bustle of people who boarded and departed, he felt more secure. He tried to determine why that old man had so unsettled him. Certainly he’d dealt with derelicts before. Why such distress?
    Because the man had read his mind.
    It was usually the opposite. Thorne could pick up thoughts and feelings from other people, had been able to do it all his life. He had picked up frightening thoughts from that man, horrible images of living nightmares, of death and decay. That man had seen things, seen repulsive things done to other people. And though Thorne had caught only glimpses of the horror, that had been more than enough.
    But it was not the images that had left him so shaken, but rather the fact that the man had willingly transferred those images to Eric’s mind, had even, in fact, picked up Eric’s thoughts as he’d walked by. He had known that Thorne had been wondering where the other derelicts had disappeared to! He had approached Eric not for money, but for the exchange of information.
    Damn