The Electric Michelangelo Read Online Free PDF Page A

there was a locked-door brew of hocus-pocus and basins of blood and the mystery women called out clamorously as if they were night-ravens.
    On these nights of careful company and whispers and bird-like screeches, Cy gradually began to tolerate what was sinister and wonder about the night-wound ministry on the other side of the wall. The keyhole seemed to expand a fraction each time he stood holding breath outside the door, as if bidding him use it. Like his eye had once upon a time been summoned to the consumptives’ waste before Satan had shown him a gallery the other side of his squeamishness. And so one night Cy bent forward and peeked. And inside was a terrible story that couldn’t ever be told in friendly childish pictures made from red paint. It was the Devil’s joyless laboratory and in it his dabblings were mirthless, invasive, and they produced wet slop like pulled fish-gut when the gulls have flocked and pecked and ruined a catch. And Cy would never, never look again.
    There was no name for what he saw, and no possible explanation for him at that age had Reeda wanted to present him with a tricky revelation. If one lesson was to be learned by her son that night, it was that there were practices which went beyond a doctor’s formal world of medicine, and which ordinary folk might be better versed in. Because his mother undertook them and she was not a bookishly educated woman. There were rituals in blood, aspects of the human body which lived beyond official stewardship and out towards an altogether stranger keeping. So when the town authorities announced stiffer gaol sentences for local abortionists caught and prosecuted successfully, without having any connection to the term for such a thing he did not know to be afeared for the safety of his mother. Having not the vocabulary to discern relevance, there was no crime that she conformed to, she was no official malefactress. And if she was indeed a witch in all her raised-leg, sharp-hooked female rites with Mrs Preston, she was still his mother who also clothed and fed and loved him.
     
     
    If it was not entirely forgotten, the parlour incident was shoved sufficiently far back in Cy’s mind so as to trouble him less and less with the passing of time. Life could be cruel and it could be strange and it was certainly messy, that much he knew. But there were the pressing amusements of childhood to enjoy also. So it was that later that same year the boys came to be standing in a line on the concrete wall of the bathing pool, engaged in one of their favourite occupations. The piddling competition. Above the bay the sky was fast with cloud, drifting fat shadows over the town, stuck between coy sunshine and a squalling rain that had kept mostly out to sea all day so far. The boys had their backs to the town and had hold of their dickies in preparation. It was low tide and once again the flat plains of the beach were exposed, fishing boats were tipped on their sides and resting on the sand. Cy was about to burst. He had been saving himself all afternoon while drinking a good quantity of lemonade, the better to get some force with. The strategy proved to be not such a terribly good idea, however, as Morris Gibbs was late in arriving and by the time he made it to the pool Cy felt as if he had a hard football in his stomach. He wasn’t sure he could go even if he wanted, so tight the blockage felt, though in fine tradition he bluffed and told them all he was going to hit the fells on the other side of the bay, if not manage Scotland that day. Jonty Preston, who was not one for long-distance urination and preferred to referee, shouted the mark.
    – Ready? Aim. Fire!
    All five let go a welcome stream in five golden arcs across the sand and shingle. Ten feet away the beach spluttered and gurgled like a drain. It could have been his height that helped him out, he was tall for his age, or his urgent need to go, but after getting a delayed start Cy knew he was winning the