Dinner at Deviant's Palace Read Online Free PDF

hands and knees, throwing up and… barking?”
    Rivas was humiliated to realize that his face was turning red. Why, he thought, can’t he and I forget that damned incident? “You’ve been wondering about that for thirteen years?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    Rivas shook his head and waved at the door. “Keep on wondering.”
    After Barrows had left, Rivas sat back and tilted up his glass again, and then, gingerly, he gave in and allowed himself to remember that disastrous night—the first and last time he’d ever tasted the Currency brandy.
    It had been in the fall of—Rivas counted the years on his fingers—the sixth year of the Sixth Ace, and Urania Barrows had decided to invite Gregorio, her fieldboy lover, to her gala seventeenth birthday party. Though only the son of one of the tenant farmers, the eighteen-year-old Gregorio had managed to save some money—a fifth and some change, big money to a field hand—and on the day of the party he spent it all on renting a suit and getting a haircut and a presumptuously aristocratic shave. And he went to the party, and in spite of being terribly nervous in the sophisticated company, he had made a good impression… until the brandy was served.
    Young Gregorio had been drinking wine since childhood, but distilled spirits were new to him, and he didn’t know that one was supposed to drink them more slowly. He eventually realized that he was foolishly drunk and embarrassing Urania, so he left the party… and as soon as he was out in the fresh air, it occurred to him that he was sick.
    Not wanting to be seen vomiting, he’d reeled off the path into a tiny clearing behind some bushes and then, on his hands and knees, begun the lengthy process of expelling the brandy from his stomach.
    And at one point, when he’d paused for breath, he heard a lady on the path asking someone about the peculiar noises coming from behind the bushes. A man’s voice replied that it sounded like a dog.
    Rivas shuddered now, and drained his beer. He remembered that he had desperately wanted the people to forget about the noises and go away, and somehow he’d concluded that the best way to accomplish that would be to convince them that it was indeed only a dog, and not anything that needed investigating. So he’d begun… barking.
    He stood up now and opened the door, but he was unable to avoid remembering the rest of it, his last conscious moments of that disastrous evening… when he’d finally opened his eyes and seen Irwin Barrows’s boots six inches from his face.
    He left the little room, swinging the door shut behind him, and as he reeled back toward the stage—the alcohol had caught up with him again—his eyes only half saw the dim bar and the stage ahead and the uneasy faces watching him; overlaid on that scene like a second transparency he was seeing again the One-a-One Freeway, seeming because of the thick fog to be a solitary track across the chilly sky, down which he’d fled on foot on that awful dawn thirteen years ago. He’d been shivering with cold and dizzily sick from a concussion as well as a hangover, for the outraged Irwin Barrows had given him a solid kick in the head before dragging him out from behind the bushes and ordering the kitchen crew to carry him away and dump him somewhere outside the Barrows land boundary.
    He’d walked all that day, and as the sun rose and gradually scattered the fog, he’d seen for the first time the weathered and vine-hung ruins of big old Ellay, noisy now only with the chatter of parrots and monkeys. Decrepitude lent the still imposing building shells an air of tragic grandeur that they couldn’t have had in life, and the sheer number of them—they stretched like ranks of uncared-for tombstones to the horizon—awed the young Gregorio; several times his curiosity had outweighed his sickness and haste and numb sense of loss, and he’d gone exploring through old rooms and up and down alarming, rubble-strewn stairways. By the time he