Read Online Greenmantle by Charles De Lint - Free Book Online Page A

where it was coming from, only then the deer was out there and I guess I just forgot about it. But it was really something.”
    “Well, I was asleep,” Frankie said, giving her daughter’s shoulders a squeeze, “and if I’d heard any kind of music, I’m sure it would’ve been the theme to The Exorcist or something like that because I was scared.”
    “Me too. He was so big.”
    “You’re telling me.” They looked at each other and laughed. “Listen to us,” Frankie said. “You’d think we both really saw your stag. I’m going to make some tea. Would you like some?”
    Ali nodded and followed her mother into the kitchen, but something was bothering her. She remembered how quickly the big animal had just…disappeared. She couldn’t have turned her head for more than a few moments, but when she looked back it was just…gone….
     
    * * *
     
    Scream or no scream, Valenti decided to leave well enough alone for the night. After watching the house for a while, he saw Ali and her mother enter the kitchen like nothing was the matter. Since he didn’t even know Ali’s mother, and he sure as hell wasn’t up to explaining what he’d been doing skulking around in their backyard tonight, he might as well just go home.
    Besides, he had too much on his mind right now. He had to sort through what was real and what wasn’t before he talked to anyone about it. For all he knew, he might have been imagining Ali out on the lawn as well.
    After taking a last look around, he set off through the trees, heading for home. The wind that had sprung up just before the stag appeared had died down now and the mosquitos were back. This had been one helluva weird night, he thought, no question about that.

7
     
     
    The sound of Tommy’s pipes, once heard, was not easily forgotten, even for a man of such limited imagination as Lance Maxwell. He hadn’t heard them so clearly again as he had on the day of that February thaw when he’d gotten the flat tire, but the memory of them and their vague sound, carried some evenings like pollen on a high wind, continued to trouble him all through the spring.
    Whereas their music awoke a longing deeply held in Tony Valenti—a need to unravel the mystery he heard hidden between the notes of the tunes—they just made Lance horny. He looked for release in his marriage bed, bringing a vigor to his lovemaking that had been absent for years.
    “I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” Brenda confided to a neighbor one day, “but I’m not going to complain. It’s nice to know I’ve still got what it takes.”
    She might not have been so ready to accept it if she’d known what was going through Lance’s head when they were making love. He liked to enter her from the rear now; he wanted to rut her like a goat, pumping away like Dooker mounting the Sneddens’ bitch when it was in heat. It wasn’t a woman under him, but a doe, and he was the buck; a nanny, and he was the billy goat; a bitch, and he was the hound. And afterward, lying spent and staring up at the peeling ceiling of their bedroom, he’d still be hard, his seed sown, but the release he needed had been stolen away on the strains of a music he didn’t even know he remembered.
    He’d gone to see the doc a week or so after he’d had what he thought was a heart attack. Bolton put him on a diet, told him to take it a little easier because he wasn’t getting any younger, adding, “Lay off the cigars, Lance, because if a heart attack doesn’t get you, then lung cancer surely will.”
    He’d cut down to two cigars a day, followed the diet as much as their budget allowed, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about taking it easier. He barely made ends meet as it was. If he cut out the hauling and odd jobs he did, they’d be on welfare faster than you could shake your dick dry after a piss. So he followed the doc’s advice as he could, and damned if he didn’t feel better, but he couldn’t explain the wanting in him, the