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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1990, 2007, 2010, 2011 by Michael R. Collings
Portions of this novel were originally published as “A Pound of Chocolates on St. Valentine’s Day” in Dark Transformations: Deadly Visions of Change (Starmont House, 1990; Borgo Press, 2007); and were subsequently reprinted under the same title in Wer Means Man and Other Tales of Wonder and Terror (Borgo Press, 2010).
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Judi,
sine qua non,
and for the original of
Aunt Annie,
who was nothing like this one.
CHAPTER ONE
Lila Ellis was surprised to discover that she was afraid to approach the last door.
The fear surprised her as much as anything.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been doing this for the past two weeks. Yes, it was occasionally uncomfortable, but the last of the die-hards has left nearly a month before, several escorted down-mountain by stone-faced Staties bearing official warrants as well as loaded side-arms. Even a rifle or two.
No, facing the anger, the resentment, the bottled-up fury wasn’t the problem. By now the only hangers-on were the handful that hadn’t yet signed the final papers. All of their possessions were gone by now, long since transported to greener—or at least drier—pastures...or, in several cases, deposited in swales and shallow valleys where they would remain until they gradually decomposed and became one with the sludge and slime that would form the bottom of the lake.
Shadow Valley Lake.
The final dams across the six or seven tributaries exiting Shadow Valley were nearly complete, awaiting only her signal that every legal T had been duly crossed, every I capped by its appropriate dot.
Tuttle’s would be the last crosses and dots.
Well, the second-to-the last, to be truthful.
Lila shuddered at the thought of approaching the Stevenson place, even though she’d never even seen it. The stories she’d heard were enough to give the place a reputation for weirdness.
At least the shudder had one positive result.
Lila straightened up in her seat, stared fixedly out the front window for a few seconds, took a couple of deep breaths, and opened the car door.
Her movement seemed to break a stasis that had settled over the Tuttle place the moment she had turned into the long, rutted drive. Poplars—some of the last trees remaining in the valley—that had seemed more like grave-yard sentinels than living things suddenly began to whisper in the faint breeze, their leaves flickering from green to silver and back again with the rapidity of old-time telegraphers stuttering out their messages in Morse code.
She wondered what they were saying to each other.
Soon. Soon. Soon. And all will be dark and deep and quiet. Quiet. Quiet.
Perhaps.
Overhead, a dozen or so black dots spiraled against the deep blue sky. They were too far away for Lila to gauge size. They might have been sparrows, or crows...or even vultures gathering for a final feed.
Insects began wheezing in the chest-high weeds bordering the drive and spilling onto what should have been—three months earlier would have been—a neatly trimmed yard, with a patch of emerald grass surrounded by cut-flower borders in full riot of summer colors.
Even the rhythmic sound of the cicadas seemed fraught with meaning.
As she stood for a moment in the growing heat, Lila tried to understand what they were saying, but meaning evaded her.
Only the job was real.
She sighed, reached back into her rental, and retrieved her briefcase. Not too long ago, it had been stuffed with sheaves of papers to be signed. Now it felt light in her grasp, almost empty.
She straightened and turned toward the old farm house.
It looked no different than any of the others she had been to over the past few days. Built decades before of hand-hewn lumber, with rough wooden shingles already beginning to look abandoned and forlorn, as if the next strong wind might pick them up and sent them spinning across the valley, over the surrounding hills, and on to some new world that lay beyond.
A full-length porch shaded the front door. In the shadows, Lila saw someone standing, waiting, as patiently as Time itself.
For this house, Lila thought as she made her way along the walk way of rough slate slabs, Time has run out.
“Mr. Tuttle,” she called, trying to infuse her voice with just the right touch of somberness without sounding too much like a professional mortician about to try a hard-sell on a grieving widow.
The figure moved slightly. This was Mr. Tuttle.
“I’m Lila Ellis,” she said as she stepped into the welcome coolness of the porch. “You may remember me from the....”
“I do.” Nothing more. Not a nod of greeting. Not a hand outstretched in the almost mandatory greeting of rural neighbors.
But then, she wasn’t a neighbor.
It anything, she was the enemy.
“I’ve come to....”
“I know.” He turned his back on her and entered the house.
With another deep breath—and an even more powerful sense of discomfort—she followed.
The interior was no surprise. She’d seen it—or its sisters, cousins, second-cousins-once-removed—on farm after farm throughout the valley. A living room. Large, open...empty of everything except one broken chair huddled in the corner. A door that might lead to the kitchen, which would have a single window overlooking the outbuildings—or rather where outbuildings once stood—and its own entrance/exit. Another door that might lead to several bedrooms tucked away on the quieter side of the house. And a third that would lead to the attic, emptied of everything except dust and ghosts and the dried-up bodies of bluebottle flies trapped there eons before and shriveled by the summer heat.
Lila didn’t bother looking for a table. She almost automatically braced her briefcase on one hip while she opened it and took out the remaining papers.
“These are the....”
“I know.” Apparently Goodman Tuttle wasn’t going to let her finish a sentence. He had taken control of the meeting before she had even set foot on the porch and he was not going to relinquish it.
It was his last controlling act over the place that had been his family’s for three generations.
She held the papers out to him. There were only two. A cover letter signed by the governor—or at least by the governor’s automated signature machine; even Lila couldn’t tell the difference any more and she doubted if the governor herself could—and a second sheet, its message shorter, more clipped, signed by the ranking local state police officer, adorned by a stamped gold seal, and lacking only Abraham Tuttle’s signature to fulfill its purpose on earth.
Tuttle didn’t even look at the papers. Time for that was long past. He simply took them, his face as stone-faced as the Staties’ had been when they stared down his more rebellious neighbors, walked over to a wall, and, using it as a one-time desk, scribbled his signature.
Still without speaking, he turned and held them out to her.
“That all?”
Lila nodded.
He strode to the doorway and stepped through, formally relinquishing his farm, his history, his dreams, his life. He disappeared from the porch. From Lila’s sight.
She