The New Weird Read Online Free PDF Page B

now. Hush." Crome backed away. "Look," he whispered, "I ― " Before he could say anything else, she had slipped her hand deftly between the osiers and, like a woman gutting fish on a cold Wednesday morning at Lowth, opened the corpse from diaphragm to groin. "Man or woman?" she asked him, up to her elbows in it. "Which would you say?" A filthy smell filled the air and then dissipated. "I don't want ― " said Crome. But she had already turned back to him and was offering him her hands, cupped, in a way that gave him no option but to see what she had found ― or made ― for him.
    "Look!"
    A dumb, doughy shape writhed and fought against itself on her palms, swelling quickly from the size of a dried pea to that of a newly born dog. It was, he saw, contained by vague and curious lights which came and went; then by a cream-coloured fog which was perhaps only a blurring of its own spatial, limits; and at last by a damp membrane, pink and grey, which it burst suddenly by butting and lunging. It was the lamb he had seen in his dreams, shivering and bleating and tottering in its struggle to stand, the eyes fixed on him forever in its complaisant, bone-white face. It seemed already to be sickening in the cold leaden breath of the pond.
    "Kill the Mammy," said the woman with the insect's head, "and in a few days' time you will be free. I will bring you a weapon soon."
    "All right," said Crome.
    He turned and ran.
    He heard the lamb bleating after him the length of Henrietta Street, and behind that the sound of the sea, rolling and grinding the great stones in the tide.

    For some days this image preoccupied him. The lamb made its way without fuss into his waking life. Wherever he looked he thought he saw it looking back at him: from an upper window in the Artists' Quarter, or framed by the dusty iron railings which line the streets there, or from between the chestnut trees in an empty park.
    Isolated in a way he had not been since he first arrived in Uroconium wearing his green plush country waistcoat and yellow pointed shoes, he decided to tell no one what had happened by the Aqualate Pond. Then he thought he would tell Ansel Verdigris and Ingo Lympany. But Lympany had gone to Cladich to escape his creditors ― and Verdigris, who after eating the tablecloth was no longer welcomed at the Luitpold Cafe, had left the Quarter too: at the large old house in Delpine Square there was only his mother ― a bit lonely in her bath chair, though still a striking woman with a great curved nose and a faint, heady smell of elder blossom ― who said vaguely, "I'm sure I can remember what he said," but in the end could not.
    "I wonder ifyou know, Ardwick Crome, how I worry about his bowels," she went on. "As his friend you must worry, too, for they are very lazy, and he will not encourage them if we do not!"
    It was, she said, a family failing.
    She offered Crome chamomile tea, which he refused, and then got him to run an errand for her to a fashionable chemist's in Mynned. After that he could do nothing but go home and wait.
    Kristodulos Fleece ― half dead with opium and syphilis, and notoriously self-critical ― had left behind him when he vacated the north-light studio a small picture. Traditionally it remained there. Succeeding occupants had taken heart from its technical brio and uncustomary good humour (although Audsley King was reputed to have turned it to the wall during her brief period in Montrouge because she detected in it some unforgivable sentimentality or other) and no dealer in the Quarter would buy it for fear of bad luck. Crome now removed it to the corner above the cheap tin washstand so that he could see it from his bed.
    Oil on canvas, about a foot square, it depicted in some detail a scene the artist had called "Children beloved of the gods have the power to weep roses." The children, mainly girls, were seen dancing under an elder tree, the leafless branches of which had been decorated with strips of rag. Behind them