The Messengers Read Online Free Page A

his head on his shoulder.
    “He’s dead. That man is dead,” I said. The reality was only just hitting me.
    “Come inside.”
    I had to stop myself from shaking. “What’s going on?” I said. I squeezed into his hut, and he locked the door, muffling the noise of the sea as surely as if he’d put his hand over its mouth.
    Peter sat in a chair, looking up at me. The sleep-mode light of a closed laptop blinked in the corner.
    “At least tell me who he was,” I said. “Because you
know
, don’t you?”
    “He was Samuel Richard Newman, and it was his time.”
    Samuel Richard Newman
. The name from the postcard.
    “You knew. I don’t know how, but you knew what was going to happen. And you made me watch it. I could report you.”
    He looked at me sadly. His stubble was blond, like little splinters of light wood, and his eyes were green and bright in the gloom of the hut, like they’d soaked up the light from the sun outside. “Report me to whom?” he said.
    “The police. I could call the police,” I said.
    He sighed as if he felt sorry for me. “And what would you tell them?”
    I realized how my story would sound to a normal person. They’d have me locked away in ten seconds flat.
    “Listen to me, Frances, because what I’m about to tell you is important. You have something special. A power. A curse. Call it what you want. I knew it the moment I saw you. I can help you use it. Responsibly. Accurately. So it does no harm to you or the people you love.”
    “What are you talking about?” I said. “This isn’t about
me
.”
    “Let me tell you what happened to Samuel Newman and my part in it. Some of this is going to sound familiar to you,” Peter said. He shifted his long legs, and his boots made a rasping sound on the dry wooden floor. “Two days ago, I was taking a late-morning walk along the beach and I began to feel light-headed. This is nothing new to me. It’s been happening since I was a boy. I sat down on the stones and I passed out. Some time later, I woke up in a daze and walked back here, to the hut. I began to paint the image you saw on the postcard.”
    He paused, waiting for me to say that this had happened to me. I didn’t give him the pleasure. But I did think of the drawing I had done after my most recent blackout. I had thought that I was just a messed-up kid, and as long as nobody saw the images spilling out of my head, then everything would be fine. Now I was beginning to recalculate my life, and I didn’t like the numbers I was getting.
    I shook my head. “No,” I heard myself say.
    “Yes,”
Peter said, and then continued his story. “I studied the scene with my jeweler’s loupe — the little magnifying glass — and began to work on finding the man in the car. The recipient. I had to work fast. The knowledge that’s been passed down tells us that we have two days between the drawing and the death. You have to deliver the message in that time, or else . . .” He trailed off, blinked, and then picked up his story from a different place. “Anyway, I knew I had seen his blue Fiesta before, and I was able to trace him from the number plate. He worked in a call center. He was single. He liked dance music. When you saw me with the loupe yesterday, I was checking the details for the last time.”
    “Are you seriously telling me . . . ?” I hesitated. It felt like if I said the words, I’d somehow make it true. “Are you trying to tell me that the drawings I do . . . the paintings you do . . . become
real
?”
    “Not until the recipient sees the message. Of course, he or she doesn’t see the real image the way we do. From what we can work out, they just see a collection of random shapes. Most messengers believe that the image somehow seeps into the subconscious. Nobody really knows how it works. But the recipient has to look at the postcard to make it happen.”
    I thought for a moment, then gasped. “You made me deliver it to him! You made me . . . You’re saying I