Charisma

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Book: Charisma by Orania Papazoglou Read Free Book Online
Authors: Orania Papazoglou
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense
up.”
    “Which means what?”
    “Which means they sell people down here, Susan. This place is a fucking slave market. Come six o’clock there are girls on this street not fifteen years old who’ll blow you off for a ten-dollar bill and let you cram your prick up their asses for forty. They don’t do it out of dedication to black-market capitalism. They do it because if they don’t their pimps will cut them up.”
    “And there are the boys,” Susan said.
    “Yeah,” Andy said. “There are the boys. Most of them are only ten.”
    “Let me tell you what they don’t do,” Susan said. “They don’t buy a bottle and sit down and let themselves go. They don’t pickle themselves into insensibility and call it relaxation. They don’t—”
    “They do. They just don’t use booze.”
    “Like Daddy,” Susan said.
    Andy blew a stream of white breath into her face. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I should have known. All the way back at the house, I should have known you’ve got to talk about Daddy.”
    “No, you shouldn’t have. I didn’t know it myself.”
    “Yes, you did.”
    He turned his back to her and started walking up the street, away from the bus stop, away from the Indian print shirts and the bookstore with its stand-up board and the movie marquee that now read HOT GIRLS HOT CITY. Susan stood where she was for a moment and wondered what she was supposed to do, as if she had a choice. Then she followed him. After a while, she even picked up speed. She knew there were people watching her, faces behind curtains at the windows of apartments on the upper stories of the buildings across the street, but she couldn’t make herself feel afraid.
    When she reached Andy she took his arm and said, “It’s just that back there on the Green everything seemed hopeless. Nothing seems hopeless here at all.”
    “I’ll show you hopeless,” Andy said. “Hell, I’ll show it to you like you’ve never seen it before.”
3
    Later, she had to admit he’d been right. It got bad, and not long after it got worse. First the stores and theaters and laundromats petered out. Then everything did. It was eerie, like walking through an abandoned movie set. The buildings were all there, intact and solid, but there wasn’t anyone in them. There wasn’t anyone anywhere.
    The weather was clearing. The wind had pushed back the clouds and the sun was shining through. It illuminated nothing.
    They turned onto Amora Street, and the landscape changed again. The buildings were no longer intact. Whole walls had collapsed into vacant lots. There wasn’t a pane of glass in a window anywhere. Even so, Susan could tell the street was inhabited. There was laughter everywhere, high hysterical laughter bubbling up out of the ground, floating into the wind, sounding insane. Sounding insane and homicidal.
    She stopped in the middle of the street, finally scared to death, wanting nothing except to go back.
    “I have to get out of here,” she said.
    Andy tugged at her arm. Again. “Look up there.”
    She looked. Two blocks away there was a building with a sign in front of it, a plastic cross lit from the inside by fluorescent bulbs. Under the cross a smaller sign spelled it out in heavy black letters:
    DAMIEN HOUSE.
    Andy tugged at her arm one final time and said, “If we’re going to get there, we’ve got to go.”

Chapter Three
1
    T HE BOY WHO ANSWERED the door at Damien House was tall and thin and wrapped in uncertainty. He couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. For a while, Susan thought there had to be something wrong with him, that he was retarded or a deaf-mute. She and Andy were standing in the cold on the stoop. The boy was standing in the doorway, blocking their path in. He seemed to be staring at Andy, but he might have been staring into space. It was impossible to tell. He wasn’t saying anything.
    Susan heard the sound of heavy walking coming out to her from deep within the house, and a moment later the boy stepped

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