Read After Me Comes the Flood for Free Online

daughter was born. But when I tried my keys they wouldn’t turn in the lock, and there were faces at the window but they were strangers and they all turned away…’
    Elijah drew the whisky towards him and surveyed the label. It showed a watercolour picture of a distillery set on an outcrop of reddish rock. The rainstorm gathering above the rocks looked to John like an impossible miracle he’d never see again. ‘I think I’ll have another, if you don’t mind,’ said Elijah. When Walker had passed him a half-filled teacup, he went on, ‘No, I’m telling it wrong – it wasn’t like that at all. Look – if I drop this cup, what will happen?’
    ‘It will fall and break,’ said John, glad for once to be certain of things.
    ‘Of course. You know that to be true, because you’ve dropped things many times before. Things fall and break – those are the rules. But what if I let go and it simply hung there, or fell slowly, or began to rise up? Would you believe it? Not the first time, you wouldn’t – you know the rules, after all. You wouldn’t believe your eyes – you’d think yourself mad, or unwell – you’d do it again and again, until you really believed the rules had changed. And then you’d think: what else has changed? If that rule can be broken, what about all the others? And maybe you’d want to put your hand in a fire, and see if it came out wet.’ He drained the cup. ‘It was like that. All my life I’d lived by a set of rules as fixed and constant as the sun setting in the west. They made sense of everything in the past, and nothing in the future frightened me. It was a rock under my feet. I’m talking about God,’ he said anxiously, leaning forward a little, as though he wanted to be very certain John understood. ‘You realise that?’
    ‘I think so, yes.’
    ‘Good.’ He reached for the bottle, thought better of it, and instead ran a finger around the lip of the teacup, and sucked thoughtfully at it. ‘You see, I believed – no, I knew – that my life had been ordered since before time. I knew that events would follow each other in their proper order, and always for my good. There’d be storms of course, but sunshine not long after. Illness, but then good health. Disappointments – more of those than I like to remember – but always cause for hope. And I never once thought, This simply is the way of life. I thanked God that he was the overseer – that he was holding up the sky, if you like. And I became a pastor, because nothing mattered more to me than making others see that they too were in the hands of God. And then one morning’ – John thought for a moment the older man was going to make the teacup disappear up his sleeve – ‘he was gone. Just like that. I woke up and he wasn’t there… or was it like that? I must try to be truthful…’ He rolled the cup between his palms and John flinched, certain it would break. ‘Maybe it happened more slowly, like waking alone in your bed with no head on the pillow next to yours, and mourning awhile before realising you’ve always been alone, and the footsteps you’d heard out in the hall were only echoes of your own. I expect it happens every day – children grow up and grow out of their faith, or life makes the case against God. But in my case, of course, everyone noticed, because they all went to church one Sunday morning and there was no-one in the pulpit.’
    Walker coughed discreetly, and lit a cigarette. In the unmoving air the ribbon of smoke lifted to the ceiling where it spread and thinned. ‘They waited almost a quarter of an hour, didn’t they? Sang the same hymn three times.’
    ‘They did,’ said Elijah, and began to tap the table again, this time accompanying the beat with a deep, half-heard hum. John thought he knew the melody, and then, in a sudden moment of perfect clarity, remembered where he’d heard it before. His had not been a pious upbringing, but his mother had been a dutiful church-goer and she