Read Online The Children of Hamelin by Norman Spinrad - Free Book Online Page B

metal monsters.
    “Dig,” I told her, “close your eyes and hold tight to my hand, and when I tell you to open your eyes again, I promise everything will be groovy.”
    She looked at me with sick puppy-dog eyes, squeezed my hand, said: “I’m afraid... afraid of the dark inside my head...”
    I put my arm around her waist, kissed her softly on the cheek. “Trust me,” I said.
    She nodded, screwed up her face, closed her eyes, and I led her across the bridge, haltingly down the stairs on the other side, through the width of the narrow empty park, and sat her down on a bench facing the river.
    I tried to see the view through her eyes: the lights of Brooklyn sparkling smokily in the dusk across the black sheen of water, the sky deepening to navy; the red-and-green jewels of an airplane’s running lights moving across the as-yet-starless sky.
    I sat down beside her, put my arm around her shoulders, cradled her against me, said, “Open your eyes.”
    Her body shuddered once against me; she opened her eyes. Sighed. Didn’t move for at least a minute that seemed to hang frozen in the air that was getting cold and dank.
    Then she turned to me. She was smiling; her eyes were big and soft and calm. She kissed me gently on the mouth with soft-but-closed lips, held it for a long moment, then pulled away and lay her head on my shoulder, her cheek cool against mine.
    “Thank you,” she said.
    “Full circle, baby. It was a beautiful place to go up in, so I figured....”
    “You’re just a beautiful, groovy cat,” she said. “I mean knowing how to bring me out of a bummer like that and you on your first acid trip... wow...”
    “You’re okay now?”
    “Oh sure man,” she said casually. “It was just a bad flash. It happens every once in a while. You get used to it.”
    A long moment of silence during which I wondered if a freakout like that was something I’d ever want to be able to get used to. Quite suddenly, I realized that I hadn’t felt very high for... how long?
    “I think we’re coming down,” I said.
    “Yeah, it’ll taper off for a few more hours maybe, but I don’t feel very high anymore either. Not exactly the strongest acid I’ve ever had.” She paused. “Ah... you don’t know what time it is, do you?”
    “Maybe five or six, I guess—”
    “Uh... look, would it uptight you if I split now?” she said. “I mean, I’ll stay if you want, but I’ve got this thing I gotta do.”
    “How about if I came along?” I said, not really meaning it.
    “Might bummer you.”
    Somehow, I didn’t mind. It seemed fitting. I felt tired as hell, and maybe I had a thing to do too: collect the fragments of the trip and try to paste them in the scrapbook of memory.
    “It’s okay,” I told her. “I could do with some aloneness now, I think.”
    She smiled, kissed me gently, go up. “You’re a groovy cat,” she said. “No goodbyes, okay? Just... later.”
    “When will I see you again?”
    She laughed. “When you most want to and least expect to,” she said. She started walking down the path, paused, blew me a kiss, and then was off like a wraith into the falling night.
    I sat on the bench for a few minutes just staring into the water and thinking no-thoughts. My next real thought was that I was starting to get really cold and I was exhausted and thoroughly spaced-out.
    So I got up and started walking home, looking forward to sleeping for about a thousand years, digesting the day’s enormities like a torpid python ruminating on his weekly meal.
    Acid was as heavy a trip as smack—heavier.
    But I knew for dead-certain that I could never get really hooked on this .
     

5 - The Big Game
     
    In the hall on the tenth floor outside the agency, Dickie Lee said: “And what kind of weekend did you have, Tom old man?” And smiled that thick-lipped pleasantly shit-eating smile of his, raised his bushy black brows, rolled what he referred to as “my sensual brown eyes,” did everything but drool. Good old