“Good of you to come,” he says even jauntily now, and waving. “So long.”
I have to raise my feet high to get through the door, and the greasy black lock snaps noisily as I draw it to behind me. There is no gap in the wall here, I see as we go through, rather the walls fold inward to form a causeway leading to the front of the house, where they fold again to form a high, narrow gravel court. The fluttering trees appear to be imprisoned, like zoo animals, behind these unbroken walls. The branches are robust and beneath the floating veils the soil sports a rich pelt of luxurious black grass soft as sable. The house presents a flat and undemonstrative front of windows shuttered in discolored ivory and a bronze door and footplate level with the ground. Above this, a bronze canopy, its outer ring studded with round baubles, and topped with two life-sized bronze foxes, mirrored, creeping along the edges of the canopy with the far forepaw raised and matching sidelong looks. A human expressiveness has been inharmoniously grafted onto their faces, and the resulting look mingles derision, rapacity, idiocy and yawning in equal parts.
In the gloom under the canopy I am injected with nervous excitement. How do you knock on a bronze slab like this? Now I see the metal rod to one side; I have to hold it in the fingers of my left hand, while my right turns a crank at the end. I’m not sure I hear any responding action from inside; I wait.
A few wisecracking birds, a slurred gush of wind over the ground.
The door opens silently, all the way back, and the Girl, smiling shyly at me and a little shielded by the door, waves me in with an easy sweep of her left hand. The Girl closes the door as I come in to the dim house. Everything is shining and dark, polished wood and metal. The entryway is round and not very wide, with a flight of many low steps rising three or four feet to the level of the hall. The house is perfectly still, as if it and everything in it were one completely solid block. The Girl’s skirts rustle, and the trailing white ribbons of her apron, which stream from both the small of her back and the top of her spine, leave trails of fragrance behind them.
The door closed, she steps in front of me and repeats her gesture, still smiling shyly, and I follow her up the steps. She is indiscriminatably young, with dark hair. Her dress seems unusually sumptuous to me, and I note the large, dark stones dangling from her ears. While cinched very tightly into this dress, and most likely into a corset, her waist moves with athletic elasticity. She flows ahead of me, guiding me to the staircase. The hall is neither deep nor wide, but it is evidently tall—just above the staircase all is pitch dark. The ceiling could be hundreds of feet overhead.
The Girl leads me across the second floor landing and into the wings. Though the house is large, I get the feeling it has no spacious rooms; it’s all narrow halls, closets and chambers. Everything gleams beautifully, not a speck of dust, not a trace of the earwax smell of old mildewed houses, rather an odor like generations of incense smoke molded into wood and brass. The Girl turns and stops me with an outstretched palm and a smile, knocks softly on a door, her shoulder nearly against it and her head leaning in. If there is a reply, I don’t hear it, but the Girl opens the door and gestures me through it.
I step into a small room filled with pale, even light. The ceiling is less than a foot from my head, the walls papered above the wainscotting with faintly violet fronds on an ash background ... potted ferns, a screen, a virginal ... The windows are all on the left, a continuous bank of glass like the wall of a greenhouse. As I turn that way, I see that she sits there at a round table by the windows, a book open in front of her. She only that moment lifts and her eyes.
The dress is the same, or nearly.
I am wafting forward into the room, confusedly aware that the door has been closed quietly behind me, and that I am in the hold of a undertow of light from the windows, which streams past her face toward me.
*
“Have you ever seen a ghost?”
The words come out from under her parasol, which she holds low enough to conceal her face from view. Not from my view, however. We are crossing an enclosed area, a walled space around a monument tower which is now open to curiosity seekers. Coming here was her idea.
“No,” I say.
“How do you know you’ve never seen one?”
“I suppose I’d know that!”
“Why do you suppose? I think they are there to be seen all the time. I roll through the streets here, and the people flash by my carriage. How can I know that every one I see is solid flesh and blood?”
“Wouldn’t there be something otherworldly about them? I thought ghosts were always obviously ghosts.”
