Michael Malone - Weebly

a camera, into the house of Limus Barnum. Lights came
on, first floor, then second. Hayes stumbled down his
steps and across the lawn, Smalter behind him.
"Alvis, wait. You think you ought to?"
"Freedom of the press," the editor said, then
belched loudly.
Barnum's house was full of things. Old and new
furnishings, dozens of electrical appliances. A set of
encyclopedias and framed prints of the Impressionists in
textured cardboard were among the hundred curiously
impersonal artifacts, things chosen because they were
the things the world told him to choose. Ordinary things.
Hayes and Smalter stared, nevertheless, because
the possessions of those separated from the rest of the
world by the fame of fortune or misfortune or by a
madness to create or destroy seem to take on the
mystery of their owners' secret, whether the secret is
one of glory, or horror, or death. Ordinary objects
seem granted the significance of talismans. And once
granted, of course endowed.
But on Barnum's top floor there were possessions
perhaps less ordinary, perhaps less ambiguous as clues