Nightspawn Read Free Page A

backward out of my view. Some seconds of complete silence followed, during which I was conscious of my left eyebrow travelling in rapid jerks up my forehead, then came another crack, and a roar, and the fat man shot out of the alley and charged toward me across the square, his arms flapping, ankles wobbling, a scarlet blossom bursting in his throat. Suddenly he halted. I swear I could hear his breathing. Time passed. He looked from right to left, leaning slightly forward, with his head bent. A crafty gleam flashed from his spectacles, and one of his plump hands stole to the back of his neck. What his fingers found there was too much for him. He rose up on his toes, threw back his head and let fly at the sky a howl of woe, groaned, gagged, there was blood in his mouth, came a tinkle of glass and six spilled coins as he spun through a pirouette and crashed to the ground spraying dark gore and the contents of his pockets before him into the dust. His legs twitched. The bird above me in the tree flapped its wing and sang a little song.
    I did not move. It was not that I could not move, no, none of your paralysis of shock or any of that nonsense, just, I did not move. I was waiting for something, as I had waited for the sound of the first shot. Once again my patience had its prize. It must have been one of my better days. Another figure came from the alleyway into the square. He was short and stringy, with a scarred mouth, and the blank still eyes of a bird. A sailor certainly, he brought no hint of the sea, but of the back streets of a hundred seaport cities, the mean bars, the whores, the gutters rife with discarded prophylactics. A great deal to perceive in a split and violent second? I came upon him again, of course, of course. He did not see me, or if he did he chose to regard me as an hallucination. He crept across the square and knelt beside the fat man, and his hands went scurrying swiftlyfrom pocket to pocket. Then I moved. The sailor lifted his head at my slow approach, and we gaped at each other in something like astonishment, though why I should have been surprised, I could not, and can not say. He turned, crouched like a sprinter, and fled soundlessly.
    I showed a threatening foot to the drowsy cat which had left its windowsill to investigate with sly sidelong glances the figure upon the ground. The fat felled man lay on his back with his legs flung wide and both arms trapped under him. One of his shoes had come off, and stood now beside the deserted foot, where a plump pink toe sprouted from a hole in the sock. He wore a baggy pair of trousers, and a gay red shirt, across which a troupe of dusky maidens danced, evoking the far south seas. His spectacles , shattered, dangled from his ear, and his wide eyes stared heedlessly at the luminous sky. There was a neat round puncture in his chest, which left a dancing girl decapitated, and a second ragged mouth gaped in his throat, marking the last bullet’s exit. His attitude was one of extreme embarrassment, at being caught in such a helpless and undignified position. An angry red stain was spreading beneath him in the dust, and an ant with a broken leg staggered through the mire. Bright coins lay scattered around him, and there was a little phial of blue-tinted glass, violet almost, the lid and neck of which had been shot away. The broken points were tipped with beads of blood, like a tiny crown of rubies. The memory of a drowned man seen long ago came to me. Querulous and strident voices approached, in the streets or in my head, I knew not which, it was all one, I turned and ran.
6
    Some of my happiest times on the island were spent sniggering in secret at the newly-arrived tourists wandering through the maze of the village, in lost blithe circles, toward a harbour they would never reach, unless deflected by someone in the know. How precious was that look of surprise dawning on the face of a blue-haired matron, clad in indecent shorts, as she glimpsedfor the third time my