Approaching Zero Read Online Free PDF

more difficult to work with. It was true that she had entered the profession because she believed that she could use her psychic abilities to help people. And it was also true that, because she could only hear twisted, negative thoughts, her work was actually far more successful with less-desirable clients: those who committed terrible crimes or at least thought about such heinous acts. So it was in this area that her reputation developed and she was eventually requested to unravel the barbed souls of murderers, rapists, paedophilesalways paedophilesthieves, violence junkies, and generally nasty people. And, of course, she was good at it because she could hear exactly what they were thinking. She could clear pathways into their truths in a way that astonished her superiors. Inevitably, the Toms became fewer and her days were subsequently filled with grime. Eventually, everything around her became grimy and then everything she touched was coloured with the same murk until something had to give. But she didn’t have to think about that right now. It was the last thing she needed to think about; she had as much time as she wanted now away from the nine-to-five and wasn’t going to waste it looking back.
    Kathy sighed deeply and turned over; her body had started to relax toward something resembling drowsiness. But then a mighty crash shook her back into the room. Some kind of instrument table had been knocked over and the noise dragged her out of her pondering. She was now wide awake again, on her back, and had pulled her arms out of the blankets before sulkily huffing them down on either side of her body. She was now in a position in which she would never be able to sleep, but it would show any passing nurses that she wasn’t happy with being put to bed in this way. However, she could only maintain this protest for a few minutes and, before she knew it, it was silent again and she had slipped onto her side and pulled the blankets high.
    Her mind began to fill with more of those early clients, the ones who actually deserved her help, before drifting her back to her childhood—so much for not wasting her time by looking back! In her mind she was nine years old and in her classroom at junior school. There was no teacher in the room so the noise was deafening: a few of the boys had jumped up onto the desks and were doing the Running Man in unison. Everyone else, including Kathy, was either clapping or slamming their desks in time with the dancing. And then other boys started throwing books and pens at the lads, and then at each other until the whole room had descended into the inevitable chaos of unattended nine-year-olds. Predictably, Brady was in the center of it, lobbing books into the air, trying to get them to land on the beams above her. And then everyone was stunned into silence by the arrival of a strange man in a brown suit and his booming voice. “What the hell is going on in here?”
    In surprisingly few moves, the class assembled itself into something resembling a learning group; books were placed back on shelves, dancing was abandoned, and screeches were lanced in the middle so that the man was presented with immediate silence. Not a single sound could be heard until a sudden retching noise caused everyone to turn their heads to the back of the room, to Kathy. Her face had turned the colour of the kind of snow that should never be eaten and she was lurched over her desk. Just as every eye had made its way to her, she projectile vomited down onto the floor until there was nothing left inside of her. Thinking about it now, the one thing that Kathy remembered was the smell—that smell. It was the first time she had smelt it, and she had no way of knowing what it was—what kind of evil was festering inside of this substitute teacher. This was the very first time that it had happened—the creeping, festering attack of the senses that would literally turn her stomach.
    Every day that week she was sent home sick, only