I Can See Clearly Now Read Online Free Page A

back of the door. Sometimes
Dora still treated him like a child, to be scared into obedience by
monsters under the bed. He was a grown man, and she only a handful
of years older than him.
    He passed in
front of the door again, feeling the Sherim start to tighten around
him. If he looked down, he knew, his feet would already be a few
inches above the grass. Of course, if he looked down his own
internal logic would reassert itself and he’d fall back to the
ground. Dora used to find all sorts of ways to trick him into
looking down when she was training him. She had no right treating
him like a child when she was so childish herself.
    Pressure built
at the back of his neck, like one of those itches that moves when
you try to scratch it. Pevan said she liked the feel of the Sherim,
something about the way it touched her skin. It had no right to
behave like that with his sister. He was all the way around the
back of the door again and coming back to the front. He couldn’t
feel the lean, but he knew he was almost eight feet off the ground,
and leaning far enough over that, if normal gravity still held,
he’d fall flat on his face.
    Something about
Pevan. His... sister? Or was that Dora? With the way she was always
teasing him, she might as well be. Which of them was he thinking
about? Dora, with her boyish body but oh-so-feminine hands. No,
that was Pevan. Dora had the eyes. His eyes were boiling. Third
time round the door. Did he have eyes? Surely if he did, they’d be
open, and he’d be able to see the hillside a hundred feet below,
and Nursim in front of him if he raised his head a little.
    So, no eyes.
Did he at least still have a body?
    Still?
    Nothing was
ever still in the Sherim. Right on the brow, the wind was always
strong. The wind was cool on his brow. Except that it couldn’t be,
because his eyes that he didn’t have were hot. No body then. He
didn’t have a body, or he was nobody?
    He opened his
eyes. Rel. That was him. Rel was somebody. Rel was in the Second
Realm, now.
    Slowly, his
brain erected a semblance of first-realm logic between him and the
world. Up was the direction his head was pointing. That meant that
the big green thing in front of him was a plain. Other features
resolved themselves into the sky, trees, the far-distant towers of
the Court. Rel allowed himself to relax when he managed to pin down
the red flower that grew out of the sky about half-way across the
plain. Going through the Sherim was never pleasant, but if you knew
what you were doing it could at least be made more or less
consistent.
    The Court was a
jagged interruption of the flat horizon, six dark spires stabbing
into the yellow fringe of the sky, a day’s walk or more distant.
You could walk there across the plain if you had the time and
stamina; this close to the First Realm, things were relatively
stable and even the predatory Wildren were wary of humans. There
were a few pitfalls, but it was easily the safest way to reach the
Court.
    Unfortunately,
Rel didn’t have a day to walk to the Court. He turned to his left,
feeling the dull ache of logic fatigue settling somewhere behind
his forehead. A path, paved in red brick, led along the side of the
plain, up to a small stone bungalow. Rel took the path, trying to
ignore the green of the plains grass shifting slowly to grey, until
only a fool could see anything other than a steep, unforgiving
stone hillside falling away to a precipice far below.
    A thin trail of
smoke wound up from the bungalow’s chimney. That was good - the mad
child was in - but also bad; the mad child was in. Rel ignored the
cheery red door and smashed his way through the sole window.
    Inside, the
bungalow’s single room was neatly organised, with pans hanging from
a rack on the wall, powdered spices in little jars on a rack, and a
fire roaring in the hearth. The mad child sat with a blanket
wrapped around her in a rocking-chair by the fire, her face so
folded with wrinkles that you could almost convince