Night Visions Read Online Free PDF

happened later this afternoon.” He stands. “I’ll stop by the hospital in a few hours.”
    â€œWho is he?” she asks, her voice shaking.
    â€œWe’re fairly certain he’s responsible for six murders in this area since September. You’re lucky to be alive.” The EMT walks over to Christina and helps her up.
    â€œSix murders?” The number seems wrong somehow.
    Detective Jacobs watches her leave, then returns to the investigators, who are taking photographs and collecting evidence in the kitchen.
    7:12 P.M.
    She gets out of the cab and decides to walk up M Street before going back to her place. The sidewalks are damp from a light rain that is still falling from the charcoal-gray sky. After beingquestioned by Detective Jacobs at the hospital, she started to remember more. The hallway with those blood-stained pictures. And that music, haunting, calm, insistent.
    As Christina thinks more about the man in her kitchen, she wonders whether he was really trying to kill her. After throwing her to the floor, he leaned close as if to whisper. Maybe he said something that she didn’t hear. Were his lips moving? Then he fell on top of her—on top of his knife. He tried to hold her still with the weight of his body and one free hand. The other gripped the knife. She could feel his closed fist against her sternum. But he didn’t try to get up. He didn’t strike or stab her again. He only struggled to keep their bodies together, holding himself against her until he died.
    At the hospital, the doctor took some of her blood to run tests, and for the first time she started worrying about AIDS. What if he was sick? What if some disease will kill her after all? She won’t know until the police conduct an autopsy on the killer. Even then, will she really be sure?
    She stops in front of a newsstand, looking at the rows of shiny magazine covers. A new image comes to her, one she has not seen before. A woman surrounded by withered trees that are upside down. No. She is upside down, hanging by her feet, each arm stretched out by rope attached to other trees. Thick, arthritic branches twist above her, dangling her body like a puppet. Her legs are crossed, suspended from a single rope, and her back is torn from being dragged across the ground. On her front, blood drains slowly from a circle carved into her torso. Her body sways slightly.
    Christina’s eyes tear up. “What’s wrong with me?” she mutters. Then she hears a man’s voice—the vendor has turned on a shortwave radio. It’s a news update on NPR.
    â€œPianist Glenn Gould died today at the age of fifty. A controversial artist, Gould was perhaps most famous for his recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which he recorded twice—at both the beginning and the end of his career….”
    An excerpt from one of these recordings begins playing, and Christina immediately feels numb. A wave of nausea passes over her as she recognizes the music from her vision.
    â€œGoldberg,” she says aloud, and the vendor turns to her, puzzled. Suddenly, she feels the need to run—from the images, the sounds, the rainwater. Along the brick sidewalks leading back to her apartment, the name Goldberg repeats in her head, and the music follows her like her own shadow on a sunny afternoon.

4
Lost and Found
    FRIDAY
    T he doorbell rings, followed by two quick knocks. Samantha knows immediately that it is Frank. The heaviness of his knuckles against the thin plywood door—it’s a sound she has been waiting to hear for months. Too many times she mistook the footsteps of a neighbor or a knock on the door across the hall for him. Sometimes she just opened the door, as if he would be standing there one day, penitent and miserable without her. Instead, he found her on a street corner, right where he expected her. And so the knock this morning comes as no surprise.
    She looks at the clock: 6:45 A.M