Half Life by Shelley Jackson

Author:Shelley Jackson [Shelley Jackson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061744815
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE DEATH & BURIAL OF COCK ROBIN

Jamaica Inn,” said the very disagreeable cabbie I had engaged in Plymouth. His tone managed to suggest that I would be sorry I’d come. The moon chewed its way through the clouds to lick the wet slates on the roof of a squat, rambling building. I paid the sum we had agreed on—I had persuaded him to drive me an hour across the moor only by promising him a fortune—and clattered over the cobblestones, tweaking my ankle, toward the only lit door. What if they had no vacancies? But they would, there were only a couple of cars parked outside.

The foyer was bright, and there was nobody at the office window. I could hear a television somewhere. I rapped on the counter and waited. Beside me a metal table held a rack with maps, a lamp; a stapled booklet decorated with a pen and ink drawing of a hunched shape with claws, entitled The Beast of Bodmin Moor; and a block of slick brochures, advertising a health club and spiritual retreat with a vague, portentous name, that when I touched it opened like a fan across the table. Somewhere nearby someone shrieked with laughter. One brochure slid off and planed to the floor, slid noiselessly across the room, and passed under a closed door. I picked the rest up, squared the deck, ruffled it, set it firmly down. It rose elastically as I released it, keeping a lingering contact with my fingertips.

“Can I help you?” A woman’s pink, crazily grinning face bobbed up behind the window. From the open door behind her came a blue glow and the choral roar of a laugh track.

She took my credit card, with a residual chuckle, and forced it through an old-fashioned device that impressed its raised figures on a sheaf of carbons. Then I followed the apron string ticking on her wide rump up a flight of narrow stairs to my room—tiny, with a giant four-poster bed, and the slanting floor and low ceiling of nightmares.

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