The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

circus to them. Fuckers. Fuckers! I owe them nothing. Nothing . Geez, I’ve only had one slug and I’m already getting maudlin and bitter … hardly a surprise though, eh? Ah, I can’t handle my booze anymore. Might as well leave the TV on anyway, whilst I’m here. It’ll provide a nice backdrop, a bit of context, as it were. I’ll just turn the sound down. Can’t stand this arsehole presenting it. I’d have done a much better job. They’d ask me to come on, too, if I hadn’t turned my phone off.
    That shot is so far back it’s almost pointless. Nowhere near as good as the one during the Second Arrival, the one from the roof of the Old Fire Station building. They showed that one over and over. Of course, after the Second Arrival, the Old Fire Station isn’t there anymore; ditto most of the surrounding city centre. No one was allowed to inhabit buildings around that space, no one ever rebuilt the ones that got demolished, and then they flattened them all anyway. Safer, they said. They paved it all over. There was a square mile in the centre of Coventry that no one was allowed to enter for a whole year, unless they had high-level military clearance. I was allowed in, of course. The ban was officially lifted once they figured out was going on, but the lake and the barrier around it were guarded more closely than the White House. And I mean that literally. I can still get inside that if I want to, as well. Heh. Still makes me feel smug, amazingly. Paul might have said I was a nice bloke, and I’m not sure that I agree (you hear that? Nice bloke, someone said) but it can’t be said that I don’t have an ego. Here’s to you, Pauly-boy.
    Right, anyway. Bloody Jim Beam … awful. So, Millennium Place, when it was still Millennium Place. The Stone Man, beginning to walk. Everybody excited, oohing and aahing … and for a moment, it was something great, like everyone knew that the world would be wanting to know about this, one of the most amazing street tricks ever, pure YouTube fodder, and in Coventry of all places! I felt the same, that I was lucky to be there; everyone was immediately caught up in it all. For a few moments, it was just a great thrill. Then the guy in the green vest got involved, and suddenly, we all knew different. It all went to shit from there.
     
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    Immediately, a cheer went up; I cheered too. It just looked so incredible, how the stone before us could move and bend without any visible joints or creasing. It seemed like it somehow compressed when it needed to, and then stretched out afterwards without any sign of how it could bend; you could almost guess that it was some kind of rubber, if not for the complete lack of rippling and the way it hadn’t had any give at all under the woman’s blows. It was stone, you could see it was actual stone … and yet there it was, ‘knees’ bending as the legs moved, the arms swaying slightly at its sides with no visible lines where they met the shoulders. It walked with its head up. Hell, you could feel the weight of it as each of the tree trunk sized legs came down. I remember that vividly. It may sound weird, but the Stone Man walking was one of the most incredible things I, and the people around me, had ever seen. Everyone was looking at each other, open-mouthed, laughing and gasping and shaking their heads, all thinking the same thing; how the hell do they make it do that?
    I remember seeing clips of a street performance in … I want to say Barcelona. I don’t know. A giant egg in the middle of a town, which later ‘hatched’ to give birth to … was it an elephant? I can’t remember, but I do remember the footage of some woman riding on it, and everyone there just being amazed. And it was amazing, no sign of puppeteers or wires. It even spewed water over the people, for God’s sake! I think it went on for a few days, meeting up with different aspects of the show that were planted across the city. It was wonderful. All I could think