Dead Titans, Waken! by Wandrei Donald

Author:Wandrei, Donald [Wandrei, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction.Horror, Collection.Omnibus
ISBN: 9781613470107
Google: f3DkygAACAAJ
Publisher: Consortium Book Sales & Dist
Published: 2013-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

XXIX A WOMAN LIKE THE SUN

* * *

“You have an interesting face,” exclaimed the new girl. “A little bit like Stevenson, and with a sort of romantic melancholy. And you’ve got the oldest eyes I’ve ever seen in a man! No, don’t move. Sit still while I sketch you.”

Startled by this sudden appraisal, Drew did as he was told. They had barely taken seats in a booth at Hangout and given their orders. She seized the stub of a pencil, slipped a paper napkin from its container, and with quick, sure strokes caught his head. Her hands fascinated him. They were small, of patrician grace, and the fingers, which tapered, were wonderfully supple. Their skin was of a milky texture against which her veins were faintly outlined. And yet they were old hands, with tiny wrinkles, and cold hands, that seemed almost bloodless. But once, when her pencil broke and Drew offered his, their fingers touched. He tingled from the contact as though from an electric shock, and a glow simultaneously fleeted through her green eyes. He divined that a similar expression was in his. As if each had opened a door, and had psychically crossed a threshold.

“Hmmm, it isn’t very good,” she candidly judged as she surveyed her work. “Would you like to see it?”

He studied the portrait. It gave him a strange sensation thus to scrutinize his features interpreted through the vision of one who had known him so short a time. He saw dark sockets with lids half-veiling the eyes, an ascetic forehead, finely modelled cheeks, and a bitter mouth. It was a sensitive face, expressive of intolerance, weariness, and pride. It was an old-young face. Its lips, he noted, matched those of the artist to a surprising degree. They curved inward at the corners and were only full enough to escape being sensual. It was almost a woman’s mouth. All in all, a contrasty face, where intellectual powers of maturity vied with the weaknesses of delayed adolescence. In a way, he resented the sketch. The new girl had no right to read him so accurately on a first meeting. And despite her assertion, the drawing showed talent in its mastery of line.

“It’s not too bad. For a woman,” he remarked coldly.

The girl looked as if she were going to cry, then she seemed angry. She started to speak but surprised him by breaking into a sophisticated laugh. That silvery sound was a paradox to her naïveté, of countenance.

“I’ll do another of you sometime, and with more truth,” she retorted.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, are you going to be crabby already? After all, you’ve just met the girl,” Sven chided Drew with disgust. Sven, seeing only the external, did not realize that Drew’s remark was an outer defense to conceal his inner approval. For Drew instantly liked the girl. In that moment, intuition told him all that his mind later accepted. He knew why she had looked hurt—she was sensitive as he, and somewhere in her unknown past she had suffered a loneliness or unhappiness such as he had endured.

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