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

the opposite end of the promenade from the church. As he drove past the Ridem rides Fairman saw how the haze that fringed the sea was helping the woods to enclose the town. At the ballroom he turned uphill past a number of large houses with their backs to the trees. The doctor's house displayed a nameplate on a gatepost, where the name was followed by so many unpronounceable clumps of letters that Fairman was reminded of the graffiti in the shelter. He parked on the street and let himself in through the grey stone porch.
    In the wide hall beyond the massive door that gleamed white as marble, a receptionist sat behind a desk outside a closed room opposite an open one. She wore a voluminous flowered dress that covered nearly all of her without disguising how disproportionately small her head and hands were. Cropped spiky silver hair framed her face, which might have been more delicate until it had grown padded. "Mr Fairman," she said in a familiar voice rather younger than she looked—of course, he'd heard it on the answering machine. "You're here already, then."
    He was bemused by being recognised, and spoke more sharply than he meant to. "The doctor said I should come as soon as I liked."
    "He'd have meant before surgery. He's got his patients now."
    Fairman felt as if he had to struggle past the professionally bland expression that hadn't changed since he'd come in. "What am I supposed to do? I haven't much time left."
    "I'm sure you have more than some of us, Mr Fairman." Before he could clear up her mistake, if indeed she had made one, the receptionist said "You can wait with the others by all means."
    "Couldn't you ask the doctor if that's what he wants?"
    She was giving this her fixed expression when a man lurched out of the doctor's office behind her. His patchily empurpled face and the disconcerting flexibility of his gait suggested that his trouble might have to do with drink. As the man fumbled to open the front door Fairman said to the receptionist "Can't you ask him now?"
    While her expression didn't waver, she pressed the key on a vintage intercom, an action that pulled back her cuff and sent a quiver up her pale inflated arm. Fairman heard a rasping buzz, and then a muffled voice said on both sides of the door "I'm afraid Mr Fairman will have to follow my patients, Doris."
    "Doctor says—"
    "I understood what he said," Fairman informed her, the nearest he could come to expressing his dissatisfaction, and tramped across the hall into the waiting-room.
    All the people seated on straight chairs against the walls stared at him as a harsh metallic rattle appeared to announce him. The buzzer above the lintel was summoning the next patient, a young woman whose baby squirmed so vigorously in her arms that its one-piece suit had almost abandoned its shape. The infant favoured Fairman with a sleepy blink that he would have been foolish to mistake for recognition, and he was working on a responsive smile when the mother carried her exuberant burden out of the room.
    A solitary table strewn with copies of the Gulshaw Gannet squatted in the middle of the dun carpet. Fairman took one to a chair, but the content was so trivial—graffiti on the seafront shelters made the front page under the headline RESIDENTS CONDEMN VANDALISM—that the paper might have been designed to reassure visitors that nothing very untoward ever happened in Gulshaw. He'd read all sixteen pages and forgotten virtually every one by the time the buzzer called the next invalid, a pasty-faced man who flattened his hand against the wall at each step he took. That left nine patients, and Fairman found some of them difficult to ignore—a woman with grey swellings reminiscent of fungi on her legs, a man whose chin seemed to merge with his spongy throat whenever he was overcome by an apparently uncontrollable nod, a woman whose every protracted breath sounded like a renewed task. If everyone was seated in order she would be the last to see the doctor, and