The Horses of the Night by Michael Cadnum Read Free Book Online

beliefs: Thinking got all of us into trouble.
    He continued, “If there was a woman out there, she’s dead by now.”
    That was another of his tendencies. Be brief, even if it means you have to be unpleasant. Fern was always honest, always reliable, and sometimes his words were a bit heavy. “That’s one way of putting it,” I said.
    â€œYou tried,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do.”
    He was right, and I thanked him. I had to feel a certain steadiness in Fern. “I’m going to bed,” I said, lying once again.
    I did not feel sleepy. I bathed, and even after that hot, almost painful, soaking I was cold. What did I expect? I had always liked that lingering chill, the weight of the ocean staying with me long afterward.
    But tonight I did not like it. And when I was dressed I did not put on nightclothes, but the sort of shirt and trousers I would wear to sit and draw. I did not think that I would be able to sleep even a little.
    It was a source of light. Turning the plume in my hand it took on subtle hues, as the throat of a hummingbird will shift from sea green to ruby.
    I was careful to put the feather in the pocket of my favorite jacket, the breast pocket, where it would lie across my heart. I wore the jacket now as I worked. I told myself that this plume was a charm, unimportant and yet compelling. I would keep the feather for luck.
    Luck. It was an innocent concept. I tried to remind myself that luck was a word for children, for happy farewells, a word that bespoke friendship and a cheery outlook.
    â€œNice—too nice.” I had lived with comments like this regarding my designs for years. I had sat here in this studio, this retreat in the family home, and adjusted the drafting table, the crook-neck lamp, hour after hour, scratching with my ever-shorter Berol H, designing roof gardens, pavilions, fountains.
    â€œYou make the world look the way it should,” Nona had told me. Without knowing it, she had paid me the sort of compliment that hurt. Because this had been the problem: My landscapes and buildings were seen as impeccable art, but unworkable.
    I turned on music that I expected to bring some sort of calm, something syrupy by Debussy, all wash and tone. I turned the music way down, and finally turned it off, leaving the only sound the thud of my heart and the high, fine dry hum of the lamp over the drafting table.
    I sat in my studio now and reviewed my plans for the new Golden Gate Park. This time I had surpassed all my previous efforts. I was almost hoping to see my drawings as imperfect, but I could not. They were more than good enough to win.
    The truth was, I needed to talk to someone. Well, I urged myself breezily, don’t think about it. Keep yourself busy. I sat before a lightbox. I had, for a moment, thought of viewing some of the garden designs gardeners had actually brought into being. There were not many, a plot of plumeria and protea near Hilo, a knot garden for a retired film actor in Montecito, a tulip bed and a lawn with a ha-ha for the widow of a governor in Woodside.
    The inner warning returned: don’t stay alone tonight.
    The translucent plastic radiated light through the miniature cells of color, gardens contracted to fine points of green and scarlet, each photograph a shrunken, jewellike universe. If a client had, in fact, met me here that night, this is what I would have showed them, my little contributions to the real world.
    Crazy. I tested that word on myself. I was going mad.
    And yet this self-diagnosis did not quite fit. I felt entirely lucid.
    There had been no woman in the ocean. She had existed only in my mind.
    But did insanity feel like this—alive, awake to every texture of wood and paper, aware of the solemn hush of the rooms?
    I left the house and walked through the darkness toward the greenhouse. I paused and looked up at the grand, half-alive gingko tree, cutting a canyon out of the night sky. I