The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror Read Online Free PDF

and followed her into the living-room. As he entered she drew the table-cloth across a brilliant sheet of pressed sunlight and pinned it down with bowls of cereal; through the sheet he’d seen its carved legs, shaped as by caresses. ‘If you think we can’t afford furniture,’ she mused, ‘I could always go back to work.’
    ‘I don’t think that’s called for.’ Shaped as by caresses. His hand stole beneath the cloth and touched the wood. Slowly, exquisitely, his fingers traced the curves. He saw the leg braced on the wall, the taut skirt. His wife picked up her spoon; it blazed at the edge of his eye. Unlacquered, her hair glowed. Suddenly ashamed, he reached out and stroked her knee.
    ‘Not when you’re eating, please,’ she said. ‘Your hands are greasy.’
    At the door he realized that he couldn’t go back for the photograph; if he did his wife would know. Instead, he looked up at the window through the leaves piled like her hair. The pane was white as an empty canvas; within, a figure shielded her eyes and waved.
    When he came home that night his mind was covered with sketches, erased lines, sheets half-torn and reassembled with conjecture. He’d imagined the tree-lined street washed by headlamps as the girl had seen it, staring down, perhaps for a last glimpse of whoever had abandoned her—the unknown hand on the camera shutter no longer holding hers. In the lunch-hour he’d sketched on the back of a form, but the sketch had lacked a sight of the reality. ‘Don’t lay the table yet,’ he told his wife as he veered into the kitchen, ‘I have an idea I want to get down.’ The people in the flat below were across the city when the girl had screamed and fallen, but they were sure that she had been abandoned; a drained husk, perhaps she’d thought that she might float toward the empty landscape. He set up his easel before the window. The room seemed more cramped than he remembered; he would have to sit on the bed. He projected the girl on the pane, but she refused to pose; her foot poised on the sill, the weighted falling sun shone through her skirt. That wasn’t what he wanted. Already the street-lamps were raw wounds on the night; a tree shed a leaf like a flake of skin. If he could see her perhaps be would be able to persuade her to pose. He crossed to the wardrobe and felt in the pocket for the photograph. There was no pocket. The suit was gone.
    You did that on purpose, said his nails biting into the wood. The sun sank and touched the black horizon. He tramped into the kitchen. ‘So you got rid of my suit,’ he said.
    ‘You don’t think I wouldn’t ask you first?’ Behind her head a curtain swayed like a skirt. ‘It’s only at the cleaner’s. You’re an artist—I’d have thought you’d care how you looked.’
    ‘So that I’ll get on, I know. I didn’t think you’d go behind my back.’
    ‘If there was anything in it you wanted I’m sorry, honestly I am. I couldn’t find anything.’
    ‘Nothing I haven’t already got.’
    ‘This table really is too small, you know,’ she said. The cruet came down hard on the clothed glass. She knows! it exclaimed. Or had she fumbled it rather than thumped it down as a protest? No, he was sure she had the photograph. She withdrew herself from him by sleeping, then she stole his souvenir. The carved leg pressed his. ‘I like the flat as it stands,’ he told her. ‘It welcomes me.’
    As he stood before the cupboard plates chattered in the kitchen. No doubt the girl had washed up for her lover; perhaps they’d eaten at two in the morning, their hours based on their shared rhythm, not imposed from outside—the sort of life he meant when he yearned to be bohemian. Arms about each other, they’d tire together when at all. He opened the cupboard door; he would find a book which might suggest a detail to extend across his empty canvas. In the shadows the titles were dim. He knew each by its place. He touched the tip of a spine, and a finger