The Mask of Atreus Read Online Free PDF Page B

slowly to her knees as the dread she had worn like a heavy cloak turned into something else, something which emptied her heart and mind in a crushing wash of despair. Richard was lying on his back, arms spread wide, a loose 28
    A. J. Hartley
    cruciform attitude, one hand open, the other closed. He was bare-chested, his body thin, his limbs spindly, frail. He looked impossibly old, and his pale skin had a bluish translucence that made the thick, clotting wounds in his chest and abdomen all the more dreadful. His eyes, mercifully, were closed.
    Deborah took his cold, outstretched hand and raised it to her lips. Eyes shut tight, all breath squeezed out of her chest, she began to sob.
    CHAPTER 6
    Deborah had no idea how long she had been sitting there: squatting, in fact, half kneeling, like a supplicant at an altar. She had knelt by her bedside like that for seven nights after the services of her father's shiva, replaying the words of the Kaddish that promised life and continuity and a just, loving God she could no longer see, had not seen since. The two deaths were utterly different, but it felt as if the twenty years that separated them had collapsed into nothing, and she was again thirteen, staring from the doctors to her relatives, to the rabbi who had orchestrated the funeral ceremonies and to whom she had never spoken again. She didn't remember the Aramaic of the Kaddish, but the English translation of one of the graveside prayers had stayed with her like a wound that wouldn't fully heal. A piece of it came back to her now.
    O, God, full of compassion, Thou who dwellest on high, grant perfect rest beneath the shelter of Thy divine presence among the holy and pure who shine as the brightness of the firma- ment to the soul of my beloved who has gone to his eternal home.
    Mayest Thou, O God of Mercy, shelter him forever under the wings of Thy presence, may his soul be bound up in the bond of life eternal, and grant that the memories of my life inspire me always to noble and consecrated living. Amen. It rankled as it always had, bitter not like the Campari of which Richard had been so fond, but bitter as she imagined poison would be, acrid like overbrewed tea.
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    A. J. Hartley
    Full of compassion? Try callous, fickle, or perhaps simply apathetic.
    Had the God of her fathers even noticed what had happened tonight? Did He ever?
    God, Richard, she thought. I'm so sorry. I should have been here.
    She had hardly moved at all since finding him, her breath coming in slow, even draughts that barely expanded her chest, as if she was trying to share his stillness, his silence. Her eyes swam, the tears welling up silently and finally breaking free and falling so that they pattered like heavy drops of summer rain onto the carpet.
    Yet through her silent anguish came a shrill, insistent voice, an official voice, like a policeman pushing through the crowd that gathered at a road accident, a voice of authority and order, a voice that stifled emotion in favor of reason. It said that Richard had been murdered, that this was not just a place of grief, it was a place of horror, even danger, and she needed to act accordingly.
    But she couldn't leave, could barely take her streaming eyes off him, off his wounds.
    They had bled heavily, but they weren't cuts so much as flat incisions little more than an inch wide, now edged rusty and crimson but a deep and threatening black in the center. The chest was streaked by trickles of dark blood, but the deep pool in which he lay had come from beneath him. Could he have been stabbed so deeply ( six or seven times, said that insistent, detail-oriented voice which usually commented on potsherds and burial mounds) that the blade had emerged from his back? What kind of weapon would do that? It had to be as close to a sword as a knife.
    And then there were the pair of indentations in the skin on either side of each wound: two small bruises an inch or so to the sides of each flat puncture . . .
    She turned