Read Online Stones by William Bell - Free Book Online Page B

spring sunshine. The large windows were trimmed in white that contrasted sharply with the dark plank walls. The lilac bush by the door was in bud. When I turned off the paved road onto the gravel concession line, I saw the stone and mortar structure. The one I had crashed into.
    “Yup, that’s it, all right,” I said to myself.
    “Why are we stopping?” Raphaella asked. “And what’s what?”
    “That’s the church where I spent the night last March. Remember? I told you about getting trapped there in the blizzard.” I hadn’t told her about the dream. “Let’s take a look,” I said.
    We crossed the road. Sure enough, the stones were chipped and there were faint traces of blue paint on the mortar.
    “It’s some kind of monument,” Raphaella said, her voice uneasy. “Look.”
    On the side opposite the one I’d hit was a bronze plaque that told us that the African Methodist Church had been built in 1849. Below the notation was a list of those “who worshipped and are buried here.”
    “African?” I said. “I don’t get it.”
    Rural Ontario was a long way from Africa.And you could count the black families in the area on one hand.
    I looked around. “There aren’t any gravestones. So where are the graves?”
    Around the church, the grounds were grass-covered. About thirty yards away was a forest of maple trees.
    “I guess the grassy part is the cemetery. Come on,” I suggested. “Let’s look inside.”
    “Maybe I’ll wait in the van,” Raphaella said quietly.
    “Just a quick look, then we’ll go.”
    I soon regretted my decision. Like dampness from cold stone, the church gave off an atmosphere of dread that I could feel on my skin and in my bones. Determined not to give in to my uneasiness, I pushed on. It’s a sunny spring day, I told myself. Birds are chirping in the trees. This isn’t Castle Dracula.
    I led Raphaella along the side of the church and looked in the windows, recalling the fright I had had that night when I had thought I’d seen a man watching me. Inside, the place appeared as I had left it. The benches that had been my bed stood before the stove.
    “Look,” I said to Raphaella, “you can seewhere the original logs have been covered with siding. And there’s —”
    Her face was ashen, and she held her hands at her waist, fingers interlocked, knuckles white.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “There are spirits here,” she whispered, her eyes wide.
    “What? How do —?”
    “Something bad happened around here somewhere. Something evil. Garnet, please, let’s go.”
    She clutched my arm as we walked back to the van. Which of us was more scared I didn’t know.

chapter     
    T he mobile home park was about five hundred yards down the road on the left, almost hidden from view by a row of tall cedars. I drove under an arch with “Silverwood Estates” printed across a rising-sun motif and followed a winding blacktop track, slowing for the speed bumps, until I came to an egg-yellow modular unit with a sign saying “Office” nailed to a deck post. I got a set of keys and Roy Weeks’s handwritten instructions from the mailbox and we drove farther into the estate, looking for unit 99. I missed it the first time by.
    “That’s it,” Raphaella pointed. “The one back there by itself, against the trees.”
    I reversed the van and drove up a dirt track to my new abode, a “single-wide” mobile home, pea green with white trim around thewindows and door. A satellite dish sat on the roof. A wooden deck ran the length of the trailer. On three sides a lawn enveloped last year’s flower gardens. We sat in the van, looking the place over. It would be private, and pretty quiet, I guessed, tucked up against the forest, separated from the other units.
    Inside, it was bright, clean and almost new. The door opened into a little living room. Then there was a galley kitchen, bathroom and shower, and a good-sized bedroom at the back. Perfect.
    I stowed my gear in the bedroom. A window