Read Seldom Seen in August for Free Online

well and
truly fucked.
    There was little to see in the room but
a small blue card table, the cheap kind you could pick up at any
convenience store. A chair was set on the other side of it. Behind
the chair was a wall of television screens. The screens were on,
but showed nothing but gray.
    Wade waited.
    At length a door opened somewhere
behind him. He tried to see who was there but gave up when it
caused fiery threads of pain to scurry up the back of his
neck.
    “Mr. Crawford?” the visitor asked in an
oddly benevolent voice, as if he had been dying to make Wade’s
acquaintance.
    “Yeah? Who’re you?”
    The man came around the table, allowing
Wade to get a good look at him.
    “My name is Hank Cochran. You may have
heard of me?”
    “Nope,” said Wade.
    “Ah. Well, no matter. We have plenty of
time to get to know one another.”
    Cochran was silver-haired and dressed
in a charcoal colored suit and a midnight blue tie. A matching
handkerchief poked like the tongue of a hanged man from his breast
pocket. As he sat and put his hands together, Wade saw that his
nails were neatly clipped. The man’s face was long and pale. Bushy
eyebrows fought to unite over a pair of light blue eyes. Everything
about him spoke of money, of a no-nonsense attitude toward
life.
    Wade wondered if he was a lawyer, a
mortician, or a mobster. He looked like a combination of all three.
Of course, many of the lawyers he’d known who’d worked for the mob
had been forced to adopt all of those roles at one time or another.
One thing he did know for sure was that the old man in front of him
was not on the right side of the law.
    “I’m sorry for keeping you
waiting.”
    “No problem. It was a good chance to
gather my thoughts.”
    Cochran looked at him, a faint smile on
his face. “Do you know where you are, Wade? May I call you
Wade?”
    Wade shrugged. “So where am
I?”
    “Still in Seldom Seen.”
    Wade looked around again, noted the
dirt walls around the bank of television screens, and nodded. “The
basement, right?”
    Cochran smiled, exposing brilliant
white teeth. “Right.”
    “Why?”
    “We’re conducting a project
here.”
    “And it’s not arts and
crafts.”
    “No. No it isn’t. It’s a little more
elaborate than that, though I suppose there are similarities. Both
require the coming together of certain elements to
work.”
    “And I’m an element.”
    “You are, yes. A vital one.” Cochran
seemed to be enjoying their exchange, which baffled Wade
somewhat.
    “So what does the project
entail?”
    “Rehabilitation.”
    “By what means?”
    Cochran raised his eyebrows. “Oh, but
you’ve already seen the means.” He looked up at the ceiling, which
consisted of a network of wires and rotting beams Wade didn’t think
would take much to bring down. “Upstairs.”
    “The ghosts?”
    The old man shook his head. “They’re
not ghosts.”
    “Holograms then.”
    “In a way, if you think of yourself as
the projector.”
    “So you put on this show of things from
my past in the hope that I would—what? Drop to my knees and pray
for forgiveness?”
    Cochran sat back and folded his arms.
“That’s the gist of it, though given your history, we’d all have
been rather astounded if your reaction had been so dramatic, or so
easily attained.”
    “What were you hoping for
then?”
    “Gradual dawning.”
    Wade pondered this a moment, then said,
“Well if by “dawning” you mean figuring out your game, then I won,
didn’t I? What’s my prize? Few hookers and some Cuban cigars?
One-way trip to Mexico?” He grinned, but let it fade when he
realized it wasn’t being returned. Cochran suddenly looked all
business.
    “Wade,” he said, leaning forward again,
his palms flat on the table. “You’re a psychopath.”
    “That’s kinda strong, isn’t
it?”
    “It’s fact.”
    “Well, so’s the fact that you’re an old
fart, but you don’t hear me pointing it out.”
    “You killed a man three weeks shy of
your