Credit and thanks for making this book availabe for publication at RGL go to Paul Moulder, who donated the scanned images of his print copy of "Dark Interlude" used to produce this e-book. He stepped unsteadily over the wall; began to walk through the small graveyard towards the yew-tree grove.
It was hot. The sun beat down pitilessly; there was no air. He began to laugh. He laughed at the priest. He began to sing a ribald song in the Breton tongue. O'Mara heard his footsteps die away.
He thought that the sound of worn shoes on the stone flags was a strange sound. He was half drunk. He was always at least half drunk. Pints and gallons of spirits, of cheap beer, of cachasa of veritable cognac that was veritable methylated spirit and colouring, had deadened his metabolic processes.
Gallons of cheap-cut, laced and doctored wine, had filled his veins with acid, yellowed his eyes, sagged his facial and stomach muscles. O'Mara was tall and big. Once he had looked like a handsome bull. A well-kept, superior, fierce and handsome bull. Now the skin under his blue eyes was faded and pouchy; the fresh complexion had turned to the greyish hue of the near third-stage drunkard. The fair shining hair that had curled back from an intelligent forehead in waves that made most women envious was long, dank, dirty, bedraggled.
He stepped over the low boundary wall on the far side of the graveyard. There was no shadow here. The sun descended on his bare head without mercy. He could feel it burning through the thick hair on the top of his head, heating the brown and dirty skin of his neck. He was dressed in a pair of blue velveteen trousers that were baggy at the top and narrow over the broken shoes. He had no socks. As he walked, the trouser legs rode up and you could see his unwashed ankles. He wore a shirt that had been a middle-blue and was now dark blue with dirt and sweat.
