Outer Banks Read Online Free PDF Page B

covered her breasts with a satin sheet; she had been brushing her soft, ebony-coloredhair. Smiling easily, she said,—Egress, how nice to see you. Will you wait outside for a second, honey, while I dress?
    He coughed, wiping his mouth with a lace cuff, smearing it with sputum and blood.—I want to talk with you about something important, Mother, he announced. He could hear the shouts and cries of the firemen and the volunteer bucket brigade in the distance as they doused the flames in the Bunkhouse.
    â€”What’s all that sound and fury? asked Naomi Ruth.
    Egress coughed again.—It’s coming from the Bunkhouse. I just wrecked the place and set it on fire. Vandalized it, sort of.
    â€”Oh-h-h, Egress, not again! she said in a low voice, pulling him to her, pressing his cheek against her soft, white, plum-shaped breasts.
    â€”I’m sorry, Mamma, he said.
    â€”I know, dear, she replied.
    3.
    Feeling superficially refreshed, young Egress left his mother’s chamber. But the old heaviness swiftly returned.
    â€”Good god! he exclaimed to himself.—Is there no outrage outrageous enough to lift these dead spirits of mine? Am I doomed, he soliloquized, to an existence of dull eeks and melancholic squeals with naught but long intervals of sodden thought between? Oh, daily, daily diminishes the possibility for suddenness; hourly shrinks the spontaneous! The hot squirts and jacks of ecstatic youth are in manhood mere dribbles, and what ere remains of that rough ecstasy now flatly lies upon the frozen turf before me. I can but prod and poke the memories as if they were the drained entrails of a goat! Would a future could be divined there as sharply as a past! He kicked the loam of his mother’s knot garden with a booted toe.—Shit! he decided.—Guess I’ll snort some coke and go to London and jam. This crap with the Green Man will blow over in a few days anyhow. It won’t amount to shit. Nothing ever does.
    4.
    He smoked hash and snorted some coke in the library and, rubbing a couple of drops of hash oil into each ear, went up to the east-facing parapet to watch the landscape darken before him while the sun set behind him. Pretending he was the sun setting was a favorite fantasy.
    This time, however, just as he was getting off, he heard a ghost.—Eee-gress! the voice called. It was not an unpleasant voice.—Eee-gress! He looked all around him but could see no one. The guards were in the watchtowers. He was alone on the parapet.—Eee-gress!
    Well, he’d had bad trips before and had learned the hard way to “go with it,” so he sat down well out of the bitterly snapping wind and said,—Okay, I’m listening. Go ahead. There was a pause; then he said,—I suppose this has to do with the green man. He’s been on my mind a lot today.
    â€”Righto, said the ghost.
    â€”Before we go on, said Egress,—do you mind telling me who you are?
    â€”You can call me Bob or Jack, whichever you prefer. It doesn’t matter, because I’m only a messenger. We’ve never met before and I rather doubt if we’ll ever meet again.
    â€”Okay, Bob or Jack, shoot, Egress said.
    5.
    After Bob or Jack had given Egress the message, which, he told him, was a “plan” from a “source” whose identity he “could not reveal,” Egress went down from the parapet, caught a car for the airport, and flew to London, where it was morning. The sun shone and birds sang. For the first time in months, young Egress was elated.
    Inside the cab from the airport, he snorted more coke and went straight to where his friends lived, in an elegant, brick townhouse near Grosvenor Square. They were all members of a world-famous rock band from California called The Sons of thePioneers. In the last few years their most popular songs had been written by Egress.
    â€”Hey, man! they all cried when they saw him.—What’s happening? they