Lucifer's Weekend (Digger) Read Online Free PDF

full with books, magazines, paperbacks, newspapers. While the room had once been a library, almost every available inch of floor space was taken up now by an electric train layout. Track ran all around the floor. Portions of other track rose from the floor on steel supports until they were six feet high. Digger looked around and saw a section of track against one wall, as close to the ceiling as it could be and still allow the trains to fit in the narrow opening.
    But there was something odd about the train layout, and Digger looked at it hard to figure out what it was. Then he realized what it was. Train layouts generally included a lot of bucolic towns, pastoral scenes, plastic cows grazing on Astroturf grass, ceramic farmers leaning on styrofoam plows and watching the trains passing by. Not this train set. There were no farms or pastoral scenes. There were elevated platforms with garbage overflowing trash baskets, with little two-inch-high people in business suits standing cheek by jowl with people in cutoff jeans who wore bandannas around their heads. He saw a train steaming by at waist level right in front of him. There was no traditional toy engine pulling a string of cars. Instead, the train was led by one car identical to the string of cars that followed it, little oval windows making them look like something used to transport prisoners. And on the outside of each car every available square inch of space was covered with brightly colored graffiti. Digger recognized RICO 177. He saw REMO LIVES before the train whisked past him and into a tunnel constructed through the base of a building. In the window of the last car, he saw the letters AA.
    Mrs. Gillette’s train set was a replica of the New York City subway system, complete to graffiti, people packed into cars, and yes… Digger looked down at one of the platforms. Behind a turnstile was a replica of a city subway token booth and a two-inch-high armed robber was splashing gasoline on it. In his free hand he held a lighted match. Inside the booth, the woman token clerk was screaming silently, her face distorted in terror. Past the turnstiles, in a darkened corner of the miniature subway platform, Digger saw a man being mugged by four denim-jacketed toughs. Another ceramic figure urinated against a wall.
    Digger looked around for the architect of all this madness.
    To the left, he saw the back of a figure, hunched over a control board, shoulders scroonched up in a parody of a mad scientist chortling over some particularly evil arrangement of test tubes. The figure wore a red-and-white vertical-striped silk shirt. A railroader’s blue-and-white cap sat atop its head, and from under the cap stray tendrils of dark hair twisted down onto the neck.
    Digger glanced at Ardath, who was staring at him coolly.
    "Mrs. Gillette?" he called out, but the sound of his voice was drowned out by the cacophony of trains whooping around the room, huffing out their asthmatic whistles.
    Ardath gave him a look of great pity, then walked to a section of track that almost reached her shoulders and flicked a switch. The sounds of the trains diminished and died as everything rolled to a stop.
    Digger saw the person at the control panel pressing buttons furiously, presumably wondering what act of God had halted the entire New York City subway system.
    "Mother," Ardath called out, her voice echoing in the high-ceilinged room.
    The train engineer turned. Digger would not have been surprised to see a twisted Phantom-of-the-Opera leer on a lipless face, with eyes sunken deep into sockets and a Singer sewing machine scar stitched neatly down one cheek.
    What he got instead was a beautiful brunette woman. Digger remembered that she would be in her mid-to late-thirties, but this woman could have been only twenty-one. Her lightly tanned skin was smooth and wrinkle-free. Her eyes were, like Ardath’s, a brilliant green and there was a quizzical look in them, as if she detected humor where no one else