A Certain Slant of Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

smiled and raised the receiver again.
       "How long have you been inside there?" I asked.
       "Since September ninth."
       That was a fortnight. "Then how is it you saw me only last Monday?"
       "That was my first day back," said James. "Billy's body was so sick, I was in bed for a week."
       "What was wrong with him?" I asked.
       James looked sorry to tell me. "He took so many drugs he al most died."
       "But how could you tell he was empty?" I wanted to know. Plenty of the students in Mr. Brown's classroom looked fatally bored.
       "It was the way his body resonated when he left it. It sort of rang."
       "It rang? Like a bell?"
       "No." He thought for a moment. "Bodies with souls in them are solid, like a beam in a house. And bodies that are empty make a very small vibration, the way the wind can blow past the gutter on the roof and make the rain pipe hoot like an owl."
       "You heard this boy hooting?" I was sure he was teasing me.
       "I noticed that he sounded hollow. Like holding a seashell to your ear," he said. "I doubt that anyone who wasn't Light could hear it."
       This was becoming as curious as Wonderland. "How is it that I have seen more years than you, but you know all these things that I don't?"
       James laughed. "It's being in a body again," he said. "For once I saw through a glass darkly, but now I see the world clearly."
       "How did you find this body?" I sounded more demanding than I intended.
       "I saw him almost every day. He came to my haunting place to hide from his friends or take pills or smoke." James watched a stu dent thump past the booth, his shoulder rattling the glass door. "I knew there was something wrong with this boy, that he sounded empty sometimes. I wasn't sure what it meant. He seemed hol low, but he was living, not Light," said James. "I was held to my haunting place, but I felt responsible for this boy because I could tell he was in trouble, and yet I couldn't warn anyone." James took a deep breath, remembering. "Sol followed him home that afternoon. On other days, I'd seen the way he came in and out of his flesh when he put poisons in his blood. His spirit seemed to go to sleep for an hour or two and he'd start to ring empty. But this day, he closed himself in his room and took pills and sniffed pow der and even inhaled fumes from a bag. This day, when his spirit left his body, it didn't come back."
       I felt a chill encircle my heart.
       "I watched for seven hours," said James.
       The pathways outside the phone booth quieted. Students and faculty had migrated to the parking lots. I was running out of time before I would have to leave with Mr. Brown.
       "Then I felt something wrong pulling at the body, something evil," said James. "I tried to wake him up, but his spirit wouldn't come back, so I went inside him, and I tried to scare away the evil. The trouble was, it wasn't afraid of me. I couldn't drive it away; I couldn't even open my eyes or move, the body was so sick. The evil didn't quail until Billy's brother came in and called for an ambulance. Then it disappeared." He sounded as if he had finished the story.
       "What happened?" I said.
       "We went to the emergency room, Mitch punched a hole in the waiting room wall, and I stayed in Billy's body while they flushed the poisons out. It was frightening."
       I must've looked horrified.
       "It wasn't that bad," he said. "We're all right now."
       "Did the evil that tried to get Billy look like a person or a creature?" Perhaps I had read too much about Middle-earth over Mr. Brown's shoulder, but I thought it was important to know the shape of the enemy.
       He shook his head as if he'd never want to describe such a thing to a lady. I was fascinated by his adventures, but they still seemed so unreal.
       "Do you have any of Billy's memories?" I asked him.
       "No, I don't. And that does make life in a stranger's body rather tricky."
       "Where is your haunting