Dead Boys Read Online Free PDF

closing the window after them.
    “You have quite a rapport with those two,” said Jacob.
    “Yeah, they’re easy to talk to.”
    The flat was on the third floor of a skinny, four-story building known as the Leaning Dutchman. Its interior was bare but for a massive metal worktable bolted to the floor, a mirror on the wall, and a wooden rocking-chair in which a well-preserved woman sat perfectly still.
    “Good even, Shanthi,” said Jacob, pushing gently at the back of her rocking chair. “My thanks for keeping the flat so well in my absence.”
    Shanthi said nothing, nor did she move the smallest bone in her body.
    “Is she your housekeeper?” Remington asked.
    “In a manner of speaking,” said Jacob. “Shanthi died after a short, futile struggle with an undiagnosed disease, which left her corpse completely unmarked: a perfect death. Thus, while she might not have been a looker by the standards of the Lands Above, she caused a sensation as soon as she stepped onto Lazarus Quay, for comeliness here is nothing more or less than the semblance of life.
    “Scores of men and women were propositioning Shanthi, not with sexual advances, of course, since the only stiffness the average corpse can attain ends with his mortis. Still, there are wealthy men who would pay unthinkable quantities of time to keep her, and everyone wanted to deliver her to one.
    “Of course, to make a prize like Shanthi last, a man would have to be wealthy indeed, and bring her to the best, that is, to me. Toss her to John Tanner and you’d end up with a scarecrow stuffed with rags, who’d be lumpier than a featherbed in a few years. But dear Shanthi, who knows her apples from her oranges, decided to take matters into her own hands. She’d heard my name in their promises, and she came straight to the Leaning Dutchman.
    “When she turned up at my window, she told me that she wanted to look this way forever, and that she was happy to give her body to me for the privilege. I told her the offer was timely and that I’d take her up on it for reasons which had nothing to do with conceptual lust: I needed a squatter.
    “These flats, you see, are too mercurial for even the Magnate to rent out. What stands one day might collapse the next, and the floods could move them about at any moment, making the ownership of property a losing proposition. Instead, squatter’s rights are absolute, and any time there’s a flood, every room in the city changes hands.
    “When Shanthi came to me, I was hobbled by this custom: when I wanted to leave the flat, I had to pay several weeks to a flat-sitter and hope they were as good as their word. But Shanthi, by staying in the flat at all times, solved my problem indefinitely, at the cost of the finest treatment time can buy.
    “We agreed on a direct exchange of five years, cheap for the Campbell Treatment, but I liked her style. Besides, I needed the practice: Shanthi’s was the first human body-mold ever created.”
    “But can she move?” asked Remington.
    “She could if she wanted to,” said Jacob, unpacking his knapsack on his worktable and taking a full inventory of its contents. “Her joints are perfectly designed, and her five years are up, but here she sits. As to why, I doubt it’s strictly a matter of loyalty.
    “Think,” said Jacob, removing a silver object from his floorboards and sliding it into the leather pouch on his wrist, “of a stone stairway in some populated avenue, weathering the dragging of footsteps for hundreds, even thousands of years. What happens to those stones over time?”
    “They wear away,” said Remington.
    “They wear away!” cried Jacob, striking the table with a metal scraper. “These solid stones wear away. And what becomes of the shoe? What becomes of its sole, made of simple rubber, dragging against street and sidewalk over the course of years?”
    “It wears away faster,” said Remington.
    “Even faster! What, then, becomes of dead flesh and skin, unable to heal,