I Am Legend And Other Stories by Richard Matheson EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:Richard Matheson
- Language: English
- Genre:Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
ON THOSE CLOUDY DAYS, Robert Neville was never sure when
sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get
back.
If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate
time of their arrival; but he still used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall
by the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn’t work. That was why he
chose to stay near the house on those days.
He walked around the house in the dull gray of afternoon, a cigarette
dangling from the corner of his mouth, trailing threadlike smoke over his
shoulder. He checked each window to see if any of the boards had been
loosened. After violent attacks, the planks were often split or partially pried
off, and he had to replace them completely; a job he hated. Today only one
plank was loose. Isn’t that amazing? he thought.
In the back yard he checked the hothouse and the water tank. Sometimes
the structure around the tank might be weakened or its rain catchers bent or
broken off. Sometimes they would lob rocks over the high fence around the
hothouse, and occasionally they would tear through the overhead net and
he’d have to replace panes.
Both the tank and the hothouse were undamaged today. He went to the
house for a hammer and nails. As he pushed open the front door, he looked
at the distorted reflection of himself in the cracked mirror he’d fastened to
the door a month ago. In a few days, jagged pieces of the silver-backed
glass would start to fall off. Let ‘em fall, he thought. It was the last damned
mirror he’d put there; it wasn’t worth it. He’d put garlic there instead.
Garlic always worked.
He passed slowly through the dim silence of the living room, turned left
into the small hallway, and left again into his bedroom.
Once the room had been warmly decorated, but that was in another time.
Now it was a room entirely functional, and since Neville’s bed and bureau
took up so little space, he had converted one side of the room into a shop.
A long bench covered almost an entire wall, on its hardwood top a heavy
band saw; a wood lathe, an emery wheel, and a vise. Above it, on the wall,
were haphazard racks of the tools that Robert Nèville used.
He took a hammer from the bench and picked out a few nails from one of
the disordered bins. Then he went back outside and nailed the plank fast to
the shutter. The unused nails he threw into the rubble next door.
For a while he stood on the front lawn looking up and down the silent
length of Cimarron Street. He was a tall man, thirty-six, born of EnglishGerman stock, his features undistinguished except for the long, determined
mouth and the bright blue of his eyes, which moved now over the charred
ruins of the houses on each side of his. He’d burned them down to prevent
them from jumping on his roof from the adjacent ones.
After a few minutes he took a long, slow breath and went back into the
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