Read Online Black House by Stephen King - Free Book Online

when he followed her into the kitchen and she wasn’t there—she’d turned out to be
behind
him, coming down the stairs, and
how
she had done that seems less important to him than
why
she had done it, gone sneaking up the back stairs and then come tromping down the front ones (because that is what she must have done; it’s the only solution he can think of). There’s the constant tapping and petting she does with her tongue. Fred knows what it all adds up to: Judy has been acting like a woman in terror. This has been going on since
before
the murder of Amy St. Pierre, so it can’t be the Fisherman, or not
entirely
the Fisherman.
    And there is a larger issue. Before the last couple of weeks, Fred would have told you that his wife doesn’t have a fearful bone in her body. She might be just five foot two (“Why, you’re no bigger than a minute” was his grandmother’s comment when she first met Fred’s intended), but Judy has the heart of a lion, of a Viking warrior. This isn’t bullshit, or hype, or poetic license; it is the simple truth as Fred sees it, and it is the contrast between what he has always known and what he sees now that scares him the most.
    From Avalon he races onto Camelot, crossing the intersection without looking for traffic, going much faster than usual, almost sprinting instead of jogging. He is remembering something that happened about a month after they started going out.
    It was the Chocolate Watchband they had gone to, as usual, only this time during the afternoon, to listen to a jazz quartet that had actually been pretty good. Not that they had listened very much, as Fred now recalls it; mostly he had talked to Judy about how little he liked being in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (Moo U, the Letters and Science snooties called it), and how little he liked the unspoken family assumption that when he graduated he would come on back home and help Phil run the family farm in French Landing. The idea of spending his life in harness with Phil gave Fred a severe case of the glooms.
    What do you want, then?
Judy had asked. Holding his hand on the table, a candle burning inside a jelly glass, the combo onstage working a sweet little number called “I’ll Be There for You.”
    I don’t know,
he’d said,
but I tell you what, Jude, I should be in Business Admin, not Moo U. I’m a hell of a lot better at selling than at planting.
    Then why don’t you switch?
    Because my family thinks—
    Your family isn’t going to have to live your life, Fred—you are.
    Talk is cheap, he remembers thinking, but then something had happened on the way back to campus, something so amazing and out of his understanding of how life was supposed to work that it fills him with wonder even now, some thirteen years later.
    Still talking about his future and their future together (
I could be a farm wife,
Judy had said,
but only if my husband really wants to be a farmer
). Deep into that. Letting their feet carry them along without much interest in exactly where they were. And then, at the intersection of State Street and Gorham, a scream of brakes and a hearty metallic bang had interrupted the conversation. Fred and Judy had looked around and seen a Dodge pickup that had just tangled bumpers with an elderly Ford station wagon.
    Getting out of the wagon, which had pretty clearly run the stop sign at the end of Gorham Street, was a middle-aged man in a middle-aged brown suit. He looked scared as well as shaken up, and Fred thought there was good reason for that; the man advancing toward him from the pickup truck was young, heavyset (Fred particularly remembered the belly bulging over the waist of his jeans), and carrying a tire iron.
You goddamn careless asshole!
Young and Heavyset cried.
Look what you done to my truck! This my dad’s truck, you goddamn asshole!
    Middle-Aged Suit backing up, eyes wide, hands raised, Fred watching fascinated from in front of Rickman’s Hardware, thinking
Oh no, mister, bad