Read Online The Narrator by Michael Cisco - Free Book Online Page A

over the house; some of them slip in through the window and slither up the wall and along the ceiling. The big doily begins to flip end over end in place, apparently passing through the substance of the table, faster and faster with a sound like a thick rope being spun in the air. Jil Punkinflake’s death’s-head moth is sprouting long licorice-like tendrils with a liquid crackling sound; they loop and twine along his lapels and up his shoulder.
    I can see a figure on the bed now, a large pale man all shining, wearing what seems to be a rough white linen suit. His hands and feet are wrapped in gauze, as is his fleshy throat up to the heavy chin densely stubbled with white. The high-browed head is pasty and his heavy lids sag over glittering dark eyes.
    The door adjacent the base of the stairs stands blackly open directly before me and a round white head is bowed there, rising and coalescing like a ball of smoke. A leg swings out at the knee and a foot of solid darkness comes down across the threshold—the flesh of half my body is tugged aside in gooseflesh withering in my chest and Jil Punkinflake slams the door shut in my face. “Don’t look in the hall,” he tells me sternly, and then scans the others with vehemence in his eyes, leaving me weakly to drag my seat to the circle again. My back to the door feels alive with creeping cold fire.
    Dr. Mellart is coming into view, propped up on the bed, and Lilly rises and open a shutter above the backboard, revealing a bough-raked sunset sky, although the window opposite me remains bottomless night. The sunken face speaks. His voice is thin and weak, projected from some other narrative, as he is not at home in this one. His speech seems to emit sense directly into my imagination. Linguistic elementals. The séance contacts disembodied narratives and raw images, imperfect memories, and dreams; the medium gives up voice to that idiom-phantom. I see why I was brought here—I am to record what will come through the others, who are all mediums.
    In my mind’s eye, a vividly colored green and blue map of the world running off into infinity on all sides—I see myself as I must appear sitting in this chair, from a point of view high in a corner of the room—rows of tattered, torn-open books dribbling leaves to the floor, tables and a stone floor strewn with paragraphs, verses, illustrations, choruses, familiar endings. Ripples in the air like heat waves, that gather in flowing ribbons, ascending and then gradually sinking again.
    The figure on the bed grows dim, and Lilly seems to climb up onto the bed as its unluminous light ebbs out of the air. There in the glow I faintly see the fabric of her dress indented by fingers of gauze. I glance up, as though my attention were a thing hanging in the wind and liable to be tossed this way and that by the least breeze. Without a sound, the silhouette of a leaping naked man interrupts the light of the window opposite me as Keen bolts to his feet screaming with raucous laughter. Keen flies forward springing bounding chalk-faced his arms and legs jerk and snap—the laughter lacerating his throat, the table isn’t there between us—he bites his hands inhumanly his blazing eyes draw streaks in the air. The two students who disappeared earlier lunge from their hiding place within the chimney and in a flash the rope is about him. Keen resists wildly, his laughter is a bellow that will blast the walls down. Now all the students are grappling with him; he veers again and again into the air like a puppet yanked up by a string, a skirt of black-sleeved arms clinging to his waist. His spine whips back and forth flinging his legs this way and that, twisting against their hands as they pin him flat to the floor. Every second, Keen wrenches his entire body a foot into the air against all their arms and slams flat to the floor, roaring with laughter hideous black implacable and bitter as death. The students hold him down with all their weight and