The Perseids and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

dying by inches, and what died of her on Earth came here.
    What died of her on Earth …
    So cold, her hand.
    He dropped it and backed away.
    “Don’t be frightened,” the Rachel-thing said. “I don’t blame you for what Taglieri did.”
    Then he saw the dark flowering of bruises on her flawless face, the bruises on her neck blue and finger-shaped.
    “Rachel!”
    “I’m sorry if this frightens you. It’s just the way things work. Go home now, Jacob. Try not to grieve.”
    He would have said more, but the gaily colored insects came diving out of the sky as if they had scented her, a shrieking torrent of them.
    They were immense, the size of dray horses. Their bodies were of faceted crystal and their eyes of polished bone. They grasped Rachel in their dangling black arms and carried her aloft as Jacob watched with a scream frozen in his throat.

    He ran, it seemed, forever, through an endless humming noon, until he found the hovering door into Ziegler’s arid bookshop.
    As soon as he stepped across the threshhold everything felt wrong—his body, the weight of himself, the pressure of his feet against the floor.
    He had, like Alice, grown precariously large and thick. The ceiling was too close, his arms were too heavy. His heart beat in his chest with a breathless, faltering rhythm.
    For a long moment he failed to recognize the boy who stood by the chessboard.
    It was the face he had seen in every mirror he had every confronted. It was himself. But the expression of gloating triumph was purely Oscar Ziegler’s.
    “Don’t look so dumbfounded,” the boy-man said. “The topology is simple enough. Like chess, Jacob! Remember? The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.”
    “My sister,” Jacob wheezed from clotted lungs.
    “To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.”
    “Taglieri murdered her.”
    The boy shrugged.
    “You’ve made me old.”
    “Why not? You would only have wasted your youth on her.”
    “Goddamn you,” Jacob said.
    “There’s no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.”
    The boy-thing opened the door and ran out into winter light.
    The sky was blue. The city smelled fetid and alive. Frigid air crackled in his nose, but sunlight warmed the skin of his face. He flexed his arms. Blood flowed in his veins as bracingly as cold creek water.
    It was the world of Steinitz and Anderssen, the world of Puccinni and Verdi and Nellie Melba. The world where night followed day. He had missed it. He ran into its embrace.
6.
    It maddened him at first, but in time Jacob grew accustomed to the bookstore.
    Its perimeters fit this aging body he had acquired. He explored the rooms upstairs, the cluttered basement, enummerating the contents of his cell, his new possessions. He took his time. He had time enough, he supposed.
    The woman who brought him groceries called him Mr. Ziegler. He grew used to that, too.
    He was polite to customers, both regulars and strangers, because they bore messages: stories, fashions, the smells of spring and summer, from a world he could only glimpse as they opened the door. He had tried to reenter that world, but there was only this single door and beyond it—for Jacob, at least—always the crystalline forest, the hovering swarms of insects.
    He locked Ziegler’s chessboard in a closet. He tried not to think about it. It was one of those things Jacob couldn’t allow himself to dwell on, like the loss of Rachel, or the fate of Taglieri or of the body Ziegler had stolen. Questions better left unanswered. He passed the empty time by reading books, of which there were many, and his only fear was that somewhere in this mass of literature he might discover the secret Oscar Ziegler had withheld from him—that he would see the disposition of all the chess pieces of the universe, and then the door to the world would open and some bright-faced young