Read Online If You Could See Me Now by Peter Straub - Free Book Online

noise of the television set, Duane told me where to find the door and the trestles in his basement and then said, “Make yourself at home,” and went outside. I watched him through the side windows of the kitchen as he lumbered toward the pole barn and emerged from it atop a giant tractor. He looked comfortable and at ease, as some men look natural on a horse. Somewhere he had acquired a peaked cap which I could see when the tractor had taken him behind the tall rows of corn up in the far field.
    The sound of the television drew me into the unexpected room where Alison Updahl had gone. When I was a child this room had been cramped, linoleum-tiled like the kitchen, and occupied chiefly by a sprung davenport and an inefficient television. Duane had evidently rebuilt it; his skills had grown since the days of the Dream House. Now it was three times its former size, thickly and luxuriously carpeted, and furnishedin a manner which suggested a great deal of expense. My cousin’s daughter, sprawled on a brown couch and watching a color television, looked, in her T-shirt and jeans and bare feet, like a teenager in an affluent suburb of Chicago or Detroit. She did not look up when I entered. She was rigid with self-consciousness.
    I said, “What a nice-looking room. I haven’t seen it before.”
    “It stinks.” She was still looking at the television, where Fred Astaire was sitting in a racing car. After a second I saw that the car was up on blocks in a closed garage.
    “Maybe it just smells new,” I said, and earned a glance. But no more than that. She snorted through her nose and returned to the movie.
    “What’s the film?”
    Not bothering to look up again, she said, “
On the Beach
. It’s great.” She waved off a fly which had settled on her leg. “Suppose you let me try and watch it?”
    “Whatever you say.” I went to a big comfortable chair at the side of the room and sat. I watched her for a minute or so without either of us speaking. She began to jerk her foot up and down rhythmically, then to toy with her face. After a while she spoke.
    “It’s about the end of the world. I think that’s a pretty neat idea. Zack said I should watch it. He saw it before. Do you live in New York?”
    “On Long Island.”
    “That’s New York. I’d like to go there. That’s where everything is.”
    “Oh?”
    “You should know. Zack says everything is going to end pretty soon, maybe with people throwing bombs, maybe with earthquakes, it doesn’t matter what, and that everybody thinksit’ll happen in New York first. But it won’t. It’ll happen here first. There’ll be bodies all over the Midwest, Zack says.”
    I said that it sounded like Zack was looking forward to it.
    She sat up straight, like a wrestler on the mat, and took her attention off the screen for a moment. Her eyes were very pale. “Do you know what they found at the Arden dump a couple of years ago? Just when I was starting high school? Two heads in paper bags. Women’s heads. They never found out who they were. Zack says it was a sign.”
    “A sign of what?”
    “That it’s beginning. Pretty soon there won’t be any schools, any government, any armies. There won’t be any of that shit. There’ll just be killing. For a long time. Like with Hitler.”
    I saw that she wished to shock. “I think I can see why your father doesn’t like Zack.”
    She glared at me and returned her gaze sullenly to the screen.
    I said, “You must have known that girl who was killed.”
    She blinked. “Sure I knew her. That was terrible.”
    “I suppose she helps prove your theories.”
    “Don’t be creepy.” Another pale-eyed, sullen stare from the little warrior.
    “I like your name.” In truth, and despite her foul manners, I was beginning to like her. Lacking her confidence, she had none of her namesake’s awesome charm, but she had her energy.
    “Ugh.”
    “Were you named after anybody?”
    “Look, I don’t know and I don’t care, okay?”
    Our