By Blood We Live by Stephen King, John Joseph Adams Read Free Book Online Page B

to each other, hadn't we, I had been asking him questions, no, telling him things. And I felt suddenly I was losing my equilibrium or slipping back into a dream.
    No. Rather I had all but caught the fragment of some dream from the past. That rush of atmosphere that can engulf one at any moment of the day following when something evokes the universe that absorbed one utterly in sleep. I mean I heard our voices for an instant, almost in argument, and I saw Father in his top hat and black overcoat rushing alone through the streets of the West End, peering into one door after another, and then, rising from the marble-top table in the dim smoky music hall you. . . your face.
    "Yes. . ."
    Go back, Julie! It was Father's voice.
    ". . . to penetrate the soul of it," I insisted, picking up the lost thread. But did my lips move? "To understand what it is that frightened him, enraged him. He said, 'Tear it down!'"
    ". . . you must never, never, can't do that." His face was stricken, like that of a schoolboy about to cry.
    "No, absolutely, we don't want to, either of us, you know it. . . and you are not a spirit!" I looked at his mud-spattered boots, the faintest smear of dust on that perfect white cheek.
    "A spirit?" he asked almost mournfully, almost bitterly. "Would that I were."
    Mesmerized I watched him come towards me and the room darkened, and I felt his cool silken hands on my face. I had risen. I was standing before him, and I looked up into his eyes.
    I heard my own heartbeat. I heard it as I had the night before, right at the moment I had screamed. Dear God, I was talking to him! He was in my room and I was talking to him! And I was in his arms.
    "Real, absolutely real!" I whispered, and a low zinging sensation coursed through me so that I had to steady myself against the bed.
    He was peering at me as if trying to comprehend something terribly important to him, and he didn't respond. His lips did have a ruddy look to them, a soft look for all his handsomeness, as if he had never been kissed. And a slight dizziness had come over me, a slight confusion in which I was not at all sure that he was even there.
    "Oh, but I am," he said softly. I felt his breath against my cheek, and it was almost sweet. "I am here, and you are with me, Julie. . ."
    "Yes. . ."
    My eyes were closing. Uncle Baxter sat hunched over his desk and I could hear the furious scratch of his pen. "Demon wretch!" he said to the night air coming in the open doors.
    "No!" I said. Father turned in the door of the music hall and cried my name.
    "Love me, Julie," came that voice in my ear. I felt his lips against my neck. "Only a little kiss, Julie, no harm. . ." And the core of my being, that secret place where all desires and all commandments are nurtured, opened to him without a struggle or a sound. I would have fallen if he had not held me. My arms closed about him, my hands slipping into the soft silken mass of his hair.
    I was floating, and there was as there had always been at Rampling Gate an endless peace. It was Rampling Gate I felt around me, it was that timeless and impenetrable soul that had opened itself at last. . . A power within me of enormous ken. . . To see as a god sees, and take the depth of things as nimbly as the outward eyes can size and shape pervade. . . Yes, I whispered aloud, those words from Keats, those words. . . To cease upon the midnight without pain. . .
    No. In a violent instant we had parted, he drawing back as surely as I.
    I went reeling across the bedroom floor and caught hold of the frame of the window, and rested my forehead against the stone wall.
    For a long moment I stood with my eyes closed. There was a tingling pain in my throat that was almost pleasurable where his lips had touched me, a delicious throbbing that would not stop.
    Then I turned, and I saw all the room clearly, the bed, the fireplace, the chair. And he stood still exactly as I'd left him and there was the most appalling distress in