Mrs. God Read Online Free Page A

rather than grow from it. Other hills like it canceled half the horizon. They looked dead, like garbage piles—then he thought they looked like black blood-soaked sheets, bloody towels and pads thrown onto the abortionist’s floor.
    The air carried a sour metallic tang, as if it were filled with tiny metal shavings. Standish came up beside the first low hill and saw that it was a mound of some material like charcoal briquets—stony chips of coal. Now and then rock slides of the chips ran down the flanks of the hill. Between the black hills of coal dusty men rode toylike bulldozers. Completely ringed by the black hills was a world of men rushing around in blackened, murky air beneath strings of lights. Obscure machines rose and fell. Yellow flares burned beside the black mounds. Slag heaps , Standish thought, not knowing if he was right. What were slag heaps, anyhow?
    Even the sky seemed dirty. Rhythmic clanks and thuds as from underground machines filled the air. It was like driving through a hellish factory without walls or roof. Standish had not seen a road sign or marker for what must have been miles. There was nothing around him now but the shifting black hills and the dusty men moving between the flares. Suddenly the road seemed too narrow to be the motorway.
    He decided to keep driving until he saw a road sign. The thought of getting out of his car in this brutal and desolate place made his throat tighten.
    Then the entire world changed in an eye-blink. The black hills, strings of lights, men on toy bulldozers, and tiny flares fell back behind him, and Standish found himself driving through dense, vibrant green. On either side of the car fat vine-encrusted trees and wide bushes pushed right to the edge of the road. For ten or fifteen minutes Standish drove through what appeared to be a great forest. The interior of the car grew as hot as a greenhouse. Standish pulled up to the side of the road and wiped his forehead. Leaves and vines flattened against the side window. He looked at his map again.
    Northeast from the second roundabout extended the road to Huckstall. The map indicated woodlands in green, but none of the green covered the roadway. Sickeningly, Standish thought that all this right-left business had so confused him that he had traveled south from Gatwick instead of north—by now he would be hundreds of miles out of his way. He groaned and closed his eyes. Something soft thumped against his windshield. Standish moaned in dismay and surprise, and reflexively covered his face with his arms.
    He lowered his arms and looked out. On the upper right-hand side of the windshield was a broad smeary stripe which he did not think had been there earlier. Standish did not at all want to think about what sort of creature had made the smear. An insect the size of a baby had turned to froth and spread itself like butter across the glass. Death again, messy and uncontainable. He wiped his face and started forward again.
    The woodland ended as abruptly as it had begun, and without any transition Standish found himself back in the empty burnt-looking landscape. Twice he passed through other, smaller outdoor factories with their slag heaps and dusty men wandering through flares. He felt as if he had been driving in circles. There were no signs to Huckstall or anywhere else. Unmarked roads intersected his, leading deeper into the undulating russet landscape. Full of heaviness and no one to comfort , Standish remembered from “Rebuke.” He longed for markers pointing to Boston or Sleaford or Lincoln, names prominent on the map Robert Wall had sent him.
    In minutes a low marker, a small stone post like a tooth set upright beside the road, came into view before him. Standish pulled up across from it. He got out of the car and walked around to see the worn words carved on the marker: 12 MI . Twelve miles? Twelve miles from what?
    â€œLost?”
    Standish snapped his head up to see a tall thin man standing