Saint Peter’s Wolf Read Online Free PDF

last swallow of Drambuie before rolling into bed, carefully determined not to tell me what was agonizing her. I had been unable to sleep, tossing, nearly rising again.
    But I had slept at last, and now there was something wrong. I listened, holding my breath. There it was: a wail, a cry, a voice like a call from another century. Cherry lay next to me, unmoving, unstirred even when I switched on the light. This cry was something from my own childhood, a sound like the sound of my own voice so long ago. I shrugged into my dressing gown.
    He was still asleep, struggling, fighting. I spoke, a whisper, but he did not hear me.
    Then he sat up, flushed and panting, and looked around at the bedroom. He was sweating, and his eyes glanced here and there, seeing nothing.
    â€œIt’s all right,” I said as gently as I could.
    A trapezoid of light fell over his bed, and he looked up as my shadow fell over him. He seemed to hear my words only several seconds after I spoke them, and even then he did not seem to understand me, or believe me.
    â€œSomething was after me,” he said, his voice unsteady. This was a different Carliss than I usually saw. This Carliss was broken, afraid.
    Just then the only thing I wanted in the entire world was to comfort this child. And what could I tell him? The ancient, pithy hope that adults have offered children for millions of years. “Everything’s okay, Carliss. It was just a dream.”
    â€œI was stuck.” He spoke with something like annoyance at the machinations of the dream. “I couldn’t run.”
    I stepped on a plastic toy, some sort of monster shape clattering under my bare foot. “I have dreams like that.”
    â€œI couldn’t move my feet.” Again, he was mildly outraged that his psyche could serve up such a scenario.
    I rested my hand on his head. “But you got away,” I said, remembering my own nightmares, my own past dreams.
    â€œIt caught me,” he said, as though returning to the world of sense was not enough. The dream lingered, outraging him. “I couldn’t do anything.”
    I sat on the bed. I put my arms around him, and I knew then that whatever happened I would protect Carliss. It was that simple: something about him made me more than a distracted adult. I was a man strengthened by love. All is well, something in my soul said to something in his. This is our refuge. Fear nothing.
    His voice was stronger. “I woke up on purpose.”
    â€œSmart move.”
    Carliss thought for a while, his forehead on my shoulder. “It was some kind of big man.”
    â€œA giant.”
    A minuscule nod.
    â€œHe wanted to eat you, I suppose.”
    No answer.
    It’s the first nightmare, I wanted to tell him. The dream that our father, or some other adult male, has turned, and gone bad. Bad, and hungry. “I think everyone has a dream like that, at one time or another.”
    â€œDo you?”
    The question surprised me. Its directness, and its pertinence to what I had just been thinking. My own recurring nightmare was not quite like that, I nearly told him. Similar, but different in an essential way. What followed me was anything but human.
    â€œI do have bad dreams,” I told him. “I certainly do.”
    I drove Carliss to school the next morning, something Cherry usually did. She was sluggish this morning, lifting herself on one elbow only to fall back with a groan.
    The Academy of the Pacific was a series of buildings under tall columns of eucalyptus. Children kicked a soccer ball, jumped rope. I got out of the car and walked to the edge of the playground, following Carliss, who swung his pack onto the lawn and ran forward to kick the black and white ball high into the air.
    Children, I thought—just as one might stand at the edge of the surf and think: sea.
    Their bright voices were everywhere around me, but the children ignored me, as though a stump hulked on the playground, or a large