Read Summer of Night for Free Online Page B

had known that he wanted to be a writer since he was six years old. Duane's reading-he had read complete books since he was four years old-had always been another world for him. Not an escape, since he rarely sought escape… writers had to confront the world if they were going to observe it accurately… but another world nonetheless. One filled with powerful voices relaying even more powerful thoughts.
    Duane would always love the Old Man for sharing books and the love of reading with him. Duane's mother had died before he was old enough to really know her, and the intervening years had been rough, what with the farm going to hell and the Old Man's drinking, the occasional beatings and even more occasional abandonments, but there were good times too-the normal flow of days when the Old Man was on the wagon, the easy cycle of hard work in the summers even if they couldn't keep up, the long evenings with the two of them talking to Uncle Art… three bachelors cooking steaks in the backyard and talking about everything under the stars, including the stars.
    Duane's old man had dropped out of Harvard but gotten his master's in engineering at the University of Illinois before coming back to run his mother's farm. Uncle Art had been a traveler and poet-merchant marine one year, teaching at private schools in Panama or Uruguay or Orlando the next. Even when they drank too much, their talk was interesting to the third bachelor in the circle, young Duane, and he drank in information with the insatiable appetite of the terminally gifted.
    No one in Elm Haven or in the Creve Coeur County school system thought of Duane McBride as gifted. The term simply did not exist in 1960 rural Illinois. He was fat. He was odd.
    The teachers often had described him-in written comments and the rare parent-teacher conferences-as unkempt, unmo-tivated, and inattentive. But not a discipline problem. Merely a disappointment. Duane did not apply himself.
    When confronted by his teachers, Duane would apologize, smile, and amble on with whatever private thoughts and projects were possessing him at the time. School was not a problem, not even a hindrance really since he liked the idea of school… it was merely a distraction from his studies and his preparation for becoming a writer.
    Or it would have been merely a distraction if there hadn't been something about Old Central that bothered him. Not the kids so much. Not even the principal and teachers, slow-witted and provincial as they seemed. There was something else.
    Duane squinted in the dim light and flipped his notebook back a few pages to yesterday, the final day of school: "Others don't seem to notice the smell here, or if they do, they don't talk about it: a smell of coldness, meat-locker taint, faint hint of corruption like the time the heifer died down behind the south pond and the Old Man and I didn't find it for a week.
    "Light is odd in Old Central. Thick. The time the Old Man took me to the abandoned hotel in Davenport when he was going to salvage all that stuff and make a fortune. Thick light. Filtered through dust and thick drapes and memories of former glory. Same musty, hopeless smell too. Remember shafts of light from a high window to the parquet floor in that abandoned ballroom-like the stained-glass windows above the stairways in Old Central?
    "No. More a sense of… foreboding? Evil? Too melodramatic. A sense of awareness to both places. That and the sound of rats scurrying in the walls. Wonder why no one else talks about the sound of the rats in Old Central. Wouldn't think the county health people would be too thrilled with an elementary school with rats, rat droppings everywhere, rats running on top of the pipes down in the basement where the restrooms are. I remember when I was in second grade in Old Central and I went down there…"
    Duane skipped ahead to the notes he had made that afternoon in Bandstand Park.
    "Dale, Lawrence (never Larry), Mike, Kevin, and Jim. How to describe