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

pitted, once-silver cornet that he hadn’t touched in years. A streetlight made the night smoke-gray outside his window, lighting up telephone and electric lines and throwing a negative shadow along the floor toward his closet. The closet door hung open, too warped to close; it had a broken spool for a doorknob. The interior of the closet, just visible from Craine’s bed, was crowded with dark forms. He thought, without emotion, how some murderer might crouch there, waiting for him to sleep. At once he found himself thinking of the women who’d been killed. He imagined their terror as the dark shape detached itself from the other dark shapes and came forward, signalling for silence, reaching out to snatch them. Abruptly, Craine sat upright, threw his feet over the side of the bed, and got up.

For fifteen minutes he stood at his dresser, wearing only his underwear—he had the lights on now, the shades not pulled—sorting through paper scraps from his pockets and the dresser drawers, laying them out like puzzle pieces, lifting them one after another and squinting, trying to read them, but to no avail; his eyes refused to focus. He worked in increasing desperation, growing angry or frightened, he could hardly say which. All at once he found himself listening to something. Perhaps he’d been listening for a long time. It was a creaking sound, rhythmical and urgent—some machine, he thought at first, something to do with torture. Then the truth broke through: Ira Katz’s bedsprings. He reached out, automatically, and turned out the lights. In the darkness that leaped up around him the sound seemed much louder. He groped his way back to the bed and lay down as before. The sound went on and on. They were still at it, banging away like demons, when Craine’s stiff muscles relaxed and he sank into sleep.

He slept quietly for a time, though the creaking continued and the walls were full of scraping and gnawings, the scamperings of mice. One poked his head out from the hole in the corner, a hole too small for notice, almost hidden by books, then came cautiously into the room, stopped in the light from the window, and stood listening. Soon the second one came, sister to the first, this one from the closet, darted out onto the carpet and paused, nose tipped upward, whiskers atremble, watching Craine’s bed. Craine slept on, and the mice moved quickly to his trench coat and squirmed into the left-side pocket, where there were crumbs. Now Craine’s eyes began to move under the lids. “Turn under!” he shouted, and the mice in the trench coat froze, hearts slamming, heads down, ears cocked. His voice diminished to a mutter, and they returned to their business, hurrying, still listening for danger.

In an unknown language which Craine was for some reason able to understand, Carnac was explaining, with brightly glowing eyes, that the room where they were locked with the five dead women—their throats had been slit—was a mystery novel; all the walls were words. There were paths across the floor in a pattern like Parcheesi, and above them, out of reach, was a hanged man, slowly turning. Emmit Royce, Craine’s assistant, wearing only his leather jacket, was crawling slowly, on all fours, from one to another of the dead women, spreading the legs of each in turn, then raising them by the hips and inserting himself. He moved mechanically, sweating, as if someone were forcing him. Craine, though the whole thing annoyed him, distracting him from his problems, did nothing to interfere. All reality, Carnac was urgently explaining—looking past his shoulder in terrible fear—was a cliché; that was why they must speak new languages. Someone was watching from the shadows in the corner of the room. “There,” Craine said, and pointed.

Suddenly he was awake. The night was quiet, though he’d almost have sworn that a second ago, before he was awake, he’d heard something—perhaps the door at the foot of the stairs outside his room, possibly a voice. Garbage men? he wondered. There were brown plastic garbage bags at the foot of the stairs. But it was still pitch-dark, and the garbage men never came in for them anyway; they waited for the bags to be moved out onto the sidewalk on the proper days—Mondays and Thursdays. He tried to think what day it was now, but his mind was a blank. He stared at the ceiling, fragments of the dream coming back to him again—so vivid he was tempted to look at his hands to see if he had blood on them. For an instant it seemed to him that he could smell the blood, but then, the next instant, he was uncertain. A car started up on the street below—right in front of the hotel, it seemed to him—and he thought of going to the window to look out. But his legs and arms were heavy, and the car was now far down the block. He let it go. At last he closed his eyes again and, after a time, went back to sleep. Again he lay perfectly still for a while, before his eyes began to move below the lids.

He dreamed he was a child of three, preaching aboard a Mississippi riverboat—a grand old sidewheeler of white and gold, with a Negro orchestra and staterooms of glowing black and crimson. His father and mother stood encouraging him and laughing, his mother’s curls shiny, his father a trim, scientific-looking man, neatly bearded like a pharaoh, the whole crowd admiring their plump child’s stern, slightly pouted lower lip, the ferocious pokes of his finger. “Praise the Lord!” cried a huge old man in gray, with a tie clasp of rapidly changing numbers. He had a huge, loose jowl and heavy eye bags. His laughter seemed malicious. There were streamers, champagne bottles, a peculiar scent in the air that he couldn’t quite place.

Craine was preaching in the way he’d seen his grandfather do—a worldly, vain man, as ministers