Tours of the Black Clock Read Online Free

having a drink with their strange captain. The gas-lamp burned low and the three played cards. Eventually Kelly spilled out naked onto the mattress halfconscious as Cyrise lowered herself onto him with almost willful compliance, riding him while he filled his hands with her spectacular chest. She rode after almost an hour to her morose ecstasy; but not his. She captained and abandoned him, and removed herself to the mattress. Kelly babbled in the deep corner of the gaslamp shadows. I’m not done, he said to Cyrise, erect; she shrugged and looked at her friend, cocked her head a moment and nodded at Kelly slithering across the floor. He took Kelly’s plump pink body and rolled it over on its front and opened it up and mounted it. Kelly sort of gawked in surprise at the ravishment behind her. “I’ll hold her down for you,” said Cyrise, taking her friend by the wrists. After a while Kelly started to cry out; it was difficult to tell what she was trying to say. She thrashed beneath him against the mattress while Cyrise held her fast to the floor; at some point someone kicked over the bottle of brandy. “She’ll forgive me later,” Cyrise explained, “we’ll talk about what a beast you were, and comfort each other.” When she said this he looked at her face in the light and felt himself fall into the deep Persian heat of her eyes, and everything emptied out of him and for a moment he’d forgotten that it wasn’t her into whom he emptied it. He stumbled off to the other wall and could only admire in terror how she’d fucked him and left the hot white consequences of it in some other body than her own. Later that night in the dark he woke to see Kelly crashing around the boat-house in confusion, opening the door and disappearing outside. A moment later Cyrise went after her. He didn’t remember later if he heard them come back. He was aware however that he had just enough of a shred of innocence left to feel guilt-stricken about having cheated at cards. The next morning the casino girls were gone, the night’s only evidence the empty brandy bottle rolling on its side.

12
    F IFTEEN YEARS PASSED. DARKNESS was all over his life now. It flooded in through a secret tunnel that began in Vienna and ended in one of the aortae of his heart. Every day through the years he sailed the boat back and forth to his home. He never stepped ashore or went into town. That he had directed his innocence toward the leaving of his home, and that his fate had become to spend his life on this river between home and irrevocable escape, transporting tourists, now stranded him in the country of self-betrayal. He became the muttering depraved rivermonk of Davenhall, his white mane and beard and the crazy blast of his green eyes adding age to his appearance by the epoch; the white hair on his arms grew like fur. After a while he didn’t have the girls anymore. If one came to him as he lay on the deck of his boat waiting for the tourists’ return, he sent her away. He’d simply raise anchor and drift off to that moment in the fog that had first terrified him when he was innocent but which he now called home or, if he couldn’t recall the word, hell. Sometimes to pass the time, he sailed the river along the island’s shore over to the western tip where he could see the old black and white machine still unmanned and burping out ice into the steaming dirt. He never ventured farther out into the open expanse of the river itself; somewhat like the ancients he was afraid of what was at the end. In truth he came to recognize he was afraid of venturing beyond the edge of his life altogether. He asked himself why he’d never been a tourist, then asked himself why he’d never been anything but a tourist. His blue coat lost its buttons one by one, not at cards but invisibly, when he wasn’t looking. It was as though something was telling him that though he might suppose he was gambling nothing, in fact he was gambling all the time and poorly, just