The Haunted Storm Read Online Free PDF Page B

and he had to open his mouth and let it enter – and then suddenly bite it off, and the corpse would collapse. And he’d keep the tongue and work magic with it. That’s what he was doing with me, but I had nothing like that tongue to give him. It’s as if he did it with the corpse of a dumb person and couldn’t find the tongue and went away, and the corpse wanders all over the world, with its borrowed life seeping away, looking for the touch that animated it.
    “And one way of looking is to open myself to the world and – sex, to search that way for the touch that brought me into matter. I know that he’s probably evil, because of the knowledge of morality in his eyes. Not just good and bad, but absolute good and evil! I know he saw them! But I couldn’t tell the difference between them, and I don’t care, because they’re not the poles I move between. Worlds… interpenetrate and the direction I move might seem arbitrary to you but I’m pulled by the north pole of my world! And the poles of my world are matter and spirit and I have to wander through many worlds searching for the touch that’ll bring me back to matter again, to make me feel at all…
    “Do you see?” She was crying now, her voice raised high over the wind. “That’s what I’m doing! I’m seeking his touch at the hands of strangers, yes, strangers! Letting them touch me – do you know how many men I’ve let do this? Eleven! And you’re the twelfth! “
    Suddenly she gasped, and sat upright, and stared straight into his eyes. If either of them moved, the world would collapse like a house of cards. The tension between them dimmed the sound of the wind and the waves; and with a rush like water Matthew felt, almost physically, their two souls flood together and meet and blend, embracing and penetrating each other completely in the psychic field that had formed around them. He felt tears filling his eyes and love choking him; he felt weak in all his limbs and broken by a great blow on his heart.
    But then – in an instant – she scrambled to her feet and dashed the rain from her eyes, and faced him like a tigress. He fell back.
    She shouted something; it was almost a scream. He could make out nothing coherent in it. Then she turned and ran off into the darkness.
    He put his hands to his head, trying to stay where he was and not run after her. The sailors on board the vessel had launched the dinghy and were struggling through the surf towards the shore, and, seeing this, the man with the rope had turned back along the Spur.
    The spray still crashed high into the air over the boat. The light was fading from the surface of things and darkness advanced over the sea. Matthew lay back on the shingle and shut his eyes, trembling. The rain fell evenly over all his body. He was uplifted and enslaved by the same force, and the world was wide again, and the universe in flood.

Chapter 2
    As she screamed she was conscious of a powerful impulse not to let him hear what it was that she was crying out; and the sound got lost in the air as a wordless shriek. How could she let him know? How dare she? As she stumbled away over the shingle she heard her breath rasping in her throat and before she could do anything about it she was torn by a burst of sobbing, and she flung herself to the ground and cried, with great gusts of tears shaking their way out of her into the flying darkness.
    She could not say “You are the one,” she could not tell him, because the whole balance of her life was tilted against finding him. To come upon him so suddenly put her in a dangerous position from which she could only escape by trying to deny that he existed. Oh! Everything she had told him was true! And now this casual stranger – was he casual? Perhaps not; he seemed as intent as she was, and his eyes went as far as she would go, and further, into the darkness – had plunged her again into the whirlpool which generated, it seemed to her, the seeds and forms of everything