Mobile Library by David Whitehouse

Author:David Whitehouse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER TEN

THE HUNTER’S HOUND

A ringing hung in the air like the distant buzz of insects. The sound was far enough away that at first Bobby thought it an effect conjured in his brain by the words in the book he was reading. Sometimes, when characters he adored got scared, he could hear their hearts flutter. When they made a joke, their laughter came from his mouth. They moved with his hands, walked with his legs and saw with his eyes. He experienced their stories not with them, but for them, their fortune in that moment his own. Today he was Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, prisoner of the citizens of Lilliput. Their tiny knives and spears nicked his belly open. Bobby clutched the wound, raised a bloody hand and together he and Gulliver begged for their freedom.

It sounded like a bell. Not a big bell from the clock tower in the village, a small bell, elfin, fragile, Lilliputian. Roused, he placed his book back on the shelf and searched the library. Nobody else was there. Val was sleeping in the cab. Outside, Rosa was trying to persuade Bert to roll over with the offer of a biscuit, which he’d decided he’d get to eat eventually whether he performed for her or not.

Again Bobby heard the sound, but slightly louder this time, and for longer, as if the bell’s clapper had come loose inside its chamber. He looked up to the tops of the trees and briefly searched the long grass.

That’s when he realized what was coming. Or rather, who. His mother.

She had worn a bell-shaped pendant. Nestled at the apex of her bosom, jingling as she moved, he remembered it now. It was there, in the photograph of them standing by the car, him toying with it, the bell, precious in his hand, its mellow gold reflection on her skin.

He ran back into the library and hunted through his files, slipping the bottle of her hair down the front of his trousers and sliding as many of her rings onto his fingers as would fit. Her bracelets fell from his wrists too easily, so he threaded his feet through and yanked them up his ankles. He filled his pockets with the slivers of material cut from her dresses, and stuffed the clippings from her pictures deep into his sleeves. Finally, he sprayed himself with her perfume so that it followed him around as a sweet sticky mist.

Leaving the clearing, Bobby skipped through the veil of trees to the edge of the woods by the road. Here the sound of the bell was much louder than before. She was close. The road bent in both directions, and because of the wind he could not ascertain from which end the sound was coming. He climbed the tree closest to the path for a better view. Halfway up its aged trunk, brittle bark breaking to the touch, a swarm of thick black flies dangled in midair. Bobby held his breath as they bumped against his ears and nostrils.

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