Read The Seven Whistlers for Free Online

the black plastic melting and running down over the kitchen
counter. The fire had started to spread on the counter.
    Terror raced through her. There were too many things in this
house that she could not bear to lose. Fire had always been her biggest fear. A
flash of fury went through her as she mentally blamed her husband, thinking
Jimmy had somehow left the machine on, though she knew it could have been an
electrical fire.
    Wincing with the pain in her wrist, she ran to the sink,
choking on black, stinking smoke, and turned on the faucet. They had a spray attachment
on the sink that was more powerful than the shower head in their bathroom. She
switched it on, and began to hose down the burning coffee machine.
    A fleck of burning black plastic splashed up at her and
stuck to her cheek, burning, searing into her flesh. Hannah screamed, wiping at
her face, trying to get it off, but it was stuck. She managed to keep the water
spraying on the coffee maker until the flames were doused.
    Only then did she let herself sink to the floor, tears and a
trickle of blood running down her face.
     
    Half a mile from the Lizottes’ house, a sudden gust of wind
blew down a dead, towering pine tree. It crashed down on Ray Winston’s house,
totaling the brand new Saturn he’d given himself as a fortieth birthday
present.
    On Charles Street, the brakes gave way on the mail truck and
Audrey Tosches panicked. Before she could get control of the vehicle, she was
up on the sidewalk and careening through the plate glass window that fronted
Kelley’s bar. She wept as she considered the irony of a twelve-stepper crashing
her postal truck into a bar. Then the jagged remaining portion of the plate
glass window fell like a guillotine and shattered her windshield. The steering
wheel stopped the plate glass before it would have reached her legs, but she’d
had her hands at ten and two like they’d taught her at driver’s ed when she was
sixteen, and three fingers on her left hand were severed.
    The blood scared her more than the pain.
    Seventy seven year old Aaron Chomsky caught his slipper on
the metal lip that separated the linoleum of his kitchen floor from the bare
wood of his basement stairs. For an old man, he was pretty spry, and he reached
out to grab the door knob.
    It came off in his hand, and he fell.
    At the Red Oak Inn, the refrigerator had died during
overnight, spoiling all of the food that Jenny would have made for guests at
dinner that evening.
    When Alan arrived at his antique shop, Cat O’ Nine Tails,
the heat was running and there was an oddly metallic, moldy smell coming from
the vents. When he went downstairs, he found that boiler had given out, and
water had soaked through the bottoms of dozens of cardboard boxes, perhaps
damaging many of the items he had in storage.
    Sheer bad luck. The boiler had been two days past its
warranty.
    Upstairs, he kept the door open to let the smell out. A
strange whistling noise filled the street and he went out onto the sidewalk,
searching for its source. A few seconds later, it stopped, and he shrugged and
turned to go back inside.
    On the street corner there stood the biggest black dog he
had ever seen. It stared at him. Though it did not growl or bare its teeth or
even take a step nearer, Alan felt waves of menace coming off of the dog.
    He closed the door, and went about opening windows instead.
     

CHAPTER 6
     
    Rose woke with a gasp, as though she’d stopped breathing in
her sleep and only panic had brought her awake. Eyes open wide, she drew
several long breaths and her heartbeat slowed almost to normal. Her head felt
stuffed full of cotton, almost as though she was hung over, but she hadn’t been
drunk last night.
    An image flashed across her mind like the fragment of a dark
dream — the silver stag, so breathtakingly beautiful, completely ethereal
— dragged down by massive, slavering black hounds. She squeezed her eyes
together as though that might make the image go away, and