Flight to Darkness Read Online Free Page B

here.” She said it like she
didn’t give a damn.
    “ Yes.”
    There was a long silence. Maybe she was trying
to be serious but there was always that twist at the corner of her
lips.
    “ Are you hurt badly?”
    “ No. Are you a nurse
here?”
    “ I’ve been here since before
Korea.”
    “ Why don’t you sit
down?”
    “ Oh, no.” She had moved a scant
inch toward the bed. “I’ve got to go.”
    “ I’ll think of some books I
want.”
    “ Do that. I’ll come back
tomorrow.”
    We looked at each other. “Let’s cut this out,”
I said. “Let’s relax.”
    “ It’s been a strain, hasn’t
it?”
    We told each other our names. She knew mine.
“The doctor told me. He also said you’re interested in
sculpturing.”
    “ Yes.” I didn’t like to talk about
that with anybody. It was the only thing I had, really. I wanted to
keep it my own—all the way.
    “ Have you done any
recently?”
    “ Hardly.”
    “ Before you went away?”
    “ Commercial stuff, mostly. My
home’s in Florida. I have a place there where I work.” I thought it
over. “You could sit down. I haven’t talked with a woman for a long
time.”
    “ Ah.” She watched the rain out the
window. It was darkening in the room now as the late afternoon
slowly failed. “My father was an artist,” she said. Her voice was
touched with bitterness. “He hung himself. I found him that way,
with the light cord twisted around his neck.”
    It startled me. They didn’t talk like that
around this part of the hospital.
    “ That why you’re a
nurse?”
    “ No.” She stared at me, her eyes
bright. “I planned it. I became a nurse so I could find some rich
man, a helpless patient, and make him fall in love with me. Then
I’d marry him for his money.”
    “ Have you found him?”
    Her dress hissed as she moved her leg. “No. I
guess not.” She told me her hitch would be up in less than a year.
After she left I lay in bed and thought about her and knew she was
going to get in bed with me. She had the look and that current was
there between us. Then I decided I was off my nut and finally I
went to sleep.
     
    I awoke in a strait jacket.
    It was the dream again. I had Frank up against
the wall with one hand driving into his throat. The wooden mallet
was in my other hand. I pounded at his head. He kept screaming. I
heard him scream and scream as I woke up—only I was
screaming.
    I was in the hall outside my room. My fist was
hurt bad from smacking it on the wall. They were tightening the
straps.
    “ Look,” Leda said one day. “You’ll
find out anyway. Dr. Prescott’s made me a kind of special nurse to
you. He thought it might do you good.”
    “ It would.”
    She put the books down on the table by the
head of the bed and stood there with her hands clasped in front of
her. Her breasts thrust large and firm in a white lace brassiere. I
glimpsed the shadow of flesh through the nylon uniform. Her eyes
were deep blue and the light from the bed lamp shimmered in her
hair. “We may as well learn to be frank and open with each other
right away.”
    “ It’s a good way to be.”
    She looked at me sharply, then turned and sat
in the chair by the window, crossing her legs. They were long
gorgeous legs and the low-heeled crepe-soled shoes somehow enhanced
them. In high heels her legs would be of the same impossibility of
a Petty drawing. Only they’d be real. That would be something and
she knew it.
    “ I know all about you,” she
said.
    “ That’s not so good.”
    “ Perhaps not.”
    “ Come and sit beside me on the
bed.”
    She uncrossed her legs and said, “I
can’t.”
    “ Why?”
    “ Somebody might come.” She made it
sound like a caress. It was that unconscious trait of hers.
Sometimes when she talked and moved she kissed you with her whole
body. Maybe it was the tone of her voice. I wasn’t sure.
    “ Come on,” I said. “Be frank and
open.”
    She glanced toward the door. It was very
quiet. The staff would be eating and the