Dark Carnival Read Online Free PDF

an optical illusion. I think. The skin moves over the bone; not vice-versa. See?' she demonstrated.
        'I'm glad yours slithers, too,' he sighed. 'I was beginning to worry.'
        'About what?'
        He patted his ribs. 'My ribs don't go all the way down, they stop here . And I found some confounded ones that dangle in mid-air!'
        Beneath the curve of her small breasts, Clarisse clasped her hands.
        'Of course, silly, everybody's ribs stop at a given point. And those funny little short ones are floating ribs.'
        'I just hope they don't float around too much,' he said, making an uneasy joke. Now, he desired that his wife leave him, he had some important discovering to do with his own body and he didn't want her laughing at him.
        'I'll feel all right,' he said. 'Thanks for coming in, dear.'
        'Any time,' she said, kissing him, rubbing her small pink nose warm against his.
        'I'll be damned!' He touched his nose with his fingers, then hers. 'Did you ever realize that the nose bone only comes down so far and a lot of gristly tissue takes up from there on?'
        She wrinkled hers. 'So what?' And, dancing, she exited.
        He felt the sweat rise from the pools and hollows of his face, forming a salten tide to flow down his cheeks. Next on the agenda was his spinal cord and column. He examined it in the same manner as he operated the numerous push-buttons in his office, pushing them to summon the messenger boys. But, in these pushings of his spinal column, fears and terrors answered, rushed from a million doors in Mr. Harris's mind to confront and shake him. His spine felt awfully — bony. Like a fish, freshly eaten and skeletonized, on a china platter. He fingered the little rounded knobbins. 'My God.'
        His teeth began to chatter. 'God All-Mighty,' he thought, 'why haven't I realized it all these years? All these years I've gone around with a — SKELETON — inside me!' He saw his fingers blur before him, like motion films triply speeded in their quaking apprehension. 'How is it that we take ourselves so much for granted? How is it we never question our bodies and our being?'
        A skeleton. One of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake-fingered, rattling things that sway from neck-chains in abandoned webbed closets, one of those things found on the desert all long and scattered like dice!
        He stood upright, because he could not bear to remain seated. Inside me now, he grasped his stomach, his head, inside my head is a — skull. One of those curved carapaces which holds my brain like an electrical jelly, one of those cracked shells with the holes in front like two holes shot through it by a double-barrelled shot-gun! With its grottoes and caverns of bone, its revetments and placements for my flesh, my smelling, my seeing, my hearing, my thinking! A skull, encompassing my brain, allowing it exit through its brittle windows to see the outside world!
        He wanted to dash into the bridge party, upset it, a fox in a chickenyard, the cards fluttering all around like chicken feathers burst upwards in clouds! He stopped himself only with a violent, trembling effort. Now, now, man, control yourself. This is a revelation, take it for what it's worth, understand it, savour it. But a SKELETON! screamed his subconscious. I won't stand for it. It's vulgar, it's terrible, it's frightening. Skeletons are horrors; they clink and tinkle and rattle in old castles, hung from oaken beams, making long, indolently rustling pendulums on the wind. . .
        'Darling, will you come in and meet the ladies?' called his wife's sweet, clear voice.
        Mr. Harris stood up, His SKELETON was holding him up. This thing inside him, this invader, this horror, was supporting his arms, legs and head. It was like feeling someone just behind you who shouldn't be there. With every step he took he realized how dependent he was upon this other