Shifters Read Online Free PDF Page B

was all right. Her beauty was in him now. She  was in him.
    Faith was power. Belief  was power. He’d known that for eons. Everything was either an insouciant lie or an unassailable truth. In all his years, in all his centuries of gleaning, that was perhaps the only real thing he’d ever become convinced of. It often depressed him—the fait accompli that the true quintessence of meaning was meaninglessness.
    But I still have my love , he accounted. He adjusted the knot in his tie, aware of himself in the mirror. More superstition. He saw a thousand different things. Were they facsimiles? Were they falsehoods? He saw himself red as blood, covered in the blood of ages.
    He stuffed the girl’s poor shriveled mouth with clumps of garlic. There was no potential here, no reason to bring her along as he had others, she was, regrettably, just food. He opened her eyes with his fingers. Love like blood, he thought. From the small bag he’d brought along, he removed a common red-bladed hacksaw.
    Then he sawed off the girl’s head.
    Words drifted across his sentience. They weren’t his words. Whose could they be? Into heaven or the saddest realm of nether … my love for you goes on forever. A poem, an edict. Someone’s love unloosed unto the night. The malefactor felt sad now, not for the girl whose head he’d just sawed off but for himself. It was a cruel trust. I still have my love,  he repeated. Even that sounded like a lie.
    The malefactor left. He did not leave through the door. He did not leave as a bat. He left instead as a desire, an…edict. He left as a longing, or as the passion behind the saddest tear.
    I am forever. I am oblivion.
    He fell adrift, into the sea of night. Drifting.
    I…am…Sciftan…

FIVE
    The Arrival of the Dead

    (i)

    Locke walked down Sunnyside Avenue. An odd ambiance struck him—it always did. It was night, obviously there was, at present, no sunny side…as with the neighboring Meridian Avenue, which certainly wasn’t the nexus of anything that Locke could determine. It seemed to show him something. Poets were weird.
    Am I weird?  he pondered. He knew he saw things differently, but he felt that, as a poet, he was supposed to. Walking at night was more than that to him. It was walking through imagery, through a panorama of visual abstraction which solicited creative assessment.
    The night’s chill air enfolded him. Down the street to his left, bright light hung in a still explosion about the Open Book: “A Poem Emporium,” enshrouded by crisp darkness. It had been a few months since Locke had done a reading there; he liked the place, they sold nothing but volumes of poetry and little literary journals, and thus were always on the verge of bankruptcy, but the little shop was true, no contradictions in its Quixotic purpose. He passed the church, the small office buildings where up-and-coming law firms shared floors with down-and-out telephone boiler rooms, some small shops. Renovated rowhouses which all seemed to tilt at odd angles descended down dark streets. Old streetlamps cast umbrae of spoiled light at each corner. Yes, Locke liked walking at night. There was a time, in his positivity, that he regarded walking as a symbolic act: each step forward became an acknowledgment, or—yes!—a celebration.  Every single step he took through life felt like a celebration of his love.
    Clare appeared in his mind. Not anymore,  he realized. Now, walking seemed little more than a celebration of ambulatory capability. His positivity turned black.
    Still, he liked to walk. Locke didn’t own a car, he didn’t need one. His world was here ; he needn’t own a car to reach his muse. The bookstore and the high school were walking distance. When he’d been dating Clare, his friend Lehrling often loaned him his second car, an old gold Dodge Colt with a dent in the side. Lehrling’s first car was an Austin Martin Volante, which got a nice eight miles per gallon and cost a hundred grand. Lehrling