A Certain Slant of Light Read Online Free PDF

place?" The more I heard, the more I wanted to know.
       "It's a park a few miles from here. There used to be a two- story house there. That's where I was born."
        "You remember your life as James Deardon, then?" I said.
       "Not at all, when I was Light," he said. "But since I've been inside a body again, some things have been coming back to me. I don't know why."
       "Do you remember how you died?"
       "Not yet," he said. "But I remember more things every day."
       "But you must've been with your family at first," I said, "if you were haunting their house."
       "The house had burned down long before I was haunting that land. Before I was in Billy's body, I didn't even know why I was stuck there. I just knew I couldn't get more than a hundred feet away."
       "How did you know you were stuck?"
       "If I tried to walk more than a hundred feet down the sidewalk ..." He thought for a moment and shortened the descrip tion for me. "It hurt too much. I'd have to go back."
       A queer recognition shook me. "Is it like black icy water crushing you?"
       He gave me an odd look. "Mine's more like a light that burns and a wind that cuts you."
       We looked into each other's eyes, picturing each other's hell. What a strange goblin God must be, I thought, to torment James. He was just to punish me, for I sensed that I had truly sinned. But not James.
       "You spent almost a hundred years on an acre of land by yourself?" I asked.
       "Well, after a few years, they built a park," he reassured me.
       I suddenly felt like crying. "You didn't have lamps at night or books."
       "Some people read in the park," he said. "Horror stories mostly."
       "No poetry," I said. "No Shakespeare. No Austen."
       As if to cheer me, he said, "I read a comic book of Franken stein sitting next to a ten-year-old girl once."
       "That's too awful."
       "It's all right now." James saw that I was on the verge of weeping and fumbled in his pocket. Then he smiled. "I was go ing to offer you a handkerchief, but I haven't got one and even if I did..."
       That made me laugh.
       "What do you recall about life as James?"
       He straightened up as the janitor walked by our glass booth. "Very little. We had an almond orchard and a weather vane of a running horse." He thought for a moment. "When I was small, I had a rocking horse named Cinder because his tail got burned off when he sat too near the fireplace."
       I felt cold and thin as tin for a moment, made fragile by a half memory of a child at play. A blonde head bent over a little wooden lamb on wheels.
       "My dog was named Whittle," he told me. "My cousin taught me to swim in the river. One year we made our own raft and nearly drowned." He laughed, then saw something that worried him in my face. "What's wrong?"
       "What else?" I didn't want to hear about swimming.
       "My father carved me soldiers out of bass wood." He switched the receiver to his other ear. "That's all that's come back to me so far."
       I wished I had a picture of James in his true body.
       "And what do you remember from before you were Light?" he asked me. "Tell all."
       "Nothing." Then I realized that wasn't true. "Only my age, my name, and that I was female." He waited for more. "The rest is only images. And feelings. I won't go inside closets," I said.
       The way he was gazing at me made me curious. "What do I look like to you?" I heard myself asking. Immediately I was em barrassed, but James wasn't.
       "You look beautiful," he said. "You have dark eyes and light hair." He stopped but continued to stare.
       "How old do I look?"
       "A woman, not a girl." He shrugged. "I can't tell."
       "I was twenty-seven," I said. "What am I wearing?" I added, "I can't see myself in a reflection."
       "I know," he said softly. I had almost forgotten that he had been Light as well. "You're wearing a gown with a striped ribbon here." James drew the neckline of the dress on his