Bury the Children in the Yard Read Online Free Page B

assumed she was asleep but decided to open the door and check on her anyway.
    When he opened the door she wasn’t in her bed.
    He looked at the walls of her room, all of her drawings and paintings hung up with masking tape as though she were still deciding which ones to keep there. Dominating the wall above her bed was a painting that did not alleviate his paranoid thoughts at all. It was on an open-hardback size canvas. There was something childlike about it. It looked like she had dipped her hands in paint—the left one in primary green and the right one, the small one, in primary red—and pressed them to the canvas. Scrawled all around the colorful hands in black ink were the words: MY SCHIZOPHRENIC HANDS. Over and over.
    Jakob ran out of his house and out to the meadow. Maybe he could still catch her before it was too late.
     
    The night was a buzzing swarm, matching some internal rant raging within Jakob. He reached the rusted fence separating his property from Old Man Bussard’s and clumsily made his way over the top. A dim light glowed from inside the slaughterhouse. Jakob didn’t want to go in. He had never been this close to it. He didn’t like it. It made his skin crawl. He slapped at a gnat that had kamikazed into his forehead.
    And now he was going to go inside the slaughterhouse.
    His stomach did a great turn. The smell increased as he drew closer. Standing at the rusted iron door between him and the mystery waiting inside, he wanted to be able to tell himself this was crazy so he could go back home and curl up in his bed, surrounded by air conditioning and a lack of insects. But Marcie might be in there.
    No, he told himself. Marcie had to be in there. Where else would she be? He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen the signs earlier. She had never been interested in creepy things like the slaughterhouse before. Then, after being presented with the alluring prospect of self-transformation, she had suddenly wanted to find an answer to all the mysteries.
    Jakob grabbed the handle of the door and yanked it to his left. It slid into place with a clanking boom. The smell hit him, threatening to drop him to his knees. It was the worst thing he had ever smelled. Occasionally, a raccoon would get smashed on the road in front of the house and rot there for a few days until the park ranger removed it. That was enough of a deathsmell for Jakob. This was a hundred times worse. This smelled like what he imagined burying his nose in the roadkill raccoon might smell like.
    His stomach tried to bolt up his spine but he managed to hold it down.
    He looked frantically for Marcie but didn’t see her.
    He didn’t see anything.
    Of course not. He had himself all worked up over nothing. This was, after all, just a slaughterhouse. Crazy old Bussard had probably just left the light on accidentally. Whatever he had seen previously was probably not what he thought he had seen. Maybe Ms. Minnow had lost a bunch of weight and maybe the person he had seen entering the slaughterhouse the one night wasn’t Ms. Minnow. He doubted everything now. Maybe Jeff had made up the whole Mr. Castle scenario. Jeff had been known to tell wild stories until everyone believed him before telling his audience that it was a lie.
    “Marcie?” he called out, just to be sure.
    No one answered him.
    Okay, he had served his big brotherly duty. Now he just wanted to get out. He turned around and saw Bussard standing in the doorway.
    “Lookin for somethin?” Mr. Bussard said.
    “No. I was just leaving. I’m sorry. I thought my sister was in here.” Surely the old man would understand that. He looked perfectly reasonable, just like he had always looked—a short man with bandy legs and a big gray mustache.
    “You two playin games or somethin?”
    “Yeah. Something like that. It was stupid of me to look for her in here. I’m gonna go now. Sorry if I bothered you.”
    Bussard stepped aside to allow Jakob passage to the outside.
    “You kids get