Instruments of Night Read Online Free PDF

appetite.
    “To begin with, I’ve followed your work for quite some time,” Miss Davies told him. “A young college student who once spent the summer here first recommended your novels to me. Evidently you’re somewhat popular with college students.”
    Graves did not dispute such “popularity,” though he knew that it had been severely limited, little more than a brief flirtation. At first he’d suspected that his student admirers had been drawn to his books by the icy nihilism they found in them. Kessler was their spokesman, rather than Slovak. Later he’d entertained the darker possibility that youthful readers had been attracted to his writing by Kessler’s sadism. The way he ordered Sykes to commit vicious injuries, then sat back and watched the whole terrible ordeal as if it were really Sykes who was the subject of the experiment. When he allowed himself to ponder it, Graves feared that it was precisely this aspect of his books to which his “fans” were drawn, Kessler’s relendess effort to invent a cruelty so hideous, Sykes would finally refuse to enact it, take the pain himself radier than inflict it.
    “I must admit that I was rather skeptical,” Miss Davies went on. “After all, different generations don’t usually have the same literary tastes.” She smiled. “But on the whole, I was quite impressed. Particularly by the way you come up with strange dynamics. For your characters, I mean. Their reasons for doing things are sometimes quite unexpected, and yet, once revealed, their motivations seem entirely believable.”
    Graves could tell by the somber look in her eyes that this last remark had not been meant to flatter him. Allison Davies was not a fan. She had invited him to Riverwood for one particular facet of his writing, the part that bored into life’s secret festering. It was the darker impulses thatinterested her, Graves thought. The serpents in the grass. Once again he heard Kessler’s arctic whisper:
It is life itself that smiles and smiles … and is a villain.
    “I’ve done a little research on you, Mr. Graves. I know that you’re forty-five. The same age as Slovak. You’ve never married or had children.”
    Nor ever would, Graves thought. Since to live alone meant you had no one to protect, no way to fail in the awesome duty of protection.
    “You were raised in North Carolina,” Miss Davies continued. “After your parents were killed in a car accident, you and your older sister continued to live on the family farm.” She regarded him solemnly. “But that was only for a year or so, the time you lived alone with your sister.”
    Graves nodded silently, hoping it might be enough to prevent her from going on.
    “You were only twelve years old when …”
    She stopped abruptly, clearly trying to determine how she should continue, by what means she should approach the darkest moment of his life.
    “I’ve read the newspaper accounts,” Miss Davies began again. “So I know what happened to your sister.” She gave Graves a strangely anguished look, as if her sympathy alone could make him talk about it, release a floodgate, penetrate a wall of silence that Sheriff Sloane, for all his tenacious effort, had been unable to breach years earlier.
    “I’m simply saying, Mr. Graves, that I know what you’ve been through,” she said finally.
    He felt his throat begin to close. He managed to get out, “Why does what I’ve been through concern you?”
    “Because your life was marked by crime,” Miss Davies answered. “So was mine. So was all of Riverwood.”
    He saw the first tiny fissure in the otherwise solid wall of her composure. It was no more than a small movement in her eyes, but in it he detected an inner disarray he knewtoo well, the aftershock that reverberates through time, moving in endless, undulating waves from the murderous scene of the explosion.
    “I don’t know if what I have in mind will work, Mr. Graves. I know only that I have to try it, and that you’re