Read Online Darkroom by Graham Masterton - Free Book Online

moment.
    He parked outside the neat yellow suburban house belonging to his friend Dennis Washinsky. On and off, he and Dennis had kept in touch since they were freshmen at college together. In those days, they had both been convinced that they were going to be the greatest screenwriters of the twentieth century. Watch out, William Goldman! Eat your heart out, Joe Eszterhas! To be fair, Dennis had written three episodes of
Star Trek: Voyager
and a made-for-TV thriller called
X Marks the Spot
. But now he was teaching screenwriting over the Internet to housewives whose chances of having a script accepted by a major studio were only marginally better than being struck by a meteorite, while Jim was teaching Special Class II, and the twentieth century was something you watched on the History Channel.
    Jim rang the door chimes and Dennis’s wife Mary snatched the door open as if she had been standing there waiting for him. She was pale and flat-faced and she was always worried about something, so that she had a habit of stopping in her tracks –
screech!
– and about-turning like Olive Oyl, because she thought she might have left her house key dangling in the front door or forgotten to put the ice cream back in the freezer or turn off the gas under the saucepan of milk.
    â€˜Jim! How nice to see you! Come on in! I’m just about to start supper. You like meat loaf, don’t you? Meat loaf?’
    â€˜I can’t stay,’ Jim told her. ‘Wish I could. I came to collect Tibbles, that’s all.’
    â€˜Won’t you have a beer? Oh, dear!’
Screech!
About turn! ‘I don’t think I put any more beer in the fridge. Or maybe I did! Did I?’ She opened the icebox and the bottom shelf was stacked with at least two dozen cans of Pabst Blue Label. ‘There! I thought I must have done! You’ve come for Tibbles? Have you found yourself someplace to live?’
    â€˜Yes, I’ve really lucked out. One of the teachers at West Grove has a vacant apartment on Saltillo Street.’
    â€˜That’s Venice, isn’t it? Venice? You like Venice. Will you be sharing?’
    â€˜Only with the ghost of the previous occupant. You should see this place. It looks like a set from
The Haunting
.’
    Jim saw Tibbles’s bowl on the floor in the laundry room, and it was licked clean, so she must have been eating well. ‘Tibbles give you any trouble?’
    â€˜I wouldn’t say
trouble
exactly. But she’s a
very
queer cat, isn’t she? For a cat, I mean. For a cat.’
    â€˜She’s idiosyncratic, I’ll give you that.’
    Mary blinked, and Jim realized that she probably didn’t know what idiosyncratic meant. ‘Quirky,’ he added.
    â€˜Quirky! You can say that again! Look, I’d better find her for you. Come on out back. Dennis has his screenwriters’ chat room at six, so he’s making sure that he’s well prepared.’
    She led Jim through to the small back yard, which had a red-painted picket fence all around it, a single row of sunflowers and a lawn covered with that bright green dichondra that used to be popular in the ’60s. It looked like a child’s drawing of a back yard rather than a real one. Dennis was sitting on the sun deck, apparently asleep, with his hands folded over his belly. His face was covered with a floppy cotton hat, like a wilted cabbage, and he was wearing a red and yellow striped shirt.
    â€˜Dennis!’ called Mary. ‘Look who’s here!’
Screech!
About-turn! ‘Did I put the washing on? Dennis has to have a white shirt for tomorrow.’ She hurried back into the house.
    Dennis raised the hat off his face and sat up. ‘Jim! How’s things?’ He was a bulging, overweight man with sun-reddened cheeks and a Jimmy Durante nose and wildly overgrown eyebrows. But his eyes were so intensely blue that Jim always felt there was a mischievous child hiding inside him, peering