Story: Perhaps The Last

by Conrad Williams

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (28.6MB)

Read By: Marty Perrett
First appeared in: Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
Duration: 31:17
File size: 30mb

Excerpt:
Garner spent his days clock-watching in a room filled with timepieces, none of which could tell him how long was left on his shift. Hours crawled by. Maybe one day he’d be given a more agreeable timetable and things would go better – telling kids to stop climbing on the display cases, giving direction to the toilets, watching girls in their summer blouses take a turn around the exhibits on the balcony below – but until then it was graveyard hours for him; in a room filled with relics from the past, Garner had never felt more dead.

In mind of the lower floor, he leaned over the railing and tried to see Della, but she was ensconced in the gloom. He could just hear the faint flick of magazine pages, the hot smell of cinnamon from the gum she liked to chew during work. He could occasionally spot her shadow, or the pale oval of her face as she moved around the exhibits in her domain, but more often than not she was lost to the hard shadows that filled that space.

 

The museum, situated in South Kensington, was split into two floors and again, laterally, between east and west. Ostensibly, four security guards patrolled each quadrant, but because of the various ways the sections were separated none of them could meet. The museum suits wanted it like that. The internal closed circuit cameras were switched off at night, for economical reasons. The lighting was also reduced by fifty per cent, to save fifty per cent. Management didn’t want any malingering, and knew that barring access to the other floors was the only way to ensure this.