Read Online Clowns At Midnight by Terry Dowling - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Terry Dowling
Ads: Link
know?
I’d have to sample every image to find out.
An exquisite ambush. Force TT’s of all of them, with the added burden of something waiting amid the image arrays.
I couldn’t do it after all that had happened. It was too much. I just signed each disk and returned it, unnumbered, to its case. Tonight I could resist the compulsion. Tonight ignorance was bliss.
I grabbed the Renault novel and lay atop the covers, meaning to read for a while to calm my nerves, but that was how Day 7 found me with its impossible sunlight and blessed reprieve.
CHAPTER 4
It was even easier to resist the TT disks in bright daylight, and there were more compelling duties. After breakfast I drove down to the front gate and confirmed that my bottle-tree had been trashed.
It looked a deadly thing leaning there, all wicked blades and shards, like something made for fighting. Better yet, like something innocent and set-upon that had been forced to defend itself. There wasn’t a single bottle intact.
It also looked more like a signpost than ever in a yes-no, there-and-gone way, and began triggering my fear responses. I needed to act. Pulling on a pair of John Rankin’s work gloves, I used pliers to snip away the bottle ends still attached to the shaft, and dropped them into a cardboard box that went into a sturdy garbage bag. Then, after clearing up the glass on the ground as best I could, I worked the metal stake back and forth till it came loose, loaded it in the car with the bag, and started back to the house.
Halfway up the drive, I pulled over and switched off the engine. Over breakfast I had decided not to bother with the ruined bottle-trees on the Risi property. They weren’t my concern; they had their own caretakers. Now curiosity had the better of me.
I got out of the car, put on my gloves again, and hurried across to where the posts had been the night before.
They weren’t there.
Could I have miscalculated? I scanned the hillside, took my bearings from the line of the forest, even looked down the slope towards Edenville Road. This was the spot. But there was no sign of them; every trace of shattered glass was gone.
Almost. I went to where the grass looked freshly trampled and, sure enough, there were still fragments, all so tiny that no casual visitor would have noticed them. Whoever had cleared up had been unusually thorough, just as whoever had shattered every bottle had been excessive and methodical, not like your typical vandals at all. Vandals usually favoured smash and run; they certainly didn’t return to clean up afterwards.
What had happened here? It was as if every trace of the bottle-trees had been obliterated, their existence wiped from the record. And I had participated in the cover-up. In my determination to keep a tidy house for the Rankins, my own bottle fragments would go off to Lismore for recycling, the wire remnants with them; the stake would go back in the shed. All would be as before. A whole stratum of experience gone.
I lived in a world where the authenticity and nature of things always remained a crucial issue. I quickly took off one of my gloves and slipped some shards into it as proof. It was the sort of flight-deck systems check Jack would understand and applaud. It was keeping it real—the other meaning of holding patterns. Hold on to what is as best you can.
It was as much as I could do. Back at the house I found that I was still able to resist the TT disks, and instead did solid work on both the novel and the Mind Fields article, first at the kitchen table using my laptop, running the Rankins’ air-conditioner, then in John Rankin’s study, using his PC and the portable cooling unit.
But I also found myself at the kitchen windows looking up at the hill, or standing before the glass doors to the long veranda. The air beyond the windows was mercilessly hot. It was bushfire season. There were plumes of blue smoke all along the ranges, untidy smudges and spirals adding to the haze. In the
I’d have to sample every image to find out.
An exquisite ambush. Force TT’s of all of them, with the added burden of something waiting amid the image arrays.
I couldn’t do it after all that had happened. It was too much. I just signed each disk and returned it, unnumbered, to its case. Tonight I could resist the compulsion. Tonight ignorance was bliss.
I grabbed the Renault novel and lay atop the covers, meaning to read for a while to calm my nerves, but that was how Day 7 found me with its impossible sunlight and blessed reprieve.
CHAPTER 4
It was even easier to resist the TT disks in bright daylight, and there were more compelling duties. After breakfast I drove down to the front gate and confirmed that my bottle-tree had been trashed.
It looked a deadly thing leaning there, all wicked blades and shards, like something made for fighting. Better yet, like something innocent and set-upon that had been forced to defend itself. There wasn’t a single bottle intact.
It also looked more like a signpost than ever in a yes-no, there-and-gone way, and began triggering my fear responses. I needed to act. Pulling on a pair of John Rankin’s work gloves, I used pliers to snip away the bottle ends still attached to the shaft, and dropped them into a cardboard box that went into a sturdy garbage bag. Then, after clearing up the glass on the ground as best I could, I worked the metal stake back and forth till it came loose, loaded it in the car with the bag, and started back to the house.
Halfway up the drive, I pulled over and switched off the engine. Over breakfast I had decided not to bother with the ruined bottle-trees on the Risi property. They weren’t my concern; they had their own caretakers. Now curiosity had the better of me.
I got out of the car, put on my gloves again, and hurried across to where the posts had been the night before.
They weren’t there.
Could I have miscalculated? I scanned the hillside, took my bearings from the line of the forest, even looked down the slope towards Edenville Road. This was the spot. But there was no sign of them; every trace of shattered glass was gone.
Almost. I went to where the grass looked freshly trampled and, sure enough, there were still fragments, all so tiny that no casual visitor would have noticed them. Whoever had cleared up had been unusually thorough, just as whoever had shattered every bottle had been excessive and methodical, not like your typical vandals at all. Vandals usually favoured smash and run; they certainly didn’t return to clean up afterwards.
What had happened here? It was as if every trace of the bottle-trees had been obliterated, their existence wiped from the record. And I had participated in the cover-up. In my determination to keep a tidy house for the Rankins, my own bottle fragments would go off to Lismore for recycling, the wire remnants with them; the stake would go back in the shed. All would be as before. A whole stratum of experience gone.
I lived in a world where the authenticity and nature of things always remained a crucial issue. I quickly took off one of my gloves and slipped some shards into it as proof. It was the sort of flight-deck systems check Jack would understand and applaud. It was keeping it real—the other meaning of holding patterns. Hold on to what is as best you can.
It was as much as I could do. Back at the house I found that I was still able to resist the TT disks, and instead did solid work on both the novel and the Mind Fields article, first at the kitchen table using my laptop, running the Rankins’ air-conditioner, then in John Rankin’s study, using his PC and the portable cooling unit.
But I also found myself at the kitchen windows looking up at the hill, or standing before the glass doors to the long veranda. The air beyond the windows was mercilessly hot. It was bushfire season. There were plumes of blue smoke all along the ranges, untidy smudges and spirals adding to the haze. In the
Similar Books
