Warp Read Free Page B

chip!” He dropped the ankle and stood up straight. “I’ll send you a postcard from the Reichstag. Does Steve have your address?”
    Hollis nodded. They shook hands.
    â€œOkay, dude.”
    â€œSuper.”
    Brian turned away, skipped once or twice as he got going, and jogged off along the crest of the hill. His sneakers pounded softly on the turf. Then he plunged down onto the slope, out of the sunlight, galloping out of control down towards the bottom.
    â€œWhoa!”
    Hollis watched him run easily through the parking lot and out along the edge of the road, until he disappeared around the bend. Hollis took his hands out of his pockets and blew into them to warm them up.
    A car horn blared behind him, a dissonant interval, and there was the sound of skidding tires. He turned around: the white Camry was stopped sideways in the middle of the road, blocking both lanes. An oncoming car had just barely managed to screech to a stop a few feet short of a collision. The driver honked his horn and shook both his hands at Hollis’s landlord. Apparently he’d started to pull out without looking, then panicked and changed his mind, and now he was trapped in between.
    As Hollis watched, the Camry made a couple of laborious cuts until it could swing back into its lane. His landlord honked his horn back at the other car and accelerated away out of sight.
    â€œGod, I have to get out of this city,” Hollis said to nobody.
    The old men in the village told stories about the Devilfish, but Malo had never believed them. Wings thirty feet wide, and horns, and a strange, horrible face on its underside. It only came into the bay at night.
    Malo came up to breathe. The speed with which it was dragging him piled up water against his chest. Already he was even with the sandbar that marked the mouth of the bay.
    He was doomed if the Devilfish reached the open sea—it would pull him out into the depths and drown him. There was an old wooden post that stood in the middle of the channel, that had been there for longer than the oldest fisherman in the village could remember, and Malo felt for it in the darkness.
    When he found it he took a deep breath and dove down to the bottom. He made a loop around it with the rope.
    His mind was racing. Would the old post hold? Or would he be dragged out to sea, to drown?
    By degrees the sunlight became more and more golden and less and less transparent. The wind was turning Hollis’s ears pink against his short, razor-cut hair, which was dyed a bright white blond. Afternoon was moving into early evening. He’d locked his bike to a guard barrier made of thick rusty cables, and past the barrier came a thin line of trees, and past them the ground kept sloping away downhill. Far away in the distance he could see the rest of Brookline—bare trees and evergreens and brick buildings all mixed together, still lit up by the sun.
    He started jogging down the hill. His shoes slipped on the grass, and he had to catch himself with his hands. When he got to the bottom he was breathing hard, and he had to bend over with his hands on his knees for a few seconds before he could go on.
    He was a mysterious figure—arrogant, aristocratic, coldly beautiful, impossible to understand. Even those who tried to draw closer to him, lured by his wealth or the secret of his success, found him enigmatic. Rumors flew around him: bizarre affairs, ruinous addictions, fortunes lost and won, crimes both passionate and dispassionate. His resources of indifference were immense, his capacity for remorse minimal. His contempt for those around him was absolute and matched only by an equal contempt for himself.
    Hollis rode back from the park in twilight, pumping hard down the hill, with sunlight flashing behind the trees and casting thick orange bars across the road. There were no sidewalks this far from the center of town, and he rode the very edge of the asphalt, sometimes straying off onto the