Mortal Love Read Online Free PDF

stared, I began to get a jittery feeling in my stomach. I brought my face very close to the painting, until I, too, could see what was inside the sleeping woman.
    Silvery green spilled from the cleft between her legs. At first I thought it was fog. But it wasn’t fog; it was light falling from a tiny lantern, held by a tiny man. He stood in the recess between the woman’s legs as though he were guarding a door, and as I squinted I saw that it was a door—a tunnel, opening in the mossy cleft and leading . . .
    Where? I wasn’t sure, but I was almost certain that I could see other figures, if I squinted just right and looked past the lantern bearer. An entire crowd of them, some tiny and others not small at all, giants they would be if only I could see them clearly. My heart began to race; I thought I might throw up.
    Because there were still more figures in the painting, hidden in the trees and leaves: all watching, all staring at the sleeper and the peeking man—but also, I realized, staring at me, Valentine, the peeking boy.
    â€œRemember me,” said a woman’s voice. She said a word then that I did not recognize; yet it was somehow familiar to me, and I knew it was not just a word but a name. Her voice came again, a whisper, but when I whirled to look, no one was there.
    â€œRed!” I shouted. I jumped from the footstool and ran toward the staircase. “ Red —”
    That was when I remembered my toy dog. I looked back and saw it lying near the wall. Something hovered in the air above it. A dark fluttery thing like a leaf or petal; as I stared, it floated down to land upon the dog’s matted head. With a scream I raced down the steps, shrieking until I found Red in the kitchen.
    â€œYou know you should never go upstairs alone,” was all he said. In fact he had never told me any such thing. “You know that.”
    He didn’t ask what had frightened me, and he didn’t seem surprised that I was scared out of my wits. If anything he seemed pleased, even relieved. He made me another sandwich and retrieved my toy dog, and we returned to the boathouse.
    I began drawing all the time. Red started by buying me coloring books and crayons and cheap drawing paper, but after a very short while, it became clear that my talents were precocious, and we began raiding my grandfather’s studio for still more pens and ink and color pencils. When I filled one sketchbook, we’d rifle Radborne’s bureaus and closets for another.
    It was years before it dawned on me that some of those pigments had been manufactured a century before. The dozens of empty sketchbooks we found were of similar vintage, their covers faded but the pages inside unblemished. One November day Red went up to Goldengrove and dragged Radborne’s ancient drafting table to the boathouse. It was immense, custom made of mahogany with walnut inlays, and engraved with the initials JC. I always assumed they represented some other unknown ancestor who’d also been a painter.
    All through the long island winters, I’d sit there with the woodstove burning, drawing while Red worked on bookshelves and cabinets and masts. The floor was covered with curls of pine shavings and balled-up papers. Red made me a special stool so that I could reach the drafting table.
    â€œThere you go.” He eyed me approvingly, his beard flecked with sawdust and cigarette ash. “You look like a real apprentice now.”
    Day after day, year after year, I drew trees: labyrinthine trees that metastasized into vast yew cities, with ladders and ropes linking one level to another and long-eyed people rustling in the shadows. By the time I was eleven, the yew cities metastasized into the land that I named Ealwearld. I drew maps that formed the outlines of oaks and tamaracks, and detailed genealogies of the trees’ denizens, who fought wars over fruit and walnuts and lobsters, carved spears and longbows from yew wood,