The Five Gates of Hell Read Online Free PDF

nostrils, the tips of his fingers grey as if with ashes, and he would often emerge at the end of an hour with radios that Mr Garbett hadn’t even known were there.
    By the time he was ten he had more than a hundred radios, radios of every size, make, and year. Some didn’t work at all; these he dismantled. Others produced only static, but that was all right too; he could still switch them on and watch the lights come up behind the names like some kind of miniature simulated dawn. A few of the old radios still worked, and he was addicted to the way the voices grew in volume as the set warmed up, and how the voices always sounded so muffled, so cosy, like people wrapped up against cold weather; though it was the present he was listening to, somehow it always sounded like the past. Other boys his age had model aeroplanes ortoy soldiers or guns. He looked down on them. A model aeroplane had had no previous life, a toy soldier had no soul, a gun couldn’t talk to you. But a radio.
    One Saturday morning he left the house at around midday and set off up Mackerel Street. He’d seen a radio in the window of the Empire of Junk the day before, but the place had been closed. He bought a quarter of Lemon Sherbet Bombs at the candy store on Airdrome Boulevard. With their fizzy white centres they matched the excitement he felt. It was a hot morning. July, it must’ve been, or August. The streets smelt of simmering green vegetables and gas leaks. It was the kind of weather where air-conditioners bust and old people just evaporated. He walked in the gutter as he always did, pausing every now and then to poke at something with his toe. He wore his white T-shirt and his old jeans and his red baseball cap on back to front. When he reached the Empire he stopped in the doorway. Something was different. It was a strange kind of different, though. Like when someone starts wearing a new pair of glasses or they shave their eyebrows off or something. At first you don’t know what it is. Jed squinted down at Mr Garbett and all around him too, and then he realised. Mr Garbett was sitting on a stained green sofa. The leather armchair had gone. Jed eyed the sofa, then he eyed Mr Garbett. Mr Garbett raised his bottle to his pale lips and drank, as if it was the sight of Jed, and not the weather, that made him thirsty.
    â€˜Where’s the chair gone?’ Jed asked.
    â€˜Sold it,’ Mr Garbett said.
    â€˜Didn’t realise it was for sale.’
    â€˜Everything in here’s for sale.’
    Jed looked at the bottle in Mr Garbett’s hand. ‘How much for the beer?’
    Mr Garbett smiled faintly on his stained green sofa. ‘You know anything about tape recorders?’
    â€˜Tape recorders? What’s that?’
    Mr Garbett stood up. It was the first time he’d ever done that. His belly pushed against the inside of his cardigan. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.
    Jed followed Mr Garbett towards a small room at the back of the store. When he reached the threshold he stopped in his tracks. Inside the room was such a concentration of junk as he’d never seen before. There seemed to be something from every place in the world. You could single out one object and imagine the church or mansion or garage that had once surrounded it. That was the thing about junk.It had been places, seen things you could only guess at. He put his mother in the doorway and looked at her face and grinned. She’d have a fit.
    â€˜Now then,’ Mr Garbett said. He bent down and grunted as his belly crushed the breath out of his lungs. He lifted something that looked a bit like a radio on to the table, then he sat down and his eyes swivelled in their slits. ‘That there’s a tape recorder,’ he said.
    Jed went and stood next to the table. He stared down at the machine. The top of it looked like a face. Two big round eyes with spokes and an oblong plastic mouth. ‘What’s it