She opened it and looked in. Dunderhead looks cute when he's asleep, she
thought. There was a cord on the floor that ran from under the table by
the priest's bed, over the stones, carefully following the zigzag of the
crevices between them, and at last the end lay in the corner of the door
sill. You really couldn't see it if you weren't looking for it, which
had more or less been the idea when she had put it there last night
before the priests had come back from vespers. The far end was tied in a
knot of her own invention to the electric plug of his alarm clock.
Dunderhead had an annoying habit of re-setting his clock every evening
making sure that the red second hand was still sweeping away the
minutes. (In her plans for this morning she had catalogued his every
habitual action, and had observed this one for three nights running,
hanging upside down from the bulky stone portcullis above and outside
his window.)
Tugging on the string, she saw it leap from the crevices into a straight
line and then lift from the floor as she drew it tauter, and then go
slack as the plug blipped quietly onto the floor.
Next she pulled the string again until the slack left and raised her end
a few inches from the floor. With her free hand now she gave the string
a small twit and watched the vibration run up and down the string twice.
The knot's invention was an ingenuous one. At the vibration, two opposed
loops shook away from a third, and a four millimeter length of rubber
band that had been sewn in tautened and released a fourth loop from
around a small length of number four gauge wire with a holding tonsure
of three quarters of a gram, and the opposing vibration returning up the
thread loosed a similar apparatus on the other side of the plug. The
knot fell away, and she wound it quickly around her hand. She stood up,
closed the door, and the oiled lock was perfectly silent. The door knob
was just the slightest bit greasy, she noted. Careless.
Back in her room, it was standing on the table. Sunlight from the high
window fell red across the board. It was very early in the morning. She
took the parts of the motor up in her hands. "I guess we try you out
today? No?" She answered herself, "Yes." Finally she put the parts in
the paper bag, strode out of the room, and slammed the ... whirled
around and caught it once more. "Gnnnnnnn," she said. "Do you want to
get caught?" For the second time she answered herself, "Yes. And
remember that too. Or you'll never get through it."
As she walked down the hall, she heard through one of the windows the
chirp of a blue lizard from the garden. "The sound I wanted to hear,"
she smiled to herself. "A good sign."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account