Maxie’s Demon Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’d blown his biggest single profit this year. Neither would his competitors. So I’d have to find some other scam; but where would I start? The sun rolled down behind a hill, and darkness wrapped itself around me as I walked.
    I hobbled up the path, spurning unseen pebbles lurking among the grass tussocks. It hurt, it was getting bloody cold and my feet skidded on the half-frozen mud,but I told myself I didn’t care. I was set on getting out of this den of acculturated lunatics and back into the real world I’d just about learned to cope with, even if they couldn’t. The high bank on either side, crowned with a rickety rail fence, bulked higher as I approached the rim of the dell, turning the path into a sharp V against the stars. I plodded on, shivering in my jacket. At least myknees weren’t aching so badly now; they were numb with cold.
    A star – a planet, rather – gleamed golden at the brow. I fixed my eye on that as a guide, tripping now and again over the tussocks and the hardness of the world. Tiredness gave me tunnel vision; it was a little while before I realised that the banks had sunk down again, and I was over the brow. My guide glistened in a vast chilly domeof blue and silver, cloudless and moonless, floored with deep velvet. It was achingly beautiful, and for a moment it held me, not cursing, not caring, not thinking at all, simply drinking it in with the clean air. It was clean, too; it smelt. …
    Ididn’t know what it smelt like. Inhaling starlight, maybe, needles of it, jagged edges, fire in my lungs; I coughed. It sounded strangely loud, weirdlyso, and the darkness swallowed it once it was gone. The chill drove through me, painfully. I thought of the warm fug of a heated car, and looked hungrily around for the road.
    I couldn’t see it; and I couldn’t hear it. Yet I could hear my own soft, rasping breath, desperately loud. There was nothing else, not even the faint background hum that haunts you when you’re sitting awake in the smallhours, waiting bleakly for the wrong kind of knock on the door. This was madness, this was utter bloody lunacy. They were all around us, the roads. I’d seen them with my own two eyes. I’d dropped off one, for God’s sake. I ought to see that same approach ramp looming against the distance now, all three tiers of it, and the grotty concrete landscape that always goes with the things, studded with littletoken greenery patches and half-dead shrubbery. I could hardly help hearing it; in the field I’d heard it, in the village – there was nothing wrong with my hearing.
    Thatwas right. There was nothing. Nothing between the stars and the velvet but a path, two fences and in the middle me. Trees were painted silhouettes around the dome’s base, infinitely distant, mere shapes with no solidity. Therewere no lights of any kind, still or speeding, chained or single. There was nothing except what the stars threw down. There was too much nothing, it became an unbearable pressure. Sheer emptiness pinned me down and stared at me, an insect on a card. It bowed my spine like a ton weight. There was only my breathing, and that was in little short gasps now, and each breath blew a little more of my lastwarmth out into the nothing, which drank it up. Nothing, and it was wrong.
    Almost as if it answered the thought, suddenly there was something. Light blinked, a faint, fragmented gleam through lacing foliage, and one clump of the painted trees sprang into shape and nearness. Not that near, though; and there wasn’t a bloody thing comforting about it. It was close to the ground, but not at it; andit was completely still. It might be an upper window, not very large; but it was pale, maybe greenish. There was no warmth in that lonely gleam; the stars seemed warmer, and by being there it only stressed what was missing. This was no world of mine.
    The village felt warm and normal by comparison. I didn’t know what or where this was, I wasn’t even going to wonder about it.