The Haunted Storm Read Online Free Page A

guardian angel – because she would at times look at him to see, not if he was listening, but if he was agreeing, as if she were recounting the history of something common to them both. And such a passionate sensual-mystical mood now lay about them, and so charged was the air, that it seemed only proper to move his hand from her shin and caress the inside of her left thigh.
    “Love inside my body and brain; that’s what it was – I’m just rambling now. No, I’ll try harder. He was middle height with blond hair. His hands were rough and dirty. He was quite stocky – very strong – and his eyes were absolutely still – powerful – iron! Do you know what they contained? – And for the matter of that –” she leaned forward and put her face close to his; Matthew felt his jaw trembling – “what yours contain? Morality!” She leaned back again, and stretched her right leg out in front of her. Matthew’s hand was moving up and down the inside of her thigh. “It was like an extra kind of vision that he had that showed him good and evil. He never said a word about it but I could see in his eyes the split-second he saw evil or good in the world. As for me… I just melted, all the rigid ness of me, twenty-two years of it; I’d never had a lover before and I’d grown hard. No! No-one had made love to me! I hated it! I hated it because it seemed to be so gross and earth-like and I was completely, oh, utterly spirit! What’s spirit? It’s everything that isn’t matter. It’s dreams and ideas and feelings – ghosts – devils – fear and love, too, though I didn’t know anything about love. Anyway, I was spirit and I hated matter and then, meeting him, I suddenly changed and started to yearn for matter, still being spirit. Because now I was bereft of something. For a minute I’d been at the centre of the matter-creating whirlpool, and then I was thrown out of it. I wanted to cuddle matter, like a baby. I wanted to feed it at my breast. I was pregnant with it, I, the transparent one, the tenuous vaporous empty one, the one the wind blew through and the stars shone through! I was bearing matter in my womb and then it was taken from me. I was robbed of my baby the world… All this is very roundabout… It’s not feminine, is it. All this image-making, I mean; I ought to be giving facts and dates. But I know them all right. Do you think I haven’t remembered the date I first met him? March the twenty-fourth! And every single date since then, like a schoolgirl. Oh, yes, but the central thing is this loss…”
    Her voice became wistful, and her eyes softened; she looked down at the shingle. After the initial shock of finding her there and the confusion of emotions afterwards, Matthew found one feeling now predominating, and that was nothing more or less than total identification with her. He knew with his body and mind exactly what she meant when she talked about matter; the same obsession troubled him. He too felt hollow, transparent and lost in what she called the spirit, and had the same doubleness of feeling towards matter – that it was hateful, and that it was infinitely desirable and to be cherished. Slowly the odd suspicion grew that this passionate and spirit-dominated girl was his own shadow, his doppelganger, come to warn him of death. And again came the crazy drift of suspicion as to her sex. Was it a girl? Yet the infinite softness of her thigh against his palm, and the subtle warmth of her belly, were intensely female. He strained to listen; she was talking again.
    “It was just before Easter; and now I haven’t seen him for six weeks. He left. But the yearning for matter and the loss of it – that’s been going on for months. Only the first time, I was really there, and perhaps once or twice at other times, because he had a special touch that could bring me to it – oh, to what I mean by matter – not just a climax but a general sort of penetrating, uniting, completely, I felt complete –