Watson, Ian - Novel 10 Read Online Free

certain sense of reality to
her, since what had happened had been quite unreal.
                 She
smiled coaxingly.
                 “I’d
better show you your rooms in the House.” She squeezed Jim’s hand.
                 “Well,
I’ll be —!” thought Jim. Did she want him to make love to her, to burn out the
awful experience? He knew that death was a kind of lover to some women. But
what had happened here this afternoon had been an act of rape . . .

           THREE
     
                 After collecting his valise from the
runabout, Jim walked back with Marta to the stone bridge over the moat. Twin
sculptures flanked the way across: aluminium-winged butterflies a couple of
feet high, mounted on white marble hourglasses. Gusts of wind set these
butterflies rotating like the turnstiles of an auto-shop.
                 Following
the ceremony of honour, the poet ought to have crossed this same bridge to
separate himself from life in Egremont, and presently — in days or weeks, at
the discretion of Alice Huron and his own inner promptings — from life itself.
Right now the two metal butterflies looked like great sharp spinning knives to
Jim. The murder had contaminated everything precious.
                 The
glass doors whispered apart, and they entered a crowded foyer. At least a score
of residents had gathered here. Voices were raised, some shrill and fearful,
others angry and complaining. The whole death sequence of these clients had
been set back. But at least they had taken refuge in the House, and an
attendant and a guide were doing their best to soothe the situation.
                 Marta
hurried Jim through the small crowd and led him along to the elevator core.
They rose up to the twelfth tier.
                 This
high up the pyramid there was space for just four staff apartments, one at each
point of the compass. Jim’s new home faced west. As Marta held the door open
for him, the westering sun was flooding through the canted glass louvres,
dappling the local pine furnishings with shadows of yucca, holly, firethofn and
fuchsia that grew outside on the balcony. Perspex privacy baffles stood at the
north- and south-west corners of this balcony, and through the aerial garden
was a view of distant suburbs fading into farmland.
                 The
lounge opened on to a bedroom with white Venetian blinds. Jim dumped his bag on
the bed. Returning to the lounge, he switched on the TV set.
                 Mayor
Barnes stood addressing the camera. To judge by a backdrop of slanted glass
and rose bushes with white blooms, he was being filmed elsewhere in the House.
                 Barnes?
Had Resnick made a fool of himself by shouting at the news gatherers? True, the
electronic news would have been subject to a thirty second delay loop for
better editing before transmission — though the first vivid, blood-stained
images of the poet crashing back on to the turf would have gone out as filmed;
everyone had been struck dumb, to begin with.
                 Barnes
looked quietly composed.
                 “.
. . but we must not simply grieve at the manner in which Norman Harper has been
cheated of his own good death. I believe that Norman would have wished us all
to rededicate ourselves to the ideals
represented by these Houses — especially if we hail from the unreconstructed
era when a person’s death had no place in the social system but was something
outside of it, something alien. If we suspect that we are polluted by the false
programming of the old days — if we feel a mad ambition in ourselves to be
frozen, or reincarnated, or translated on to some astral plane to avoid the
truth of our life’s end — why don’t we all visit our local House of Death to
discover the beauty of dying at the proper time? Why don’t we sign on for a
seminar? The Houses are places of detachment, yes