Walkers Read Online Free PDF

eyes and forced
herself to cry, her chest heaving, her throat clenched tight, trying to wrench
out of herself all of the fright and all of the horror, trying to exorcise all
of the nightmares that she knew would come crowding in on her, come nightfall.
    She had dreamed for months of her
mother’s distorted face. She knew that she would dream about the dead girl on
the beach for ever and ever.
    Daffy put her arms around her and
held her close, shushing her, rocking her gently backwards and forwards as if
she were a small child. In the hallway, the vacuum-cleaner started up again,
and began to harvest the dust next to the living-room door.
    Daffy was younger than Susan by four
months and two days exactly, but she was much more mature. She was a tall,
skinny, brown-skinned girl, with masses and masses of curly brunette hair, and
one of those pouting provocative mouths that every senior in high school had
wanted to kiss. She had wanted to write to Hugh Hefner and offer herself as
Playmate of the month, but her mother, although she was broad minded, had said
no. Her mother had brought up Daffy on her own. Her father had gone to work on
the oil pipeline in Alaska and never quite managed to come back, and so Daffy’s
mother was generally not in favour of male exploitation of women. She had
brought up Daffy to be pretty and suspicious and worldly wise, not to take
rides from strangers, and to take the pill.
    Susan stopped crying as suddenly as
she had begun, and sat in Daffy’s arms looking around the room.
    ‘Are you okay now?’ Daffy asked her.
    ‘I guess. I wasn’t really crying. It
was just thinking about it. That poor girl, you know, all gnawed away by eels.
And one of the eels bit a cop, too, right in the face.’
    ‘What were they, some kind of
man-eating eel? What do they call them, moray eels?
    There was one in that movie. You
know that movie with Nick Nolte? Anyway it bit some guy’s head off. Don’t you
think that Jerry looks like Nick Nolte, if he had a moustache, I mean?’
    Susan stood up, and mechanically
took off her tee-shirt and her running-shorts, so that she was naked except for
her socks. She dropped her shirt and shorts on to the floor, next to
yesterday’s skirt, a copy of Rolling
Stone which she had been cutting up for pictures of Bruce Springsteen, her
badminton racquet, her hairdryer and the sleeve of her new Eurythmics album.
    ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Daffy
asked her, worried.
    Susan nodded. Her eyes were still
reddened and watery. ‘I just want to go take a shower; then we’ll go over to
your place.’
    Daffy waited while Susan went to the
bathroom. She paced up and down the bedroom for a while, nudging with her
sneakers at discarded clothes and dismembered magazines. Then she went to the
window and looked out into the yard, a small paved area with sunbeds and a
stone fountain that didn’t work, or only rarely.
    It was a hot clear day, and lizards
were poised in the shadows of the undergrowth.
    From here, it was possible to see a
small part of the street outside, and Daffy’s attention was caught by a young
man in a black sports jacket and white tennis slacks sitting on the wall
outside Susan’s grandparents’ house, smoking a cigarette. He looked as if he
were waiting for somebody, because every now and then he lifted his wrist and
Daffy could see a spark of reflected light from the face of his watch. His eyes
were masked with impenetrably dark sunglasses.
    She watched him for almost five
minutes. Cars passed him by on both sides of the street, but nobody stopped for
him, and it occurred to Daffy that he wasn’t watching out for any particular
car, either. He remained where he was, never turning his head, smoking and
occasionally checking the time.
    She turned away from the window and
suddenly realised that Susan had stayed in the shower for an awfully long time.
She walked through to the hallway, where Susan’s grandmother was now burnishing
her collection of brass figurines of