Voodoo Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

muscles of his legs burned.
    “I’m here!” he screamed as the stairway panel clicked shut above him. “Claire!” He pounded on the hatch with the butt of the gun, smashing dents in the wood planking. He rushed over to a curtained window and raised the gun again, but the hot blast from the blimp’s engines knocked him backward, whipping and cutting at his arms and neck. He tried to shield his eyes from the storm whirling around him. Then came the horrible tearing noise as the mooring rings ripped loose from the ground, each one dangling a crumbling heap of earth. Pres glanced above the crook of his elbow at the blimp. His hands shook with panic as he saw the cabin rise away from him. He grabbed at a nearby mooring rope and clutched it as tightly as he could. The blimp’s nose tilted down slightly, and then it began to glide forward. Pres ran behind it, clinging to the rope, but it soon picked up speed and before he knew it he was being dragged on his belly through the dirt. Pebbles flayed the bottoms of his arms. The friction stung so badly that he thought he wouldn’t be able to hold on. Then he was being peeled up, lifted into the air as the blimp ascended.
    Pres crossed his ankles around the rope, tightening his grip. He looked down at the landscape falling away beneath him, at the wrinkles in the red earth, the torched heaps of rock. He glanced over his shoulder and saw his car, his battered Model T, growing smaller and smaller until it vanished in a whirl of sand.
    Pres turned back to the blimp. He knew that all that stood between him and death was his grip on the cable, and yet even as he clung to its steel braiding a strange calm came over him, an almost restful feeling. Things were out of his hands now; he was being carried toward the end of his journey by the blimp, which he now saw was called
The August.
The name was printed in fine gold lettering over the cabin’s rear window.
    The air thinned and grew cold and Pres began to feel light-headed. His shoe fell off and tumbled through the sky. Breathing became an effort. Soon he could feel the blood coursing up his arms. But he would not let go. The rope felt a part of him, the blimp too, and for a moment when he gazed up at its body, sunlight gleaming off its silver skin, what he saw floating up there was not a blimp at all but an extension of himself, his own heart, swelled to bursting and released from his chest. His heart, swinging him through the sky. He thought about all the places and wonders he’d seen these past months, and felt a strange gratitude toward Claire for taking him all this way.
    He turned back to the cabin and tried to focus on the word
August.
It was just the right name, Pres thought as a falcon whirled past him. As a child, he’d always thought of August as a time of rousing, the month when everything was rustled awake from the bright dream of summer. And that was just what he was going to do for Claire. He looked at the curtains blocking his view inside the cabin. They were purple and velvety, but they did not look so heavy to Pres. He could push them aside with one hand.

I ONCE LIVED NEXT TO A MAN WHO WAS INDESTRUCTIBLE. HIS name was Gay Isbelle and he cheated death three times—twice before I’d met him, and then once in my company.
    It was important for me to be around someone like Gay at that point in my life, someone invulnerable, as I was scared and lonely and hiding from my family, which was, and still is, one of the wealthiest in the country. Their money goes back to the days of gas and steam, and the root of the family name means both “vision” and “light” in a language that will not be revealed here. They had detectives out looking for me, detectives with real means, but in Florida at that time, for a short, wonderful period not too long ago, it was easy to find employment without identification of any shape or sort. It seemed you could open a police station with just a few phony papers to tack on the wall. You