Read Mickelsson's Ghosts for Free Online Page A

stubborn will by means of which he’d survived his troubles were at last getting ready to pay off.
    He drove on, plunging between walls of damp shale into the darkness of suddenly sloping woods, the chill of another bright swirl of fog, then up onto a high, clear overgrown meadow where there were lilacs, a solitary chimney, low stone walls that had once been bounded by orchards or pastures. Light, then shadow, flashed on his windshield and glasses.
    â€œIf I were you I’d try Pennsylvania,” Tom Garret’s wife had told him weeks ago. It seemed to him incredible now that he’d dismissed her advice out of hand. But she was a strange woman—creepy, in fact: shy and furtive as a mouse; large, gypsy-black eyes. She was said to be “intuitive,” almost psychic. (Mickelsson had his doubts.) At parties she would hide in the corner of the room, hugging herself inside her shawl. “It’s the most beautiful country in the world—but very queer, people say.” She slid her eyes toward the others, making certain she wasn’t overheard, then put her hand on his arm—a bony, small-fingered hand that made him think of a rat’s. “Full of witches and heaven knows what.” She smiled. “That’s where I see you, Peter. Really!” “I’m sure you do,” he’d said, edging away. Not the least of her oddities was the smell that came from her, something faintly like wet, burnt wood.
    Now the road dropped sharply, like a twisting waterfall—so he would remember that first encounter later, when the descent no longer seemed so frighteningly steep—passed through a cavern of interlocked trees and fog, curved around abruptly, and emerged into strange, charged light. It was not at all the light of Wisconsin. If the light there was unearthly, it had a luminous, strained, Scandinavian unearthliness, so that it seemed no wonder that men like his grandfather (before the coming of his gift) should ponder God—even God’s love and grace—in a fashion almost chillingly logical, respectful; and that even common grocers should carry about them an aura of the scholarly, a wintry crispness and clarity that one might mistake—here among the yellows and misty greens of Pennsylvania—for icy-hearted. He slowed, the car’s weight laboring against the brakes, pulled the rumbling old Chevy onto the shoulder, and switched off the engine, knowing though not yet quite believing that this was the place he’d discovered in the Snyder Realty brochure (“Beautiful old farmhouse, 4 bedrooms, outbuildings, pond, woods, pasture”). After a moment he got out to stand beside the blue, pitted fender, looking down at his prospect from a quarter-mile away and a hundred yards above. The engine clicked noisily. There were blackberries by the roadside, grown up in profusion as if to hide the broad scar of an abandoned gravel pit with a chain across what remained of the entrance and a sign, NO DUMPING! He picked a handful of berries and absently ate them as he looked. He could now see the realtor’s red and white sign.
    â€œSon of a gun,” he muttered, and shook his head.
    Long blue shadows reached from the woods above down the cant of the mountain—pale, new-mown hay—toward the house and barns. Between the house and the nearest shed, a creek glittered, and directly above the house, startling as a wolf in the late-afternoon light, stood a perfect, white full moon.
    Finney, his lawyer, would stage one of his grand-operatic fits when he heard the price. “Listen, pal. Take an old goat-fucker’s word for it—” he would say.
    Mickelsson wiped his hands on his handkerchief, climbed back into the car, put the gearshift in neutral, and coasted nearer. In front of the house he pushed in the brake, took off his glasses and cleaned them, then fitted them back over his ears.
    The lawn was mowed, the barndoors padlocked. The owner