Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

he would do it, Craine heard himself saying, “I’ve been having some queer experiences lately.” He glanced past his shoulder, then leaned forward again. “I keep feeling someone watching me. Crazy, eh? Ha ha!” His free hand slapped the chair arm.

Ira Katz nodded, eyebrows lifted, and tentatively smiled, alerted.

“I’ve got a friend who maintains it’s the Lord watching me. I laugh. I don’t believe in such things, naturally. But I’ll tell you, it gives me the jeebies!” He had an odd sensation—not quite frightening, but curious—of sinking chair and all into the floor.

“I should think so,” Ira said and again just perceptibly nodded. He raised his wineglass and sipped. His eyes had gone vague.

Craine desperately focused his attention on Ira, keeping the chair from sinking further. “I don’t believe in connections—especially metaphysical connections,” Craine said. He laughed, alarmed, as if his words tempted devils, then hurried on, focusing still harder on Ira Katz. In his drunkenness he believed he was zeroing in on the heart of the matter—he would not think so tomorrow, perhaps, but his feeling that he was getting at the truth at last was intense. In a burst, struggling with his thickening tongue, he told Ira Katz how Carnac kept pursuing him, hounding him, and how even as he fled he felt mysteriously bound to the man, doomed to some terrible brotherhood with him. He spoke of the bookstore and how Tummelty had strangely latched onto him, hooked in like a burr, pretending it was Carnac’s mind, not his own, that interested him. Craine laughed, three sharp yelps, as he spoke of how Tummelty had tried to fool him. The feeling that he was onto something grew by leaps and bounds. As he was about to speak of the woman who stood watching from the stacks, unseen—a woman with cat’s eyes, black as coal—there came a terrible whirring and, out of sync, the clocks all struck eleven. Craine stopped short, mouth wide open, listening.

To Craine’s drunken ears, the whirring, pinging, and bonging of the clocks was monstrously mechanical, at the same time mocking and despairing. He strained to hear the words, but if any were there they eluded him. It seemed to him that he knew where the wild noise came from, the pitch-dark hole at the center of the universe, aclutter with dead things—old planets, prima materia, a cosmic Sargasso sea from which came now only the sound he’d heard as he came back to consciousness after his operations. His eyes leaped toward Ira Katz. Ira, he saw to his amazement, had heard something totally different, innocent. Craine felt himself quietly slipping under again, drowning toward the whisper.

Ira Katz had set his wineglass on the table beside his chair, the glass still almost full. He sat—or blurrily hovered—with his fingertips together, like a priest. He looked up and ran one hand through his hair.

“Yes, it’s interesting,” he said, “the work Dr. Tummelty’s been doing.” Craine had to concentrate, tensing so hard his cheeks twitched, to make the words make sense. Ira was saying, “I got a copy of his book—The Shattered Mind, I think it’s called. I only read a little of it. You know him well?”

By Ira’s tone Craine understood for the first time—dimly, as he understood everything just now—that Dr. Tummelty was in some way famous. Perhaps he’d heard that before, in fact. No use hunting; his mind was like a dead man’s. With his right hand he was gripping the chair arm, with his left the glass of whiskey, still struggling against the horror of that chiming from the depths. “I’ve talked with him once or twice, that’s all,” Craine managed to bring out. His speech was badly slurred, beyond all control now. He could feel the long tumble of the room through space. Struggling for sobriety, he tried to think what Dr. Tummelty had said, but his mind had quit as if forever.

“He works with people who’ve had head injuries,” Ira said. His voice came out hollow, the words dirge-slow; a dream voice. “People who’ve severed certain nerves or something. They can write, for instance, but they can’t read—not even what they’ve written. Neurophysiology. It’s a scary business. You introduced him to Carnac?”

“No,” Craine said, “something …” He could call back none of it, or nothing but one phrase, the bioplasmic universe. Then that too slid away from him. He felt his eyelids sinking and struggled to stay awake.

Ira Katz was increasingly impatient to see him gone; he could barely hide it, Craine saw. But the door was far across the room. If he stood up and tried he couldn’t make it, not a chance. As if he’d actually gotten up, he saw himself staggering, falling against bookshelves, knocking down clocks. Again, he jerked his eyes open. “Psychics,” he said.

Ira Katz looked at him. “Pardon?” he said.

“Tummelty’s in’rested in psychics,” Craine said. It took all his energy to keep his eyelids partway open. He saw himself as Ira Katz must be seeing him, a newly dead corpse, two narrow chinks through which his icy blue, unfocussed eyes peered out with hushed malevolence.

Then, like a collision of clocks thrown together, maybe sliding from a dump truck, there came from behind him the deafening jangle of Ira Katz’s phone in the bedroom. Ira started as if in fear, then, controlling himself, rose to his feet. “So that’s it,” Craine thought, and would have cackled if he could have—one last feeble burst of demonic intelligence—he’s been expecting a phone call from his wife! Craine’s eyes narrowed more, murderous as the cat’s, and he strained all his powers toward the difficult business of eavesdropping, but before the phone could ring twice, he was fast asleep.

He slept for forty minutes, or forty-five, perhaps fifty—the clocks were in rough agreement on ten to twelve. It took him a long time to remember where he was and even longer to realize that it was his neighbor in there, still on the phone, speaking angrily and loudly, confident that Craine