King Solomon’s Carpet – Barbara Vine Free Audiobook

Written by Barbara Vine
Read by Michael Pennington
Unabridged

“The train belched again and this movement, much more powerful than before, shifted and heaved the people around her to enclose her in a kind of human tide. Her face now against a tweed back, she fought for breath, struggled and pushed, moaning as another icy drop flowed down her body and set off the pain. It seemed to set if off, to trigger it, for as it slipped along her skin like a bead of ice, a huge pain took hold of her left arm as if an iron claw had grasped it. She arched her back, tried to stretch her neck above assorted flesh and hair and smell. The train started, moved forward on a smooth glide, and as it did so the iron claws embraced her, like the appendages of a monster.”—from King Solomon’s Carpet “To the inexperienced traveler, the London Underground seems to harbor hideous secrets, its complex network crisscrossing like a spider’s wiry legs, tunnels spanning endlessly outward, doors to dark caverns locked tight against the constant tide of humanity issued forth from its choking traains. It is said that during the building of the Victoria Line, the diggers sometimes saw a black mass hovering about the tunnel entrance, like a vast subterranean spirit. When Axel Jones surfaces from the depths of the Underground, draped in along black coat and wearing the drawn, unnaturally pale face of a figure in an El Greco painting, it is to cause slow and deliberate destruction. In much the same way will a coarseskinned reptile raise its horny head to feed on everything within its reach, then submerge once again into the primordial mud. “Of all living writers, she can enter most convincingly into the criminal, or even pathological mind.”