The Glister Read Online Free PDF Page A

the crime that told Morrison what the killer felt; it was nothing rational and it was certainly nothing he could have put into words had someone come, at that moment, to question him, or prod him into doing his job. No: it was something about the arrangement of the body that struck him, an arrangement in which he sensed the reverence of a last moment. No matter how incredible or disgusting the idea would have seemed to him at any other time, Morrison sensed, for one fleeting and terrifying moment, that there had been reverence here, a terrible, impossible tenderness—in both the killer and his victim—for whatever it is that disappears at the moment of death, an almost religious regard for what the body gives up, something sublime and precise and exactly equal in substance to the presence of a living creature: the measured weight of a small bird or a rodent, a field mouse, say, or perhaps some kind of finch.
    Morrison had to fight the temptation, then, to cut the boy down, to undo the ceremony of what had been done to him, to cover him up and not let him be seen like this by anyone else. He wanted to deny this sacrifice, he wanted to invalidate it—but then the realization came that what he really wanted was to bring the boy back to life, to reverse the process through which he had suffered and died, and that was something nobody could do. And it was then that John Morrison understood, with a sudden and brutal clarity, that he wasn't a real policeman after all, because he did not have what it took to deal with this. He could already feel some brittle structure crumbling in his mind and, as he stood staring at this sacrificed child, everything he had hoped for when Brian Smith unexpectedly wangled him the job of town policeman collapsed like a bad wedding cake. When he'd joined the police force, he had never expected to find a body. Or not like this, at least. People died in the Innertown all the time, as they die elsewhere. They died of strokes, old age, lung disease. Occasionally, they killed themselves, or were made strange by some random accident. Morrison had already had his fair share of those, and he'd been obliged to deal with the aftermath, or make notes, or stand at the edge of some family's bewilderment and grief and pretend he had a reason to be there. Mostly, though, his neighbors died privately, with no need for an official presence, and Morrison was as removed from those deaths as he was from their other secrets. Some of them died from causes that were, and would forever remain, unknown, because no authority on earth wanted to determine what those causes were. The Innertown wasn't a healthy place to live; the trouble was that, for most people, there was nowhere else to go. This was why so many also died of things that no doctor could have diagnosed—disappointment, anger, fear, loneliness. Not being touched. Not being loved. Silence. In the old days, even hardnosed GPs would talk about dying from a broken heart: now cause of death had to be something more official. Still, nobody had been murdered in the Innertown, not in Morrison's lifetime, and he was glad of that, at least. He might have wanted to be a policeman all his life, but he had never wanted to be one of those policeman, like the ones he saw on television, finding bodies, stalking the killer, refusing tea from a friendly, but now slightly anxious woman, because he was about to tell her that her child had been tortured to death. That was all very well for the cinema, or crime magazines, but Morrison had never thought of it as real police work. What Morrison had wanted was to be a small-town bobby, walking the beat, a face familiar to everyone, a person people could trust. He wanted to work with the familiar and the tender; he wanted to be able to know what he was dealing with, learning all the time as he went along till he had a body of knowledge and understanding that he could pass on to whoever replaced him. He wanted, in other words, to be part of