Cycle of Nemesis Read Online Free

impending doom. Everything pointed, like the trailing fronds of those plants of home, toward a future that could hold only trouble, pain and disaster. That man in the blue and yellow checked Corinthian helmet, who dripped blood, that man with my face—why did he haunt me? Had he killed and mutilated that young girl whose naked and blood-spattered headless body had rolled like a macabre Cleopatra from some decadent sadist madhouse play?
    Following Pomfret as he advanced on Paul Benenson I felt less like social platitudes with that bore than going five rounds with a tiger shark. Benenson’s round gray face with the absurdly antique pince-nez in their rolled gold rims he affected smiled benignly upon all whom he met as though their day had thereby been fulfilled. I shook hands with a curt word or two and then went off for another look at a remarkably fine globe of the world that stood in globular dignity by itself in a corner. The ticket said Lot Forty-five, so that it would be coming up fairly soon during the morning session.
    The events of yesterday and this morning had unsettled me—this was an understatement I could live with—and I had no deep conviction that whatever had begun was finished with. I looked at the South Pole Estate on the globe and, with that half-startled little chuckle of remembrance that your world has not always been everyone’s world, saw that Antarctica was represented by whiteness, barrenness and a terra incognita. I smiled, forcing other thoughts out of my head; Aunt Nora and her Siamese and her warmth and comfort would have been regarded with open-mouthed disbelief by the men who had made this globe.
    More people entered the ballroom and their muted conversation like that of a plate-glassed aviary in its platitudinous hum drove me further away. Nothing was coming up until the globe that I wanted, for the Bennet commode had been removed as material evidence, and I felt the need to divorce myself from this artificial if understandable world of refined art. We have our art galleries and museums in our cities beneath the sea, but somehow the very frontier-like pressures of our everyday lives are not conducive to this hothouse atmosphere of artificial culture.
    I went out of the ballroom, not without a backward glance for the empty musicians’ gallery, and trod carefully up the marble staircase with its glorious bronze and iron scrollworked balustrades. Brown-coated guards prowled watchfully and I got the impression that there were more of them in evidence than there had been yesterday.
    Passing up from the ground floor to the first floor and going through to the long gallery, I saw a multiple series of reflected distorted images of myself receding and approaching as I walked. To some people I would now be on the second floor, having walked up from the first; but to most modem folk these old-fashioned distinctions meant little. Undersea we had our own ways.
    The long gallery led directly into the picture gallery.
    Every picture had been removed by a London specialist company for cleaning, renovation where necessary, for authentication and valuation. They would form the subject of a later and separate auction. If I had the luck, I meant to be there—if only to see good old George Pomfret struggling to acquire the J. B. Morse collection —a collection that I, among others, would have given a very great deal to own.
    Bare and shining and echoing, the picture gallery stretched before me, the long windows pencils of light, the pendant chandeliers glinting arabesques of reflections.
    The gentle wooden floor, black with the polish of age, softened my footfalls. At the far end I saw a guard move into the gallery and then, with a hitch to his slung weapon and a characteristic stamp of one booted foot, turn and go out again, satisfied of my credentials.
    I was alone in the picture gallery.
    The floor beneath the third window showed its expected rectangle of lighter color where the chest had stood through so