Complete Short Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

finger and thumb to catch it on the back of his hand. It was Rachel’s buckle.
    Richard’s breath came in gasps, his heart beat violently and he nearly vomited. He was shivering with cold, and yet sweating. Soon they came toan open place among the sand hills near the sea. There was a raised bank with sea holly growing on it and a little sickly grass; stones were strewn all around, brought there, it seemed, by the sea years before. Though the place lay behind the first rampart of sand hills, there was a gap in the linethrough which a high tide might have broken, and the winds that continually swept through the gapkept them uncovered of sand. Richard had his hands in his trouser pockets for warmth and was nervously twisting a soft piece of wax around his right forefinger – a candle end that was in his pocket from the night before when he had gone downstairs to lock the door.
    ‘Are you ready?’ asked Charles.
    Richard nodded.
    A gull dipped over the crest of the sand hills and rose again screaming when itsaw them. ‘Stand by the sea holly,’ said Richard, with a dry mouth, ‘and I’ll be here among the stones, not too near. When I raise my hand, shout! When I put my fingers to my ears, stop at once.’
    So Charles walked twenty steps towards the holly. Richard saw his broad back and black silk handkerchief sticking from his pocket. He remembered the dream, and the shoe buckle and Elsie’s fear. His resolutionbroke: he hurriedly pulled the piece of wax in two, and sealed his ears. Charles did not see him.
    He turned, and Richard gave the signal with his hand.
    Charles leaned forward oddly, his chin thrust out, his teeth bared, and never before had Richard seen such a look of fear on a man’s face. He had not been prepared for that. Charles’s face, that was usually soft and changing, uncertain as a cloud,now hardened to a rough stone mask, dead white at first, and then flushing outwards from the cheek bones red and redder, and at last as black as if he were about to choke. His mouth then slowly opened to the full, and Richard fell on his face, his hands to his ears, in a faint.
    When he came to himself he was lying alone among the stones. He sat up, wondering numbly whether he had been there long.He felt very weak and sick, with a chill on his heart that was worse than the chill of his body. He could not think. He put his hand down to lift himself up and it rested on a stone, a larger one than most of the others. He picked it up and felt its surface, absently. His mind wandered. He began to think about shoe-making, a trade of which he had known nothing, but now every trick was familiarto him. ‘I must be a shoemaker,’ he said aloud.
    Then he corrected himself: ‘No, I am a musician. Am I going mad?’ He threw the stone from him; it struck against another and bounced off.
    He asked himself: ‘Now why did I say that I was a shoemaker? It seemed a moment ago that I knew all there was to be known about shoe-making and now I know nothing at all about it. I must get home to Rachel. Whydid I ever come out?’
    Then he saw Charles on a sand hill a hundred yards away, gazing out to sea. He remembered his fear and made sure that the wax was in his ears: he stumbled to his feet. He saw a flurry on the sand and there was a rabbit lying on its side, twitching in a convulsion. As Richard moved towards it,the flurry ended: the rabbit was dead. Richard crept behind a sand hill out ofCharles’s sight and then struck homeward, running awkwardly in the soft sand. He had not gone twenty paces before he came upon the gull. It was standing stupidly on the sand and did not rise at his approach, but fell over dead.
    How Richard reached home he did not know, but there he was opening the back door and crawling upstairs on his hands and knees. He unsealed his ears.
    Rachel was sittingup in bed, pale and trembling. ‘Thank God you’re back,’ she said; ‘I have had a nightmare, the worst of all my life. It was frightful. I was in my