“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 Jil 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.
“This will take a little time.”
I write up the now single screed on a roll of fine creamy paper, with a pen that audibly cuts the ink into the fibres, and bind that paper up with black crepe. That shows a bit of flair. I give this to Jil Punkinflake by the starlight of early that morning, and he takes it in his outstretched hand, then inbrings his hand holding the roll, gazing down at it as though it were an infant.
The mist lifts and lowers; it does this languid dance dreamily over the dank earth and lifts long shoots, limp and elastic, above its level, and I watch a slender probe trailing off and losing itself in the air in front of me. The body of the mist forgets and expends this pinch of its stuff without noticing it; before it vanishes, it acquires a sort of demeanor, like something not far short of a tranquil personality.
The kinked wand of mist is turning invisible and is reflected in the steelly bus of a tiny concave mirror in a bronze frame, and what I had taken for small green leaves nearly swallowed up in black I now see is a dark and green patterned sheet of wallpaper ... on the wall ... on which hangs the mirror ... in front of which I stand ... but in which I don’t appear.
I see through it, that this is the landing of the staircase of her house, and here I have stood for who knows how long, where nothing has come nor gone, nothing has happened, and no light has been. There is a little light of the kind that makes mist glow, and now I see a panel of moonlight at my feet. Am I narrating now? It creeps snailishly along the bare boards and the wafer of wan rug, leaving behind it an oyster track of nacreous sperm. All a dream, that’s certain. I find I can see the motion of this patch of moonlight; the leading edge is cloudy but firm, but for some reason my vision imparts a trickling to it. It shines now on the hem of a skirt, so that the color of the skirt and the color of the moonlight can’t be differentiated.
I look to my left, and see a face in the dim, inches away. I see the scattered light of her face and her hands, interrupted by leopard spots of dark as though she were spattered with paint, or piebald with sores. Perhaps her fragrant, rich dress is only paint? Is she only painted on the door? There’s a spot of paint on her right cheek, or isn’t there? One of those ghostly hands rises and presses itself to my chest, sliding luxuriously inside my jacket and up past my heart.
Hollowly she says, “I want to love you” and it seems to be a variety of similar phrasings all said at once.
Her living skirts rise up closing around me and her hand, glued on my chest, pulls me forward. She draws me into her shade as weightless as a spirit, and I watch from some distance as we drift backwards together and dwindle out of sight like a starved candle ebbing out.