Page 34 (1/2)

Shethe doors open one by one--standing aside as she does to avoid whatever ht leap out at her

Bathroourkhacolow, blue this ti frourkha knife and finds a se wooden entertainment center, the kind that takes up a whole wall and has a hundred little doors and drawers The sound she’s been hearing is coe television The static on the screen fills the rooht, and a constant, invariable hiss comes from the speakers

There hasn’t been an active broadcast in years--not since before Temple was born And even if the television had been left on when the residents left, these tubes burn themselves out after a few years

She considers the possibility that the house is haunted She norhosts, but she’s co that she can’t identify She’s never been this close to life before the slugs--and also never so far away Her skin goes taut, and she wants to turn off the television, but she is afraid of disturbing anything--as though the spirit voices of the dead, the really dead, ht admonish her

She backs out of the den

There’s one more room at the end of the hall, and she approaches it slowly and pushes the door inward Thethe Ducha frilly bed, atop the comforter and fully clothed in fine apparel, are two corpses lying side by side They are not laid out on their backs like bodies in coffins Instead, they are on their sides, curled up in fetal positions, the woure of the man, his arms wrapped around her torso in one of those forever embraces

She approaches the foot of the bed The two have been dead for many years Death is all about skin, Temple knows It dries to paper thinness, it shrivels and tautens around the knuckles and the other bones to create shrink-wrapped skeletons It changes color--gray then brown then black, but it frequently holds its hair follicles in place Another thing it does, it pulls tight around the face, which pries open the jaw and gives the dead an expression of wild and outraged laughter

Two hysterical, laughing mannequins in dusty embrace

The clothes, the corpses, the cobwebs--they are all inextricable from one another, adhered by dry decay that forms a scaly cocoon around all of it

Jeb and Jeanie Ducha broken roads, all the blood she’s spilled

Doggone it

She goes around to the bedside table and picks up a prescription pill bottle It’s e to place it exactly where it was--in the small coin-sized circle in the dust

Then she kneels down to look into the face of Jeanie Ducha that would contain thousands of hidden burrows and cavities if you were to break it open That’s where the past lives, stored up in the puny hollows of our heads

Her eyelids are sealed shut and sunken, collapsed over the dried-out sockets Her cheeks are flaky and coated with dust and rees of an old photo albuaping wide and her teeth are like pearls Laughing, laughing Inside she can see her tongue, shriveled to a piece of beef jerky, like a stuue and flaky skin and teeth like big oyster pearls

What you laughing at, grandht your boy to you--your nephew, your cousin, whatever he is I brought hiood boy, Teht--but he’s a good boy You would of liked hihs

Yeah, Temple says Anyway What aht I’m worn out

Jeanie Duchamp is silent

Look at you, Te set of teeth

And then the response, spoken by a voice behind her, a voice she recognizes i, since the houses she explores only ever seem to be haunted by one person, the voice of Moses Todd himself:

All the better to eat you with, my dear

14

She rises and spins around all in onedully in the dusty rooe of her blade He stands calmly in the doorway of the bedroom, and he has a pistol pointed at her head

Steady do, little girl, he says We got some business to finish between you andmess out of it

He is different from when she left him in the basement cell in the tohere the inheritors of the earth lived For one thing, he has trimmed his beard shorter than she re strip of red paisley fabric, probably an old bandanna, tied at an angle around his head so that it covers his left eye

I been waiting for you, he says, innin to think you weren’t coes to say She can’t figure it, Moses Todd here, alive, here in Point Co here?

How? she says again

How about we go downstairs and sit for a while I built a fire for you and everything