Read Online Forever Shores by Peter McNamara - Free Book Online

get in? Who’s this?’ I nudged the dead guy who lay with one leg stuck out.
    â€˜The world is not as it seems,’ she told me. She had wrapped herself in the towel, dropped toilet seat and cover and sat poised on it. I had never seen anyone so gloriously lovely, not at the movies, not on television, certainly not in this slightly down at heel suburb.
    â€˜No shit,’ I said.
    â€˜What do they call you?’
    â€˜They call me August, Lyoon. They call me that because it’s my name.’
    â€˜You’ve read Charles Fort, August?’
    â€˜No.’ What, now we’ll have a Reading Group? I glanced at the locked windows, waiting nervously for the backup troops to come barging in, maybe waving copies of the collected works of Charles Fort, whoever he was.
    â€˜He said, “I think we’re property.” And you are , you poor goose, you and all your fellow humans. Property is what you are, all six billion of you.’
    I didn’t laugh, it was too depressing for laughter. Aunt Tansy downstairs drifting in senile delusions, this gorgeous person upstairs heading for the same funny farm. No, wait. Tansy wasn’t delusional. There was a corpse, and so presumably one had been delivered on each of the previous six Saturdays. Delivered by naked women, for all I knew, then disappeared in the early hours of Sunday morning. It didn’t bear thinking about.
    â€˜So now that you’ve told me,’ I said, ‘I suppose you’re going to have to kill me.’
    Lune was horrified. ‘Certainly not, what sort of immoral—You get your memory deleted.’
    Someone had been priming Hollywood. Memory wipe—what was that, Men in Black , right? And people appearing out of thin air, or in this case through an impossibly high bathroom window, that went all the way back to The Twilight Zone . How come the scriptwriters and directors and actors didn’t get their memories obliterated? There’s always an escape clause in these mad conspiracy theories, and always a logical hole large enough to drive a tank through. Still—
    â€˜I know it’s hard for you to listen to this,’ Lune said. I thought I saw tears welling in her eyes. ‘You’re so brave and foolish, you humans. You invent one absurd creed and philosophy after another to persuade yourselves that you are the elect of some friendly deity. I’ll say it bluntly: you’re just a backdrop. You’re the setting against which we play our parts.’
    I shrugged. ‘You’re deluded,’ I said. ‘I’ve read that Phil Dick guy. He was crazy too, by the end.’
    The air burned. I leaped so my back covered the door. Lune stayed where she was, perched on the toilet. She looked elegant, slightly sad. The same locked window blazed with blue flickering intensity, paint crackling. The glass crazed, vanished like steam. Maybelline shoved her stocky form through the gap, warily pointing a shiny steel tube at me, balancing herself with the other hand. She edged around the corpse on the floor, stood near Lune. I waited with my mouth open, expecting a blast of blue to swallow me down.
    â€˜You don’t have to kill me,’ I started to gabble. ‘You’re from a UFO, so you can take me back to your own planet, I’ve always wanted to travel, Illinois was interesting but space would be better. Roomier.’ They stared at me. ‘All right, not a spacecraft. You’re from the future, it’s a time machine outside the window, right? This guy would have been the next Hitler, so you’re cleaning up the past before it contaminates your own time, I can live with that, your information is undoubtedly better than mine.’
    â€˜I told him they’re all property,’ Lune explained to her associate. ‘I think it’s unhinged him.’
    â€˜ What? You stupid bitch, now we’ll have to erase his medium term memory. The disposer will not be