Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms Read Online Free PDF Page A

phone receiver.
    It wasn’t there.
    He looked around wildly. It wasn’t anywhere. Someone had taken it.
    And there was something odd, too, about the slot for the money. It was white rather than black. He peered at it closely and saw that it had been stuffed full of chewing gum.
    Well, then, that was that. Glumly, he pocketed the threepence again and pushed open the door.
    There seemed no point in going straight back to his horrible new home, next to his horrible new neighbors. He unlocked his bike and cycled slowly through the town. He passed a park with a playground and an old bandstand. The bandstand looked vaguely familiar. He glanced down a side street and saw a crowd of people waiting in line outside an old movie theater; that too reminded him of something. It wasn’t until he saw the sign for the station that he realized he’d seen all of these places in the book of photographs in the library. The places were older now, and shabbier, but still recognizable.
    He felt strange. He felt as if someone was trying very hard to tell him something, but he couldn’t quite catch the words. There was a bicycle rack outside the station, and he parked his bike. The main entrance was fenced off and displayed a sign saying DANGER! HARD HAT AREA , so Stuart followed an arrow around to the side of the building and entered through an arch beside the ticket office.
    The interior of the station was a construction site. Green wooden panels blocked off most of the concourse, and behind them scaffolding reached as high as the glass roof. A thin film of dust covered everything, and there was a constant whine of power tools.
    Every few feet, a poster had been stuck to the boards.

    Stuart pressed his eye to a tiny gap between two panels and saw a man in protective goggles cutting a block of stone. A fountain of sparks rose from the circular blade. Close by, another man was scouring the blackened bricks of the wall with a spinning disc. Slowly a rosy color was emerging from beneath the layers of soot.
    Suddenly Stuart noticed an odd thing. Near the second man, on a part of the wall that was still dirty, there was one incredibly clean patch. The patch had a definite shape—a tall, thin rectangle topped with a large circle—and it was bright pink against the surrounding black, each brick looking perfectly new. Something must have been standing in front of that wall for a hundred years or more, protecting it from the smoke and dirt.
    And he knew that shape.
    It was the shape of the weighing machine in the photograph, the one that the little boy had been standing in front of. And he understood, somehow, that he had to find it.
    He moved along the panels from one end to the other, squinting carefully through every gap, but there was no sign of the weighing machine. He opened a door marked NO ACCESS TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC and got shouted at by a worker. He ventured cautiously around the fencing sheets that obscured the main entrance and was shouted at by the same worker, who this time threatened to call the police.
    It was just after that, as Stuart stood beside the bike rack wondering what to do next, that another man pushing a wheelbarrow full of splintered wood and chunks of plaster walked out of the blocked-off entrance and straight past him. Man and wheelbarrow disappeared behind a plywood screen at the end of the parking lot. There was a brief series of crashes, and then they reappeared. This time the wheelbarrow was empty.
    Stuart waited until the parking lot was clear of people, and then ran for the wooden screen. Behind it was a large yellow dumpster, piled high with trash. A wide plank slanted up to it from the ground, and Stuart walked along it and peered over the edge. He saw the weighing machine right away. It was right in the center of the dumpster, leaning at an angle. Cautiously, he picked his way toward it, tiptoeing across broken boards that tipped and swayed beneath his feet.
    There were three parts to the machine: a square