Quicksand Read Online Free PDF

double-checking

because the police insisted, but everybody's safe and sound."
     
     
"That's how you heard about it -- from the police?"
     
     
"They rang up about ten minutes ago. I must say I didn't get a very clear

idea of what's supposed to have happened. Something about a man in a car

being attacked by a naked madwoman, as far as I could make out. Is that

right?"
     
     
Paul let his shoulders sag. "Yes, I'm afraid it's true. He came staggering

into the Needle with a broken arm."
     
     
"Then we can look forward to a month or two of the leper treatment from

our neighbors, I suppose," Natalie commented without humour. "Did you

only come back to make sure it wasn't somebody from here?"
     
     
"That's right. And since it isn't, I suppose I'd better go down to the

woods where it happened so that somebody's on hand to stop Mrs Weddenhall

turning loose her hounds."
     
     
     
     
     
     
*5*
     
     
-- I'm sure Natalie thought I was joking about Mrs Weddenhall.

I only wish I was.
     
     
He clicked his lights up to full beam and accelerated down the winding

Cornminster road. The village stopped dead at this point, though on

the other roads leading from the junction it straggled a few hundred

yards further. In seconds a curve had taken him out of sight of human

habitation and he was driving between steep black banks crowned with

wet thorny hedges.
     
     
-- Abstract of insanity: aloneness in a private world. Oh, there is some

excuse for a reaction like Mrs Weddenhall's. A cripple can still be a

person, but in what sense is a lunatic human? Humanity's in the mind,

in the tangle of thoughts spun by the brain, and once that's gone what

remains is human only in outward shape. But sometimes one can win back

what's been lost. You can't create a person, only let him grow, but you

can occasionally, with care and planning and foresight, help shattered

fragments bind together, whole.
     
     
He felt the car's rear wheels slide on mud and slowed down; better to

get there in one piece than not at all.
     
     
-- All the king's horses and all the king's men . . . They put me back

together. I owe them that.
     
     
The doom / the dome of the black night leaned on his skull with a

crushing weight. For an instant he had, with terrifying vividness,

the old familiar illusion: that when he ended this interval alone and

once again came on his fellow men, they would stare at him strangely

and speak incomprehensible new tongues.
     
     
-- I built myself a blank black trap like this empty road. I should have

had the sense to tell Iris the truth even if it meant her not marrying

me. They don't talk about it in my family because it's a shameful thing,

and I banked on their silence. By shifts and devious expedients I eluded

the admission and uttered those diversionary half-truths: psychiatry is

the coming thing, that's the field where the great new discoveries will be

made from now on, this is the right branch of medicine for an ambitious

newcomer to select. . . . And the worst sophistry of all: passing off

my analysis with that ready phrase "Physician heal thyself." What good

are cliches in ordering your life? Stick to the stale and sooner or

later you wear down into the standard mould. Goodbye individual, hello

matchstick man!
     
     
He braked abruptly. There was his goal, and he hadn't been joking about

Mrs Weddenhall.
     
     
In the glare of his lights stood three vehicles, partly blocking the road.

Under branches dripping rainwater, a Ford Anglia station wagon, which

must be Faberdown's, a police Wolseley with its blue light shining,

and Mrs Weddenhall's elderly Bentley with its wired rear compartment

used for transporting dogs.
     
     
He pulled as far on the verge of the road as he dared, cut his engine,

and at once heard a low bark: the sound between a cough and a roar which

he'd noticed many times as he drove around Yemble. He jumped out.
     
     
And there she was, standing with her dogs on