Relentless Read Online Free PDF

by having to pester Hud for reimbursement.”
    As far as I can remember, in ten years I had never kept secret from Penny anything that occurred in my daily life. At that moment, I could not have explained why I failed to share with her that Shearman Waxx sometimes ate at Roxie’s Bistro. Later, I figured it out.
    “Are you thinking about the Waxx review again?” she asked.
    “No. Not exactly. Maybe a little. Sort of.”
    “Let it go,” she said.
    “I am. I’m letting it go.”
    “No. You’re dwelling on it. Distract yourself.”
    “With what?”
    “With life. Take me home and make love to me.”
    “I thought we were getting dessert.”
    “Aren’t I sweet enough for you?”
    “There it is,” I said.
    “What?”
    “That crooked little smile you get sometimes. I love that crooked little smile.”
    “Then take me home and do something with it, big boy.”

   Having gotten up at three in the morning to do thirty radio interviews, I had no difficulty falling asleep that Tuesday night.
    I endured one of my lost-and-alone dreams. Sometimes it is set in a deserted department store, sometimes in a vacant amusement park or in a train terminal where no trains depart and none arrive.
    This time, I roamed a vast and dimly lighted library, where the shelves soared high overhead. The intersecting aisles were not perpendicular to one another, but serpentine, as if reflecting the manner in which one area of knowledge can lead circuitously and unexpectedly to a seemingly unrelated field of inquiry.
    This library of the slumbering mind was buried in a silence as solid and as sinuous as the drifted sands of Egypt. No step I took produced a sound.
    The wandering passageways were catacombs without the mummified remains, harboring instead lives and the work of lifetimes set down on paper, bound with glue and signature thread.
    As always in a lost-and-alone dream, I remained anxious but not afraid. I proceeded in expectation of a momentous discovery, a thing of wonder and delight, although the possibility of terror remained.
    When the dream is in a labyrinthine train station, the silence is sometimes broken by footsteps that lure me before they fade. In a department store, I hear a faraway feminine laugh that draws me from kitchenware through bed-and-bath and down a frozen escalator.
    In this library, the thrall of silence allowed a single crisp sound now and then, as if someone in an adjacent aisle was paging through a book. Searching, I found neither a patron nor a librarian.
    An urgency gripped me. I walked faster, ran, turned a corner into what might have been a reading alcove. Instead of armchairs, the space offered a bed, and in it slept Penny, alone. The covers on my side of the bed were undisturbed, as though I had never rested there.
    Alarmed at the sight of her alone, I sensed in her solitude an omen of some event that I dared not contemplate.
    I approached the bed—and woke in it, beside her, where I had not been lying in the dream. Gone were the nautilus spirals of books, replaced by darkness and the pale geometry of curtained windows.
    Penny’s soft rhythmic breathing was a mooring to which I could tether myself in the gloom; her respiration should have settled me but did not. I continued to feel adrift, and anxious.
    Wanting something, not knowing what I wanted, I eased out of bed and, barefoot in pajamas, left the master suite.
    Moonlight through skylights frosted the longer run of the L-shaped upstairs hallway. Passing a thus twice-silvered mirror, I glanced at my reflection, which appeared as diaphanous as a ghost.
    I was awake but felt still dreambound. This venue, though it was my own house, seemed more sinister than the deserted library or than the department store haunted by an elusive laughing spirit.
    My rising anxiety focused on Milo. I hurried the length of the main hall and turned right into the darker short arm.
    From the gap between the threshold and the bottom of Milo’s bedroom door, a fan of