Outer Banks Read Online Free PDF

matter: whichever, he had been mightily impressed.
    8.
    He stopped for lunch—tea and beef jerky—on the side of a large, granite outcropping. This time the cougar walked out of an aspen grove at the far end of the outcropping, and, leaping onto the rock, sat there and waited, watching him while he chewed on the dried beef and sipped his tea. They seemed to be studying each other’s eyes. Finally, the cougar turned and loped back into the forest, headed east, toward Blue Job.
    Dread started to feel a little crazy.—My god, he thought,—who needs to race automobiles at 160 miles an hour, when you can have this ! He named the cougar Merlin, after his favorite car, a Merlin Lotus Rue.
    9.
    As he got to his feet, moving slightly off-balance and too quickly, he reached for his rifle, which he had leaned against the chunk of rock he had been sitting on, and he knocked the gun off the rock to the grassy ground about ten or twelve feet below, where it fired, sending a bullet into the young man’s right ear and out the top of his head, hurling him off the rock into the blackberry brambles on the other side, where he had three quick visions, and died.
    10.
    D READ’S F IRST V ISION
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    A hot wind roaring, a tilt to the landscape, which is quickly righted, and then he is flying through the air a few feet above theground, when suddenly the flight ceases, and he seems to hover, bodiless; looking down, he sees gray paws and legs, and he lets his tongue loll, and he pants, and for a second realizes that he is becoming the cougar; and then he forgets this, for he has in fact become the cougar, which immediately pisses on a blackberry bush and commences hunting.
    11.
    D READ’S S ECOND V ISION
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    His battered, hurt body is washed and anointed with oils and laid out in a white gown and left on a redwood bier in a dimly lit room heavy with the smell of burning incense; he is conscious, sort of, but is unable to speak or move, until a man enters the room, a man wearing an exotically cut, glistening green suit with flowers, daisies, apple blossoms, black-eyed Susans, in his curly hair; and when the man takes Dread’s hand, Dread is able to speak and move, as if by magic; sitting up, he steps lightly from the bier and, his hand still held by the green man, says,—Am I the one?—Yes, is the answer, uttered in a melodic voice full of sweetness and light and delicate caring.—The others? Dread asks.—The others are where they have always been. You were chosen to leave because you alone were thought to be the angelic one, the green man informs him; and together, holding hands, they leave the darkening room for the sun-drenched meadows outside.
    12.
    T HE V ISION OF T OO B AD : D READ’S T HIRD V ISION
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    The first two visions are categorically denied.

6

    1.
    Meanwhile, back at the palace, Prince Egress, alone in the Bunkhouse (the name given to the apartment years ago by the press, when the boys’ rooms had been redecorated with plastic, simulated-log walls, false fireplaces, electrified kerosene lanterns, stuffed heads of mountain sheep, elk, and bear, and for each prince, his own bunk bed), was “getting in touch with his anger.”
    He strolled through the five rooms of the apartment, tipping over all the furniture, pitching lamps and wall hangings and draperies onto the floor, smashing every piece of glass he could see—windows, mirrors, dishes, liquor bottles. Then, finally, emptying the contents of the closets and dresser drawers onto the floors, he splashed kerosene from one of the lanterns that had not been converted across the heaps of cloth and flipped lit matches into each room, one after the other, and worked his way toward the hall exit. With the rooms blazing behind him, he ran out, passing the just-arriving bucket brigade in the hallway.
    2.
    He rapped on the door of his mother’s chamber and, without waiting for an answer, walked in. She quickly