Angry Lead Skies Read Free

another one of his stories. But then somebody broke into his flat. While some of his family were there. Which is weird, because the Proses don’t have a pot to pee in. Then, next day, this morning, they came to the stable. Three of them. Three strange, shiny women. I’ve been letting Kip use a corner of the smithy for a workshop. He does his projects there. They tried to drag him off.”
    “You didn’t let them?”
    “Of course I didn’t let them.” He was offended because I’d even asked. “Though it wasn’t all me. They seemed extremely distracted by the horses. Afraid of them, even.”
    “That just sounds like basic common sense to me.”
    “You shouldn’t joke that way, Garrett.” Playmate just will not believe the truth about horses.
    “These guys know horses mean trouble and they’ve got a beef with this kid and those things are somehow a surprise to you?”
    Some people view the world through a whole different set of spectacles.
    Playmate chose not to pursue the debate. “Their eyes were weird, Garrett. Almost like holes. Or like there were little patches of fog right there hiding them when they looked straight at you.”
    I tried to imagine the encounter. Playmate abhors violence, yet, for a nonviolent idealist, he can be totally convincing in any argument that steps on a banana peel and slides off the intellectual plane. Playmate has sense enough to understand that not everyone shares his views. There are some people that need hammering and others that just plain need killing. There are people out there even a mother couldn’t love.
    “These visitors some new kind of breed?” All the races infesting TunFaire seem capable of interbreeding. Often the mechanics aren’t easy to visualize but the results are out there on the street. At times nature takes a very strange turn. And some of the strangest are among my friends.
    Kip shook his head. Playmate told me, “Give me a sheet of paper. I’ll draw you a picture.” He produced a small, polished cherrywood box with silver fittings. When opened it revealed a battery of artist’s tools. He took out a couple of sticks I decided had to be Kip’s inventions.
    “Another unsuspected talent.” I pushed over a torn sheet of paper. I’d only just started using its back side.
    I recalled seeing charcoal drawings around Playmate’s place but I never wondered enough about them to make a direct connection.
    This detecting business requires great curiosity and attention to the tiniest details.
    I was amazed once Playmate got started. “You’re in the wrong racket, Play.”
    “Not much call for this kind of thing, Garrett.” His hand moved swiftly and confidently. “Maybe in a carnival.” He was a lefty, of course. They always are. The guy who did Eleanor probably had two left hands.
    The portrait took shape rapidly.
    “The original must’ve been one ugly critter.” It had a head like a bottom-up pear. It had a mouth so small it was fit to eat nothing but soup. No ears were evident but Playmate was still drawing.
    His hand moved slower and slower. A frown creased his forehead. Pinhead sweat beads appeared. He strained mightily to get his hand to do something it didn’t want to do. He gasped, “Less call than there is for new preachers.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “This won’t come out like what I saw. I wanted to draw the woman in charge. A small woman, average-looking with ginger hair. Cut off straight above her eyes and straight all the way around the rest, two inches down from where her ears should’ve been.”
    The thing he had drawn owned no ears.
    He was drawing something that wasn’t human. Its head was shaped something like an inverted pear. Its eyes were oversize, bulgy, teardrops shaped, evidently without pupils. He did not put in a nose. Instead, there were slits, unconnected, forming an inverted Y.
    I observed, “There isn’t any nose. And what about ears?”
    “I thought they were hidden under her hair. I guess... not.