The Nightmare Factory Read Online Free PDF

indifference, and then everything would be as it had been before; they could leave the prison town and move back home. In fact, they could move anywhere they liked, maybe take a long vacation first, treat Norleen to some sunny place. Leslie thought of all this as she made the drinks in the quiet of that beautiful room. This quiet was no longer an indication of soundless stagnancy but a delicious lulling prelude to the promising days to come. The indistinct happiness of the future glowed inside her along with the alcohol; she was gravid with pleasant prophecies. Perhaps the time was now right to have another child, a little brother for Norleen. But that could wait just a while longer…a lifetime of possibilities lay ahead, awaiting their wishes like a distinguished and fatherly genie.
    Before returning with the drinks, Leslie went into the kitchen. She had something she wanted to give her husband, and this was the perfect time to do it. A little token to show David that although his job had proved a sad waste of his worthy efforts, she had nevertheless supported his work in her own way. With a drink in each hand, she held under her left elbow the small box she had got from the kitchen.
    “What’s that?” asked David, taking his drink.
    “Something for you, art lover. I bought it at that little shop where they sell things the inmates at the penitentiary make—belts, jewelry, ashtrays, you know.”
    “I know,” David said with an unusual lack of enthusiasm. “I didn’t think anyone actually bought that stuff.”
    “I, for one, did. I thought it would help to support those prisoners who are doing something creative , instead of…well, instead of destructive things.”
    “Creativity isn’t always an index of niceness, Leslie,” David admonished.
    “Wait’ll you see it before passing judgment,” she said, opening the flap of the box. “There—isn’t that nice work?” She set the piece on the coffee table.
    Dr. Munck now plunged into that depth of sobriety which can only be reached by falling from a prior alcoholic height. He looked at the object. Of course he had seen it before, watched it being tenderly molded and caressed by creative hands, until he sickened and could watch no more. It was the head of a young boy, discovered in gray formless clay and glossily glazed in blue. The work radiated an extraordinary and intense beauty, the subject’s face expressing a kind of ecstatic serenity, the labyrinthine simplicity of a visionary’s gaze.
    “Well, what do you think of it?” asked Leslie.
    David looked at his wife and said solemnly: “Please put it back in the box. And then get rid of it.”
    “Get rid of it? Why?”
    “Why? Because I know which of the inmates did this work. He was very proud of it, and I even forced a grudging compliment for the craftsmanship of the thing. It’s obviously remarkable. But then he told me who the boy was. That expression of sky-blue peacefulness wasn’t on the boy’s face when they found him lying in a field about six months ago.”
    “No, David,” said Leslie as a premature denial of what she was expecting her husband to reveal.
    “This was his last—and according to him most memorable—‘frolic’.”
    “Oh my God,” Leslie murmured softly, placing her right hand to her cheek. Then with both hands she gently placed the boy of blue back in his box. “I’ll return it to the shop,” she said quietly.
    “Do it soon, Leslie. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be residing at this address.”
    In the moody silence that followed, Leslie briefly contemplated the now openly expressed, and definite reality of their departure from the town of Nolgate, their escape. Then she said: “David, did he actually talk about the things he did. I mean about—”
    “I know what you mean. Yes, he did,” answered Dr. Munck with a professional seriousness.
    “Poor David,” Leslie sympathized.
    “Actually it wasn’t that much of an ordeal. The conversation we had could