Read Draw the Dark for Free Online Page B

trembling. Cold beads of sweat popped over my forehead, and my teeth actually chattered the way they hadn’t since I was a little kid with the flu. I thought about heatstroke, but I remembered that you weren’t supposed to sweat. Then, just as quickly, the icy wave passed to be replaced by the muttering.
    I wasn’t too scared, which was really weird. Did this mean I was getting used to being crazy? Did crazy people even worry about things like that? But I was more . . . apprehensive. The empty eye of that window the next level up seemed to yawn wider and wider and then this arrow of thought: the muttering—the voices—wanted me inside. Well, why not? It was hotter than heck, and the ground was so far away....
    The crows had come back too, their claws digging into the roof, and I felt their glittery eyes drilling my back as I pulled myself over the lip of the window and into the barn. Inside, the first thing that hit was the smell, which is weird for me because I usually notice how things look first. But this time, it was the smell: the memory of sun-scorched timothy hay, a faint overlay of manure, and the fresher stink of bird poop. Heart thumping, I eased my way down a rickety old ladder from a kind of catwalk that went around the mow. The ladder groaned and squealed, and I kept waiting for a rung to crumble under my feet and drop me to the loft floor, but I made it down and I stood a sec, waiting for my legs to stop wobbling. I turned a slow circle, letting my eyes sweep over the barn and broken windows, unsure what I was supposed to see but drinking—
drawing
—it all in. The loft was cut by thick shadow, alternating with bolts of sunlight shooting through gaps in the roof. A flight of stairs led from the cupola and ducked through a square cut into the wooden floor. The mow was wide and above it ran bare wooden beams. I spotted an old rat’s tail of rope curled around one beam, but it was frayed and would probably crumble to dust if you touched it.
    The muttering in my head was . . . well, it was there but holding its breath, waiting for me to notice—
what
? Then I saw it through the jagged gap in an east-facing window, and all at once, my vision narrowed and sharpened, like I was looking through a telescope, and the muttering surged to life.
    I was looking at Winter, and it was the town almost exactly as I’d drawn it on the last page of my pad on the day I’d awakened from that first awful nightmare. There were the stacks of Eisenmann’s plant chuffing ash gray smoke. There were fields alternating with tracks of oak and birch; and beyond, the cerulean lake seeping into a light turquoise sky. My gaze involuntarily clicked to the place in the landscape where I knew the onion-domed building ought to be . . . but, of course, it wasn’t there. To the left was a copse of aspens on the southern tip of a small pond. From this height, I could see that someone had decided that was a great place to dump a load of old bricks, barely visible through weedy snarls.
    I didn’t know why I needed to see this. I didn’t know why I was doing any of this. I decided I really needed to take a break. I was tired, sweaty, hungry, my head swimmy from the heat and, yeah, a little freaked out again. Best to rest and then Justin would come back and I’d have lunch and feel better.
    The hinges of the second-story hay door protested when I tugged, but I got the door open, and a gust of cool air lifting from the lake pillowed against my cheeks. I leaned out a few seconds, letting the air wash over my face and then I felt calmer, ready for a nap. I sprawled with my back up against the boards and stretched out my legs . . . and the muttering dropped to a whisper, my thoughts got jagged and smells became sounds became colors and then I was falling—

V

    I’ll try to describe exactly what happened next.
    I still smelled manure and hay, but the smell was stronger now, and horses nickered in their stalls below. My head filled with a swirly