Rubicon Beach

Rubicon Beach Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Rubicon Beach Read Online Free PDF
Author: Steve Erickson
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Slipstream, gr:favorites, gr:read, gr:kindle-owned
the windows made anything visible. I had that usual anxiety you feel when you fall asleep where you haven’t expected to, waking alone to a change of light. But I also had a feeling that clashed with the anxiety of being alone in spent light. I stumbled up from the chair. It’s not true that one wakes knowing someone else is in the room. No one ever wakes knowing that. People who believe that give too much credit to human instinct. They forget that as children they woke knowing something was beneath the bed or behind the door when in fact nothing was there at all. At Bell there were many nights I woke knowing someone was in my cell; in fact no one was ever in my cell. Now I woke feeling both alone in spent light and that there was someone else in the room, even as I knew too much to believe it. I kicked the manuscripts away and moved toward the back of the dark archives, and the glow from outside the window never changed. I passed one aisle of files and then another and then found the two of them in front of me as though they’d just appeared.
    I jumped where I stood and feIt the percussive slam of my heart in my ears. She turned to look at me, as she had the first time; he turned to look at me as he had the first time, from his place on his knees. I waited for the image to come apart, like a fetus smeared into an ephemeral jelly, and then not be there at all. But this wasn’t an image of my aftersleep, like the other images of other sleeps; it didn’t go away. I’d lived in a cell too long not to know the real thing. Then I saw the knife.
    Her blow was faster than I could speak. His head sat so still on his neck for a moment it was as though she had missed aItogether, and then it seemed to come floating toward me. If I had wanted I could have caught it, cradling it in my arms and pressing its face against my chest. It landed behind me with an awful soft smack, not unlike the thuds of the nights when the city shook and its sound changed. Like the first time, the body took a long while crumpling at her feet, and she stood and raised her head and watched me. She parted her lips and then said something in another language. I stepped toward her and she raised the knife to me, and the color seemed to go out of her face and her mouth was wet. Her eyes were wet. I looked to the body. She boIted from where she stood, darting for the aisle behind one of the shelves. I just stood looking at the body and turning to its head sitting some distance away on the floor. It was leaking slowly while the body erupted at the neck, deflating like a bag.
    I had this momentary burst of composure. I had this momentary burst of composure in which I thought I would just walk over to the head and pick it up and look at its face; I was certain I’d see Ben Jarry looking back at me. But I never got that far. Suddenly I was sitting in a chair in the corner of the archives and ]on Wade was standing over me and the glow of the street was still coming through the windows and another familiar light was flashing in my eyes like the electricity of a storm. All around me were other guys in coats and a lot of activity. It wasn’t as though everything had just changed at the snap of someone’s fingers; rather I was vaguely aware of a passing period of time during which I traveled through the things that happened around me without paying any attention to them whatsoever. I put my hands in front of my face and looked up. “Don’t tell me,” I said, not especially to Wade. I knew it was a little too convenient. He didn’t say anything, he was waiting with his hands in his coat. He didn’t look happy. “Like last time,” I said.
    “Last time?”
    “What are you doing here?” I said to him.
    He still didn’t look happy. “What happened?” he finally said.
    I shook my head. There was this damn flashing light.
    “Nothing. I had a dream. It was nothing.”
    Wade reached down and put five huge fingers around my collar. “What are you trying to hand
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

The Shadow Companion

Laura Anne Gilman

A Mixed Bag of Blood

David Bernstein

Never Say Never

Emily Goodwin

Touch the Sun

Cynthia Wright

CallingCaralisa

Virginia Nelson

The Cosmic Logos

Traci Harding