A Darkness in My Soul Read Online Free PDF

far away-the thoughts being recorded by serious men with serious faces who listened, no doubt, quite seriously.
        Then the drug must have finally taken hold of him, or I would have been swallowed alive by a mind construct and destroyed in his cauldron of insanity. The two-headed beast had swum near without drawing my notice. It caught my eye, now, as it moved swiftly, its mouth gaping, a giant cave that drooled…
        I lifted my sword as it raised its huge head above me to strike. Then there was a sudden, jerky slip like an old movie reel that has been spliced, and everything went into slow motion. It was like an underwater ballet. At that rate, it would have taken an hour for the beast's jaws to reach me and snap me up, and I slew him as his red eyes glistened and as a strange THRIDDLE THRIDDLE came out of his throat. Or hers.
        Turning back toward the river, I directed thoughts toward the slow-moving waterspout until so much time had passed that I thought I had better get out before I lost my own character identity.
        I turned away from the screaming Id pit.
        I walked back the gray tunnel.
        Cobwebs brushed my face.
        But there were stairs leading upward this time…
        

    VI
        
        There were candles in her green eyes, reflections of those on the table. The same flickering amber glinted from her hair, made the smooth flesh of her one bared shoulder glow with health. Her sequined, well-cut, Oriental something-or-other was dazzling.
        "I'd want nothing held back," she said over the remains of two Cornish game hens of that special diminutive and fleshy mutant strain. Bones and gravy contrasted with her loveliness.
        "Nothing," I assured her for the hundredth time.
        We sipped the wine, but I felt giddy without it, and her flesh did not need any more glow than it had.
        "All your feelings toward Artificial Creation, toward the FBI, and all the others who have used you."
        "That could be a blunt book."
        "Backing down?"
        "Just making an observation."
        "Anything watered down would be a flop. Believe me, sensationalism sells a book."
        I remembered some passages from Bodies in Darkness and smiled and drank my wine and felt my face grow red.
        The tape changed. The colored lights playing on the walls to either side ceased. Then a recording of Scheherazade came on, and the walls took on color again, spattered with orange, showered over with yellow, bursting with crimson along the baseboard.
        She took her wine to the Plexiglas view deck that bubbled out from the east wall of the living room. She stood on the transparent floor of it, as if suspended above the side of the pine-covered mountainside. My mountain thrusts downward into a jumble of shattered rocks, falls off from there into the sea. White waves crashed against the stones below, and a dim echo of the ocean's agony reached us.
        I walked after her, forcing myself to be calm, and stood next to her.
        The moon was high and full and scarred. My guest was quite beautiful, flushed with its light, but she did not seem altogether real. A woman out of Poe or modeling herself after one.
        "I keep thinking of Dragonfly," she said, her eyes up there where it might be.
        Toward the horizon a cloud drifted, gray against the purity of the sky. The storm had failed to materialize.
        "Why do people enjoy ugliness so much?" she asked. It was such an abrupt change of pace that I was not able to cope with it. I shuffled my feet and smacked my lips at the wine I still held, and tried to think why people did that. She went on without me. "There's all this beauty, and they try to make it ugly. They like ugly movies, ugly books, ugly news."
        By then, I was functioning. "Perhaps, in reading about the worst parts of life, the terrible parts of reality seem more tame by contrast, more easily lived with."
        Her