The Matrix Read Online Free PDF Page B

my rooms in Canongate. The journey there, made on foot, was a constant terror. I half walked, half ran through the streets of the New Town, through Charlotte Square to the West End, then along the more dimly lit stretches of the Old Town, below the Castle, then up into Lawnmarket and so back at last to Canongate and Bakehouse Close. Each time I passed the unlit entrance to a close or court, I would hurry past, as though fearful that something lurked there unseen.
    By the time I reached my rooms I was exhausted. I turned on all the lights and sat for half an hour, shaking, slowly collecting myself. I put a record on my stereo and played it softly, Bach violin concertos, the most soothing music I could find. Gradually, the music and the familiar surroundings began to restore me to a sense of normality. Two cups of coffee revived my nerves and mind, and I was soon able to take stock of what had happened. It seemed obvious enough. I had overworked myself recently, buried myself in matters likely to lend themselves to morbid brooding, spent too little time in normal company, or going to concerts, or visiting the theatre. The lateness of the hour and the eeriness of my surroundings had combined to produce in my overwrought and exhausted brain an abnormal reaction to a perfectly ordinary sixteenth-century woodcut. That reaction had itself brought on an aural hallucination, and I had panicked and fled. Or so I reasoned at the time.
    It was about three in the morning when I finally went to bed, tired out both physically and mentally. I fell asleep at once. I remember nothing of my dreams, nor do I know precisely what it was that woke me. All I recall is that I started out of sleep with an indefinable yet powerful sense of dread, a feeling that the darkened room around me was alive with something even darker. It must have been about four-thirty, with dawn still some time away. Gradually, the first feelings of panic started to subside, but, even as they did so, I became conscious of sounds above the ceiling of my room.
    These were not the flapping and scraping noises I had heard in the rooms above the library, but seemed more like footsteps. At first I thought it must be someone in the room above me pacing his floor, unable to sleep. Then I remembered that there was no room above mine.
    When the building had been reconstructed in the early eighties, on account of the curious shape of the roof, the sixth floor – the one just above mine – was too small to allow for a full-size apartment. Instead, there were a couple of single rooms let out to students and a long section where the roof came to within three feet or less of the floor. I knew that this section stretched across my apartment. I also knew that it had been bricked up and closed for good. There was no way in or out.
    I lay in bed in the dark, sweating as I listened to the forwards and backwards movement of the sounds above me. I could make them out more clearly now and, with a feeling of the most intense horror, I realized that they could not have been made by human feet. They possessed a quality that reminded me somehow of the creatures I had seen in the woodcut, sucking the corpses on the church floor. The image of that scene came back to me then with renewed vividness, and nothing I could do would expunge from my mind the sight of that eyeless thing, half turned, with its mouth set at an abnormal angle.
    I do not know how long I lay there listening, paralysed, unable to reach out for the light or otherwise break the horrified trance into which I had fallen. Dawn came at last, pale and weak at first, the light gradually strengthening as it filtered through my curtains. As the darkness was gradually dispelled, the sounds seemed to grow weaker until they finally faded completely. I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
    I slept through all of the next day, a Saturday, and neither dreams nor sounds disturbed me. My appointment with Professor Craigie was forgotten. I did not