Memory Wall: Stories by Anthony Doerr Read Free Book Online

feet grew speedier and lighter; their whole soul was bound up in that fortune, that whole lifetime of extravagance and pleasure, that lay waiting there for each of them.
    Roger is tapping his temple with one finger. His eyes are whirlpools into which she must not look. I am not here, Alma thinks.
    “But from another angle what does it look like?” the man is saying. “Houseboy lets himself in the gate, through the door, watches you dodder about, moves beyond the edges of your memory. Lined up for his inheritance, surely. Fingers in the till. He eats the sausages, too, doesn’t he? Probably pays the bills. He knows the kind of money you’re spending with that doctor.”
    “Stop talking,” says Alma. She thinks, I am not here. I am not anywhere.
    “I did it to the boy,” he says. “I can tell you, you don’t even know what I’m saying. I found him in the Company Gardens and who was he? Just an orphan. I paid for the operation. I fed him, I took care of him. I brought him back. I keep him healthy, don’t I? I let him wander around.”
    The headlights of a passing car swing through the yard, drain through the trees. Alma’s fear rises into her throat. The headlights fade. The wind flies over the house.
    “Stop talking right now,” she says.
    “You eat now,” says Roger. “You eat and I’ll stop talking and the boy upstairs will find what I’m looking for and then you can go die in peace.”
    She blinks. For a moment the man in her kitchen has transformed into a demon: imperious, towering; he peers down at her from beneath a limestone brow. He is waving his terrible hands.
    “We all have a gorgon in here,” the demon says. He points to his chest.
    “I know who you are.” She says this quietly and with great intensity. “I see you for what you are.”
    “I bet you do,” says Roger.
    N IGHTMARE
    In a nightmare Alma finds herself in the fossil exhibit she went to with Harold fifty years before. All the gallery’s overhead lights have been switched off. The only illumination comes from sweeping, powder-blue beams that slice through the room, catching each skeleton in turn and leaving it again in darkness, as if strange beacons are revolving in the lawns outside the high windows.
    The gorgon Harold was so excited about is no longer there. The iron brace that supported the skeleton remains, and a silhouette of dust marks where it stood. But the gorgon is gone.
    Alma’s heart quickens; her breath catches. Her hands are at her sides, but in the dream she can feel herself clawing at her own throat.
    A column of blue light, swinging through the arcade of museum windows, shows cobwebs, shows the skeletal monsters in their various postures, shows the empty pedestal, shows Alma. Shadows rear up and are sucked back into darkness. The roof above her makes oceanic groans. The purpose of her errand veers past her, there, then gone.
    Then she sees. In the window looms a demon. Nostrils, a jaw, a face chalked white with dry skin, and two yellow canine incisors, each as long as her forearms, extend from a scaly pink gum. It exhales through its wet, reptilian nose; twin ovals ofvapor cloud the window. Saliva hangs from its lower jaw in pendulous bobs. The light veers past; the beast ducks lower. Its pleated throat convulses; it peers at her with one eye, spiderwebbed with filigrees of blood vessels, whole tiny river systems trundling blood deeper and deeper into the yellow of its eyeball, unknowable, terrible, wet—it is a demon dredged up from some black corner of memory; even from across the gallery, she can see into the crypt of its eye, huge and unblinking, and she can smell it, too; the creature smells like a swamp, riparian, of mire and ooze, and a thought, a scrap, a line from a book, rises to her from some abscess of memory and she wakes with a sentence on her lips:
They are coming. They are coming and they don’t mean well
.
    S ATURDAY
    The southeaster throws a thick sheet of fog over Table Mountain. In