The Matrix Read Online Free PDF

demons’.
    Tired from my hours of note-taking, my mind turned readily enough to the relatively undemanding task of poring over a book not directly connected with my paper. I read on, lulled by the lateness of the hour, the silence, the dim lighting, and my own fatigue, entranced by the weird lilting verses and their haunting tone. I understood very little.
    As I turned a page towards the end, I saw, not a pentagram or a talisman as I had expected, but a wood-cut illustration. It took me about half a minute to disentangle the subject and composition of the drawing, but to this day I wish I had never done so. Printed on my mind’s eye were shapes and figures of unspeakable horror. It had been no more than a glimpse, but in that moment of recognition I had seen forms that I will never forget as long as I live.
    The woodcut depicted not an Eastern scene as might have been expected, but one set in Europe, the interior of a large church, huge and vaulted, with shadows on both sides of a wide nave. Thick carved pillars divided the nave from the side aisles, and a heavy curtain hung in front of the chancel, blocking all the eastern end of the church from view.
    Along one side were ranged several stone tombs, topped with monuments. One near the chancel end had been opened, a great iron door swung back. On the ground lay what I took to be corpses, as though they had been dragged from their resting-places and scattered in the aisle. That was sufficiently revolting in itself to make me shudder, but it was not the real horror of the drawing.
    Just visible in the opening of the tomb were several indistinct figures, stooped over the remains of the dead. They had short, stumpy bodies, naked bodies the colour of parchment, white meat, bloodless, eternally pale. They were bent over the corpses, sucking and nibbling. And one . . . Dear God, I cannot forget this – one was turning its head to look directly at the viewer. It did not have a face exactly, and it was shrouded in a piece of rotting cloth, but I could tell that it had no eyes. It had no eyes, but I knew that it could see.
    I slammed the book shut and sat back, stupefied by the obscenity of the woodcut I had happened on. One thing I knew with absolute certainty, and I know it now without any hint of doubt – whoever the artist was who had penned that loathsome scene had not imagined it, but drawn it from life.
    As I sat there, glancing nervously about me, I became aware for the first time that there were noises in the room above me. Something told me that they had been there for some time, but, engrossed as I had been in my reading, I had failed to notice them. I strove to make out what they could be. A sort of flapping and scraping that moved slowly across the floor above my head. At first I thought it must be a member of the Fraternity come to investigate the lights, or that, perhaps, the apartment upstairs had been rented without my knowledge.
    But even as I listened, something in the quality of the sounds told me that, whatever was making them, it was not human. My heart seemed to freeze as the noises moved across the room in the direction of the door that led to the second-floor landing. I heard the door opening, and the sound moving across a wooden floor. Terrified, I went to the door of the library. Somewhere above me, I could hear it, very soft, like seaweed on damp rocks, flapping and wriggling across the landing.
    As I stood listening, it reached the first step and started down the stairs.

FOUR
    I can scarcely remember how I got out of the building. I gathered my books and papers together in any order, rammed them into my briefcase, and made for the door, leaving library books scattered across my desk and lights burning. I did not pause to listen to the sounds that were audible from the staircase now, but dashed down to the ground floor and through the front door, all but falling down the steps onto the pavement.
    I did not halt for breath or thought until I was back in