The Ammonite Violin & Others Read Online Free PDF Page A

laughs. Then he sinks below the surface, or something unseen pulls him down, and that’s when I see the girl, standing far out near the center of the pool, bathing in one of the fountains.

    A week ago, I laid the pen down after that last sentence, and I had no intention of ever picking it up again. At least, not to finish writing this. But there was a package in the mail this afternoon—a cardboard mailing tube addressed to me—and one thing leads to another, so to speak. The only return address on the tube was Chicago, IL 60625. No street address or post-office box, no sender’s name. And I noticed almost immediately that the postmark didn’t match the Chicago zip. The zip code on the postmark was 93650, which turns out to be Fresno, California. I opened the tube and found two things inside. The first was a print of a painting I’d never seen before, and the second was a note neatly typed out and paper-clipped to a corner of the print, which read as follows:
A blacksmith from Raasay lost his daughter to the Each Uisge. In revenge, the blacksmith and his son made a set of large hooks, in a forge they set up by the lochside. They then roasted a sheep and heated the hooks until they were red hot. At last, a great mist appeared from the water and the Each Uisge rose from the depths and seized the sheep. The blacksmith and his son rammed the red-hot hooks into its flesh and, after a short struggle, dispatched it. In the morning there was nothing left of the creature apart from a foul jelly-like substance. (More West Highland Tales ; J. F. Campbell, 1883)
    The print was labeled on the back, with a sticker affixed directly to the paper, as The Black Lake by Jan Preisler, 1904. It shows a nude young man standing beside a tall white horse at the edge of a lake that is, indeed, entirely black. The horse’s mane is black, as well, as is its tail and the lower portions of its legs. The young man is holding some black garment I can’t identify. The sticker informed me that the original hangs in the Nardoni Gallerie in Prague. I sat and stared at it for a long time, and then I came back upstairs and picked up this pen again.

    These are only words. Only ink on paper.
    I had the dream again tonight, and now it’s almost dawn, and I’m sitting in my study at my desk, trying to finish what I started.
    And I am standing on the stone bridge in the park, standing naked under the full moon, and I can hear the fountains, all that water forced up and then spattering down again across the pool, which, in my dream, is as black as the lake in Preisler’s painting. The girl’s wading towards me, parting the muddy, dark water with the prow of her thighs, and her skin is white and her long hair is black, black as ink, the ink in this pen, the lake in a picture painted one hundred and two years ago.
    Her eyes are black, too, and I can read no expression in them. She stops a few yards from the bridge and gazes up at me. She points to the heavy bridle in my hands, and I hold it out for her to see. She smiles, showing me a mouthful of teeth that would be at home in the jaws of some devouring ocean thing, and she holds both her arms out to me. And I understand what she’s asking me to do, that she wants me to drop the bridle into the pool. I step back from the edge of the bridge, moving so slowly now I might as well be mired to the ankles in molasses; she takes another quick step towards me, and her teeth glint in the moonlight. I clutch the bridle more tightly than before, and the bit and curb chains jingle softly.
    I found this online an hour or so after I opened the mailing tube and copied it down on a Post-It note, something from a website, “Folklore of the British Isles”— There was one way in which a Kelpie could be defeated and tamed; the Kelpie’s power of shape shifting was said to reside in its bridle, and my body who could claim possession of it could force the Kelpie to submit to their will.
    One thing leads to another.
    In my