We Will All Go Down Together Read Online Free PDF Page A

palm-down, not even stroking, not even anything. Just
    And he had this look, like he was going to fall asleep. Like he was going to puke. Like he was asleep already. Like he was drowning. And the hand
    I can see it right now: long white fingers, no rings, no distinguishing marks, not even fingernails, like the top and bottom of each finger looked exactly the same, like neither of them even had any fingerprints. And it was glowing just a bit, ever so slightly, so slim I could see the veins under the skin, the bones just under the surface, all lit up: a sick light, a phosphorescence, unnatural/impossible, like something from deep under the sea, utterly out of its element. But worse—like those veins, those bones, themselves, were the things that glowed.
    It was sticking out of the wall, plaster lapped to its wrist, a sleeve. And behind it, I saw this impression of something further underneath: an arm, a shoulder, faint red smudge of hair hanging down. Faint gleam of teeth, the wall like a gauze curtain, everything reduced to scribble or implication, or
    I don’t
    It looked up, and it saw me, and it smiled. Like it
knew
me. Like it knew me by sight.
    And because it saw me, it pulled its hand back in. Because it saw me, it let him go.
    And because he was standing at the top of the stairs when it did that, he fell.
    And I think it’s all my fault. Somehow. I don’t really know why, but I
    No, that’s bullshit. It is. I
know
it is.
    And I know
exactly
why.
    September 7, 2004
    You’ll notice I’m not really specifying music anymore, which isn’t like me, and sort of depressing, too. But perhaps it’s all for the best.
    So I called Josh, which was fun. Asked him if I could borrow his car for a bit, considering it’s in storage, and he never renewed his driver’s licence anyway. Turns out, he was also at Joe’s on the 2 nd ; wanted to know why I needed it, what was going on with me, who was that guy. I just asked him if he’d actually meant it when he said “anything you want, I’ll do it for you, Galit,” or whether that (too) had been total bullshit.
    Surprisingly enough, he didn’t hang up on me, and I now have a ride for the weekend.
    Spent far more time than I should have online again today, meanwhile—pretty much all of it, actually. Hung around in Internet cafés all up and down Yonge Street, maybe two hours tops in each of them, playing a little
Myst
here and there in between surfing for lore . . . reading haiku-like snatches of story about people like Elidurus the monk, who mourned all his life over how his own ignorant treachery (he stole a golden ball, to prove where he’d been) left him forever locked out of the fairy hill he spent half his childhood inside, a “country full of delights and sports.” Or John Roy, the Highlands farmer who swapped his hat for a stolen British lady by throwing it into a passing swarm of fairies, crying: “Yours be mine and mine be yours!” Or how the best time to enter a
brugh
, a fairy hill, is apparently either at twilight, midnight, the hour just before dawn or high noon . . . pretty much anytime, in other words. Whenever you—or they, the “people” inside said hill—happen to feel like it.
    More things I’ve since learned, in no particular order:
    Torrance Sidderstane did die in a hospital, just like Ganconer said. It was a mental hospital. People said he’d killed his first wife, who came from Scotland; she stayed at their place in Overdeere. Nobody’s still alive who remembers ever seeing her. They used to go walking together a lot, up near the Lake of the North. In 1907, he bought some property “on the other side of the Lake”—nothing more exact—which nobody ever seems to have mapped, submitting papers to have it renamed “Dourvale.” Dourvale was the name the Druir family gave their ancestral seat on the Scots/British border, a valley people said you’d never be able to find if they didn’t want you to.
    The last leader of the Druir