The Haunted Storm by Philip Pullman Read Free Book Online Page A

frenzied, either hot or cold, either soothing or anguishing? There was no escape from it. It was embedded in the depths of her like a long splinter of glass, pinning her to nature.
     The surface of the road was like a giant slash of ink across a sheet of dirty paper that was smeared with grease and tiny grains of dust. She knew without letting her eyes dwell tin it that it was less attractive than clean concrete, and she knew equally well that the garage down the road had a forecourt which was bounded by a wall of concrete slabs. Furthermore, it contained and exhibited a large number of glossy surfaces of paint and enamel, and these would be even more cool and refreshing to her eyes than concrete.
    She began to walk slowly down the road, her hands in her coat pockets. Until she got to the garage her only link with wholesomeness was the gusty air, which made her shiver; but she did not bother to tighten her coat around her or to button the neck, because she was striving to suppress the loathing that rose in her throat for the clutching night. She fixed her eyes on the bright neon light in the little building in the forecourt of the garage and resisted the impulses of all the other surfaces she was aware of, which flew up in her imagination and drove themselves against her like snow.
    She came to it and rested her hands on the cold roughness of the concrete. The garage was deserted, as she had hoped. At the back of it was a large corrugated iron building where they repaired cars; the little glass-sided hut in the forecourt, with the neon light on inside it, was where they sold accessories and kept the till. In front of it stood three petrol pumps. There was a circular sign about three and a half feet high which swivelled on a metal frame and stood in the entrance, saying “Closed”. Her eyes took it all in gratefully. She looked first of all at the wall. Her hands lay side by side about three inches apart on a rough grey shelf which formed the top of the wall. It was perfectly flat. She had seen insects crawling on stone walls at night, lapped in a mellow air of peace, and wished she could throw off her alien body and join them. Now her hands, with their flawless surface, were tortured and inert, like victims of passion: but a passion that was not hers. that she had never felt, that she had never imagined or dreamed of… it had passed over her without even a shadow and fastened the mouth of its attention on these hands of hers, biting and twisting them unrecognizably and leaving them torn and shapeless, but still the same shape as before, unchanged.
    The circular sign was caught in a gust of wind and swung round creaking. She looked up sharply and found her heart moving out towards it, as helpless in the sweeping air as the metal was.
    Then she really began to ache with sorrow for the stranger on the beach; because he had gone for ever, and because she didn’t even know his name. Memory was false, and God and the world were false, but if she knew his name she could say it to herself and think of him… he had obeyed her too faithfully, and it was her fault and not his. How had the God of the world brought her to this?
    She visualised as strongly as she could the rest of the village, on a sudden impulse, and spread it out around her like a cloak. She did this in order to fix herself there, because she was coming to pieces again after the momentary wholeness of the train journey. She concentrated as hard as she could, gripping the wall tightly with her invisibly tortured hands, and tried to see in her mind’s eye the entire darkened expanse of the village. Most of it lay behind her; hut that made no difference. The road, on her right, curved to the left ahead of her and led downhill a little way past the builder’s yard and out of the village. A few yards ahead on the right the road was joined by the other road through the village; the two of them formed the two sides of a triangle which was completed by a shorter road