“Sometimes I lie awake and hear noises in the house, and despite myself I’m frightened. Then I hear some familiar sound—a clock strikes, or a train whistles somewhere—and my fear abates. But why should those sounds comfort me, and others frighten me? Why couldn’t a ghost make the sound of a train?”
The wind rises along her length where she parts its current, and there stream from her head two or three calligraphic locks. Her hair is a deep black with grey spun in almost imperceptibly.
She squeezes the money into my palm, and I pay our way into the tower. We ascend slowly, past suits of armor and tapestries woven specially to exploit the curvature of the tower wall. There is only one floor, a bare round room at the summit with a stone bench to the right of the entrance. An archway leads out onto a windswept promenade where we take in the view together.
I feel her distraction.
I place my palm lightly on the center of her back, expecting her to step forward toward the battlement, and moving forward a little myself. She doesn’t move forward, but allows me to come up near to her, my hand sliding a little forward toward her right shoulder. I am within her warmth now, and the climate of her breath, her hair, and she seems to bend slightly into me, so now she is leaning with her shoulder and part of her bosom on my chest. I feel her hand gently alight on one of my shoulder blades. I drop my gaze to her face, but meet only the sight of her lowered eyelids; her features taper away from me, her lips are parted. She is strangely well-preserved, her face is unlined. A ghost lifts my left hand from my side, and I watch it settle uncertainly at her waist. She turns a little more in my direction, still not looking at me. Sparkling fingers touch my left hand, and she guides it smoothly up her body; I feel the sweep of her ribs flow beneath my palm, and flex out with her breathing. She tosses back her head, I am looking down into her shadowed mouth, and the lips I kiss are plated with cold over warm. The tip of her nose is cold, and draws a line like a stylus on my cheek.
Now she looks into my eyes. Hers are nearly black, with a deep light in them.
“Let’s get inside, you might be seen with me.”
Hand in hand we go back into the tower. I walk right over to the stone seat, pulling her. I sit, and draw her to me. She seems to feel this daring but drapes herself sidesaddle on my lap and twines her arms around my neck; her eyes are warm, luminous black. A fleeting look that tugs one sharp corner of her mouth up in a smile expresses pleasure and surprise at me. A few moments later there is a step on the stair below and instantly she bounds away from me. Straightening herself, she steps out again into the air.
“Closing soon, ma’am.”
Then, as I yank casually at my shoelaces (which are tied), “Closing.”
What do I feel inside me? A succession of warmly glowing haloes rise in layers in my heart and burst like bubbles without vanishing.
*
“Come on loverboy,” Jil Punkinflake swings a shovel up onto his shoulder. “Tonight we’re for some good old-fashioned grave robbing.”
An anticipatory gurgle of laughter draws a ring around me.
The embalming students make their pocket money by distilling a tincture from the spiracles of young female cadavers and use it to make grigrio, a depilatory agent favored by courtesans and discreet wives.
They drop the latest batch of grigrio off in the market and we slide in line through the alleys, passing again along the
row of alphabet stores. It’s deepest night, and I see clandestine runners slip in and out of the backs of the stores like daring lovers keeping forbidden trysts, all dressed in tight velvet liveries, capes and masks. We run beyond the city limits and into a no man’s land of crumbling walls and listing wrought iron, riven graves and heaps of unburied remains, animal and man bones and meat tangled all in red and black, striped with fat, lined with sinew and fine skeins of grease, tingling with flies. Here slumps in the mud a collapsed set of shelves spilling bottled animal specimens onto the ground, and from shells of broken glass have emerged frail, custard-fleshed creatures quivering like mute newborns.
