Read Online Secret Dreams by Keith Korman - Free Book Online

look over the world, listening for a billion heartbeats, for a billion voices,- feeling the rain in a backwater Amazon jungle and the raw bite of wind on the Greenland ice pack; brushed by the pungent smell of turmeric and reeling from the caw of parrots in a noisy, crowded Rangoon market stall. Her restored spirit reached out into the world, and then she knew for certain that all of them were gone. Her poor clinic no longer on any person’s mind, not even the Russian Special Police,- a final closing of the bedroom door … not a soul on the planet remembered Frau Direktor at all.
    But the motion and the voice of things were open to her: the strips of clouds in the blue sky, leaves rustling in the wind, and the trickle of water running down a gutter in a city — minor things and great things and the confused thoughts of men like the steady roar of the sea over dunes. Chaotic, for she heard the babble of many tongues: a great war was brewing across the continent of Europe, much greater than the one she had known in her youth. She saw the spray of golden showering sparks in arms factories, the shunting of trains, and the flickering needles of a thousand electric sewing machines stitching a million bits of braid on the collars of uniforms. She heard the bark of orders and the answering shouts of men, the sound of marching ants, singing the same marching song, stamping the same billion feet: soldiers’ feet in every city, town, and village.
    Already in the East an empire from Japan was rising like a great wave to hurl across the Pacific Ocean,- and on the mainland of China she felt their single will like a heavy canvas smothering Manchuria: a muffled scream from Shanghai, the feeble voices of people drowned out by shellfire and the moans of those trapped under collapsed buildings. While from within the great landmass of Asia, she sensed a coldly burning coal from the brain of the man who ruled Russia, He still ruled it — alive and plotting — while the ghosts of millions he had sent out of his sight hovered about him in the very bedroom where he slept with a woman. But he was a hard man, who slept soundly despite the wailing throngs beside his bed. They did not trouble him. He dreamed of adding to their millions.
    And suddenly her eye lit upon Vienna. The National Socialist flags flew everywhere: the red field, grand white circle, and black swastika. They hung smartly from public buildings, and pairs of smaller flags from lampposts along the avenues,- red, black, and white bunting draped from streetfront windows, miles of it in every
Sirasse and Platz
. The city was all dressed up as though for Easter, Throngs of gray-uniformed soldiers chatted loudly on the sidewalks and shopped in the stores,- officers in gleaming boots ordered bottles of champagne in the restaurants. There seemed to be a teeming rally or party in every flat and alley, while bejeweled royalty danced gaily in the crystal-lit ballrooms of the Imperial Palace of the Hofburg.
    But no music came from the Freud family house at 19 Berggasse,-no electric bulbs burned in the sockets. The Freud family had gone,-the upstairs rented out to strangers, who hung their wash in the rooms and never did the dishes, The old study lay empty — no books or pictures — and the furniture had vanished, There were cigarette butts ground into the hall carpet and muddy bootprints on the stairs. Down, down through the house she peered, looking for some clue, some trace of those who had left. Dust and dirt were crammed in every corner,- someone had urinated on a wall. The closets ripped open, empty, except for a torn dress hanging limply from a hanger,-a pocketful of change tossed on the floor. The stench of human filth grew worse in the basement,- on the concrete floor she saw what looked like a few shards of cracked pottery. The chariot frieze she liked so much, now broken junk. Recognizable only by the pitted stone. Off in a corner a fractured piece of the