The Nonesuch and Others Read Online Free

inexplicable and horrible accident of all time—to end up square like that, an eighteen inch cube with his flattened face on one side—or the Thin People did it to him after he talked to me. And at the time, I wasn’t willing to take the chance.
    Accident? I didn’t think so. Thin People? Well, the trouble is I thought I’d seen one of them…maybe. So they were either real or it was a bad case of the dt’s. Whichever, it had scared me enough I packed my bags (plastic bags, that is) and portable typewriter, and got out.
    And as for Lois or Lori or Lorraine (shit, I can’t even be sure of her name now) I’ve done almost as good a job of forgetting her as I thought I had done of forgetting the Thin People. So may your poor buried ashes rest in peace, Diary.
    But as for the Thin People—
    —I hate to admit this, but there have been reminders…
    Diaries go year by year, usually. And so do you, Diary. Or you should but you’re three years out of date, just a notebook now. Still, what the hell, I can talk to you because you’re not a shrink and you can’t talk back. Or maybe you can.
    Let’s turn one or two of your pages back to find that time I took a holiday in Cyprus. The sun, the sea, and the sand. And no booze. I was over it. I had a good job up in the north-east, Newcastle, and I was in control. All those bars, those alfresco tavernas—all that cheap Keo beer in big brown bottles—that Metaxa, clear Ouzo, dusty resinata ? Hell, no! No way! Make mine a diet Coke. Water, even. How clean can you get?
    And I would look at the holidaymakers in the Cypriot night—all tipsy, some stoned, others flat out—and think, “God, what clowns we make of ourselves!” But now, when I think about clowns, I think of something else.
    Clowns: they used to scare me as a kid and still do, even more now. But I’ll get to that.
    Out there in Cyprus, however, well it was a great holiday. Only one thing spoiled it; one little nothing kind of thing, a dream I had that turned into something else. And here it is as I wrote it down in your pages, Diary:
    … I think I was dreaming about those Thin People that Barmy Bill told me about — I think I probably dream of them quite frequently, but can’t remember too much about it when I’m awake. Just as well, I suppose. Old Bill told me they looked a lot like men in the daylight — not that they were out very much in the daylight — but that at night they were more themselves. At night they unfolded themselves, like a joiner’s wooden ruler but fifteen feet long and incredibly thin. He said it was their science, totally different from ours, which let them manipulate matter differently. That was how they could do things with their bodies; even with…well, other bodies. Bill said their joints must be similar to the joints of certain insects…
    So that’s what I was thinking, or dreaming, as I came awake in my hammock under the grapevines, in the garden of the hotel where I was staying, near the British military base in Dhekelia. Or was it?
    Perhaps what I saw as I slowly woke up reminded me of that time in Barrows Hill. So that I wasn’t so much dreaming as reflecting — constructing or maybe reconstructing one event from the other — until both events merged, flowing into each other in the surreal interval between true dreaming and full consciousness.
    But as for what I actually saw as I awakened … well, that was more dreamlike than a dream! In fact, and if I didn’t know it now to be a natural phenomenon, I would have to say it was nightmarish.
    Who am I kidding, it was nightmarish!
    Close by. In the cropped grass, I noticed that a small area of the ground was moving…
    Now consider: the place where I was staying was rather rare on a Mediterranean island, insofar as the garden had real grass. And the owner was very proud of it. He watered it daily and cut it twice a week — despite that it didn’t need it. I saw him watering and cutting away at it that morning. Maybe