Read Days for Free Online Page A

but what always strikes him is not so much the gigastore’s size as the quantity of bricks used in its construction. There must be billions of them, and each was laid by hand, each individually trowelled with mortar and positioned by a workman who patiently pieced together his segment of the puzzle, making his unacknowledged contribution to the enormity of the whole. Time, wind and weather have pitted and pocked the bricks’ surfaces, and the mortar that binds them is crumbling, but Days still stands, the dream of one man, the handiwork of thousands.
    Window-shoppers are huddled, as always, one deep, occasionally two deep, beneath the huge display windows, long straggling lines of them running unbroken except at the loading bays, which are located midway along each edge of the building. Most of them are awake now. Some are picking at pieces of sandwich and morsels of pie that they have hoarded overnight. (Each evening, charity workers come and distribute food, water, and soup among the window-shoppers, a practice the Days administration tolerates without condoning.) Others are going through their personal exercise routines, flexing the night’s stiffness out of their joints. A few have taken to the shrubberies to relieve themselves, and the rest are staking out their patches, unfurling moth-eaten blankets in front of their favourite windows and weighing down the corners with bulging, tattered Days carrier bags. Nearer to nine o’clock, unless the sky clouds over and it looks like rain, more window-shoppers – ones who have homes – will arrive, but by then the best places will have been taken. These other window-shoppers bring picnics, chairs, tables, families, friends with them to watch the displays, but they are not hardcore, all-weather devotees like those who spend their entire lives in the vicinity of Days, who eat and sleep in the gigastore’s shadow. Tradition has it that window-shoppers are former customers who for one reason or other have been banned from the store, but this has never conclusively been proved.
    At present, each window is draped inside with a pair of heavy green velvet curtains which sport the black and white halves of the Days logo on either side of their adjoining hems.
    As Frank arrives at the corner of the building, a few of the window-shoppers look up, nod to him, and look away again. They recognise him not by his face – few people remember Frank’s face – but by his demeanour. They recognise him as one of their own, one of the overlooked, the disregarded, the discounted.
    He closes his nose to the smell the wind wafts his way, the reek of unwashed clothing and bodies.
    A pair of guards wearing quilted jackets and fur-lined caps with Days logos on the ear-flaps are stationed at the top of the shallow flight of steps that leads up to the North-West Entrance. Hopping up the steps, Frank greets them both, showing them his Iridium. One of the guards takes the card and peers at it, at the same time adjusting the weight of the rifle strapped to his shoulder. There is no need for a visual check on the card, but he examines both sides of it just the same, several times, until, satisfied that it doesn’t look like a fake (as if a skilful forgery would be detectable to the human eye), he turns and swipes it through the slot of the lock unit set into the frame of the pair of doors behind him. He punches in a seven-digit code on the lock unit keypad, and seven bolts within the doors shoot back in quick succession from bottom to top, their ascending clanks like notes in a rising scale. The handle on the left-hand door is a black semicircle, on the right-hand door a white semicircle. Their verticals meet flush when the doors are closed. Grasping the left-hand handle, the guard hauls back on it.
    Frank nods his thanks, takes back his card, and steps through the open doorway. The door is closed behind him, and the bolts slide to in reverse order, descending the scale.

 
    5
     
    Seven Names of God :