The Shadow Year Read Online Free

station. It was said that when he was drunk at a bar, he was happy-go-lucky, not a care in the world, but when he got drunk at home, he hit his wife and cursed her.
    â€œOne night around Halloween, he got off the train at Whitestone. The wind was blowing, and it was cold. The station was empty but for him. He started walking toward the steps that led down to the street, when from behind him he heard a noise like a voice in the wind. OOOOoooo was what it sounded like. Heturned around, and at the far end of the platform was a giant ghost, eight feet tall, rippling in the breeze.
    â€œIt scared the bejesus out of him. He ran home screaming. The next day, which was Saturday, he told my father that the train station was haunted. My father printed the story as kind of a joke. No one believed Mr. Weeks, because everyone knew he was a drunk. Still, he tried to convince people by swearing to it, saying he knew what he saw and it was real.
    â€œOn the way into the city on the following Friday, he told one of the neighbors, Mr. Laveglia, who took the same train in the morning, that the ghost had been there on both Monday and Wednesday nights and that both times it had called his name. Weeks was a nervous wreck, stuttering and shaking while he told of his latest encounters. Mr. Laveglia said Weeks was a man on the edge, but before getting off the train in the city, Weeks leaned in close to our neighbor and whispered to him that he had a plan to deal with the phantom. It was eight o’clock in the morning, and Mr. Laveglia said he already smelled liquor on Weeks’s breath.
    â€œThat night Weeks returned from the city on the late train. When he got off onto the platform at Whitestone, it was deserted as usual. The moment he turned around, there was the ghost, moaning, calling his name, and coming straight at him. But that day, in the city, Weeks had bought a pistol. That was his plan. He took it out of his jacket, shot four times, and the ghost collapsed on the platform.”
    â€œHow can you kill a ghost?” asked Jim.
    â€œIt was eight feet tall,” said Mary.
    â€œIt wasn’t a ghost,” said Nan. “It was his wife in a bedsheet, standing on stilts. She wanted to scare her husband into coming home on time and not drinking. But he killed her.”
    â€œDid he get arrested for murder?” I asked.
    â€œNo,” said Nan. “He wept bitterly when he found out it washis wife. When the police investigation was over and he was shown to have acted in self-defense, he abandoned his home and Louqueer and went off to live as a hermit in a cave in a field of wild asparagus at the edge of town. I don’t remember why, but eventually he became known as Bedelia, and kids would go out to the cave and scream, ‘Bedelia, we’d love to steal ya!’ and run away when he chased them. Louqueer got sent to an orphanage, and I never saw her again.”
    â€œWhat happened to the hermit?” asked Jim.
    â€œDuring a bad winter, someone found him in the middle of the field by his cave, frozen solid. In the spring they buried him there among the wild asparagus.”

Sewer Pipe Hill
    After lunch we put George on the leash and took him out into the backyard. Mary didn’t go with us because she decided to have a session with her make-believe friends, Sally O’Malley and Sandy Graham, who lived in the closet in her room. Once in a while, she’d let them out and she would become Mickey and they would go to school together down in the cellar.
    Jim had the idea that we could use George to track the pervert. We’d let him smell the ladder, he’d pick up the scent, and we’d follow along. Franky Conrad joined us in our backyard where the ladder again lay propped against the side of the toolshed. For a while we just stood there waiting for the dog to smell the ladder. Then I told Jim, “You better rev him up.” To rev George up, all you had to do was stick your foot near