Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online

first-time novelist.
    Then, even as
Carrion Comfort
was appearing in its brief hardcover stint as a special edition from Dark Harvest . . . (one young speculator in California sold his mother’s insurance so that he could buy up one thousand copies of the book— a full one third of the print run, but I got him back for it. Besides throwing him and his lackeys out of an Orange County bookstore when he dragged in all one thousand copies for me to sign, I later learned from a friend that the fellow had fallen behind on his payments on the California storage shed where he stored the one thousand volumes, waiting for them to reach a certain high collector’s price before selling, and the storage owner seized them . . . and sold them at cover price. I bought as many as I could. But I digress.) . . . even as the Dark Harvest hardcover of
Carrion Comfort
was quickly appearing and disappearing, Dean Koontz, totally without my knowledge (I’d never met him), was convincing Warner Books to publish it as a nine-hundred-plus-page, small-print paperback.
    The paperback came out in 1990, the same year as my Bantam Doubleday Dell novel
The Fall of Hyperion
, my long novella
Entropy’s Bed at Midnight
from Lord John’s Press, and my first collection of short fiction,
Prayers to Broken Stones
. (I told you I was keeping busy.)
    Finally, thanks to the efforts of a bestselling writer I hadn’t yet met and had never spoken to, simply because he thought it was a book worth reading, readers could find and read
Carrion Comfort
. . . in its complete form.
    When shall we three meet again?
    In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
    When the hurlyburly’s done,
    When the battle’s lost and won.
    That will be ere the set of sun.
    Reader, I hope you enjoy this Twentieth Anniversary Edition of
Carrion Comfort
. I wish you good luck in avoiding the real mind vampires in this life who wish to play with you as if they were the cat and you a ball of yarn. And, finally, Reader, I wish you luck in vanquishing the monsters you do have to meet . . . and in celebrating the mentors who have and will again fill your life with unanticipated joy.
    — DAN SIMMONS
    Colorado, July 2009

“Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist— slack they may be— these last strands of man In me or, most weary, cry
I can no more
. . .”
    — GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

PROLOGUE
    Chelmno, 1942
    S aul Laski lay among the soon-to-die in a camp of death and thought about life. Saul shivered in the cold and dark and forced himself to remember details of a spring morning— golden light touching the heavy limbs of willows by the stream, a field of white daisies beyond the stone buildings of his uncle’s farm.
    The barracks was silent except for an occasional rasping cough and the furtive burrowings of Musselmänner, the living dead, vainly seeking warmth in the cold straw. Somewhere an old man coughed in a wracking spasm which signaled the end of a long and hopeless struggle. The old one would be dead by morning. Or even if he survived the night, he would miss the morning roll call in the snow, which meant that he would be dead before morning ended.
    Saul curled away from the glare of the searchlight pouring in through frosted panes and pressed his back against the wooden mortises of his bunk. Splinters scraped at his spine and ribs through the thin cloth he wore. His legs began to shake uncontrollably as the cold and fatigue worked at him. Saul clutched at his thin thighs and squeezed until the shaking stopped.
    I will live
. The thought was a command, an imperative he drove so deep into his consciousness that not even his starved and sore-ridden body could defy his will.
    When Saul had been a boy a few years earlier, an eternity earlier, and his Uncle Moshe had promised to take him fishing at his farm near Cracow, Saul had taught himself the trick of imagining, just before he fell asleep, a smooth, oval rock upon which he wrote the hour and minute at