Athena Read Online Free PDF

making the panes rattle, and immediately, as if she had been waiting to spring out at me, a jolly, fat girl with red hair threw open the door and said, ‘Whoa up there, you’ll wakethe dead!’ and grinned. She was dressed in a nurse’s uniform, with a little white cap and those white, crêpe-soled shoes, and even had a wristwatch pinned upside down to her breast pocket (why do they do that?), but none of it was convincing, somehow. She had a faint air of the hoyden, and reminded me of a farm girl I knew when I was a child who used to give me piggyback rides and once offered to show me what she called her thing if I would first show her mine (nothing came of it, I’m afraid). I asked for Aunt Corky and the girl looked me up and down with an eyebrow arched, still grinning sceptically, as if she in her turn suspected me of being an impostor. A blue plastic tag on her collar said her name was Sharon. ‘Are you the nephew?’ she asked, and I answered stoutly that I was. At that moment there materialised silently at my side a plump, soft, sandy-haired man in a dowdy, pinstriped dark suit who nodded and smiled at me in a wistfully familiar way as if we were old acquaintances with old, shared sorrows. I did not at all like the look of him or the sinister way he had crept up on me. ‘That will be all right, Sharon,’ he murmured in a low and vaguely ecclesiastical-sounding voice, and the girl shrugged and turned and sauntered off whistling, her crêpe soles squeaking on the black-and-white tiled floor. ‘Haddon is the name,’ the pinstriped one confided, and waited a beat and added, ‘Mr Haddon.’ He slipped a hand under my arm and directed me towards a staircase that ascended steeply to a landing overhung by a broad window with gaudily coloured panes that seemed to me somehow menacing. I had begun to feel hindered, as if I were wading through thick water; I also had a sense of a suppressed, general hilarity of which I felt I was somehow the unwitting object. As I was about to mount the stairs I caught a flurry of movement from the corner of my eye and flinched as a delicate small woman with the face of an ancient girl came scurrying up to me and plucked my sleeve and said in a flapper’s breathless voice, ‘Are you thepelican man?’ I turned to Haddon for help but he merely stood gazing off with lips pursed and pale hands clasped at his flies, biding and patient, as if this were a necessary but tiresome initiatory test to which I must be submitted. ‘The pelican man?’ I heard myself say in a sort of piteous voice. ‘No, no, I’m not.’ The old girl continued to peer at me searchingly. She wore a dress of dove-grey silk with a gauzy silk scarf girdling her hips. Her face really was remarkable, soft and hardly lined at all, and her eyes glistened. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘then you are no good to me,’ and gave me a sweetly lascivious smile and wandered sadly away. Haddon and I went on up the stairs. ‘Miss Leitch,’ he murmured, as if offering an explanation. When we reached the landing he stopped at a door and tapped once and inclined his head and listened for a moment, then nodded to me again and mouthed a silent word of encouragement and softly, creakingly, descended the stairs and was gone. I waited, standing in a lurid puddle of multi-coloured light from the stained-glass window behind me, but nothing happened. I became at once acutely aware of myself, as if another I, mute and breathing, had sprouted up out of the balding carpet to loom over me monstrously. I put my face to the door and whispered Aunt Corky’s name and immediately seemed to feel another heave of muffled laughter all around me. There was no response, and in a sudden bluster of vexation I thrust open the door and was blinded by a glare of light.
    By now I had begun seriously to regret having breached this house of shades, and would have been thankful if Mr Haddon or some other guardian of the place had come and stepped firmly in front of me