Power, The Read Online Free PDF Page A

dark and haunted, the pavement deserted. Life had retreated from the streets into snug little homes and apartments and rose-wallpapered bedrooms. It gave him the willies. It was as if the city were totally empty, mile after mile of desolate streets, a no-man’s land with himself as the only living person … .
    The click of his heels echoed back and forth from store to store—the solid, steady sound of leather hitting concrete. The solitary click-click-click , like the ticking of some huge watch.
    He had covered three blocks before he caught the tiny separation in the sounds, the minute distinctions between the sound of his own heels on the sidewalk and the sound of someone else’s a block down. So he wasn’t the only one out late at night, he thought. In a way, it spoiled the illusion … .
    He turned a corner and crossed over a block. The footsteps that paralleled his own also turned a corner and crossed over a block.
    He changed step, just to vary the rhythm.
    A block away, somebody else changed step.
    Sweat oozed out on his forehead and the pounding of his heart filled his ears. He stopped under an awning to light a cigarette and the flame jiggled uncertainly in his hands. His palms felt damp and greasy.
    If somebody was after him, he’d wait for them to come; he could take care of himself. And if it was just somebody out walking, he’d wait for the sound to die away.
    Thirty seconds.
    One minute.
    Five minutes.
    There was no sound except the rising wind and the rustle of leaves. He forced a smile. It had been his imagination. He’d been acting like a kid sidling past a graveyard.
    He started walking.
    And there were the sounds of footsteps a block away. A little faster. He quickened his own step.
    It hit him just when he was walking past a street lamp and he had to hold on to the post for support. It felt like being slugged and for a moment he almost blacked out. Something tore and buffeted at his mind, forcing the essential bit of personality that was him to scuttle into the dim recesses. For a brief moment he felt the helpless inferiority of a very small man in a very large room, as if he were drunk and there were a small kernel of sobriety in the back of his mind wondering why he was saying and doing the things that he was.
    It passed quickly and he straightened up, no longer afraid of the evening and the footsteps.
    Footsteps. Odd he should have thought of them. There were no footsteps other than his own. He had been walking down the street in the middle of a deserted city. Alone.
    Alone.
    His mind plucked curiously at the word and it struck him how appropriate it was. He had been alone all of his life. Alone in this damned vale of tears that people called life. Alone in the rabbit warrens of the cities.
    The unfriendly city. The houses, the apartment buildings, the stores—all frowning at him, dark and unfriendly. Like the world. The whole, entire world.
    He turned another corner and walked slowly towards the park, It loomed ahead, a darkened stretch of trees and winding paths and small, crouching hills. The string of street lamps wound through the hills like a gigantic pearl necklace. To the right there was … the lake.
    He was sweating. His hands were shaking and the salt perspiration crept down his forehead and beaded into the corners of his eyes. He had a headache, a whopping big headache, and somewhere lost inside him a voice was crying: not the lake, not the lake, not the lake!
    People didn’t care, he thought. People never gave a damn about each other. About him. Marge would smile and kid him to his face but she didn’t really mean it. And it was that way with everybody he knew. Not a single friend among them, not a single person who cared …
    What was it the man had said? The epitaph? He lived, he suffered, he died.
    But there was always the lake. The beautiful lake. The cool, black, rolling lake with the long concrete piers that fingered out into the friendly water, into depths where the level