The Damned Read Online Free PDF Page A

childhood imaginings Diana had walked from the garden pedestal, and had walked exactly that way. They kept to the high bank and he caught her arm to help her where it dipped steeply down toward the murky water. “Want to go wading?” she asked.
    “Not in that stuff, certainly. There doesn’t seem to be any place down here. Shall we go back?”
    “Let’s try along the bank. Come on.” He shrugged and followed her. The sun began to bite through his thin shirt into his shoulders. Sweat stung the corners of his eyes.
    On and on. “Hey, is this a cross-country hike?”
    “Just to there, John. Just to that clump of trees.”
    “That’s another half mile!”
    “But it looks so pleasant,”
    When they got to the trees, he saw that it was pleasant. These trees were taller, thicker. And the grass was green under them, not seared and dusty as back by the highway. They sat on the spread blanket and drank sparingly of the water. He looked up across a bend of the river. The toy ferry twinkled in distant heat. Cars waiting on the far bank sent blue-white dots of chromium fire across the distance.
    “Cooler here, isn’t it?” she said.
    “Mmmm. Much. You’re a bright girl.”
    She lay back on the blanket and said, “Kith me quick. I’m thickthteen.”
    He bent over her and kissed her, lightly. Her arm went around his neck and pulled his lips back again as he started to sit up. Her mouth enlarged and was moist. He liked the light dry kisses. These kisses were the ones that brought on the need of her, brought on the spinning craziness. She moaned and thrust against him.
    “Now,” she said, deep in her throat. “Now, John Carter Gerrold. Here and now, in sunlight again.”
    “Your dress,” he said haltingly. “It will be rumpled. And besides, I didn’t… I don’t have any of…”
    Her eyes were closed. “That doesn’t matter.”
    “But we were going to wait for a year before we…”
    Tears squeezed out from under her closed lids. “I thought of that. I have a funny theory. Right now, with what we still have for each other, we can make a baby with eyes that will laugh, a baby to roll brown in the sun, and husky. A year from now, all we can make will be sad-eyed pale little children with… with the love left out.”
    She sat up, frankly crying, hitched the skirt of the dress from under her hips, pulled the dress off over her head, and lay back again, dressed in the blue honeymoon wisps of fragilest nylon and lace.
    He took her then, more roughly than ever before, with her responding tautly, with love a pulse like the measured beat of a drum, took her with an almost shocking quickness matched by her own readiness. And while it was happening, while all the world had focused down to the chant of bodies, a kind of singing, he knew that this was right and true and forever, that there was no nastiness, that Diana had been stone, and this was flesh to enclose him tightly.
    And they lay side by side, her head tucked against his shoulder.
    The uncomfortableness was seeping back, the feeling of having done something animal, reprehensible. The body that had been incredibly lovely only moments before was becoming overpoweringly of the flesh, sticky-soft, enervating.
    He said quickly, thickly, “Now is when… it happens. I go sour inside. As if it had been wrong. I don’t know. Maybe you’re right about that lid. Something twisted wrong inside me.”
    “How much money do we have left?” she asked, surprising him.
    “Huh? Oh, maybe four thousand. A little more.”
    “Darling, Uncle Dod can get along without you for a little time. We’ll drive your mother home, and then we’re going out to Santa Fe and call on your father and his lady.”
    He sat up, conscious of nakedness, reaching quickly for his shorts, scissoring his long legs into them. “Mother would never permit that.”
    “Don’t you see? This strange sort of reserve of yours comes from what happened. If it had hit you harder, I think you might possibly