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

“Really?” the man asked, stiffening.

“Shit, how do I know?” Craine snapped, strangely angry. He remembered his dream of preaching, those golden curls. “What the hell do you people expect of me?” he whispered.

The man on the right, then the man on the left, drew back a little. With both hands, trembling, Craine raised his coffee cup and drank.

BOOK TWO

Editor’s Note

Hereafter, the narrative loops. In several variants, the first line of what follows is the first line of the book. There is a definite break between the capture of Elaine Glass—with its assault on Emmit Royce—and the unit thereafter where Crainefirst talks with the girl. The chairman of the English department, Professor Davies—an early name for Detective Inspector McClaren—seems, to this reader at least, constructed in haste. But a novel so concerned with time and perceived causality can incorporate a glitch or two in its program; the elements here introduced are, clearly, part of the plot.

One

Craine’s work was a bore. His associates were bores, his clients were bores, the people he spied on were pitiful bores whose secrets, when he finally nosed them out, were boring beyond all description. “If I were you, Craine,” some observer might have said to him, perceiving Craine to be too old, too decrepit, for the kind of work he did—and discerning, behind that whiskey-fog, a mind still keen enough for nobler occupation—“If I were you, Craine, I’d seek employment more suitable.” “Good point,” Craine would have snapped. He had knots in his shoestrings. His fingers shook so badly, till noon or so, that he had to use two hands to elevate his glass. (He’d been an all-day drinker for fifteen years.) Often when he visited old friends in Chicago, former business associates, he was mistaken for a bum. He had wrinkled clothes, dim, bloodshot eyes behind thick, tinted glasses, and in his facial cracks, drab gray whiskers.

“But what would you have me become?” Craine would have added, drawing his pipe out and speaking acidly from the side of his mouth. “A master criminal? A philosopher?” And he’d have laughed, nasty, like a man always one step ahead of you, and he’d have pushed the pipe back in and splashed himself more Scotch.

He was right, of course. We’ve slipped past the age of exciting adventure, no question about it, though the fact may fill young people’s hearts with dismay and drive fools to malevolent fictions and secret societies. Craine had read about such things. Waiting in his office for the phone to ring—hunched forward at his desk (red skin, sharp bones), shoulder holster dangling from the back of his chair—or waiting for people he was shadowing to come through the doorways, he’d skimmed through innumerable books and magazines. He consumed the written word ferociously, indifferently, like a library fire. Never reading deeply, never with full attention—one ear always cocked toward the business of the moment—even when he slept, one ear tipped cautiously toward the ominous potential of the universe. But he read; he thought things over; he caught on. A puzzle solver from way back. His trade.

He’d read of West Coast fertility cults—even met a fellow once who had claimed to be a demon, the one time Craine had made a trip to San Francisco. Craine had perked up. “Demon?” he’d said, supposing it must be a slip of the tongue but straining to make out, with his watery eyes, some oddity in the eyes of the stranger. “In ancient times,” his aunt Harriet had told him solemnly, when Craine was about six, “demons were supposed to be all around us, even in us. Our Lord once chased a great flock of them into some pigs and made them run off a cliff.” His aunt had been a dabbler in things antiquarian, going through old bookshops, visiting museums. She’d placed in his bedroom (it had given him nightmares) a greenish black statue of the Horus bird. His aunt had been odd in a number of ways. She’d been a sleepwalker. Sometimes in the middle of the night she would drift downstairs and sit in darkness staring out the window.

The San Francisco demon had proved, of course, a disappointment. Plump-faced boy of twenty-one, slanted eyes, pink sunglasses. Craine had sighed, half-sneered, and turned away. It was everywhere, of course, that hunger to get free of the facts, float high above the patched and ragged earth as the plane he’d been on then—bound for San Francisco—floated high above the tinkle and pachinko of Nevada. Ah, spirituality! Alpha waves, Do-in, Silva Mind Control! Better Carnac’s tarot, his dowsing for telluric centers of the ancient gods’ power. That was sanity, in a man who’d had his head smashed. Yet the child in Craine hoped on, of course, like the rest of poor hopeful humanity; hoped on, scorning hope. Craine scowled, shook his head, and lit his pipe again, thinking of cancer. Hannah glanced in, moving past his door, but did not stop. The mail hadn’t come yet; they had nothing to do.

Craine understood how it was with the world. Zeus-cult revivals in Boston and New York, and here in the old, plain-brained Midwest, secret organizations of loyal Americans, disloyal Americans, people who hated Jews, people who hated gasoline, people who hated banks or universities or churches, women who hated men—the whole tiresome range of deranged human spirits whose personal and professional disappointments they’d nursed into cosmic monsters, foul, dark beasts as dreary as any to be seen late at night on the snowy TV of some run-down motel outside, say, Decatur—but monsters that in fact had the power to kill, given their bulk and mindlessness. Mesopotamian bulls, animation by Disney. Malevolence and stupidity huddle all around us, cowering in chrome-furnished bedrooms with their Playboy magazines, or gliding down the aisles of the A&P with a vengeful raised consciousness not even the Muzak can disarm. All empty. That was the miserable fact, the fact that remained. Gerald B. Craine