Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams Read Free Book Online

was simple, wooden and small, about his own size.  A Monk-size door, painted white, with a single, slightly dented brass knob slightly less than halfway up one side.  It was set simply in the rock face, with no explanation as to its origin or purpose.
    Hardly knowing how he dared, the poor startled Monk staggered to his feet and, leading his horse, walked nervously forward towards it.  He reached out and touched it.  He was so startled when no alarms went off that he jumped back.  He touched it again, more firmly this time.
    He let his hand drop slowly to the handle -- again, no alarms.  He waited to be sure, and then he turned it, very, very gently.  He felt a mechanism release.  He held his breath.  Nothing.  He drew the door towards him, and it came easily.  He looked inside, but the interior was so dim in contrast with the desert sun outside that he could see nothing.  At last, almost dead with wonder, he entered, pulling the horse in after him.
    A few minutes later, a figure that had been sitting out of sight around the next outcrop of rock finished rubbing dust on his face, stood up, stretched his limbs and made his way back towards the door, patting his clothes as he did so.

CHAPTER 6

    ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
    A stately pleasure-dome decree:’

    The reader clearly belonged to the school of thought which holds that a sense of the seriousness or greatness of a poem is best imparted by reading it in a silly voice.  He soared and swooped at the words until they seemed to duck and run for cover.

    ‘Where Alph, the sacred river ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
       Down to a sunless sea.’

    Richard relaxed back into his seat.  The words were very, very familiar to him, as they could not help but be to any English graduate of St Cedd’s College, and they settled easily into his mind.
    The association of the college with Coleridge was taken very seriously indeed, despite the man’s well-known predilection for certain recreational pharmaceuticals under the influence of which this, his greatest work, was composed, in a dream.
    The entire manuscript was lodged in the safe-keeping of the college library, and it was from this itself, on the regular occasion of the Coleridge Dinner, that the poem was read.

    ‘So twice five miles of fertile ground
    With walls and towers were girdled round:
    And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
    Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
    And here were forests ancient as the hills,
    Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.’

    Richard wondered how long it took.  He glanced sideways at his former Director of Studies and was disturbed by the sturdy purposefulness of his reading posture.  The singsong voice irritated him at first, but after a while it began to lull him instead, and he watched a rivulet of wax seeping over the edge of a candle that was burning low now and throwing a guttering light over the carnage of dinner.

    ‘But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
    Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
    A savage place! as holy and enchanted
    As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
    By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’

    The small quantities of claret that he had allowed himself during the course of the meal seeped warmly through his veins, and soon his own mind began to wander, and provoked by Reg’s question earlier in the meal, he wondered what had lately become of his former... was friend the word?  He seemed more like a succession of extraordinary events than a person.  The idea of him actually having friends as such seemed not so much unlikely, more a sort of mismatching of concepts, like the idea of the Suez crisis popping out for a bun.
    Svlad Cjelli.  Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, ‘popular’ was hardly right.  Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated about, those too were true.  But popular?  Only in the sense that a serious accident on the motorway might be popular -- everyone slows