Stalking the Nightmare Read Online Free PDF

down the stairs, much less across the city to the American hospital that had been opened at Tan Son Nhut.
    He tried to stanch the flow with a bedspread and all the white tennis socks in his drawer, and miraculously, she lived for almost an hour. In that hour they talked, and in that hour of farewell she gave him the only gift in the world he wanted, the only thing he could not get for himself. She told him how he could find True Love.
    “We have talked of it so many times, and I always knew.”
    He tried to smile. “In a business partnership like ours there shouldn’t be any secrets. How else can I trust you?”
    Pain convulsed her and she gripped his hand till the bones ground. “We’ve no time for foolishness, my love. Very soon now you’ll be alone again, as you have been so often. I have this one thing I can give you in return for the love you gave me … and it will take some believing on your part.”
    “Whatever you tell me I’ll believe.”
    Then she instructed him to go to the kitchen and get an empty condiment bottle from the spice rack. When he brought back the bottle labeled chopped coriander leaves, which was empty because they had been unable to get fresh coriander since a Claymore mine had gone off in the central market, she told him he must not argue with her, that he must fill it with her blood. He argued, wasting precious minutes; but finally, filled with a vaguely familiar self-loathing, he did it.
    “I have always sought perfection,” she said. “Always knowing that one must die to reach perfection, for life is imperfect.”
    He tried to argue, but she stopped him. Sternly.
    “Chris! You must listen to me.”
    He nodded and was silent.
    “For each woman there is a perfect man; and for each man there is a perfect woman. You were not perfect for me, but you were as close to what I sought as I ever found. But I never stopped searching … though my movement was very slow since we met. I should have been content. It’s easy to be smart, later.
    “But knowing what I knew, that True Love is a real thing, that it can be picked up and turned in the hands, that it can be looked at and understood … that kept me always dissatisfied. As you have been.
    “Because somehow, without possessing the knowledge I chanced upon ten years ago, you knew it was real. And now I will tell you how to go about finding it. And that, my dearest, is the best way I can apologize to you for not giving up the search when we met.”
    Then with her voice fading off and coming back a little less strong each time, she told him of an artifact that had never been described, that had first been unearthed during Evans’s excavations of the Palace of Minos at Knossos in 1900.
    It was taken from a walled-up niche behind an elaborate fresco painted on a wall of the Corridor of the Procession, and had been hidden there since 2000 BC. Where it had come from before that time, not even the archeologist who discovered it and smuggled it away from Crete could begin to guess.
    He recognized it for what it was the instant the light of his torch fell on it. He disappeared that night and was presumed to have returned to England; but was never seen again. Record of his find was revealed in 1912 during the dying reminiscences of Bessie Chapman, one of 711 survivors of the sinking of the Titanic picked up by the Carpathia.
    Suffering from extreme exposure and seemingly delirious, the immigrant passenger babbled a story heard only by those few Carpathia deckhands and ministering survivors who tried to make her last hours easier. Apparently she had been a London doxy who, after an evening of sport with “a real elegant nob, a brick ‘e was,” actually saw the artifact. She spoke of it with such wonder that when she died it seemed she had passed over having known all there was to know of joy in this life.
    One of the deckhands, an Irish stoker named Haggerty, it was later reported, hung about the dying woman and seemed to be paying close