Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe Read Online Free

like a psychotic simpleton.
    â€œâ€˜No place?’ I probed.
    â€œâ€˜Yes, precisely, Herr Doktor. I’m not some snob who puts on airs and pretends to emanate from some high-flown patch of geography. Ge-og-ra-phy. That’s a funny word. I like all the languages you have.’
    â€œâ€˜Where were you born?’ I asked in another brilliant alternate form of the question.
    â€œâ€˜Which time do you mean, you meany?’ he said back to me, and so forth. I could go on with this dialogue—”
    â€œYou do a pretty good John Doe imitation, I must say.”
    â€œThank you, but I couldn’t keep it up for very long. It wouldn’t be easy to imitate all his different voices, accents, and degrees of articulacy. He may be something akin to a multiple personality, I’m not sure. I’d have to go over the tapes of my interviews with him to see if any patterns of coherency turn up, possibly something the detectives could use to establish who this guy really is. The tragic part is that knowing Doe’s legal identity is a formality at this point, just tying up loose ends. His victims are dead, and they died horribly. That’s all that counts now. Sure, he was somebody’s baby boy at one time. But I can’t pretend to care anymore about biographical details—the name on his birth certificate, where he grew up, what made him the way he is. I’m no aesthete of pathology. It’s never been my ambition to study mental disease without effecting some improvement. So why should I waste my time trying to help someone like John Doe, who doesn’t live in the same world as we do, psychologically speaking. I used to believe in rehabilitation, not a purely punitive approach to criminal behavior. But those people, those
things
at the prison are only an ugly stain on our world. The hell with them. Just plow them all under for fertilizer, I say.” Dr. Munck then drained his glass until the ice cubes rattled.
    â€œWant another?” Leslie asked with a smooth therapeutic tone to her voice.
    David smiled now, his illiberal outburst having purged him somewhat of his ire. “Let’s get drunk and fool around, shall we?”
    Leslie collected her husband’s glass for a refill. Now there was reason to celebrate, she thought. David was not giving up his work from a sense of ineffectual failure but from anger, an anger that was melting into indifference. Now everything would be as it had been before; they could leave the prison town and move back home. In fact, they could move anywhere they liked, maybe take a long vacation first, treat Norleen to some sunny place. Leslie thought of all these things as she made two more drinks in the quiet of that beautiful room. This quiet was no longer an indication of soundless stagnancy but a delicious, lulling prelude to the promising days to come. The indistinct happiness of the future glowed inside her along with the alcohol; she was gravid with pleasant prophecies. Perhaps the time was now right to have another child, a little brother or sister for Norleen. But that could wait just a while longer . . . a lifetime of possibilities lay ahead. An amiable genie seemed to be on standby. They had only to make their wishes, and their bidding would be done.
    Before returning with the drinks, Leslie went in the kitchen. She had something she wanted to give her husband, and this seemed the perfect time to do it. A little token to show David that though his job had proved a sad waste of his worthy effort, she had supported his work in her own way. With a drink in each hand, she held under her left elbow the small box she had got from the kitchen.
    â€œWhat’s that?” asked David, taking his drink.
    â€œJust a little something for the art lover in you. I bought it at that little shop where they sell things the inmates at the prison make. Some of it is quality merchandise—belts, jewelry, ashtrays, you