Flight to Darkness Read Online Free

me—or
what?”
    She whirled, came across the room, sat down
beside me. I got a crazy thought. Maybe she was being paid to do
this—part of her job. Maybe she was just seeing me home. . .
.
    Excitement was in her voice. “No, Eric. Please
don’t. You’re hurting me and you’re hurting yourself. I simply
talked with Prescott. He wanted to know more about your plans, our
plans. You’re so closemouthed.”
    “ It’s no business of
his.”
    “ He’s concerned, Eric.”
    I nodded. “Concerned. Thinks I’ll do some damn
fool thing.”
    “ You’re acting like a
child.”
    I kept silent.
    “ He has a right. So’ve I. We want
you well.”
    “ I am well.”
    “ But, darling, you still dream
those horrible dreams. Now, listen. We’ll be married soon, and you
know I love you.”
    “ You want to be sure I won’t kill
my brother when I see him, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to be
hooked up with a murderer. Damn it, Leda. Nothing’s wrong with
me.”
    “ All right, darling.” She came
against me like a flame draws to your hand. “Now I’m going to
dress. You’re going to sit here and think. We’re not going to be
like this anymore.”
    She rose, swung into her bedroom. She blew me
a kiss as she closed the door. It was like she’d swung her hip
against me. I heard her humming in there and I sat on the couch and
knew how wrong I was to take off like that, blow up
inside.
    So much of what I thought was Leda could be my
imagination. There was no evil in her. Not the kind of evil you’d
think of, anyway. She was pent up. Her nature was like the heat
that hesitates along the top of a blast furnace. Withering, hot,
molten—anxious to consume. To consume was her nature. It was in her
walk, in the way she moved her lips, in the motions of her hands—in
fact, of her whole body. Yet it seemed unconscious on her part. I
tried to read conscious movement into it. But when I thought about
it, I knew it was nothing but instinct. Perhaps Leda was more like
her mother than she thought.
    I wondered plenty about myself, too. What was
going to happen when I returned? There was the loan business my
father had left. Frank was running that now. I wanted to get back
and get some money. I needed money bad. Because with money I could
go on with my sculpturing. That and Leda were the important things
in my life. I wanted to do a nude of Leda in stone. Maybe then I’d
have her—cold and warm at the same time.
    And me. What about me? What was going to
happen to me? Because there was always that void between sleep and
waking. For the long moments after I woke up, after dreaming, it
seemed as real—the wooden mallet, Frank, everything—as it seemed
that blood-and-thunder day back in Korea.
     
    Leda and I had met close to a year ago. I was
in bed all the time then, unable to get around. I had a private
room at the far end of the ward and Leda was helping out at the
library. She wheeled the cart of books around, for bed
patients.
    There were trees out beyond my window and some
hills, and if I rolled and propped myself on my side I could see
pretty well. The room was small and out there it was small too,
only in a different way. It was a place composed of the region
within my sight. It was good to see it all. The four walls of the
room were bare except for a religious painting at the head of the
bed and that single window with the sky blue, gray, white, pale,
dark with rain or with the unrebellious succession of days, and the
green.
    I was in a far wing of the hospital so there
were no buildings in sight, only the voluptuous unreality beyond
the pane of glass: unreal because I wondered then if I would ever
be there again—where it was. A kind of through-the-looking-glass
thing, though not backward. And between the myriad procession of
hospital events, the time-clocked meals, needles, blood-pressure
and pulse counts; “We’ll take off the dressing. There, that wasn’t
so bad, was it?”; nights of dreams; Prescott’s first visits,