Read Online The Ninth Nightmare by Graham Masterton - Free Book Online Page B

lost their balance and fell over sideways. They lay on the bed, breathless, looking into each other’s green eyes. Even after all of these years of growing up together, they still found it a source of fascination that they should look so much alike, and think so much alike. For each of them, it was like owning a mirror which could talk back.
    Kiera reached out and stroked Kieran’s hair. ‘You need a haircut. Your hair is almost as long as mine.’
    Kieran said, ‘The last time I had a haircut we saw that dead guy, remember?’
    â€˜Oh, so you’re not going to get a haircut because you’re scared you might see him again?’
    Kieran said nothing but shook his head. It had been over two months ago but they could both visualize him as clearly as if he were sitting in the bedroom with them now. Kieran had been having his hair cut in the old-fashioned barbershop in the Handlery Hotel in San Francisco. It was a long, mirrored room with a dozen red-leather chairs in a row, and a row of white basins. Kieran had been sitting two chairs away from a bulky, balding man who appeared to be asleep. Nobody was cutting his hair or shaving him, even though there were two barbers at the far end of the room, talking to each other and laughing. Kiera had come into the barbershop, carrying a whole bunch of shopping bags, and said, ‘You should see the dress I’ve just bought! Prada, seventeen hundred dollars!’
    The barber who was cutting Kieran’s hair had gone to fetch more towels. Kiera had said to Kieran, ‘What’s the matter with that guy? He looks like he’s asleep.’
    It was then that they had both noticed that the towel around the man’s neck was stained bright red, and that the stain was rapidly spreading. Kiera had gone over to him and said, ‘Sir? Sir? Are you OK? You look like you’re bleeding.’
    She had turned his chair around and it was then that the man’s head had suddenly dropped to one side, revealing that his neck had been cut open all the way back to his spine. Kiera had looked at Kieran in horror, but they had both realized that what they were seeing was a memory of a dead man, an after-image, like all the ghosts they saw. None of the barbers were cutting his hair or paying him any attention because in reality he simply wasn’t there.
    Later they had Googled the history of the Handlery Hotel and discovered that Tony Sciarro, a San Francisco gangster, had been murdered in the barbershop in September of nineteen thirty-seven by a man who was dressed as a barber. One diagonal cut with a straight razor had almost taken his head off. His murderer was never identified or caught.
    Kiera climbed off the bed and rearranged the pillows. ‘Seriously, Kieran, you need to get some sleep. I’ll wake you up at six.’
    â€˜Make that six fifty-nine. It won’t take me more than a minute to get dressed.’
    She came up to him and hugged him and gave him a kiss. ‘Sweet dreams,’ she said. ‘And I mean it. None of your nightmares.’
    A few minutes after three in the morning, Kiera was woken by a soft sighing noise. At first she thought it was a woman crying, but it went on and on for over five minutes, low and persistent, and she realized then that it couldn’t be a woman because a woman would have had to pause for breath.
    She sat up in bed and listened. After a while she heard a light pattering sound, too, and she thought: rain . That’s what it sounded like, rain. And the sighing was the wind, blowing underneath the connecting door to Kieran’s bedroom.
    She could smell rain, too, and wet soil; and when she drew back the bedcovers and put her feet on the carpet, she could feel the wind blowing cold against her legs.
    She switched on her bedside lamp. Then she crossed over to the door and pressed her ear against it. Before she opened the door she wanted to make sure that she wasn’t hearing things.