Still in a madcap row we make our way faster and faster, hurdling over huge fallen trees and burping sloughs, cut through a derelict crematorium whose brick stacks tower into the sky. The moon rolls between them. Bodies here were burned to papery ash flakes and bone shards, and some of the ovens stand open, gagged with the stuff, spilling down the fronts and onto the ground in a petrified vomit. On the other side of the crematorium we bound over a low wall, and now we are making our way much more slowly and with greater care across a cemetery where the ground is upholstered with moss, and big standing stones interrupt the regular disposition of the graves. I think Lilly takes my hand in the dark. The fingers that hold mine are cool and wet and cling, like slugs. The stimulant wind that blows down the sluice of the Idle, past the tombs, wants to spatter us with cold, jingling silver spray, and make weightless ghosts out of us.
Nectar drops to one knee periodically and thrusts a bronze probe into the ground. Eventually the little propeller at the top spins and he nods showing his teeth. Shovels and picks chough into the ground. I have one myself and am digging. Thunk of wood sends a shock up my arm, and we withdraw to let Jil Punkinflake do his work; he snaps the nails up and out with his fingers as though they were so many pinecone spines and then lunges from the grave with the lid in his hands. A feeble stink, the meagre welcome this old grave is able to afford, clambers out to us. Nectar and the others are pointing—one side of the empty coffin is bored out in a circular hole leading sideways into the earth, and I can just make out a pallid trunk glistening there in the foggy shadow.
More digging reveals many other graves are in the same condition, their tenants having burrowed or perhaps digested their way through the ground, drawn to each other by an overpowering desire out of mind. Where they conflow, we uncover—with an eruption of stench that scatters us retching and snickering—a massive starfish hump, leprous and trickling with spermy ooze. The thick surface shivers at intervals, and, when exposed to the air, a dancing plume of cold white ethereal fire jets from the low cone at the center, or just above it. The bodies have melted together here, sighing and cooing ... That pungent smell is less and less like decay, and more and more like the must of a living thing, like a stable or a pig wallow.
The odor claws at me, and somehow I am pulling at Lilly, or was it Dusty?, and remembering. We all are falling into remembering ... I see darting windows and halls, these endless halls of mine, dark except for the blazing windows ... parallel lines of the floorboards to the walled horizon, and the mortal webs of the spiders matted with dust ... A huge crescent-shaped building seen from a window, ruins all around. A resonation in the air—I’m in a terrible place I never should have come ...
Someone jostles me and I watch Jil Punkinflake, hanging from a metal pole protruding from the ground and bent over the excavation, a thick canvas glove up to the elbow on his right hand, collecting that ether fire in bottles relayed to him by Keen. Jil Punkinflake avoids touching the thing as he works; when the last bottle is filled, he inches back along the pole and we all help pull him onto sound land.
“Let’s get it covered again,” he says.
Dirt flies, and in no time it is reburied. Nectar is carefully setting the bottles in his grigrio box. Jil Punkinflake plucks up a smaller one, blue and square, and swaggers over to me smiling. He puts it in my hand. Though the icy glass seems empty, I can feel an abrasive swirling through the glass, and without thinking I tamp down on the cork firmly with my thumb.
“Give it to your lady friend,” Jil Punkinflake says, the moon white in his pupils.
*
The Girl beams at me as she opens the door. I am led into the house, and she turns to look at me several times. Once, on the staircase, she stops outright, and turns to smile at me.
She stands and smiles at me, for a long time.
Then she turns and we continue to the landing, her opulent hips swaying with a rustle of silk to the right, and to the left, before my eyes. She does not accompany me to the door, but waves me on, her smile unchanged. I go down the hall, to the door I passed through before. When I turn to look back, to ask the Girl with my eyes if this is the right thing I’m doing, she is not looking at me. The Girl shivers, her hand comes up to her breast, where her other hand seizes and folds it around its thumb. She lifts her face slowly, still holding one hand in another hand, and gazes into the air in front of her.
I open the door, and enter the small room, the tepid air close with her fragrance. Light from a grey day sifts from the windows, and she sits soft and remote as a figure in a painting.
