That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote Read Online Free Page A

and chicken soup, innocent aromas of bread and soap, the daily sounds of the street below, all joined the stream of enjoyment she took in her recovery.
    She hesitated over Vali’s question. She still felt sensitive about the farcical night at the necropolis. She rather thought she had looked into the eternity beyond the Teleute Shelf and had, at last, feared it. Nor could one discount the stupid kid – dying as if just to remind her that death had little to recommend it.
    She smoothed the bedspread over her legs. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I lost my nerve.’ Wanting to give Vali a better answer, she said, ‘And then, sometimes the witless leaf drifts far away, until it sees love coming to pick it up.’
    Vali smiled, unfooled but not uncontent, and rang for their boy to bring breakfast.
     
    On a clear day early in winter they took a picnic lunch to the necropolis. They sat outside the mausoleum of St Anna Vermicula. Mona had been taking her various physicks like a model patient. She was less pale, and had begun training with her sword again.
    ‘I’m feeling much better,’ she said, chewing delicately on a sandwich. ‘Wanting to die was some strange summer madness that lingered on out of season, I think.’
    ‘ Perhaps it was,’ Vali agreed.
    She couldn ’t recapture the sense of timelessness she had felt a month ago. The world was marching on. Bigger factories with more and taller chimneys were growing on the Volta’s east bank, giving the whole area the appearance of a huge fortress perpetually on fire. Chic new bars attracted the in-crowd on Arcade Bridge. The days were frosty now, and although snow rarely fell on Sheol, Vali felt this year might prove an exception.
    Munching on a biscuit, she watched the tiny figures of a tour group standing near the Edge, peering down at the sands which covered Sheol ’s other graveyard. Closer, in the middle of the no-man’s land, a group of children were playing ‘Masked Avengers’. Their high voices carried on the wind:
     
    The men in the masks,
    The ladies in the masks,
    See how they kill, see how they kill–
    Six -shooters and switchblades,
    Swords, daggers and poison,
    We all fall down,
    We all fall down.

THE LOVE OF BEAUTY
     
    Some souls lose all things but the love of beauty;
    And by that love they are redeemable
    – P.J. Bailey, Festus
     
    Near the middle of the night, Seaming dithered in front of the brick arch – formerly a minor gate in the old city wall and now a decoration in a lane. If there existed a main entrance to the Ravels, it was that arch. It stood only half a furlong from the glitz of Cake Street, but the short distance marked a change of register from the demimonde to the underworld proper. Behind the gaudy theatres and beer halls the streets became dark, the buildings closely pressed, the walls bare of signs, posters, paint – of everything except light-absorbing soot.
    Seaming smoked a cigarette, a last procrastination, while a polka spinning down from a loft somewhere invited him to head back, spend the rest of the night with friends, and let that be that.
    Act as if you belong , she had told him, and you’ll be safe enough .
    He took three slow breaths, then stepped through the arch.
    Immediately he was struck by cold, a sensation he remembered from his single prior excursion into the Ravels. He had gone in with a few others after an evening of drinking, and they had ventured only a few blocks into the worming scrawl of alleys before their liquid courage ran out .
    Tonight he had to go in much further, and all alone. His poet friend Stroud had urged him to refuse the commission, but Seaming had argued that an artist should welcome all experiences, even dangerous ones. Stroud had solemnly clasped his hand and promised him a flattering elegy.
    Seaming had no intention of putting Stroud to the trouble of composing any such work. Indulging a secret taste for cloak -and-dagger aesthetics, he had prepared a disguise, scouring the