Instruments of Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

the best person for the job. And, of course, it’s not just because of what happened when you were a boy. It also comes from my having read your books. You have something I require. Imagination.”
    For the first time, Graves felt a stir of interest in what Allison Davies might say next. Long ago he’d recognized that imagination was his only gift. The way the world came to him in stories was a way of seeing that had emerged almost immediately with that first story Gwen had read to him, then more powerfully with the first he’d written. Almost unconsciously he had begun to tell stories to his classmates, amazed at how intently he could hold their attention. Often, he’d listened to his own stories in the same way his audience listened to them, without knowing where the tale was going or what the ending would be, as surprised as they were when it all came together. It was a gift that had never deserted him, the one constant in his life, as natural to him as breath. Even during the long year when he’d been mute, sitting silently in the dingy wooden swing that hung in Mrs. Flexner’s front yard as Sheriff Sloane came and went, determined to find out what he’d seen and heard that night, even then, especially then, it had been his imagination that had sustained him, drawn him protectively into the far less dangerous world of his own mind.
    Allison Davies leaned forward. “But now, after having met you, I’ve come to think that you also have something beyond that. Beyond imagination. A certain restlessness. I can see it, Mr. Graves. This agitation.”
    How had she seen it, Graves wondered, the restlessnessshe’d spoken of? After all, he could sit still and concentrate for long hours on a single task. He didn’t fidget or have tics. And yet he knew what she was talking about. The jittery undercurrent of anxiety that never left him, and which he felt like a frantic pulse incessantly beating. It had begun the night he’d stopped in his tracks as the light blinked off on the back porch of his home. Since then, he’d never lost the sense of a creature stalking him through a tangled wood, a predator he could hear and smell and even glimpse occasionally as it darted through the undergrowth. In the end he’d even given his stalker a human form, wrapped it in a black leather coat, named it:
Kessler.
    “Your character. Detective Slovak,” Miss Davies said. “He’s very intuitive. Very observant too. He seems to know a great many things about people.”
    As far as Graves was concerned, Slovak knew—or thought he knew—only one thing, that people sought love but rarely found it. It was Kessler who really knew things about people. Particularly the mad drive of even the dullest and most worthless life to sustain itself, to go on seeing and hearing regardless of what it saw and heard. Kessler ceaselessly depended upon this simple, primordial urge to get his way in the world. Of course, Kessler knew other things as well. The drive for power. The ecstasy of conquest. The rapture of cruelty. The delight in hearing someone beg to live, and how the writhing anguish of one person could enter another like a warming sip of rich red wine. Most important of all, because of his long experiment with Sykes, Kessler knew that there was no bottom to the human pit, no act to which terror could not drive a man. Graves wondered if Allison Davies had noticed any of these things in his books as well.
    “But Slovak never actually wins, does he?” she asked.“Never actually captures Kessler. Slovak’s goodness is his fatal flaw.”
    Graves had never actually thought of it in the same way, but he knew she was right. Slovak’s mighty effort to track Kessler down was made futile by the fact that something forever stayed his hand. The rules of the game. The constraints of conscience.
    “But even so, your detective puts things together quite well,” Miss Davies added. “I’ve always been impressed by the way Slovak sees connections—extremely