Read Online The Rascal by Eric Arvin - Free Book Online

height, but Jeff never saw his face. He was always seen from behind. The first Jeff had seen of him, the boy sat near naked on the ground in the woods wearing a pair of dirty underwear and a large-brimmed brown hat. Perhaps too large for his pointed head. The boy had something in his lap and was working furiously on it. Feverishly and unnaturally fast. Around him lay the bloody carcasses of small animals: birds, rabbits, and moles.
    The boy turned quickly, as if being called, and then got up and ran. He ran to the big house on the hill. The sky was mute and heavy over the structure. The boy stopped suddenly in the yard and tensed. He backed off slowly, and the big house began to transform. From wood and stone, it became flesh and bone. The widow’s walk became a woman’s head and it looked disapprovingly down at the boy. Its roof had become her messy dark hair and the railing was a line of her sharp teeth. The boy screamed and he began to run back to the cottage. He ran as fast as he could, but she caught him with her arms made of the splintered porch.
    At once, the boy was in the barn, being whipped by the woman, who now stood all too human before him. Jeff tried to intervene, but the woman would not allow it. She continued to thrash at the boy without mercy with a finely whittled tree branch, leaving deep red marks on the boy’s bare legs and arms. He howled in pain and rage, his face still a blur to Jeff.
    “He gets what he gets because he sins,” the woman said as she continued whipping the boy. “You must stop it before it begins.”
    Then she let go of the branch and it became a rope. It wrapped itself around the boy, tying him to one of the beams in the barn. Again, Jeff made a move to interfere.
    The woman flung him back. “It gets what it gets because it sins!” she screamed.
    From the woman’s push, Jeff fell back to the mouth of the well and peered down into it.
    The woman stood at the barn door. “Well, you fell and found the well. It will tell, oh it will tell! A gateway, an opening, out of some hell.”
    The darkness of the well enveloped him, and he woke. And when Jeff awoke from such dreams and visions, they did not fill him with dread. No. It was excitement that filled him, for he knew then that there was adventure yet to be had.
    ***
    The actress saw everything from her widow’s walk. She saw the ocean mock the sky. She saw the sky rage at the water. At night, she saw the lights from across the bay, tiny and twinkling. She saw the change in weather before it arrived. And through the telescope, she now saw Chloe, the new cottage owner, trudging up the hill.
    Lana didn’t think Chloe was headed for the big house. Truthfully, Chloe didn’t look to be headed anywhere. She was just walking, climbing up the hill and tiring herself out. Her arms were wrapped around her body, and Lana sensed the loss the girl was feeling. Loss was like a bridge and tackle. Anyone who has known it—true loss, not just the displacement of a favorite trinket—anyone who has honestly known it connects automatically, almost angrily and with a starving need, to those souls who are similar. The actress felt Chloe was throwing her tackle. The question was, could Lana accept it? Would she want to? She’d been alone so long, everything else was foreign now. To seek comfort in another human being would be… immoral.
    As Chloe walked closer, Lana found that she wished Chloe might look up to the widow’s walk. To connect, if just a little.
    “Here I am,” she whispered. But they were words not meant to be heard. They were at once taken by the same mad breeze that chafed her face raw. Words dead from their first utterance.
    Opening up to Chloe would be selfish, Lana chided herself. The actress had laid her bed with self-accusations, and she had to sleep in it. The wind agreed. A friend would not help matters anyway. Lana felt she was already hurtling toward the end of the scene, her lines flubbed or the script rewritten.
    Her