Read Online Defy the Dark by Saundra Mitchell - Free Book Online Page B

dead woman on the sidewalk,” he whispered. “Her face—”
    The line went dead.
    Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the dead woman prop herself against the lamppost, giggling facelessly.
    The phone cracked in his fist; otherwise Cado didn’t react. If he ignored the dead woman, surely she would remember she was supposed to be dead and shut up.
    A thick tearing split the air. Like whatever had stolen the dead woman’s face had decided to rip it in half. Only nothing so small as a face—this was vast. Mountainous. The sound of the world clawing itself open so violently, the force of it snuffed out the scant halos of light beneath the lampposts.
    The cathedral bells chimed but distantly, as if they were miles away instead of down the street. On the third chime, the trolley appeared.
    Cado squinted against the sudden light it brought. The single burning headlight and the interior lights all cast a feverish glow. Even the trolley itself was the yellow of something spit up from a diseased lung.
    The doors accordioned open when Cado stood. For several moments his legs refused to move forward, but once he took the first step, it became easier.
    Cado noticed an animal stink as soon as he boarded, like the inside of an iguana cage. The odor emanated from the motorman crammed into the driver’s seat, too tall for the space if the awkward jut of his knees was any indication. The motorman had no eyelashes, and his lids made a gummy smack when he blinked.
    â€œOne dollar.” It was the same sexless voice Cado had heard earlier, but it didn’t belong to the motorman. It came from a speaker on the control panel. A recording.
    Cado put two Sacagawea coins into the cash box. “I told you,” he said, proud that he no longer sounded like a girl. “Round trip.”
    He turned to take a seat, and a sharp pain stabbed through the base of his skull just before the doors banged shut.
    Â 
    C ado grabbed the back of his head and whipped around in time to see a stinger retreat into the motorman’s palm as he grabbed the lever and set the trolley in motion.
    â€œWhat did you do to me?”
    The motorman punched a button on the control panel, and the voice hissed once again from the speaker. “Sit.”
    Cado realized, just as he had with the cackler, that he was in the presence of something inhuman. Not just smelly and misshapen, but inhuman. Something he might have been tempted on any other day to stomp beneath his shoe, but today he did as he was told. He went to the back of the trolley and sat on the hard wooden seat. The sting hadn’t hurt him; it simply made everything floaty and pleasant.
    Above the windows but below the arched roof were old-timey ads for stuff like Dictaphones and athletic trusses and nerve food, whatever that was. The ad didn’t show what nerve food looked like, only a woman holding her head in agony, and a bunch of words he wasn’t close enough to read. He wondered if nerve food was good for what ailed him.
    Cado touched the sore spot on the back of his head, and his finger came away bloody. The motorman had stabbed him in the brain or maybe the spinal cord. Both? Either way, Cado should have been dead. Or paralyzed. Or at least worried. But the only thing he felt was the trolley propelling him through town. And then out of town.
    Cado no longer recognized the landscape. East Texas was thick with piney forest, but the passing trees were massive, big enough to tunnel through, which the trolley frequently did. After a few moments, it began a steep ascent, and the giant trees fell away as a city rose before him.
    It was what Cado imagined New York City must be like, only with buildings so tall they were wreathed in clouds. The tracks twined about the mile-high, artfully sculpted towers like ribbon unspooling from a beautifully wrapped gift.
    At the height of the track, the trolley paused and Cado’s window aligned with the top window of one of