Read Wildwood Road for Free Online Page B

Cheese,
announced one.
Nikki and Danielle were here. Ruthie Loves Adam. Lizzie & Jason, TLA.
    TLA.
Michael hadn't seen those three letters put together since grade school, but their meaning was fresh in his mind.
True Love, Always.
The sort of notion kids believed in, before they began to understand just how many obstacles there were to get in the way.
TLA
seemed so damned simple then. But
True Love, Always
could be hard work. Even when you got lucky, like he had, finding Jillian. Even then, it was work.
    Jillian.
He could imagine her face in front of him, her grin, the way she always seemed to have one lock of hair hanging in front of her eyes.
Oh, Jesus, honey, I just want out of here.
    A door slammed. Michael spun, heart pounding, and let out a long, shuddering sigh when he saw that it was not the door to this room. He staggered into the hallway.
    A trickle of sweat ran down the back of his neck.
    Michael broke into a run for the end of the hall, for the top of that grand staircase. There were higher floors, more stairs that went up and up, to the very top . . . to that one window at the peak of the house where he had seen a light on. He didn't care about those stairs. He only wanted the ones that went down.
    His boots thumped the floor as he ran, stumbling toward the stairs, building momentum.
    Giggles erupted from the rooms he passed, but now he did not want to look inside them. Still, he could not avoid the images his peripheral vision sent to him.
    A swing set, chains creaking as they swayed in some unseen breeze.
    More graffiti . . . in every room. Names in chalk and crayon and marker, and maybe in other substances he did not want to think about.
Heather. Sarajane.
Michael picked up speed. The hallway seemed impossibly long.
Barbie. Alisa.
His arms were pumping, legs flying under him. The stairs were getting closer, at last.
Tracy. Erica. Scooter.
    Scooter.
    He tried to stop short, twisting himself around to get a better look inside a room on his right, a little study with a desk and bookshelves and children's names finger-painted in watercolor on the side of the desk. But he was running too fast. Michael tripped over his own legs and for a moment he was airborne. Then he hit the wood floor and slid. The fabric of his costume jacket tore.
    He lay panting, eyes closed tightly, wishing it would all go away. Someone had given him something bad, and here he was running around some stranger's house like a lunatic. Scooter's house.
    His eyes opened. The temptation to go back to that small study, to look at her name painted on the side of the desk, was strong. But he was through with succumbing to curiosity. It could wait until morning, until he was sober. Or straight. Until he got his head on right.
    Michael pushed himself to his knees and glanced along the hall toward the top of the stairs. The whole corridor was dappled with splashes of moonlight and shadows, but there were other things there as well. Things that were neither light nor darkness. Silver things that shimmered like heat off the summer pavement, that only really seemed solid if his eyes were half closed.
    They were between Michael and the stairs.
    Without ever seeming to move, they came nearer. It was as though they blinked out of one spot and appeared in another, flickering from one gloomy place to another, becoming visible not in the patches of shadow or the shafts of moonlight, but only ever in those slashes of nighttime twilight where shadow and light met.
    Michael froze, staring. His stomach lurched again and he gasped for breath. He shook his head and started to back away, moving down the hall. But images flickered in his mind, silver ripples he had seen down in the kitchen, and back along that hallway. He did not have to turn around to know that they were behind him as well.
    Out of the corner of his eye he could see the open door of that little study,
Scooter
scrawled in lime green finger paint on the desk. Erica had used yellow, Tracy a metallic gold.