Mortal Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

began to create things that were truly new and strange. His work began to implode; without commissions or a story to follow, he had no creative compass, nothing to keep him from wandering deeper and deeper into his own nightmarish visions. When I was a kid, Red gave me a book that contained images of Louis Wain’s schizophrenic fractal cats. I recognized in them the pattern that my grandfather’s late painting followed, nearly photorealistic detail giving way to fancy and, in the end, ferociously fragmented, almost purely geometric images, like the endlessly replicating honeycombs traced across your eyelids during an acid trip.
    These were the paintings on Goldengrove’s fourth floor: extravagantly detailed canvases filled with trees whose trunks sprouted nests of bees with men’s faces, armies of insects, women who rode dogs big as horses. Each canvas was framed with the acorn-and-twig designs that Radborne himself made from autumn gleanings and birds’ eggs, the husks of dragonflies and hawkmoths, sea glass and dried fungi. Each bore a small brass plaque stating its title.
    ESELT EISPLAYS HER HAIR TO THE FLEEING CHILDREN
    A PERSISTENT SUITOR’S RUIN
    HALBOL THE BOLD
    WITHIN THE WHEEL, AN EYE
    RAPTURE OF THE QUEEN UPON DISCOVERING HIS SHOE
    THERE THE SLEIGH BEGGAY STAYED THE NIGHT,
    Â Â Â Â AND IN THE DAWN FED
    I was six when I discovered them. Red was taken up with the renovation of a custom Hinkley for a Boston stockbroker. He had the blueprints laid out on the kitchen table in Goldengrove, the only room in the mansion where you could rely on sunlight. I’d spilled something on the blueprints, which made Red swear for about five minutes without stopping. When he finally caught his breath, he gave me a peanut butter sandwich and my lumpy toy dog and pushed me into the living room.
    â€œGo play for half an hour, okay? And stay out of trouble.”
    The first floor was dark, but light spilled down the stairway from the upper stories. I started climbing the steps, passing from rooms I recognized to rooms I didn’t, until finally I reached the fourth floor.
    It was bright up there, and cool. A not-unpleasant air of neglect hung about the corridor, and the house’s pervasive smell of turpentine and oils. Drifts of dead insects covered the windowsills. I started walking, sandwich in one hand and dog in the other. I remember stopping in astonishment in front of a closed door. There was a piece of jewelry stuck on it, a gold-and-silver dragonfly with wings of silvered crystal. I tried to pick it up, and the dragonfly skimmed from my fingers, disappearing down the corridor toward a window.
    I chased after it, but I wasn’t fast enough: the dragonfly was gone. When I stopped, I saw that what was before me was not a window but a painting. I stared at it, sucking on my stuffed dog’s nose.
    It was a painting of a woman. She had very long red-brown hair falling across her face. She seemed to be asleep, but not in bed: she was lying on top of a mossy rock, which I thought was strange if she was supposed to be sleeping. What was stranger was that she was naked. And strangest of all was that a man, or a sort of man, was kneeling between her legs, grasping each of her calves and pulling them apart so that he could peer between them.
    The picture was hung too high for me to get a clear look at what the man was staring at. So I put down my dog and ran through the hall, opening doors until I found a room with a footstool in it. I dragged this back and clambered onto it to examine the picture more closely.
    The man had horns on his head, flat curling horns, almost hidden within his shiny black hair. The horns reminded me of seashells I found sometimes on the gravel beach. Once Red had shown me a very, very old one, hard as a rock, older than the dinosaurs, he said: an ammonite.
    The man’s horns were like that. He had long, slanting eyes and a very red tongue, like a bloodworm. As I