Castleview by Gene Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page A

worst, or fog. But the rain’s letting up, and when you do see it in rain or fog, it’s up really close, and that’s a trip. You can practically always see it if you go up to the scenic view after one and really look hard, but sometimes it’s way far away. You know those pictures they have?”
    Mercedes sipped her Coke. She had asked for the Super Size to see whether Seth would object, and had more than half of it left. “You mean like your grandmother painted? That’s the only one I’ve seen.”
    A black on yellow sign displayed a sharply curved arrow and warned: 40 MPH. Seth took it at sixty. “No, that’s people who just happened to catch it and drew it from what they remembered. Like, Grandma Roberts was pulling weeds and looked up, and there it was, sticking right up out of the trees on the other side of the cornfield. So she watched till it was gone—she says maybe ten minutes, but I think more like a minute—then she set up her art stuff and started the picture.”
    “You mean she saw it in the daylight?”
    “Damn straight. That happens sometimes too. I saw it like
that when I was a little kid. Take it from me, that’s something you remember. But the photos—”
    “I didn’t know they had any.”
    “Sure they do,” Seth told her. “Look, we’re going up there right now—suppose we see it. Okay, if we had a camera we could take a picture, but it probably wouldn’t be a very good picture.”
    “I’ve got a pretty good camera,” Mercedes said, “only it’s back home. We haven’t moved our stuff yet.”
    “What kind? An Instamatic?”
    “An Olympus. You know, the clamshell?”
    “Sure, I know them. It’s not a bad little camera, but it’s got almost a wide-angle lens. Say you want to get a picture, so you buy some really fast film and take your little Olympus up to the scenic view on a good clear night, around one or one-thirty. There’s the castle, ten or fifteen miles away. Snap! Back home you turn in your film at the drugstore, and you get back this little thirty-five neg, and the castle’s a tiny little speck in the middle of it. Then you get somebody to blow it up to some humongous size and cut off all the stuff around it, and there’s a lot of shimmer anyway from the distance. That’s if you were smart and set your camera on the stone railing they’ve got. If you held it in your hands, forget it.”
    Mercedes took another sip. “You really do know a lot about photography, don’t you?”
    “Sure. I worked in Burke’s Photo Supply this summer. Mr. Burke says he’s going to get me to come in after school whenever he needs me. He’s thinking about staying open evenings one day a week during the winter, just to try it out. The deal would be that I’d come in after, so he could go home and eat dinner. It would be Friday night, if he does it. I’ve got a camera with me right now, a Pentax. I took it in on trade, and he let me keep it. It’s an old model, but it’s got damn good glass.”
    “Can I see it?”
    Seth nodded. “I’ll get it out as soon as we stop. It’s in the
trunk.” He hesitated, suddenly embarrassed. “Listen, you don’t have to get out to look if you don’t want to. I mean, if it’s still raining. You can stay in the car.”
    “I want to. I’ve got a plastic thing to put over my hair. Is that where we’re going? The scenic view?”
    “That’s the best, you can see three counties. Not tonight, but on a clear day. Sometimes you can see the river, and into Iowa. I thought this rain was going to stop, you know?”
    “It’s not raining as hard as it was.”
    “Sure. But it’s still raining.”
    “That’s all right,” Mercedes said.
    She was watching the black, wooded hillside reel past; it seemed to her that the road they drove was an intruder in the same way that the blade of a saw would have been an intruder, vulgarly revealing the secret, almost silent life of the trees. You were supposed to see things in dark woods like this: bears,