Stillness & Shadows John Gardner (nice books to read .txt) 📖

a high-priced Girl Commando. She at once stepped around him and in front of him, reached up and poked him in the chest, and said, “Watch yerself, buster, or I’ll push yer face in.” His eyes widened, his mouth opened, and then he bent over and laughed, slapping his knee, and couldn’t stop. The fish man laughed too, and she had to stand there, leaning on her elbow, waiting to be served.

Her doctor said, in his dingy little office in Shaftsbury, “You realize, Joan, this hypnotism’s all very well, but that stuff’s in there working. You’re going to have to face up, before long, to another operation.”

“I know,” she said, “and another and another.”

“Well—” he said.

She smiled, listening to the ticking of his clock. “Not just yet. But soon. I promise.”

He shook his head, chewing on his pipe. “What’s your secret?” he said.

“I’m in love,” she said.

“Does your husband know?”

She leaned toward him confidentially. “My husband is a fool.”

Dr. Faris was nonplussed and looked at her forehead. “It doesn’t seem to bother you much,” he said.

“Well, you see, he’s rich.”

Driving home down the mountain afterward, she thought about it. They were rich—not that, in point of fact, they had all that much money. But his sad, hopeless stories made people who heard them or read them come alive, made them gentle, made them notice their compassion for one another. His readings had the effect of a really good funeral: they made people come together and defy that age-old horror of things, the restless churning of sudden births and deaths, a universe of clumsily bumping bits of force, a cry out of the grass—and they were better than funerals, because the horrors he wrote of were all made up, mere airy might’ve been. (She knew what horror was, knew in, excuse the expression, her guts. “Watch yerself, buster,” she said to Death, riding, sadly watching her, in the wide blue real-leather seat behind her back.)

As she walked into the house, Martin was shouting as if in Euripidean rage, defying the gods, cursing the gray earth that so patiently bore him, “God damn Bennington!” Either the college had sent him more forms or he’d stepped in some dogshit.

“Hi, Martin, I’m home!” she called.

“Hi, Mom,” Evan said, grinning, looking up from the carpet where he was reading a great, fat paperback, Martin’s last best-seller. A sign of their progress was that Martin’s mad rages no longer frightened Evan at all. Mary waved hello from the couch, where she was writing, not bothering to look up.

Martin hadn’t heard her call of greeting, still howling his anger like a Midwestern tornado. She poked her head in at the study door. “Bennington the College, dear, or Bennington the Dog?”

“You’re home,” he said, staring with murderous, icy eyes. But he loved her, it wasn’t personal.

“Mmm,” she said, nodding. “I’m home.”

SHADOWS

The external world of physics has become a world of shadows. In removing our illusion we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions … The sparsely spread nuclei of electric forces become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow.

—SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON

BOOK ONE

One

Something poked him on the shoulder, and a soft voice whispered in Craine’s good ear, “Detective, you’re being watched!”

He jerked his sharp nose and thick glasses from the book, heart leaping, throat constricting, just in time to see Two-heads Carnac’s blue choir robe go flying around the end of the bookshelf. Craine glanced left and right, trembling and blushing, half in rage, half in embarrassment, black eyebrows lowered, cheek muscles twitching, but so far as he could tell, no one had seen. The gloomy old bookstore—Tully’s Tome Shop: Used Books & Maps—was practically deserted, as usual. There might be browsers among the floor-to-ceiling stacks that ran the length of the store, butted against the brown cracked plaster wall on the street side, but in the area he could see—the dim central cavern with its map-cluttered tables, astrolabes, and faded, illegible old globes—no one had looked up. A white-haired professor, soft-featured, large-eyed, like a wise old white Tom in an expensive gray suit and spectacles, stood leafing through a dictionary, bent over the pages with a round, brass-framed magnifying glass—he was a man Craine knew, though the name now escaped him; a doctor, member of the medical faculty—and over by Wilbur Tully’s desk a young woman in a shabby black floor-length cape with a collar that went up into two sharp points stood picking through paperback books on the occult. Her hair had a dead look; maybe she was pregnant. Except for Tully himself, hunched over his ledger in his usual gray cardigan, frameless spectacles gleaming—behind him his grizzled brown bulldog waiting with infinite patience beside his dish—there was no one else in sight.

Craine stepped carefully to the end of the bookshelf where the choir robe had disappeared. At the nearest of the tables that now came into view, Carnac sprawled as if he’d been there for hours, engrossed in a map of the Holy Land. “Maniac,” Craine muttered, and lowered his nose toward his book again, then pursed his lips and, with a curt little nod and a cunning look, as if someone had suggested it, moved back to where he’d been before, out of Carnac’s view. It was too much to hope that Two-heads would forget him, mercifully go trouble someone else. The whisper was still in Craine’s ear, like an itch: Detective, you’re being watched. He glanced to the left, past his shoulder, then quickly to the right. It wasn’t true; no one was watching him. “Maniac,” he whispered again, angrily. He spoke sternly, but, listening, he wasn’t convinced. He was by nature a suspicious man—it had saved his life on more occasions than one—and his years had taught him it was best to suspect the worst. As a matter of fact he’d been feeling all morning a weird impression