Walkers by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

of
your brain is like.’
    ‘Listen, I have to tell you this
joke,’ said Bradley. ‘What do you get if you let an elephant walk across your
living-room?’
    ‘For God’s sake, Bradley, I don’t
want to know about that.’
    ‘No, come on, what do you get if you
let an elephant walk across your living-room?’
    Gil sighed in exaggerated
exasperation. ‘I don’t know, Bradley. What do you get if you let an elephant walk across your living-room?’
    ‘You get a thick pile on your
carpet.’
    Gil said, ‘I should throw you out of
here, right on your head, you know that?’ But then he turned around and there
she was, standing in the doorway, with the sunlight shining brightly behind her
so that Gil had to narrow his eyes to make out what she looked like. Bradley
turned around too, and was suddenly silent. Gil’s father had been quite right.
She was tall, almost as tall as Gil, and dark haired. Her hair was brushed and
clean and shining and it reached right down over her shoulders. Her eyes were
wide and her lashes were extravagantly long; her mouth was slightly parted as
if she were about to say something or as if she were about to kiss somebody.
She wore a tight white tee-shirt which clung to her overfull breasts, and it
was obvious from the way that the darker tint of her nipples showed through the
cotton that she was wearing no bra. She wore white rolled-up shorts and white
sandals, and that was all.
    ‘Gil Miller?’ she said.
    Bradley whispered, ‘My wish has been
granted. Did she say Bradley Donahue?’
    Gil looked the girl up and down,
trying to be steady, trying to be cool, but with an extraordinary tightness
around his heart.
    “That’s – ‘
he began, in a choked falsetto. Then, much deeper, ‘That’s me.’
    The girl stepped into the store, and
smiled at him. ‘My name’s Paulette Springer. I hope you don’t mind my
surprising you like this.’
    ‘Well, uh, no,’ said Gil, wiping his
hands on his denim shorts. ‘No, no. My folks told me you called by earlier. I’m
just sorry I wasn’t here.’
    ‘I know, you had to take Susan
Sczaniecka home. But that’s all right. I had a cup of coffee at the second-hand
bookstore. That’s quite a place, isn’t it? I bought a book called De Sortilegio.’
    Gil glanced at Bradley, but all
Bradley could do was look baffled.
    Paulette came closer. Gil couldn’t
help noticing the tantalising sway of her breasts underneath her tee-shirt.
Close up, he could smell her perfume, which was like sweet-peas and roses and
something else altogether, something subtle and arousing and barely
perceptible, like the smell of a warm clean body.
    ‘I was hoping you could help me,’
she said.
    ‘Well, sure,’ Gil told her.
‘Anything, you name it.’
    ‘I’m writing an article for San Diego magazine about the different
things that get washed up on the beaches.’
    ‘Oh, yeah?’ Gil’s heart still felt
tight; in fact it felt tighter than ever.
    ‘I know it sounds silly,’ said
Paulette, ‘but actually it’s going to make a pretty interesting piece. You’d be
amazed what gets washed up. I mean apart from whales and driftwood and things
like that. There’s an old man who lives about a mile north of here, and he’s
furnished his whole cottage with chairs and tables and beds that were washed
right up on the beach.’
    Gil drummed his fingers on the top
of the cash-register. ‘That’s pretty interesting. The only thing is, what does
it have to do with me?’
    ‘Well,’ Paulette smiled, her eyes
sparkling at him, ‘you go down to the beach every morning, don’t you? You have
to jog, because of your leg.”
    ‘That’s right,’ Gil agreed. ‘It’s
part of the therapy. But I still don’t see...’
    She lifted a finger to silence him.
He didn’t know why, but he was silent. She said, quite sweetly, ‘You’re almost
always the very first person down on the beach, aren’t you? Sometimes you’ re
down there as soon as it’ s daylight. So if anything was