Read Online The Witch of the Wood by Michael Aronovitz - Free Book Online

was rubbing the back of her ankle as if she required as potent a physical soothing as the mental comforts she’d just supplied to her patients.
    Sam reached to touch those legs, and she let him.
    Rudy felt them too; she had goosebumps.
    As if back to the grainy black-and-white film stock, she jumped camera frames then, making Sam move ten feet laterally to get to her, lying on her back on the kitchen table, knees up, ankles together. He approached and palmed those knees, spreading them slowly, her heels making rubbing sounds on the tablecloth, letting the shadows disappear up her thighs, and Sam saw her dark pussy, one of the lips sticking just for a moment, then coming off the other in a sweet unfolding, and Sam bent in to tongue it, his back cracking softly, and he and Rudy smelled her deep musk.
    But right at the very moment he made to slide his tongue into her, she jumped frames again, now twelve feet deeper into the house in the baby’s playroom, naked on all fours and sunken down in front with her elbows and forearms flat to the carpet, ass pointed ceiling-high in a lovely heart shape, waiting there, just for him.
    Sam was desperate now, bright purple in his passion, eyes rolling, and he stumbled to her, unbuttoning his pants, wading and waddling as they fell to his ankles, voices in his head pleading, “Oh my God,” and “No, please . . .” and that made it better somehow as he fell to his knees to ram his second aunt from behind, and he was amazed in a distracted sort of way by the roughness of the carpet.
    Then the playroom vanished, and so did his second aunt.
    “Oh,” Sam said, voice small. Initially, he hadn’t been running his fingers along goosebumped flesh, but the pitted bumper of the old Chevy illegally parked and booted with three old tickets fluttering from under the windshield wipers. He hadn’t been palming knees and spreading a pair of bare legs, but rather, he’d moved down the sidewalk to the bike rack and strategically pushed apart the tires on a couple of old ten-speeds that had been abandoned, and now he was in the street with his pants down, knees scraped, bus braking desperately because it had been doing fifty-seven with “Express” flashing across its automated route identification board.
    “Wait,” Sam said, just before the bus hit him dead on.
    The kid in the Alaskan parka, the one who had actually said, “Oh my God,” was still digging to try to get a bit of this on his cell phone. The woman next to him who had said, “No, please . . .” was looking away, face screwed in like a prune.
    The front of the bus plowed into Sam and kicked him backward, his head slapping down to the street, blood bursting behind in an egg-shaped spray. The tires screeched and smoked over him, the back end of the bus fishtailing, Sam’s body puppet-jumping as it was caught up and mangled by the under carriage.
    Rudy got out of the car and moved toward the apartment’s rear entrance.
    “Thanks for the subtle diversion,” he muttered numbly. Before taking hold of the doorknob, he looked down at his son.
    Wolfie was smiling.

    Rudy brought his child in, put him on a blanket on the living room floor, drew a bath, went through the motions. Every three seconds or so he looked back over his shoulder from the bathroom to check, and Wolfie basically stayed put like a good little baby, reaching his fingers playfully into the red ambulance lights washing across him through the picture window facing the reservoir. It gave the illusion of movement, a lunatic carousel.
    “You’ve got to kill him before it’s too late ,” Rudy whispered under his breath. Then he said back to himself, “Yeah, right.”
    So did Wolfie, and he was right in the doorway, wobbly, but standing there naked and bloody. Rudy’s heels kicked out from under him and he sat hard, right on the spot where two of the tiles had come loose, and his ass hit an edge. He winced, bit it back. Yes, he’d forgotten about this particular