The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers Read Free Book Online Page A

revolver. I woke up when she touched the cold muzzle to my forehead. This is thirty-seven years ago, but I remember it as if it were last night – we were in a crummy motel south of Santa Monica Boulevard, on one of her low-life tours. I sat up and pushed the gun away, but she kept trying to get it aimed at me – she was laughing, irritated, cajoling, I wasn’t playing along properly – and when I pushed it back toward her it went off. Under her chin. I wrote a suicide note for her.”
    The old woman’s face was stony. Sydney sat back down.
    “I loved her,” she said. “If I’d known that resisting her would end up killing her, I swear, I wouldn’t have resisted.” She smiled at him belligerently. “Crush an ant sometime, and then smell your fingers. I wonder what became of the clothes we buried her in. Not a sweatshirt and jeans.”
    “A black linen suit,” said Sydney, “with a white blouse. They were damp.”
    “Well, groundwater, you know, even with a cement grave-liner. And a padded bra, for the photographs. I fixed it up myself, crying so hard I could barely see the stitches – I filled the lining with bird-seed to flesh her out.”
    Sydney recalled the vines that had seemed to be embroidered on Cheyenne’s bra, that first day. “It sprouted.”
    Rebecca laughed softly. “‘Quickens, gladly grows.’ She wants something from you.” Rebecca fumbled in a pocket of her skirt. “Bring the moon to free her from these yellowed pages.”
    Sydney squinted at her. “You’ve read that version of the sonnet?”
    Rebecca was now holding out a two-inch clear plastic cylinder with metal bands on it. “I was there when she wrote it. She read it to me when the ink was still wet. It was printed that way in only one copy of the book, the copy you obviously found, God help us all. This is one of her ink cartridges. You stick this end in the ink bottle and twist the other end – that retracts the plunger. When she was writing poetry she used to use about nine parts Scheaffer’s black ink and one part her own blood.”
    She was still holding it toward him, so he took it from her. “The signature in your book certainly contains some of her blood,” Rebecca said.
    “A signature and a thumbprint,” said Sydney absently, rolling the narrow cylinder in his palm. He twisted the back end, and saw the tiny red ring of the plunger move smoothly up the inside of the clear barrel.
    “And you touched the thumbprint.”
    “Yes. I’m glad I did.”
    “You brought her to this cycle of the moon. She arrived on the new moon, though you probably didn’t find the book and touch her thumb till further on in the cycle; she’d instantly stain the whole twenty-eight days, I’m sure, backward and forward. Do you know yet what she wants you to do?”
    If I’d known,
Rebecca had said,
that resisting her would end up killing her, I swear, I wouldn’t have resisted.
Sydney realized, to his dismay, that he believed her.
    “Hold her hand, guide it, I guess, while she copies a poem,” he said.
    “That
poem, I have no doubt. She’s a ghost – I suppose she imagines that writing it again will project her spirit back to the night when she originally wrote it – so she can make a better attempt at killing me three years later, in 1969. She was thirty-five, in ‘69. I was thirty-three.”
    “She looks younger.”
    “She always did. See little Shy riding horseback, you’d think she was twelve years old.” Rebecca sat back. “She’s pretty physical, right? I mean, she can hold things, touch things?”
    Sydney remembered Cheyenne’s fingers intertwined with his.
    “Yes.”
    “I’d think she could hold a pen. I wonder why she needs help copying the poem.” “
    I –” Sydney began.
    But Rebecca interrupted him. “If you do it for her,” she said, “and it works, she won’t have died. I’ll be the one that died in ‘69. She’ll be seventy-two now, and you won’t have met her. Well, she’ll probably look you up,