The Last Revelation Of Gla'aki Read Online Free PDF Page A

with keeping himself in better shape; perhaps he ought to use a gym, as Sandra did.
    Outside the window the streetlamps blanched the promenade and blackened the graffiti in the shelter. The pale glare illuminated just a narrow strip of the beach, so that he couldn't be sure whether there were jellyfish in the receding sea. He unlatched the sash and pushed it up, which didn't help him to distinguish the indistinct restless shapes from the movements of the waves. As he leaned over the sill a wind brought him the smell of the sea—at least, the smell of Gulshaw beach. It hadn't previously occurred to him that the place didn't smell as the seaside should; he was reminded of the stagnant smell he'd noticed in the bathroom. Although he believed it was healthier to sleep with the bedroom window open, he dragged the sash all the way down.
    The stagnant odour seemed to linger in the dark. It held him back from sleep, and so did thoughts of the book. The reference to a stone cocoon kept catching at his mind, and he found himself visualising an enormous stone oval suspended in outer space, an object that resembled a monstrous egg or an island torn loose from its world to wander among the stars. As it plummeted towards a familiar planet he had a sense that it was being held together from within and reinforced against the friction that would have consumed a lesser meteor. What kind of entity could exert so much control over matter? The vision troubled him like the one he'd experienced after visiting Deepfall Water, and made him feel as he had while reading the book—that he was reaching for memories he hadn't known were his. He was glad the image of the cocoon went no further, and eventually it let him sleep.
    Daylight wakened him, and so did an idea. While it might be too much to hope that each volume was indexed, he ought to check. He opened the safe and the carton, and leafed to the end of the book. "Good God," he said with very little sense of what he was expressing.
    There was no index. The text was followed by the flyleaves, which were covered with handwriting. However nearly illiterate the sprawling script looked, it might be senile or written under some influence. Fairman didn't think it could be Lunt's, though it must be relatively recent, having been written with a ballpoint. Do not trust all which is herein, it said. Some visions were imperfectly set down, and some came damaged at the source. Some were spoiled by the minds employed to convey them, while others were misinterpreted by the editor. Not the bible nor the Quran is so worthy of restoration.
    By the time Fairman had read this he no longer thought the book had been defaced. If anything the comments seemed to make the copy rarer still, but how could anyone establish what the original text had been? The set would be available for experts to decipher if they could, and Fairman was content to be its guardian. He closed the book more carefully than ever and returned it to its nest in the safe before he emerged from the room.
    A smell of breakfast greeted him in the corridor, and he heard voices murmuring downstairs. He flushed the toilet and then used it while the fattened lid nestled against his lower back. The stagnant smell had departed from the bathroom, and the shower he took didn't revive it, though condensation turned the mirror into a block of fog. Once he was dressed he reassured himself that the safe was locked and went down to the breakfast room.
    Two teenage girls in grey track suits were on their way out while their parents told another family "See you next year." The seated party were the only breakfasters just now. They were a stocky lot, consisting of a dumpy son and daughter who resembled their parents so much that Fairman was reminded of those wooden dolls that unscrewed to produce miniatures of themselves. As he sat by the window, beyond which a whitish haze was curtaining the sea off from the beach, the mother twisted her top half around on the chair to