The Stickmen Read Online Free PDF

patterns change,
almost as if the lights have somehow been able to sense Danny’s
approach.
    Once he’s made it to the top of the hill, he
just stands there, staring.
    Staring down at—
    Danny doesn’t know what it is.
    Trapezoid, he thinks. He knows the
word from math class, when the teacher was talking about geometry.
Basic shapes and angles. It’s stuff he’ll learn more about when
he’s older and gets into higher grades. Circles, squares,
triangles. Parallelograms.
    Trapezoids.
    The trapezoid is made of blinding white
light that seems to be sitting on top of the other red and yellow
lights. And now Danny can hear a sound: the sound of his own rapid,
terrified breathing.
    All the colors churn over his face. He can
feel each separate color—the white, the yellow, and the red—as
though each is a hand rubbing over him.
    Suddenly, then, something moves. It’s inside
the trapezoid.
    A shape, a thin figure.
    Looking back at him—
    —and—
    —everything turns black—
    —and—
    “No! No! No!”
    —and then Danny woke up.
    He jerked bolt upright in bed.
    “No,” he whispered to himself.
    His rapid breathing continued, the same
breathing he’d heard in the nightmare. His heart felt like a little
fist trying to beat its way out of his chest.
    The nightmare again, he realized. The nightmare…
    Only now did his heart pace down; he glanced
around and saw with relief that he was not on the weird hill at
all, and there were no funny lights and no trapezoid. Instead he
lay in the safety of his own bedroom.
    It took a few more moments for the shock to
run out of his eyes.
    “The trapezoid,” he whispered to
himself.
    He sat up in bed, catching his breath. His
pajamas were damp with sweat. He looked at the clock on his
nightstand, right beside his Hercules and Xena figures. The clock
read: 6:00 A.M.
    He remembered the funny smell from the
dream, the smell like burning metal, which somehow seemed to linger
even though the dream was over. But then the smell was replaced by
something much more familiar—the aroma of bacon frying.
    “Danny!” his mother called to him from
downstairs. “Time to get up! Breakfast is ready!”
     
    ««—»»
     
    Garrett frowned in the bookstore window, and
the sign that read: “Meet Best-selling Author Arron Matthews, and
Buy His New Autographed Book, THE ALIEN ANTENNA NETWORK OF THE
GREAT PYRAMIDS!”
    Blow me, Garrett thought. It
should be me on a damn book tour, not this idiot.
    What Garrett hated most were the
theory-predators: the phony “autopsies” sanctioned by prime-time
tv, the bullshit tabloid and even Penthouse magazine
“extraterrestrial” photos, the Joe Scully UFO book that was
underwritten by the Air Force as disinformation, etc., etc. More
than half of Garrett’s battle wasn’t with the government cells that
strove to rape his constitutional rights and discredit him to
preposterous degrees, it was the simple assemblage of cash-grubbers
out there—like this nimrod Matthews—who would go to the most
creative lengths to profit from the work of Garrett and his
vilified coterie with everything from snapshots of “faeries” to toy
submarines masquerading as the monster of Loch Ness to British
bumpkins with nothing better to with their time than elaborately
manufacture “crop circle” landing sites.
    And with just the right camera angle, an
altered gorilla suit made for a great Bigfoot.
    The field Garrett had given up so much
potential for to put all of his belief into was truly a three-ring
circus of fakes, schmucks, scumbags, and greed-laden boneheads. It
only made Garrett’s true calling that much more difficult, because
for every scintilla of truth he legitimately exposed, there was an
avalanche of fraud he had to sift through first like straining
lumps of feces from a box of cat litter with his bare hands.
    Even when he persevered to meet his most
honest objectives, he still wound up smelling like shit.
    The tentacles of sham stretched far, yet
those same