Garden of Evil by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

can only be happier if you’re happy to begin with.’
    â€˜Well, all right. It will make him marginally less grouchy.’
    Jim made himself a Swiss-cheese-and-tomato sandwich for breakfast. He would rather have had pastrami, but he had used it all up yesterday and there was nothing else left in the fridge. He would almost have preferred to share Tibbles’ turkey dinner, which actually smelled quite tasty. Tibbles didn’t even look up at him, even when he tucked his briefcase under his arm and went to the front door and said, ‘Later, you obscenely fat cat.’ Tibbles had his head in his dish, gobbling.
    As Jim drove to college, his thoughts kept going around and around like some nauseating carousel ride that wouldn’t come to an end, no matter how much he wanted to get off. Again and again he saw that dark shadowy figure, twisting off his balcony like smoke; and the same shadowy figure in last night’s dream about his car. Those glittering eyes, inside that hood. Again and again he pictured the nightmare that Summer had described to him, about lines of people shuffling toward the final fiery furnace. Then he saw the pale self-satisfied face that kept appearing in Ricky’s portrait of The Storyteller, in spite of all his efforts to paint him differently, and the same man in white, sitting at the bar yesterday evening, mocking him.
    He didn’t want to think about what had happened at the restaurant because it was too embarrassing. You had to be seriously off your head to get yourself barred from Barney’s Beanery.
    All the same, he couldn’t help thinking that all of these nightmares and all of these incidents were somehow entangled with each other, like the tangled-up snakes on the shadowy figure’s ring. It was impossible to distinguish where dreams ended and reality began. Or maybe they weren’t dreams. Maybe they were
all
real – the shadowy figure and the man in white and Summer’s nightmare about Armageddon. Or maybe
none
of them was real. Or maybe they were just coincidences and Summer was right and he was going nuts.
    It required some complicated maneuvering, but he managed to park his car in the space marked J. ROOK. Somehow he didn’t feel like tempting fate by parking in Royston Denman’s space. It wasn’t smoggy this morning, unlike his dream, but you never knew. He made sure he locked his car, too, because he never usually bothered. He didn’t want to come back at the end of the day and find some shadowy character in a hood sitting in the driver’s seat, offering to drive him to God alone knows where.
    He was too late for Dr Ehrlichman’s assembly, of course, which was partly due to the crawling traffic along Sunset, and partly due to the fact that he had deliberately left his apartment about ten minutes too late to make it in time.
    He climbed the two flights of stairs to the second floor and walked along to the end of the corridor to Art Studio Four. Assembly hadn’t finished yet, so the building was empty, and his footsteps echoed.
    Before he opened the battered, blue-painted door, he peered through the porthole. Instead of the separate desks of Special Class Two, there were four long benches, all of them spattered with inks and paints of every conceivable color. The walls were hung with scores of paintings and portraits – landscapes and abstracts and odd-looking animals by students who seemed to believe that horses had legs as thin as golf clubs and bodies the shape of overstuffed couches.
    There were shelves on either side of the studio, too, crowded with sculptures and pottery in various stages of completion. Most of the human figures were lumpy and misshapen, more like trolls than people, and the jugs and bowls looked as if they been molded during a disastrous out-take of the pottery scene in
Ghost
.
    Jim did one thing more before he opened the door. He craned his head and looked up toward the ceiling. If there