The Five Gates of Hell Read Online Free PDF Page A

ran them didn’t care if he was ugly; most of them were ugly too, and some of them, maybe they were mistakes as well. Old Mr Garbett, he was ugly all right. He ran Jed’s favourite store. It was on Airdrome Boulevard. The Empire of Junk, it was called. Old Mr Garbett had a moon face and eyes that seeped. He sat on a leather armchair just inside the door with a brown bottle of beer standing beside his right foot. He wore the same mustard cardigan every day, and smoked cigarettes with wrinkles in them like the legs of elephants. The strangest thing about him was, his lips were the same colour as his face. It was here that Jed found the radios.
    That first afternoon he was so excited that he ran all the way home. Along the boulevard, down Mackerel Street, through the front gate, straight into his mother’s bedroom. She was sitting at her dressing-table as usual. Instead of turning round, she used the mirror to look at him. ‘Do you have to bring those in here, Jed?’
    â€˜They’re only radios.’
    â€˜Yes, but look at them. They’re filthy.’
    There was something wrong with what she was saying. But she’d thrown him off balance and he couldn’t think.
    â€˜And what do you want radios for, anyway?’ It was sweet, that voice of hers, it was always sweet, somehow, but like all sweet things too much of it could make you ill. ‘We’ve already got a radio in the kitchen.’
    â€˜That’s different.’
    â€˜What’s different about it?’
    He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. These ones have names. It’s the names that I like.’
    A plane went over, and all her tiny bottles jostled and clinked.
    â€˜Names?’ She frowned. ‘What names?’
    â€˜You know, the names of the stations. Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki. Those names.’
    If only Pop was still around, he thought. Pop would have understood. Trouble was, Pop had moved out about a year before. Jed knew it was final when he saw Pop carrying his gun magazines out to thecar. Pop had the same passion for collecting as Jed did, only Pop collected guns. He had nineteen of them. Six were special, and hung on the wall in the den. The rest, he actually used. Sometimes, on weekends, he used to take Jed out to the abandoned graveyard on Normandy Hill and they’d shoot at the wooden crosses. The bull’s-eye was the place where the parts of the cross joined, but Jed liked to shoot at the arms and watch the bits fly off. Pop loved guns so much, he’d even named his sons after them: Thomas Colt Morgan, Jed Gattling Morgan (if he’d had a girl he would’ve called her Baretta). He wanted to change his own name to Winchester, but Muriel wouldn’t hear of it. Winchester Morgan! He always thought that would’ve sounded grand. As it was, he had to be satisfied with Pop. Not even Bang. Just Pop.
    About every month or two Pop would come back, late at night, a few drinks under his belt. The door would shake, then the windows, then the door again, it didn’t seem so strange, it was just like another plane going over, and then his voice would force its way through the mailbox. ‘Muriel? Let me in, will you? Muriel? Goddammit, Muriel, let me in.’ And Muriel would call Tommy. Or if Tommy wasn’t home she’d call the police. ‘He’s drunk,’ she’d say. ‘I think he’s got a gun.’ She didn’t like calling the police, though, because the cars’d scream into the street, the lights’d flash and then everybody’d know. She was a beautician, and she had her reputation to think of.
    And now she turned to him and it was as if she’d been reading his mind. ‘You must get this from your father.’
    She banned his radios from the house, but that just drove Jed’s passion underground. He became a regular at the Empire of Junk. He’d insert himself into the darkest corners of the store, dust burning in his