Passage from The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Jason Hill

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Audiobooks

Description

I find his writing very challenging to narrate and this is a prime example.

Vocal Characteristics

Language

English

Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night, he'd reached out to touch the child, sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness, and the days more gray, each one than what had gone before, like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets, and looked toward the east for any light. But there was none in the dream from which he'd wakened. He had wandered in a cave with a child, lead him by the hand, their light playing over the wet flow stone walls like pilgrims in a fable, swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some Grenet IQ beast. Deep stone flues with the water dripped and sang tolling in the silence. The minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it, and the years without cease until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake, and on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rim stone pool and stared into the light, with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there, pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it its bowels, its beating heart, the brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side, and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and locked soundlessly into the dark with the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping, and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the South. Baron. Silent! Godless! He thought the month was october, but he wasn't sure they hadn't kept a calendar for years. They were moving south, and there'd be no surviving another winter here when it was light enough to use the binoculars, he glassed the valley below everything, paling away into the murk, a soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see the segments of road down there amongst the dead trees, looking for anything of color, any movement, any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose in the back of his wrist, and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warren, he said. If he is not the word of God God never spoke