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

if she remembers to be grateful, but you won’t remember any of … this interlude with her.” She smiled wryly. “And you certainly won’t meet me. That’s a plus, I imagine. Do you have any high-proof liquor, at your house?” “
    You can’t come over!” said Sydney, appalled.
    “No, I wasn’t thinking of that.
    Never mind. But you might ask her –”
    She had paused, and Sydney raised his eyebrows.
    “You might ask her not to kill me, when she gets back there. I know I’d have left, moved out, if she had told me she really needed that. I’d have stopped … trying to
be
her. I only did it because I loved her.” She smiled, and for a moment as she stood up Sydney could see that she must once have been very pretty.
    “Goodbye, Resurrection Man,” she said, and turned and shuffled away up the cement steps.
    Sydney didn’t call after her. After a moment he realized that he was still holding the plastic ink-cartridge, and he put it in his pocket.
    High-proof liquor, he thought unhappily.

    Back in his apartment after making a couple of purchases, he poured himself a shot of bourbon from the kitchen bottle and sat down by the window with the Fleming book.
    But when the Resurrection Man shall bring
The moon to free me from these yellowed pages,
The gift is mine, there won’t be anything
For you.
    The moon had been full last night. Or maybe just a hair short of full, and it would be full tonight.
    You might ask her not to kill me, when she gets back there.
    He opened the bags he had carried home from a liquor store and a stationer’s, and he pulled the ink cartridge out of his pocket.
    One bag contained a squat glass bottle of Scheaffer’s black ink, and he unscrewed the lid; there was a little pool of ink in the well on the inside of the open bottle’s rim, and he stuck the end of the cartridge into the ink and twisted the back. The plunger retracted, and the barrel ahead of it was black.
    When it was a third filled, he stopped, and he opened the other bag. It contained a tiny plastic 50-milliliter bottle – what he thought of as breakfast-sized – of Bacardi 151-proof rum. He twisted off the cap and stuck the cartridge into the vapory liquor. He twisted the end of the cartridge until it stopped, filled, and even though the cylinder now contained two-thirds rum, it was still jet-black.
    He had considered buying lighter-fluid, but decided that the 151-proof rum – seventy-five percent alcohol – would probably be more flammable. And he could drink what he didn’t use.

    He was dozing in the chair when he heard someone moving in the kitchen. He sat up, disoriented, and hoarsely called, “Who’s there?”
    He lurched to his feet, catching the book but missing the tiny empty rum bottle.
    “Who were you expecting, lover?” came Cheyenne’s husky voice. “Should I have knocked? You already invited me.”
    He stumbled across the dim living room into the kitchen. The overhead light was on in there, and through the little kitchen window he saw that it was dark outside.
    Cheyenne was sweeping the last of the ants off the counter with her hand, and as he watched she rubbed them vigorously between her palms and wiped her open hands along her jaw and neck, then picked up the half-full bourbon bottle.
    She was wearing the black linen skirt and jacket again – and, he could see, the birdseed-sprouting bra under the white blouse. The clothes were somehow still damp.
    “I talked to Rebecca,” he blurted, thinking about the ink cartridge in his pocket.
    “I told you not to,” she said absently. “Where do you keep glasses? Or do you expect me to drink right out of the bottle? Did she say she killed me in self-defense?”
    “Yes.”
    “Glasses?”
    He stepped past her and opened a cupboard and handed her an Old Fashioned glass. “Yes,” he said again.
    She smiled up at him from beneath her dark eyelashes as she poured a couple of ounces of amber liquor into the glass, then put down the bottle and caressed