Read Online The Narrator by Michael Cisco - Free Book Online

one wing, and the bare, scattered land beyond the house is creased with a shallow, oozing stream, little more than an inky scrape in the ground. An eerie, resonant stillness pours down in an avalanche from the sky, settling about the house like an invisible plume of dust. Lilly glances up at me with iodine whited eyes.
    “It used to belong to a big camphor man,” she says. “Once, his detectives caught up with a man who’d hijacked one of his cargos. They brought him here, and camphor man cut both his legs off him in one of the upstairs rooms.”
    She sidles up to me and takes my arm with her free hand.
    “The man broke loose somehow and got as far as the front door before they shot him dead. From that time, now and then, people have heard him thumping down the stairs without his legs.”
    She gives my arm a playful squeeze. As we approach, I can see a shadow emerge from the high grass to one side of the house and pull itself instantly up through one of the windows. It’s a brick house, with acute gables at either end like a cat’s head. The windows are large panes of glass in scalloped stone frames, and as we bunch up to follow the stingy path through high weeds dried to wheezing husks I glance up in time to see a candlelit face recede from one of the sills upstairs. Are they coming in through the roof?
    The veranda is deep but not broad; the steps and planks groan at our every move. Dusty opens the door, which chitters as it swings back. The house closes around me, and I am aware of a vibrant stillness, produced by tensions in something below or behind me. We are pushing back the invisible, ponderous fabric of presence inside the walls; the moulding on the walls shivers, and the doorknobs seem to cringe back into the shadows. A hand takes mine, and I am led a few steps down the hall, with the stairway barely discernible to my left, and through a wide single door of darkly reflective polished wood, into a parlour. I can make out many figures in the gloom, and Jil Punkinflake is already making the rounds with his cheroot in his hand, lighting the gas mantles.
    A single round table in the center of the room, oilskin cloth and a big doily in the middle, tables all round. Dim light from the hollowly breathing mantles, tiled fireplace, mirror above it, fronded wallpaper and ponderous carved ornaments everywhere. The ceiling is bunched and wrinkled in a funereally heavy floral pattern, and a ghoulish rosette in the center. I am directed to a seat at the table with the door not far behind me; Nectar sits on my left and Dusty on my right, Jil Punkinflake beside her and Keen sits opposite me with his back to the window, the curtains nearly brushing his shoulders. I hear the boxed-in ticking of the clock for the first time as Jil Punkinflake says, “Lilly, it’s time to bring him in.”
    Lilly clomps into the obscurity at the far end of the room, where darkness has collected like smoke. I can see her seat herself on a low stool and roll up alongside an enormous object nearly filling the space in that half of the room. Lilly is looking down at something on one side of this object and I can make out her pale hands manipulating what look like organ stops. A granulated light gathers around the base of the object which I now see is a four-poster bed with a beyond-elaborate sculpted frame. Lilly has a pair of earphones clapped to her head, connected to the bed with a length of heavy coiled wire in an embroidered sleeve. She is turning cherub’s-head knobs the size of tomatoes, and sliding gilded wooden flowers, cherries, leaves, and grapes expertly back and forth, peering with bunched eyebrows at the results. Every few moments she flicks her eyes up at a deep curving groove, notched like a ruler, cut into the headboard, where a burnished copper needle sails back and forth along the notches as she turns a heavy cherub bulb with her left hand. Through the window, I can see high black clouds rolling up from the horizon and passing