Read Castleview for Free Online Page A

three or four different things and calling them the same thing. See the pinkish one over here? Got five points on it—towers, or whatever you want to call ‘em. Now look at this one. The towers aren’t pink any more; they’re black. Over on that one, they’re gray. The black one,” Roberts waggled a finger, “it’s got one, two, three, four, five, six of them. The gray one’s got three. Sure, things will change color with changes in the light, ’specially if they’re some ways away. But they don’t change their shapes.”
    “Some things do,” Shields said.
    “Clouds, maybe.”
    “And cars. Airplanes.”
    Roberts stared, then turned to look from picture to picture. The old house groaned in the silence, icy tears dropping from its eaves.
    At length Roberts said, “You think it’s moving.”
    “There’s a chart of sightings over here,” Shields told him, “you must have seen it. Most are east of town; but there are a lot that are almost due west, one north, one northwest, and so on. We’ve been saying it has towers. Imagine somebody back in the Middle Ages looking out to sea and catching sight of a big warship. He’d think he was seeing a floating castle, wouldn’t he? And he really wouldn’t be very far wrong.”
    “The stacks and masts and so on, you mean.”
    Shields nodded.
    “And if it was headed right at him, he’d see just the one tower, ’cause all the rest would be behind that one. But if it was
sideways to him, he’d see three or four—however many stacks and whatnot it had.”
    Shields nodded again. “Let’s look at the photos; paintings and drawings are pretty subjective. None of the photos are very clear—whatever it is doesn’t photograph well, it seems, and no one had a long enough lens—but all of them show something.” He pointed from picture to picture. “Three towers here, and three in the next one. Then that one shows five—one of them rather indistinct. The next shows three again, and the one after that four, with one a good deal wider than the other three. Would you mind going back to the desk now? It’s on our way out, anyway, and there’s something I want to show you.”
    But Roberts was no longer listening to Shields. “Did you hear a sort of scraping just then?”
    “No,” Shields said. “Did you?”
    “Thought I did. Probably just a car going by. Sure, we can go back out to the desk. You want to make a call?”
    Shields shook his head. As they passed the glass case that contained the Wells Fargo agent’s diary, he asked, “Have you got a transcription of that, Bob? I’d like to read it.”
    “I can loan it to you. The keys ought to be in the desk.”
    Shields hesitated. “All right. Thanks.” He thought that he, too, had heard something, though the stealthy sound (if it had been a sound at all) had come and gone so swiftly he could not be sure.
    He had noticed a tape dispenser on the desk, and in one of the drawers he found what he had hoped for: blank paper. “Look here,” he said. Roberts watched as he rolled a sheet of paper into a cylinder, taped it, and stood it on end on the desk. In rapid succession he added four more, forming a rough circle.
    “Crouch down, Bob.” Shields demonstrated, squatting on his heels. “Count them, and tell me how many you see. Not how many you know are there, but how many you can see.”
    Roberts bent, his palms on his knees. “Five now. Only if I
move over a little, it’s only three, because two are behind two others. When I move back a little—you’re right—it looks like four. Only one’s thicker, because it’s really two, one peeking out behind another one.”
    Somewhere nearby, glass broke with a crash as precipitate as an explosion.
     
    “Perhaps I should introduce myself,” Ann said. “I’m Ann Schindler.”
    One of the young women walked briskly around the end of the sofa, hand extended. “Lisa Solomon—wonderful to meet you! I’m afraid that we’re closed for the season,” (the other