Death Will Have Your Eyes Read Free

Except…
    Except that Gabrielle had been a big part of my transformation. Except that I carried Gabrielle, carried my feelings for her and memories of our years together, within me now, and always would. Maybe none of us finally is anything more than the residue of those he’s known and loved.
    Blaise’s cratered face came back to me: “You must not think . Cast away everything, David, let it go, let your spine become brain. The body has an intelligence of its own, far older than your mind’s.”
    Blaise had trained me, trained us all. Taught us to stay alive. And if ever I had loved anyone in that prior life, I had loved him. Leaving the agency, leaving that life, I felt that I had to leave Blaise as well: one of the few regrets I allowed myself, but it was a profound one.
    In my years as a soldier (for that’s what we always called ourselves, among ourselves) I lived without personal identity, slipping in and out of roles and temporary lives as easily, and as readily, as others change clothing. I had been many people, known many people, taken part in many dramas and not a few (albeit unintentional) comedies. One thing I knew absolutely was that the stories we live by are as real as anything else is. As long as we do live by them. Even when we know they’re lies.
    Towards morning I dreamed that Gabrielle was above me, moving steadily upon me, head thrown back and black hair catching light from the window. Then something changed and my hands, reaching up, touched not flesh, but canvas, steel, the rough grain of wood. I opened my eyes again in the dark and saw it there over me. Half-formed, unalive, its weight ever increasing, it continued to move upon me: the sculpture I’d left behind, unfinished, at the studio.

3
    Towards dawn another thing happened as well.
    The old training, the reflexes, were flooding back all at once, and I don’t know what cue alerted me, some minutely perceptible shift in the volume of sound outside, a muted footfall or mere sense of presence, but I was awake, waiting for the sound, before the sound came.
    The sound was my door being tried.
    There was a pause, a silence, then the lisp of a flexible pick entering the door lock. Senses at full alert, I could almost feel the tension as again the knob was turned hard right, till it stopped, and held there. The pick raked its way slowly, methodically, along the lock’s pin-tumblers.
    It had happened a few times before when I was concentrating like this, and it happened now: I was outside my self, in another self. I watched my hands (except they weren’t mine) working at the lock, felt a trickle of sweat down the middle of my back, became aware of the weight of a folded paper in the side pocket of my coat.
    For a moment it rippled back from there. I sat in a large rented room off a hall so narrow that people had to turn sideways to pass one another. The room smelled of canned meats and beef stew, stale coffee, the bathroom four doors away. Bedroom and living room furniture were jumbled together indiscriminately. A stack of newspapers squatted under a low window looking out onto a wall, with a sliver of morning light showing at the top.
    Then the ripples spread. I was nineteen and terrified, running beneath a thick canopy of green. Minutes ago there had been a riot of birdsong; now the only sounds were my boots slapping into puddles and sucking their way back out, the staccato gabble of those pursuing me in the distance, my own thudding heart.
    And, again, my heart pounding: but now when I reached out, my hand fell not against vines and undergrowth, but onto the waist of a slim, dark woman in white shorts and sandals. She stirred in her sleep.
    Then, like a thread suddenly unraveling, giving way, it was all gone. I was back in my own body and mind. Back with the old training, the old reflexes.
    By the time he got the door unlocked, I was out of bed and in a dark juncture of shelf and wall. By the time he crossed