Count Geiger's Blues Read Online Free PDF

spray and disappearing into the dark mirror of the pool. A dream? Xavier went back to his tent and lay down.
    He soon fell asleep, on the still warm slab of the rock ledge. Owls hooted, bats twittered, treefrogs chuckled. Eventually, even Tarzan could not have been more at home in the jungle than Xavier was here in the Phosphor Fogs. Then, he dreamt. His dream had the stark suprareality that well-made horror movies sometimes have, and he woke unsure whether he was awake—Friedrich, I’m not a sleeper—or still under the spell of his subconscious. He crawled out of his tent in his shorts, looked at the sky, now moonless, and saw that under the stars hung a glowing membrane, a thin airy scarf occupying a part of the sky just over the rotting mill, the hidden spring, and some of the nearby forest. In addition to this glow, Xavier noticed a prickling of his scalp and skin, as if microscopic mites had hopped onto his body to feast on him. It didn’t hurt, this prickling, but it burned a little: a peculiar sensation. The Phosphor Fogs were notorious for causing unsuspecting tourists to hallucinate.
    July or no, it was too cold to swim. Xavier put on his boots, pulled on a shirt, and found some stepping stones in the stream. On the other side, he climbed through a maze of blackberry vines and trees to a dirt roadway. He hiked it, two ruts in an open-topped tunnel, until the sky-glow led him to an overlook above eight concrete towers resembling huge termitaria. The light staining the sky here, sending its tendrils into the adjacent Phosphor Fogs on plumes of steam, was urine-colored, a sickly yellow, the product of hundreds of smoky arc lamps. It was nothing like the glow Xavier had seen earlier, but it came from the same place where that other bleak shimmering had originated, i.e., here at this half-hidden power station.
    The “termitaria” were cooling towers for the nuclear reactors. Xavier gazed down on Plant VanMeter, built by Consolidated Tri-State to serve major parts of Tennessee, Georgia, and Oconee. Despite protests, the plant had come on line, as scheduled, the same spring Xavier joined the Salonika Urbanite . Here, on the edge of Phosphor Fog National Park, it had run efficiently ever since.
    The plant was walled, fenced, moated.
    Tonight, it looked like a set from a horror film about the crematoria in Hades. In fact, Xavier saw an army of figures in white masks, caps, and suits swarming around the hourglass towers. A helicopter eggbeatered above. A man shouted instructions through a megaphone at the swarming workers. But Xavier could hear no cries, no rotors. Had cold spring water rendered him deaf? Along with the plant’s eerie yellow glow, its dreamlike silence unnerved him. He gripped his elbows, scratching his upper arms to ease the prickling-tingling-burning there. He wasn’t deaf. He could hear his fingernails scraping skin, his own ragged breathing, and the forest’s night noises. He also heard a man on the ridgetop fifty yards away: “ Hey, dude, what’re you doing up here? ”
    Nothing, Xavier thought. Just gawping. Just wondering about my selective deafness. Still, he felt guilty. And when this man, a helmeted security worker, yelled again, Xavier bolted. He darted back into the trees and, from their cover, followed the roadway until he could hear the creek. Winded, he knelt, scratched and bleeding, among blackberry vines until certain that nobody was coming. Then he forded the stream and scrambled back to the ledge on which he’d set up camp. There, he removed his shirt, moistened it, dabbed at his wounds, and crept back into his tent. He no longer cared about that queer shimmering just under the stars. His cuts’ sting had replaced the tingling that had earlier mystified him. He lay down on the rock and slept until morning.
    When he awoke, Xavier knew that something odd had happened. On the other hand, he didn’t know if he had dreamed his trek to Plant VanMeter or if he had really gone