Read The Waking Dark for Free Online

the feces that certain thuggish members of the team had secreted in their instruments. This, too, or at least some crude and beastly act like it, was tradition. The participation of Jeremiah West – about whom the thuggish branch of the team had harbored its suspicions until he’d turned up at practice this season a new and brutish man – was not.
    By November, Daniel Ghent was finally sleeping through the night. Though he still had nightmares of bullets and blood, he no longer jerked awake at two a.m. in a puddle of his own sweat, and he never remembered them in the morning.
     
    There was no Founders’ Day tradition in Oleander, no bunting-bowed ceremony of child-chanted couplets and paeans to hometown pride. It was an odd absence in the communal calendar, odder still in a town that had been founded twice. The first settlers arrived in the fall of 1855, Boston abolitionists determined to ensure Kansas’s entrance to the Union as a free state.
    There are towns in the Midwest where residents can trace their heritage back to Civil War days – where even the meth-addled Dumpster divers can map out the exact boundaries of their forebears’ ancestral homestead. But not in Oleander. Here history stretched back no further than 1899, because here, while the rest of the country celebrated the birth of their Lord and awaited the birth of a new century, Oleander died. It was a Christmas Day fire. That much was known, but nothing more – not how it began, or why, or how it happened that not a single resident survived. On Christmas Eve, there had been 1,123 souls living in the town. By sundown the next day, there were none.
    There were charred bones and piles of ash, and that was all.
    They founded a new town on Oleander’s mass grave, and gave it the same name. They never spoke of the dead; they spotted no ghosts. The new town filled up with strangers who saw the possibilities of cheap property and ripe fields rather than the outlines of buildings that no longer stood and the gray dust of a cremated world. The new Oleander bustled and shone, its determined noise drowning out any echoes of the past. Grass and flowers and trees sprang from fallow ground. The scents of corn and life drove out the lingering smoke, and finally, the fire and its carpet of bones could be safely buried in the past and allowed to slip through the cracks of collective memory. But the earth had memory of its own.
     
    Christmas in Oleander now was a twinkling wonderland, complete with an unexpected Christmas Eve snowfall. No one but Grace Tuck and her parents remembered that little Owen had been meant to play baby Jesus in the winter pageant. The Tucks skipped Christmas that year. Grace – no one called her Gracie anymore – had frozen pizza in front of the TV, trying not to look at the corner where the tree should have been. Her mother had not come out of her room since the night before, while her father had been drunk since Thanksgiving.
    They weren’t the only family in town to bypass the festivities: Ellie King gave herself up to a marathon prayer session in the skeleton of the half-rebuilt church. While she was out, her father packed up the last of his belongings and carted them over to the Sunflower, a sad apartment complex for a sad assemblage of men whose families had moved on without them. The daughter who’d once been his secret favorite, back before she turned into a bigger zealot than her mother, promised she’d come visit the next morning. She never got around to it.
    The remaining Prevette brothers sought salvation in the form of hammers and spray paint, laying midnight waste to the town crèche. They broke every window at town hall before graffitiing giant red genitalia across its century-old stone face. Scott signed his name at the bottom.
    Daniel Ghent was alone. The Preacher had taken to the road; the Preacher had not been home in three days; the Preacher had developed a habit of sleeping on the street, in small lean-tos improvised