Desolation by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online

grabbing it in case it was part of his mind.
    Left, quietness and safety and a place he had already been. Right, something unknown. He wasfree—away from Afresh and his father’s skewed influence—and as the Voice had told him so often, his life was his own.
    But that dream from last night still spoke to him.
    He turned left.
    Sometimes Cain believed he had an original idea, something elemental and unique, something that could change things. But he was never confident enough to believe in it.

 
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Chapter Three
Circus
    They tried. After his father died and Cain went to Afresh, and the extent of his mistreatment slowly revealed itself, the Voice and the Face did their best to help him sense real life.
    He was a teenager then, lost in his years, confused by his body and thoughts and everything around him. Ironically, in many areas he was as educated as anyone they had ever met. His father had allowed him access to an impressive library of reference books, which Cain read compulsively during those times when his father’s research and experimentation led him elsewhere. He had also spent a long time educating Cain himself, because Pure Sight would never manifest in someone without extensive knowledge. So Cain’s father had taught him numbers but not languages, because he said that the language of wisdom was universal. He had lectured in physics but not biology, because the flesh isweak. He had helped Cain understand the history of war, but never the tales of those who strove for peace, because chaos was the fundamental form of existence. And Cain had remained trapped in that old, rambling house in the country, forever denied the experience to complement his learning. He knew the great histories of Egypt, though he had never smelled the spice of its forbidden sands. He read of women and their beauty, though he had never seen a member of the opposite sex, not even his mother. He found endless cookery volumes celebrating feasts, banquets, the world’s foods and wines, but his father fed him the most tasteless, insipid concoctions imaginable.
    In one tome there were fifty essays written in celebration of Mozart. Cain was mesmerized. Such beauty and rapture in words, describing something so beyond his understanding. The only music he heard was the humming in the shadows, the tune that took years to progress from nothing to something he could never, ever forget. And that had been beyond his father’s knowing.
    So at Afresh they tried to bring him out of the deep, dark place his father had forced him into. And though their efforts were benign and designed only to help, for his first couple of years in the Home the siren had blasted Cain every single day. When he heard music, the siren erupted. If he tasted something new, it smashed the pleasure from him. If he looked at a painting, the siren’s sheer violence bled the colors to gray. He slowly came to believe that it was no longer real, but thatmade it worse. It meant that it was inside him, and he had no concept of how he could ever purge it from his mind.
    As the years went by so the siren receded, first in frequency and then in volume. It still found its voice from time to time, but Cain’s understanding of his father—what he had done, how, and why—seemed to temper it somewhat, and its influence faded away into bad memories and nasty dreams.
    They took him to a circus. At seventeen he was older than most of the children there, and probably more knowledgeable than many of the adults. But he had never eaten candy floss, toffee apples, or doughnuts, and he had never abandoned himself to unrestrained laughter or awe. The Voice talked consistently, trying to calm Cain as new sights and sounds opened up around him. He had been on trips out of Afresh many times, but they were always well planned to avoid too much exposure at any one time. The circus blew all that away. As they guided him into the Big Top and found a seat, Cain began