A Dinner at Deviant's Palace by Tim Powers

Author:Tim Powers [Powers, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes the breeze from behind slacked, and when it did he thought he could hear the sighing crash of surf, far ahead; and the glass underfoot was frosted-looking now, and he could feel an increasing grittiness of sand with every step. He strained his neck to look forward, and saw that the glass plain ended in a jaggedly shattered edge a few hundred feet ahead. Beyond that was a paleness that had to be sand, and he thought he glimpsed low ragged buildings and points of dim yellow light.

And then above the scratching of his footsteps and the breathing of himself and the doomed boy, he heard behind him a mix of sounds like a thin stick being whipped back and forth through the air and quick taps on a taut snare drum and the rattling of a length of chain, and it was getting closer fast.

He spun around, automatically going into a sliding crouch so as not to fall, and saw, still a hundred yards away but closing, the jungle-gym-stuffed-with-old-car-parts figure of one of the trash men skating with a weird grace across the glass directly toward him, approaching with such speed that it grew from a distant dot to a noisy, sky-blotting bulk in only a couple of seconds, and only at the last instant did he manage to collect his wits and frog-hop out of its way to one side.

Rivas relaxed into the somersault it turned out he was making, and he rolled to his feet several yards beyond the sprawled looseness of the dying boy and watched the skating trash man, well past him now, flail its lawn-mower arms and lean around in a tight, screeching curve that threw up a starlight-glittering spray of glass chips. When it came looping back toward him, working its aluminum-pipe legs to get back some of its lost speed, he waited until it had a lot of momentum and then he feinted to his right and dove to his left.

The thing reached out an arm for him as it rushed past and succeeded in tearing his shirt, but then like an ungainly top it had spun out in a screeching abrasion of metal on glass, and as Rivas turned toward it it toppled and fell, still sliding.

Run up and try to disable it while it's down, he wondered tensely, or run away? Remembering its speed, and his inert companion, he ran toward it.

The thing was making a terrible racket flailing its junk limbs against the splintering glass, but just as he ran up to it, planning to launch a flying kick at one of its knees, it rolled over and wobbled up onto its wide barbecue-grill feet and faced him.

Rivas skidded hastily to a stop and then just stood and caught his breath, cautiously confident that the thing couldn't, from a dead stop, close the three yards between them more quickly than he could leap aside.

He stared at the roughly man-shaped construction. It was at least a foot taller than

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