Summer of Night Read Online Free

off some fungus stuff and rotting mushrooms in the woods at night when he and his Old Man went out coon hunting.
    Tubby felt his neck grow cold. He started to step out of the hole, but then he realized what the light must be and he grinned. The girls' (the sign painter had got that right) rest-room next door must have an opening in it. Tubby imagined peeking out of whatever hole or crack in the laths was letting that light out of the girls' bathroom.
    With a little luck he'd see some girl taking a leak. Maybe even Michelle Staffney or Darlene Hansen or one of those stuck-up sixth-grade bitches with their underpants down around their ankles and their secret parts showing.
    Tubby felt his heart pounding, felt the blood stirring elsewhere in his body, and began shuffling sideways, away from the hole, deeper into the passage. It was a close fit.
    Panting, blinking cobwebs and dust out of his eyes, smelling the under-the-porch richness of earth all around him, Tubby shuffled toward the glow and away from the light.
    Dale and the others were lined up in the room, ready to receive their report cards and be dismissed, when the screaming started. At first it was so loud that Dale thought it was some strange, high-pitched thunder from the storm that was still darkening the sky beyond the windows. But it was too high, too shrill, and lasted too long to be part of the storm, even though it sounded like nothing human.
    At first the noise seemed to come from above… from up the stairwell on the darkened high-school level… but then it seemed to echo from the walls, from downstairs, even from the pipes and metal radiator. It went on and on. Dale and his brother, Lawrence, had been out at their Uncle Henry's and Aunt Lena's farm the previous autumn when a pig had been prepared for butchering, its throat cut as it hung upside down from the barn rafter above a tin basin set to catch the blood. This noise was a little like that: the same falsetto squeal and screech, like fingernails being dragged along a blackboard, followed by a deeper, fuller scream, ending in a gurgling noise. But then it began again. And again.
    Mrs. Doubbet froze in the act of handing a report card to the first student in line-Joe Allen-and she turned toward the doorway and stared at it for a full moment after the terrible noise stopped, as if expecting the source of the scream to appear there. Dale thought that the old lady's expression combined terror with something else… anticipation?
    A dark shape appeared in the gloom of the doorway and the class, still lined up alphabetically to receive their cards, took a collective breath.
    It was Dr. Roon, the principal, his dark, pinstriped suit and slicked-back hair blending with the darkness on the landing behind him so that his thin face seemed to float there, disembodied and disapproving. Dale looked at the man's pink skin and thought, not for the first time: Like the skin of a newborn rat.
    Dr. Roon cleared his throat and nodded toward Old Double-Butt, who stood precisely where she had been, report card still half-extended toward Joe Allen, her eyes wide, her skin so pale that the rouge and other makeup on her cheeks looked like colored chalkdust on white parchment.
    Dr. Roon glanced at the clock. "It is… ah… three-fifteen. The class is ready for dismissal?"
    Mrs. Doubbet managed a nod. Her right hand was clenched so tightly on Joe's card that Dale half-expected to hear a crack as her finger bones snapped.
    "Ah… yes," said Dr. Roon and his eyes flicked over the twenty-seven students as if they were trespassers in his building." "Well, boys and girls, I thought I would just explain that the… ah… odd noise you just heard was, Mr. Van Syke informs me, merely the boiler being tested."
    Jim Harlen turned around and for a second Dale was sure that he was going to make a funny face-a sure disaster for Dale, who was so tense that he was bound to break up in laughter. Dale desperately did not want to be kept after