Read Online A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer - Free Book Online

lord’s having followed through on the threat, it made me sad to hear he had really done so. It was, after all, an impressive collection of very rare, decadent, and often shockingly corrupt tomes. Those on the subject of fornication were my favorite, of course, but those were fewer and farther between than I liked. Far more of the collection was made up of rather moldy books on performing dark sorceries and profane rituals to honor a pack of heathen gods who sounded rather rum compared to Zeus or Thor. There was one I recall that had loads of filthy pictures—a translation of some sort of foreign sex and murder manual, it seemed to me. I can’t recall the title but I know an Englishman named Dee saw fit to have the book available in our tongue, but I question his decision there. It was a far cry from Burton’s Kama Sutra ; I can’t imagine anyone would find those positions or actions pleasurable, but there’s no accounting for taste, I suppose. But that wasn’t all: there were books on horrid-sounding cannibal cults of the ancient world— Nameless Cults , I think the title was—and I recall there was even a treatise on the delights of necromancy by a young woman of the family, Rosemary Vincent, whose portrait still hangs in the gallery! Though a stilted homage—or, funny, it must have been a precursor, for she lived during the eighteenth century—to Shelley’s Frankenstein , my ancestor’s manual, Resurrecting the Dead for Work and Pleasure was entertaining reading at the very least, as it detailed how one might create some sort of composite creature from dead bodies using common household items and magic spells, many drawn from some of the other books in the Private Library. I had even cross-referenced a few, bored creature that I was … I wonder if Shelley had a copy of her work? It seems the sort of thing Byron would have had lying about.
    It occurs to me as I write this that it was in that strange sex-manual where I had once before seen the chimerical tortoise-image my guardian had been wearing. There had been two creatures hand-drawn upon the page, one very like my guardian’s pendant, and another in the same style, of a winged, hound-faced sphinx. I saw the same image in a few books, come to think of it, though those had Latin titles and were indecipherable to me.
    “Well well well, Fanny Hill ,” said Orlando Vincent, interrupting my thoughts as he poured himself another tipple from the decanter. “Variant or not, it seems the adage is true—what is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh. The slut’s pup is a slut herself!”
    “Then you must be as illegitimate as I, for you are no gentleman!” I said hotly.
    “Mind that temper, cousin,” he said, and slurped his wine at me lewdly.
    “And you mind your manners!” said I. “I shall not be calumniated by a messy-haired stripling, drunk on his father’s wine. Good night, sir!” Thus I rose, and took my leave of him.
    I wasn’t really that offended, I just wanted to make it clear to him that he could not speak to me like that. But upon reaching my rooms I regretted my decision; I was not yet tired. The strange day had enlivened me rather than the reverse.
    Remembering that when I was a girl and wakeful in the night I used to sit at my window and brush my hair until I was sleepy, I changed into my night-clothes and blew out the candle. Yet while I thought the ritual would settle my mind, when I saw how ill-tended the storm-lit grounds of Calipash Manor were, instead of relaxing me, looking upon them brought back my earlier feelings of gloom, horror, and ruination.
    Especially when I saw that the woods were not so overgrown as to prevent me from seeing the Calipash family crypt through the pine-boughs!
    I felt a shock when I saw the crumbling Doric structure, quite as if I had been struck by a bolt of the lightning still occasionally illuminating the night sky—how had I forgotten the nightmarish sepulcher until that very moment? Not that