that would give her courage. Nevertheless, she stepped to the open doorway, in quiet pursuit, convinced that the hellish creature was on Iris’s trail and that it was a predator.
Witness positioned himself to ensure that the next fluctuation would take him to the third place he hoped to see, which was the study belonging to Sparkle Sykes. Here were even more books than in the attorney’s apartment. They were not law books but volumes used for research, poetry, and mostly novels.
He knew about this woman because he knew about all things, but also because in his youth, when he had not merely looked like a man in his twenties but also had been exactly that, he had read what she’d written.
Later, when he was required to kill, he had done so with what now seemed inexplicable enthusiasm. The only time he had hesitated was when a young woman named April, thinking him a friend, had taken from her backpack a book by Sparkle Sykes, one he had read long before, and wanted to share it with him. He repeated for her passages from memory. She had been thrilled to find, in such grim circumstances, one who shared with her the love of this enduring light. He gave her the mercy of killing her quickly with an iron bar to the back of her skull.
His bottomless memory was his greatest curse, for it was dark water, an abyss, in which drifted the bodies of April and so many men and women and children, not just those whom he had killed but uncountable others who perished when the great blade of monstrous history cut them down. He passed his days now on the floor of that ocean of death, where the feeble yellow illumination illuminated nothing, and when he sometimes walked in daylight, he still felt drowned.
His time in Sparkle Sykes’s study, as it had been when she wrote to shape the world, was much shorter than Witness hoped. But then he supposed it was more than he deserved. He faded from the room, the room from him.
15
Apartment 2-A
W inny didn’t want music when he was reading because music reminded him of his dad, and his dad didn’t approve of reading too much. His dad wanted him to put down the books and do manly things like join the wrestling team at school. Of course, there wasn’t a wrestling team in the fourth grade. For sure not at the Grace Lyman School. Although judging by the humongous painting of the late Mrs. Grace Lyman in the school lobby, she could have wrestled her way to a state championship. Winny’s dad wanted him to go all-out nuts for football, Tae Kwon Do, kick-boxing, and also learn to play a manly musical instrument like a guitar or a piano but not, for God’s sake, a flute or a clarinet. Winny didn’t know why his dad thought some instruments were manly and some were sissy. He did know that if he turned on music while he was reading, no matter what kind it was or who the singer was, his father would get in his head so much that he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the book.
He never switched on the TV when he read, either, but twice the previous day, Wednesday, the set in his room had turned itself on to Channel 106, which on local cable was a dead channel. Instead of electronic snow, rings of blue light pulsed from the center of the screen to its borders.
The first time this happened, having never seen anything like it before, Winny thought the TV must be haywire. When he tried to turn it off, the remote didn’t work. Because there wasn’t any noise with the pulses of blue light, he decided to continue reading and see if the set might switch itself off.
After ten minutes, he had felt maybe the TV was watching him. Well, not the TV but someone using the TV somehow to spy on people. That sounded fully whacko, just the kind of thing that would land him on a nut-doctor’s couch, in a custody battle, and in a new home in Nashville with his manly, musical dad.
So he had pulled the plug, and the TV had gone dark.
Later Wednesday, when he had come back to his room, the TV was plugged in again. Mrs.
Witness positioned himself to ensure that the next fluctuation would take him to the third place he hoped to see, which was the study belonging to Sparkle Sykes. Here were even more books than in the attorney’s apartment. They were not law books but volumes used for research, poetry, and mostly novels.
He knew about this woman because he knew about all things, but also because in his youth, when he had not merely looked like a man in his twenties but also had been exactly that, he had read what she’d written.
Later, when he was required to kill, he had done so with what now seemed inexplicable enthusiasm. The only time he had hesitated was when a young woman named April, thinking him a friend, had taken from her backpack a book by Sparkle Sykes, one he had read long before, and wanted to share it with him. He repeated for her passages from memory. She had been thrilled to find, in such grim circumstances, one who shared with her the love of this enduring light. He gave her the mercy of killing her quickly with an iron bar to the back of her skull.
His bottomless memory was his greatest curse, for it was dark water, an abyss, in which drifted the bodies of April and so many men and women and children, not just those whom he had killed but uncountable others who perished when the great blade of monstrous history cut them down. He passed his days now on the floor of that ocean of death, where the feeble yellow illumination illuminated nothing, and when he sometimes walked in daylight, he still felt drowned.
His time in Sparkle Sykes’s study, as it had been when she wrote to shape the world, was much shorter than Witness hoped. But then he supposed it was more than he deserved. He faded from the room, the room from him.
15
Apartment 2-A
W inny didn’t want music when he was reading because music reminded him of his dad, and his dad didn’t approve of reading too much. His dad wanted him to put down the books and do manly things like join the wrestling team at school. Of course, there wasn’t a wrestling team in the fourth grade. For sure not at the Grace Lyman School. Although judging by the humongous painting of the late Mrs. Grace Lyman in the school lobby, she could have wrestled her way to a state championship. Winny’s dad wanted him to go all-out nuts for football, Tae Kwon Do, kick-boxing, and also learn to play a manly musical instrument like a guitar or a piano but not, for God’s sake, a flute or a clarinet. Winny didn’t know why his dad thought some instruments were manly and some were sissy. He did know that if he turned on music while he was reading, no matter what kind it was or who the singer was, his father would get in his head so much that he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the book.
He never switched on the TV when he read, either, but twice the previous day, Wednesday, the set in his room had turned itself on to Channel 106, which on local cable was a dead channel. Instead of electronic snow, rings of blue light pulsed from the center of the screen to its borders.
The first time this happened, having never seen anything like it before, Winny thought the TV must be haywire. When he tried to turn it off, the remote didn’t work. Because there wasn’t any noise with the pulses of blue light, he decided to continue reading and see if the set might switch itself off.
After ten minutes, he had felt maybe the TV was watching him. Well, not the TV but someone using the TV somehow to spy on people. That sounded fully whacko, just the kind of thing that would land him on a nut-doctor’s couch, in a custody battle, and in a new home in Nashville with his manly, musical dad.
So he had pulled the plug, and the TV had gone dark.
Later Wednesday, when he had come back to his room, the TV was plugged in again. Mrs.
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