We are going downstairs this time, to sit together in the rare gloom beneath the veiled trees. She has gone for her hat. I wait at the window, looking down at the dark grass, the stingy flowered border, the strict line of the upright house. There is a protruding what-do-you-call-it, a cupola? Some sort of fistula. A light is there now, where there hadn’t been before. It is moving around the room, now bright, now faint. That’s the Girl there, at the window, moving about the room in that light, which is now still. She is voluptuously in her slip, and now she sees me. I am smiled at again, across these windows. I can see even the strip of pink ribbon that cinches the slip around her narrow waist. Looking straight at me, she looses the slip and lets it fall about her feet, and I fly through stair and hallways and doorways, ways and spaces, lights and darks unmoor and spin smoothly and rapidly around me until through what I seem to know is the right door I am flung headlong into darkness, into bare, enfolding arms.
Later, I join the veiled woman who waits for me beneath the veiled branches, in a small paved spot by an airy pavilion. The thick crepe folded down from her great hat is impermeable to my sight, and the waxy light lances in between us, making her even harder to see. There is little said, and less meant maybe, before it is suggested to me that I might go. But, I am also tersely instructed to come again tomorrow. She sounds different. I agree to go, but for the moment I am a little faint, and wait a little to collect myself. I rub my brow, and my face is tickled by three long grey hairs, tangled round the fingers of the hand that rubs my brow, fluttering in the wind.
I peer at her, who sits there under the trees, and then up at the cupola window. In a spell, I wander out through the house. Of all the doors I see, I pass only one that stands open. The room beyond is black, but fragrance, and the sound of breathing, comes from it. I pause to look. Teeth glint in the dark. I go on toward the front door. Bare feet pat the floor behind me. I feel two firm hands on my shoulders.
On my way back to the college, the swift-coming rain catches me, and I have to hurry along the sloughing path with my lapels turned up. The trees here are bare, it takes me a while to find one with enough leaves to offer me any shelter. I stand there shaking the rain from my hair. Already the trunks around me are soaked, glistening and brown like hard turds planted upright in the ground. I put my hand in my pocket and with a shock I feel it close on the whirring bottle. I forgot to give it to her.
*
I am drinking with Jil Punkinflake when the word comes, just within the one vast hour. Separating the glass from my lip to which it had lightly adhered makes it ring, and I pick up the envelope from the rough boards of the table. From a nest of shredded newspaper comes a small card with Makemin’s name embossed in what I know at once to be real gold near the top: my orders. We move out tomorrow. I look up at Ji
l Punkinflake, and in my mind I see her, walking high above me against the horizon, her arms at her sides, her veiled head lowered, rolling a little wearily with each step and her long skirts undulating lazily against red and orange sky, like waves on the sea. Orders brought me to these people that I learned to love the moment I saw them, now orders from the same source will take me from them.
We take his lantern and make our way through the wreckage to the river. I make a magic knot from cadaver hair, make a hole in the soil with my finger, put the knot in, cover it, sprinkle it with water from a rain barrel there. I bend down and speak into the ground, saying whatever comes into my head. A transparent shoot shaped like a budding oak leaf slips from the ground and brushes my lip like a mineral noodle, before it bends at a sharp angle and points in a particular direction. I take a bearing from it.
We follow the line to a building with steps going down to the river. An adjacent tree is growing down through the roof and the long naked branches white as bones bore into the shelves. The pungent odor of decaying paper blends with the usual musty neglect smell, and I hear mice flit along the walls. With Jil Punkinflake’s scalpel I cut along a thickly embossed leather membrane covered with golden curlicues and letters stretched all out of shape, which has grown over the shelves here. Most of the shelves are wrapped up like sleeping bats in folds of thick binding leather. I make a number of lateral cuts, and immediately the pages begin to dribble out onto the floor.
“Catch them! Don’t let them touch the ground!”
Jil Punkinflake darts back and forth snatching pages out of the air, starting to laugh a little, and I am, with mounting silliness, slashing at this groaning leather membrane. The leaves sail out, and Jil Punkinflake’s deft hands catch them.
“All right now,” I say, “Give me those pages.”
I carry them outside and hold them out, let the wind rattle them in my hand. Then I shove them into my satchel.
The Narrator Page 7