The Narrator Read Online Free PDF Page B

sheepish smile and toss of the hands.
    “An Edek saw you?” he asks sharply.
    “Yes.”
    He shakes his head.
    Twilight shows violet fire in the sky as we make our way to the dormitories. Skulls hang in net bags from the street lights, which are not lit.
    One of the students grabs my arm and points, and the other students are watching in rapt attention as a hearse rattles by in the square terraced below this one. The horses are large and burly, with glistening curried hides and quivering tails painstakingly bundled atop their buttocks. Their plumed heads bend in the same direction at the same time, their dishevilled manes seem especially wildly to contrast with their otherwise impeccable grooming. A hatless man in a plain black suit is driving them. I crane my neck to see inside, but the windows are curtained. A veiled black wreath adorns the back. My comrades sigh and coo to themselves over it, and sagaciously evaluate the style of the brass fittings, the magnificent lacquering of the wood.
    “It’s built low,” the one who took my arm says, “because the coffin rides in a compartment above the passengers. Isn’t that dreamy?”
    We go on. Now, here and there, I see a few faltering lanterns. Most of the people of the district seem either to be old or ill, but not for that reason lacking in street vigor. There are no doctors in the death precinct, only morticians; if you get sick they’ll be happy to embalm you. We stop on the way before one of the many haunted houses that line this route. I am told of strangled voices from mouths clotted with earth, bellowing curses and prophesies from the basements and stairways; a stirring of the embroidered hem of the arras, and a certain object no one has ever seen because it is shrouded in darkness even in the noonday sun. The students hang on the gate, looking eagerly from one black window to the next. Finally, having evidently seen nothing, they straggle back into the street, ragged yellow smiles kneading faces that glow blue as though dusted with lead powder.
    “You’ve seen ghosts in there?” I ask.
    “Naturally. There are ghosts all over the district.” Jil Punkinflake turns one of these hyena grins on me, his eyes like luminous toadstools in the fluorescent dusk. He waves his hand at his three dice-playing companions. “There were five of us, you know.”
    We spin through brilliant salons of butter-colored candle light and twinkling crystal, straight-backed lady plays remote music on the spinet as the room darkens with burgundy shadow, and a breath stirs webs in the empty hallway. As we pass the mouth of a sunken arcade lined with heavy wooden doors, a crazed pounding breaks on the air, resounding down the long arcade from somewhere out of sight. One of Jil Punkinflake’s friends, a plummy-voiced boy named Nectar, explains adipocere to me. “It’s an entirely distinct variety of decay, and quite ubiquitous, but you seldom see it expressed because the other, more common variety seems to drive it out. In those rare circumstances in which it does gain the ascendancy, it transforms the flesh into a kind of wax. We have a little girl at the school who’s all adipocere; eighty years ago, or more now, she died—and hasn’t changed a hair since.”
    “She’s gone the color of weak tea,” Jil Punkinflake adds.
    Nectar points to a sunken burying ground about the area of a modest house. The grave markers are tumbled in disarray and half buried in firm mud, marbled throughout with a thick pale substance that in places has oozed onto the surface in smooth, flat wads.
    “There’s a real welter of the stuff down there,” says Jil Punkinflake. “Water main broke a few years back, when all of those—” he flips his hand at the stones, and now I see fragments of coffin, a dull bronze handle “—were just in.” And we pass by. “Wouldn’t you love to have a cake of that ?” They grin at each other. “Fine laaadyyyy soooaaap .” “Or make candles, for a slow