Moonheart Read Online Free PDF Page B

Pattison, an author who, like Sara, had sold short stories that had yet to appear in print. He had the air of a delicatessen owner about him. He was a short bustling man in his mid-forties with a rounded balding head and frizzy black hair. He took care of the Library, though he spent most of his time making tiptap typewriter sounds on his Olympia and filling the wastebaskets with sheets of crumpled-up manuscripts. Lately he'd taken to writing scripts for the CBC Television series The King of Kensington, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him that it had been taken off the air.
    Jamie paid little attention to the houseguests unless they sought him out and Sara soon learned to do the same. When she asked him about them once, he'd only shrugged.
    "They need some place to be," he'd replied. "Lord knows, the House is big enough. They come for the same reason that you and I and the regulars stay. To get away from the world outside for awhile.
    "I can't deny them that. They're like us, Sairey. Different from the norm. And, as this is a place where difference is the norm, they can relax. There's no need to try and fit in because everything fits in here."
    That was what Sara liked best about Tamson House: that it didn't seem to be a part of the world outside its walls. Stepping over its threshold was like stepping into a place where everything you knew had to be forgotten to make way for new rules. It was here, when the world outside lost all its secrets and seemed to unfold around her, flat and unending, every surprise and wonder ironed out of it, here in the maze of rooms that she could find mystery again and rejuvenate her own sense of wonder.
    And somehow, for all that it seemed a place where only chaos could govern, some unspoken rule had people cleaning up after themselves and making sure that nothing in the House was damaged, be it fixture or guest. The broken jars in the carnies' room had been the exception rather than the rule. Sara doubted that they even realized that they'd left them behind.
    As Blue put it: "It's like the House takes care of itself, you know? It does weird things to people so that nobody messes up. It's funny how it works out that way."
    All in all, Tamson House with its twisting corridors, endless rooms and secret passageways and stairwells, the facades it presented to the world at large and the hidden garden inside its walls, was a curious place, suited to its curious owner.

    ***

    "Curious," Jamie said, hearing Sara out.
    She'd found him in the Postman's Room. It was called that because once during a postal strike, their postman had spent three weeks in it sorting old letters and muttering to himself about the need for order and how greed and avarice were deadly sins, though he later accepted his raise and the resumption of his normal duties without protest. Jamie was just getting ready for a before-dinner cup of tea that was steeping in a pot at his desk when Sara came in. His article on mushrooms was stacked in a tidy pile of manuscript pages on a table beside his chair.
    Jamie was a small man, but what he lacked in height he made up for in intensity. His clear grey eyes were as piercing as a peregrine's and the impression he usually gave was of a tightly coiled spring about to burst loose. His hair was grey and thinning on top, his full beard bushy and still retaining some of its original chestnut color. He tended to wear brown corduroys, a peculiarly Irish tweed vest— basically a sports jacket without sleeves— a cotton shirt and loafers. He had an obsession for knowledge— not simply clear and provable facts, but other, more tenuous knowledge that was more intuitive than studied and therefore open to question... at least by those who might dispute the validity of any matter "not manifest or detectable by clinical methods alone." He'd been studious even as a boy, losing himself to the twists and turns of old riddles and older lore, living in his father's rambling House— inhabiting the