Darling Clementine by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online

whispers. “Wish I was.”
    I know what he means. I am so glad to be dead I want to kiss him. Now I can sit down against a wall, safe from harm, and wait until I or some other fortunate is discovered and the lights come on again.
    I sit down against the wall, facing the room’s only door, which I see as a rectangle of the dimmest gray in the blackness. I wait. Minutes go by—slowly, but a lot more like minutes than when I was wandering around with that knife-wielding father-killer on the loose. No one can come through the door without my seeing them. I wait and wait.
    Then, a silhouette on the dim rectangle. It pauses, enters. It is Arthur!
    â€œArthur! Arthur!” I hiss. “Over here!”
    He comes over, pausing on the way to bark his shin and curse. Then he is standing above me.
    â€œSam?”
    â€œArthur! Scream,” I say. “Discover me, so they’ll turn the bloody lights back on.”
    â€œWhat’s the matter, Sam?” he says. “Scared?” He kneels down in front of me.
    â€œYes, I’m scared! Why would I want you to scream if I wasn’t scared, you idiot?” say I.
    I feel Arthur’s hands on my jeans, unzipping my fly, passing inside, down over my pubic hair to my vagina, which begins to gush at once in my high-pitched state of jumbled terror, relief, frustration and excitement.
    â€œSo you want me to scream,” says Arthur, several of his fingers, maybe his whole hand, swimming into this hot fountain between my legs.
    â€œYes!” I hiss, but I am giggling now. Panting and giggling.
    â€œWhat will you give me?” says Arthur.
    â€œAnything, anything.”
    â€œWill you marry me, Sam?”
    â€œWhat?” I have an orgasm: a small one, but elegant and I am amused by its presumption.
    â€œI love you, Samantha,” says Arthur. “Will you marry me?”
    â€œOh. Oh, Arthur.” I am gushing, it seems, from both ends. “Oh yes. Yes.”
    His hand slips out of my cunt and he lets out a shriek so loud, so high-pitched that I am sure it will shatter one of the two glass candle holders that Jake is so proud of.
    There is the sound of footsteps approaching. Lights go on around the house. Quickly, I zip up my jeans. Lansky—in an effort, no doubt, to avoid the appearance of guilt—is the first into the room. He snaps on the light. The glare hurts my eyes and I turn to one side.
    And I am face to face with the beatific smile of Isabella, who has been sitting not six inches away from me all this time.
    My reaction to this little revelation, I suspect, takes care of the other candle holder.
    It just came to me with a great shock that Arthur’s name is Arthur. Or not exactly a great shock, so much as a sort of reverberating pip! but all the same what makes it so shocking, or so pipping, is that that is King Arthur’s name, too, the pip here deriving from the fact that I am, or was, something of a King Arthur fanatic.
    The craze has passed now but there was a time—it’s so odd that this did not occur to me before—when Arthur, King not my, inhabited all my days. It began about five years ago, while I was still in school, when Richard Burton brought the revival of the Lerner and Lowe musical “Camelot” to Lincoln Center. To be exact, it began when Burton, who was much shorter than I had imagined and seemed to me to have something of an oversized head, peered lugubriously off-stage and sang:
    â€œDon’t let it be forgot,
    That once there was a spot,
    For one brief shining moment,
    That was known
    As
    Camelot.”
    The point being that the great civilization of the Round Table had fallen because Lancelot and Queen Guinevere had been at it and, anyway, I wept, I don’t mind confessing. I went home and began reading. I read T. H. White’s Once And Future King , and then Tennyson’s “Idylls,” then Malory’s Morte , then Chrétien De Troyes’ romances