Mortal Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

distilled poisons from monkshood and skullcap.
    Ealwearld was not a happy place. Its human-size inhabitants ate so much that there was never enough food for the smaller long-eyed warriors in the trees, whose nocturnal depredations upon their rivals involved blinding them with the stingers of wasps and yellow jackets or tying them by the hair to iron bedsteads and leaving them to starve. I’d go up to the fourth floor and look at my grandfather’s paintings, sometimes incorporating his characters into my notebooks.
    But then I slammed into puberty like a brick wall, and Ealwearld changed. Radborne’s painting of the sleeping woman especially fascinated me, and gradually my imaginary land became her: a woman who was a vast tree, with boles for breasts and leaves for eyes and a mouth that opened into another, hidden country where even stranger creatures lived. I drew her obsessively, masturbating over the images when I was done. My childhood stories of Ealwearld became a chronicle of the woman, who had herself become a labyrinth. I hid these notebooks beneath a loose shelf in my room at Goldengrove. Eventually there were nine of them. I called the woman, and her chronicle, Vernoraxia. When I was fourteen, I saw her.
    * * *
    I was home from Andover for Halloween. Red drove down and brought me back to the island for the weekend. Halloween was the closest my family—if you could call my brother and Red and me a family—ever came to celebrating a holiday together. For as long as I could remember, Simon had hosted a party on Halloween night. His friends from the city and D.C. would come up several days beforehand, taking over Goldengrove’s spare rooms and studios; Red would fire up the propane lanterns and gas refrigerator, fill the fireplaces with applewood and oak, arrange to ferry any latecomers from the mainland, and invite all those island friends who were wintering over. It was the only time I ever felt as though I occupied the same world as my brother did, or his friends.
    The day of the party was crazy, as always. Simon made multiple trips to the island general store and the harbor to get supplies. My brother’s friends pillaged Goldengrove’s closets and my grandfather’s studio for costumes, trading makeup and wigs and drugs in the corridors, shrieking and blasting old Roxy Music albums on the ancient cabinet hi-fi. Radborne had kept two quartersawn oak wardrobes in his studio, filled with antiquated clothing that he used in his paintings—Revolutionary and Civil War uniforms, Edwardian gowns, Johnny Appleseed’s ragged trews, medieval-style tunics that had graced models for Robin Hood and Maid Marian, Benedick and Beatrice, Tristan and Iseult.
    But by the time I rolled out of bed late that afternoon and found my way to the second-floor studio, all of the good stuff was gone. A torn satin doublet lay on the floor, surrounded by green glass beads sprung from a broken necklace. On the windowsill was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, nearly half full. I took a long pull from this, then started looking for a costume.
    It was slim pickings. One wardrobe was completely empty. Alongside the other, T-shirts and flimsy dresses were heaped like rummage-sale leftovers: nothing but crap. I kicked them aside, yanked open the door to see if there was anything left. Torn stockings dangled from a wire coat hanger like a snake’s shed skin; on another, wooden hanger hung an old-fashioned woolen jacket. I pulled it out: dark burgundy, smelling of camphor and some kind of fruity perfume. It had glass buttons and enough detailing around the collar that I figured it must have cost a lot of money, once upon a time.
    It was big, too big I thought at first. But I’d grown since last summer, shooting up nearly five inches, so I was now over six feet, though it would be another few years before I stopped growing. When I pulled the jacket on, I was surprised at how well it fit; and when I examined