Read Online Apocalypse by Nancy Springer - Free Book Online

face to the world if it had been Barry Beal.
    Oona Litwack was a plump, gray-haired woman with polyester slacks and poodle curls that reminded Cally of shredded coconut. “Look what I got me,” she chirped to Sojourner and Cally, displaying the object dangling from her hand. An obvious garage-sale find, it was macrame-and-ceramic wind chimes in the shape of owls.
    â€œYou listen to them things all the time,” said Sojourner darkly, “you’ll go deaf.”
    â€œThen I won’t be able to hear Gus call me,” Oona retorted, and with more eagerness than prudence she clambered onto her porch swing to hang her find amid an already-impressive display of pendant macrame planters, other wind chimes, and nameless whirling objets d’art made out of two-liter Orange Crush bottles. She swayed with the swing, grabbed at a porch post, then paused, staring down the street.
    â€œIs that somebody riding a horse?”
    Cally smiled. “Haven’t you seen Elspeth going to check her post office box? She loops the reins over a parking meter—”
    Cally’s smile faded as she looked, then peered. It wasn’t Elspeth.
    â€œDon’t know what anybody would want to ride horses for,” said Sojourner severely, knowing quite well that Cally rode several times a week. “You don’t never know what a horse is going to do. And it puts you up too high. The birds fly too close to your head, they get tangled in your hair and peck out your eyes.”
    For no reason Cally got up and went down the porch steps to stand with her children on the sidewalk, a hand on each of them to protect them against she didn’t know what danger, as the rider went past like a dreamwisp plucked out of deep time.
    A woman, a young woman, so beautiful Cally knew without asking that she had never been seen in Hoadley before: Cally would have heard talk of the stranger if she had been anybody anyone in this town knew or had ever known: the fine-molded beauty of her face was that unforgettable, that symmetrical, that eerie. Her long hair, moon blond, rippled down her shoulders to the back of the white horse so that for a moment Cally thought hazily of Lady Godiva, though this young beauty rode fully clothed, in a simple dress like a flame that flowed down over her feet. Her eyes, amid a haze of blue shadow, seemed enormous. She, the stranger, whoever she was, did not turn her head or glance at the people standing on the sidewalk gawking at her—for Cally and her children were not the only ones—but gazed straight ahead. She did not speak. Down Main Street she rode, holding her bit-champing horse to a spirited walk. After she rounded the curve under the railroad bridge, Cally could see her no longer.
    And though her children were tugging at her and exclaiming, Cally turned first to Sojourner Hieronymus and demanded, “You saw her, right? You saw her too?”
    â€œI saw some sort of hussy on a white horse,” Sojourner snapped.
    â€œThe horse,” Cally muttered. The strange, far-too-beautiful woman had not just happened into Hoadley, Cally felt sure of it. Her ride had been staged. It took hours of work to get a horse looking that white. The animal had been prepared as if for a parade. Had the hussy in question truly been riding it sidesaddle? Or had that been an illusion of the shimmering flame-red draperies, the elaborate trappings? Cally remembered a jeweled bridle with a bright circle of bronze at the cheek. With that bridle, the matching breastplate, tossing mane, polished hooves, the horse had looked like—like—like no living sort of horse Cally had ever seen. Its conformation did not match that of any breed she knew. Straight of profile, high-headed, short-coupled and slender and so white—
    â€œIt looked like a carousel horse,” Cally said aloud.
    Of course. The bronze circle had been the number plate. The horse had even rolled its eyes and gaped its mouth like a