The Peacock Cloak Read Online Free PDF

cool.”
    Pennyworth turned to the side and spat.
    “So are there any questions, lads?” asked Graves, making one last effort to force cheerfulness into his voice.
    A seagull screeched. The ocean sighed.
    “I’ll leave you to it then,” Graves concluded. “Have fun. Lunch will arrive back at the sorting area at twelve. Just come over and find us when you’re ready.”
    Shoe and Pennyworth grunted, watched him go, and then slumped on a slab of rock and lit up cigarettes.
    “A fascinating place,” Pennyworth mimicked. “A wonderful book waiting to be read.”
    He put two fingers into the back of his mouth as if to make himself gag.
    “What a dump ,” he concluded.
    “Yeah,” agreed Shoe, “what in God’s name made us pick this job?”
    After half an hour of this sort of talk, boredom finally drove them to interact at least a little with their surroundings, and they chucked a few stones at each other. Then they set up a bit of ancient marble paving slab and lobbed more stones at it until it split in two. Finally, when they couldn’t think of any other games, they began picking up rubble and dumping it into Graves’ bin, settling in spite of themselves into a slow rhythm that was certainly more pleasant than doing nothing at all, though both of them would have strenuously denied it.

    Then Pennyworth’s counter began to bleep.
    “What the…?”
    Before Pennyworth could finish the sentence, Shoe’s counter went off as well. Both men laughed raucously.
    “So are we going to go and tell that Graves guy?” asked Pennyworth at length.
    “Are we shit!” said Shoe. “This might be something interesting.”
    Pennyworth nodded and tried to turn off his counter. Unable to find the switch immediately, he lost patience with the thing and silenced it by banging it repeatedly on a rock.
    “Piece of shit,” he growled.
    “You dick, Pennyworth,” said Shoe, turning off his own device. “The switch is right here on top. Where it says ON/OFF.”
    “Yeah, well,” grumbled Pennyworth.
    He poked the switch, found it no longer worked, and tossed the counter aside.
    “Come on then,” said Shoe. “Let’s find out what this is.”
    Working at a speed that would have delighted Graves’ heart, they shifted more stones and finally reached something that looked like a circular lid, about a metre across, made of shining and untarnished metal.
    “It’ll be locked, or rusted up underneath,” Pennyworth said glumly. “Then we’ll bloody well have to go and get help.”
    “You never know,” said Shoe, tossing aside a cigarette and kneeling in front of the lid with his fingers under the edge.
    Pennyworth joined him with a sigh.
    “One – two – three,” Shoe called out, and they both lifted.
    The lid came away quite easily, and they found underneath it a well. This explained the name of the place, of course, but that was not what was on their minds just then. The thing that struck them was what they saw inside it. There was no water in that well, nor was there the dark echoing space you expect in a well that has dried up. There was – nothingness.
    Of course the human eye doesn’t see the essence of things, but can only detect light or its absence, and you might argue that what was visible there must therefore have been amenable to description in such terms. But it didn’t seem like that to them. There was neither light nor darkness down there. There was no surface, solid or liquid, rough or smooth. There was just nothing.
    “Holy crap!” intoned Pennyworth.
    Shoe turned his radiation counter back on. It was bleeping away so fast that it was pretty much giving out a continuous screech. He listened to it for a moment, then laughed.
    “Sweet!” he exclaimed.
    Others might have worried that the radiation would do them harm, but to these men danger and uncertainty felt like home.

    Shoe and Pennyworth hadn’t known it, but their counters were connected to a monitor back at the sorting area which Graves checked