The Daredevils Read Online Free PDF Page B

Caruso.
    When the strange noises began . . . early in the morning, Charles snug, cozy, dreaming deep meaningful dreams, meaningfully complex psychological dreams, not the insipid nightmares of a little boy . . . and the house to shake, and things to fall, with the discrete recognizable sounds of falling now and smashing to pieces later —he thought he could hear the falling of the object through the air, or its creaking away from its place, and only after some time the shattering, breaking noise, but it is certainly possible that he was still in some way dreaming—and finally the house to seem to jump down on itsfoundation and collapse, Father had them (Mother, Amelia, Charles, the servants) out on the streets immediately, and it was easy, too easy, to see how you got things done. In the early going it was “frightening,” of course it was, but it was the consequent sadness that Father urged Charles to repel, brutally if he had to. He quoted Montaigne at him, which was something he did under ordinary circumstances too: “I neither like nor respect it, although everyone has decided to honor it. They clothe wisdom, virtue, conscience with it! But the Italians have baptized malignancy with its name. It is always a harmful quality, always insane, always cowardly and base, and the Stoics forbade their sages to feel it.” And while the thought would ring quite resoundingly in his memory a hundred years later or however long it had been (he didn’t know and didn’t care—though his secretary informed him it had been less than twenty): Sadness? The brutal, if necessary, repulsion of sadness? He wondered: Have I got that right? He wanted to laugh in Father’s face. Where does sadness come into it? He was only twelve years old but had to say it was ludicrous: The great magical city, isolated by the blue blue ocean on its chilly yellow hills and impregnable in its glorious golden, silver, railroaded Wild Western American queenliness, had crashed to the ground in less than a minute and broken apart and burned to ash so easily that he could not think of it except as something of no or little consequence. It had disappeared. The entire vast intricacy, the little cosmos. What had it been that it could disappear like that? Whatever it was, it had been swept up and away in poisonous black whirlwinds. The dome of City Hall looked like the burned-out and still smoking cage of a monstrous bird against the red sky and the bellies of buildings seemed to have been ripped open, spilling iron intestines and organs composed of brick and wood. Faces of buildings had been stripped, revealing tiny stage piled upon tiny stage, floors and floors and rows and rows of secret rooms thrown open and lit as if to prove there were no other kind of drama than pitiless silence and nakedness. The dead men and women on the sidewalk, shrunken and blackened and charred. The first time they’d encountered such a corpse, his first thought was that it was some kind of objet d’art, and he’d turned away. Amelia said, “Oh my God,it’s a man.” They’d drawn nearer and suddenly ice was running up and down Charles’s spine, his head was spinning and his knees gave way. “No,” he said, getting up quickly but with help, “it’s a woman.” There was no sign of gender on the corpse, almost no sign of species, but something in the black hard lava of the head seemed . . . feminine. It made no sense at all that it should matter, even when it had mattered so much just a few hours earlier, but it harrowed him. And the horses, those poor magnificent horses, swollen and deformed, turned to grotesque marble statues, the hideous chess pieces of a gigantic blazing weeping demon who was sweeping the piles of junk along the streets with the skirts of his robe as he staggered and flew in little hops in search of something they could not guess at. At some point—it must have been the second or