How They Were Found Read Online Free PDF

retrieve my pistol from its holster. It glows yellow where I've touched it, smeared with some chemical I no longer recognize. I pull back the slide, then put the muzzle to the fleshy muscle beneath my jaw. There is a tenderness there already, and although I wonder where it came from, I push hard anyway, feel the pain ignite my frozen nerves. I close my eyes, take a breath, and squeeze the trigger, howling as loud as the wind when the pistol produces only a dry, useless click.
    I return my pistol to its holster, force myself to my feet. I start walking, leaning heavily on my one good leg, dragging the other behind, until a stumbling collapse delivers me to the ice. I struggle to sit, surrounded by the loud creak of my frozen muscles, of tendons contracting away from bone.
    Then the pistol, then the confusion of the muzzle-press bruise, then the frustration of the empty chamber. Then the struggle to my feet, the few awkward steps, the next painful crash to this ice.
    I drop the pistol, fail to find it in the blowing powder.
    I try to draw the pistol, only to find it missing, lost somewhere behind me.
    Lying on the ice in the darkness, I hear a bird cry far above me, riding the currents of rising, warmer air that must flow even here. I cannot recognize its speech, cannot remember how to differentiate between the ravens and owls who hunt the tundra and the gulls and terns found only near the shore. As useful as that information might be, I know it doesn't matter. I do not open my eyes to look, or even strain to hear the bird again. I am sure I have dreamed it, as I am dreaming all the other, older things I see flashing behind the closed curtains of my eyelids. And then the rest of me breaks free, flies away, rises above, taking the words that tied these dreams to me, and afterward there are no ships, no shores, no signals, no static, then no towers, no captains. Then there is no Maon, and then I run out of words, and then I

HIS LAST GREAT GIFT
     
     
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    SPEAR HAS ALREADY BEEN LIVING IN THE CABIN OVERLOOKING HIGH ROCK for two weeks when the Electricizers speak of the New Motor for the first time. Awakened by their voices, Spear feels his way down the hallway from the dark and still unfamiliar bedroom to his small office. He lights a lamp and sits down at the desk. Scanning the press of ghastly faces around him, he sees they are all here tonight: Jefferson and Rush and Franklin, plus his own namesake, John Murray. They wait impatiently for him to prepare his papers, to dip a pen in ink and shake it free of the excess. When he is ready, they begin speaking, stopping occasionally to listen to other spirits that Spear cannot quite see, that he does not yet have the skills to hear. These hidden spirits are far more ancient, and Spear intuits that they guide the Electricizers in the same way that the Electricizers guide him.
    What the Electricizers show Spear how to draw, they call it the New Motor, a machine unlike anything he has ever seen before. He concentrates on every word, every detail of their revealment: How this cog fits against that one, how this wire fits into this channel. In cramped, precise letters, he details which pieces should be copper, which zinc or wood or iron. The machine detailed in this first diagram is a mere miniature, no bigger than a pocket watch but twice as intricate.
    It's too small, Spear says. He puts down the pen, picks up the crude blueprint with his ink-stained fingers. He holds it up to the specters. He says, How can this possibly be the messiah you promised?
    Jefferson shakes his head, turns to the others. He says, It was a mistake to give this to him. Already he doubts.
    Franklin and Rush mutter assent, but Murray comes to Spear's defense. Give him time, the spirit says. At first, we had doubts too.
    Murray touches Spear on the face, leaving a streak of frost where his fingers graze the reverend's stubbled skin. He says, Have faith. It is big enough.
    He says, Even Christ was the size