The Haunted Storm Read Online Free PDF

reach it to ask.
    “The importance of it grew and grew. I thought of it as having some kind of affinity with the laws of matter, with nature, and it possessed me so I could think of nothing else, nothing at all…”
    She looked straight in front of her as she said that and caught her breath in a deep gasp as if he had hurt her suddenly. He pressed less hard and changed the direction of his caress, squeezing the flesh softly between his two fingers.
    “You know – you know I said about the bottle that shook because he wanted it to? Well, that was – I think that was because I’d just said something stupid that made him angry, and instead of showing his anger himself he made something else shake and smash itself. It fell off the shelf and smashed. He didn’t move but I jumped and burst into tears hysterically because I was so frightened by him. Then another time when he was angry – it was on a bus, we’d got on together, and there was a drunkard sitting there who was shouting and upsetting an old lady beside him and my lover just sat down quietly and didn’t even look at him but suddenly I felt sick, and it came from him like a blow, a great wave of anger that made a silence – and he said nothing at all, but I could see the drunkard go pale and then I felt faint and weak from the force of it. And the seats themselves and the drunkard’s head and body went – transparent – faint – for a second as if they were fading like a ghost, and everybody fell still and shocked. That was all. No-one said a word but I knew it came from him and he could make things unsure of themselves enough to go faint and pale like that. So that’s why I thought that his own secret heart that I knew nothing of was so linked up with the laws of matter.”
    One of the men below them had tied a rope around his waist and was wading into the surf at the foot of the Spur. The light in the wheelhouse of the boat was fainter, and occasionally it flickered. Apart from wondering briefly what they were thinking of doing, Matthew was hardly interested. The scene down there was merely a study for a land scape with figures, set perhaps on the shores of Lake Avernus, lit by the irregular corpse-light of the white spray and the lightning; a fine, mysterious, Cimmerian picture, but of no great concern to him anymore. All his interest was centred in the remote and sexual world he and the girl in habited. He had found the opening of her body and his hand lay over it with the tip of one finger inside her. This, and the pressure of the way he was sitting, had brought him nearly to orgasm; and their two souls faced each other passionately as their bodies sat apart and while the fast-running current of her voice held them still.
    “I’ve picked up things in my arms and pressed them close to me and cradled them for hours, kissing them even, because I was so remote and lost, and this making-love-to things was a way of getting back to the world of matter; I’ve been blown about, open and empty, on cold plateaus, searching for him and his matter–dominating touch to bring me back; the touch of him that dominated matter and brought me back to what I craved was all I looked for and I never found it anywhere… In Tibet when they had magicians there, there was a rite they used to perform. The magician would go alone into a dark room with a corpse in it. Then he’d lie down on the body, mouth to mouth, and hold it tightly, and think of a magical spell and repeat it over and over again. After a while the body would begin to move; its eyes would open and get brighter, and it would look around, and move its limbs feebly, but he mustn’t let go or stop thinking of the spell. The corpse would get stronger and force itself up, and twist and turn trying to get away, but he must hold on or else it would kill him; it would leap up and down, dragging him with it with his lips fastened on its mouth, and then, slowly, its tongue would begin to stick out and touch his lips,