The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies by Langan John

Author:Langan, John [Langan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2013-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

V

Despite the bruise on my hip, the increased pain and difficulty moving that sent me to the emergency room the next day with a story about colliding with a doorstep, to learn after an X-ray that I had chipped the bone, I half expected Chris to walk in the front door as usual the following night. It wasn’t that I doubted what had happened—I was in too much discomfort—it was more that I couldn’t believe its finality. Not until another week had passed, and the landlord appeared wanting to know where Chris and his rent were (to which I replied that I hadn’t seen him for days), did the fact of his . . . I didn’t have the word for it: his sacrifice? his abduction? his departure? Call it what you would, only when I was standing at the open door to his room, which was Spartan as a monk’s cell, watching the landlord riffle through Chris’s desk, did the permanence of his fate settle on me.

The week after that brought a concerned call from Kaitlyn’s parents, asking if I’d seen their daughter (to which I replied that I hadn’t had any contact with her for weeks). This began a chain of events whose next link was her father driving to Albany to ask a number of people, including me, the last time they’d seen Kaitlyn. Within a couple of days, the police were involved. They interviewed me twice, the first time in a reasonably friendly way, when I was no more than the concerned boyfriend, the second time in a more confrontational and extended session, occasioned by the detective’s putting together my disclosure that Kaitlyn and Chris had been briefly involved with the fact that both of those people had gone missing in reasonably close proximity to each other. There wasn’t any substantial evidence against me, but I had no doubt Detective Calasso was certain I knew more than I was saying. Kaitlyn’s mother shared his suspicion, and during a long phone call before Christmas she attempted to convince me to tell her what I knew. I insisted that, sorry as I was to have to say it, I didn’t know what had happened to Kaitlyn. I supposed this was literally true.

Not that I hadn’t dwelt on the matter each and every day since I’d awakened fully dressed on my futon, my hip pounding, a trial of muddy footprints showing my path from the front door to the refrigerator, the top of which served as a nominal liquor cabinet, to my room, where the bottle of Johnny Walker Black that had plunged me into unconsciousness leaned against my pillows. That Kaitlyn should be at the far end of that dark tunnel, surrounded by those things, the Hounds, the Ghûl, was unbelievable, impossible. Yet a second stop at her apartment failed to reveal any change from my previous visit. I sat on the edge of her bed, the lights out, my head fuzzy from the painkiller I’d taken for my hip, and struggled to invent alternative scenarios to the one Chris had narrated.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.