Behind the concave-winged marble angel who clasped the gilded shell for FATHERS and FAMILY began a deep hollow where the Great Flood had wrenched away a full acre of old graves; and down there we held our nightly banquet, dining on overturned slabs, with crowds of new-made ghouls around us. Two or three times I thought about the street where Sophie and I used to live. It was as if I were at the bottom of a well gazing up at a blue marble of sky.
At first the banquets took place at what adepts refer as the time of the living midnight. — What is the color of death? Mortensen kept asking the dead. Soon he would have mapped the infinite. The warlock was with us from moonrise to dawn. He was gloomy, perhaps, but never asked for our pity. I nearly began to consider him a member of our society once I overheard him teaching Mortensen about the Bitter Sea. Rolling his last cigarette, Goldman recleaned the putrid bellows of his speaking-apparatus; while I modeled myself after the tall bronze soldier leaning on his saber before the wide rectangle of Pablo Riccheri’s tomb. Sophie was copulating with a swollen blue man — for isn’t miscegenation a sharing and exhausting of our common feast? After that I no longer wanted her.
We now ate nothing but cadavers and bones, aside from the occasional dead birds Sophie gathered just before dawn. From each repast to the next, it seemed, at least to me, that the light in our neighbors’ eyesockets was rekindled; and as centipedes and ashes commenced to fall from their ears they attended to Mortensen with diminished apathy. We four agreed that we were indeed in some measure depleting their deaths; so that what we had done for them, they could do for others; perhaps by midwinter we would be prepared even to meet the denizens of the Red Place. I asked the warlock which fruit he had fed Sophie, and he replied: That must be concealed from doubters such as you. — Enough now, said Mortensen, cracking open a skull for me. — Once I had eaten, nausea and misery kept me quiet. I reminded myself that the death of the One gives life to many.
There came the night when the dead began to look around them of their own volition, and so they perceived each other’s hideousness. Mortensen lectured them that the most hateful thing is to be dead in secret, because that avoids the question of what one is.
Die, said our tall yellow skeleton, in what I thought to be insolent or threatening style.
As it happened, this skeleton possessed a more excellent memory than most of the other dead; it could even remember kissing someone. I asked how we could kill death, and it said: Love.
Sophie demanded: What do you mean? If I loved you, could I kill your death?
The warlock said: Even Christians say you must give up your life to save it.
That’s not to the purpose, said Sophie, almost sharply. I was asking about you people who’ve already lost your lives.
We’re not people, laughed the blue man, behind whom several pairs of living eyes glowed as glossily as berries in various dead skulls.
We’re advising you to die, the warlock reminded us. Nothing but cowardice keeps you from taking that step.
Goldman was completing his explanation to Mortensen about the mathematical proportions of skulls in relation to their inner content, so it was to Sophie whom I whispered my question: Could the dead mean us evil? — She turned away, leaving me to my own miseries. Now Mr. Mooncrow was leading her inside a dome filled with murmuring ghouls. I knew what knowledge she would give and get of him. Truth to tell, each night the dead seemed more active. So did the many beautiful things which claimed the moistness beneath our banquet slab before dawn: the snails whose jet-black shells glistened like cloisonné, the clean-picked little skulls goggling up at us like bespectacled elementary-school students who hoped to be called upon by the teacher even as luna moths emerged from their nostrils; the hard seedpods filled with stars. Beneath the table, sweet small bats were parting purple-velvet leaves of funereal cabbage with their darling claws, so that they could watch our demonstrations. The bird-skulled woman bowed and pecked at her glass of urine-infused wine, as if she might soon pay attention to me. Perhaps if each one of us swallowed down more, we could reverse all imperfections, and achieve what Mortensen had begun to call the dark comfort. Watching me, or so I supposed, certain decayed banqueters worked their jaws, as if they were preparing to speak. Had Mr. Mooncrow uttered a syllable just now? Perhaps it was merely that my hearing was sharpened since I had so long avoided the hummings of the sun. (I should have asked Goldman about this.) Turning his back on the rest of us now that Sophie had gone, the warlock passed his hand over the ground, and blue hands began to claw themselves out of it. Meanwhile the Mummy Lady played with Mortensen — who, truth to tell, was undersexed; but he rose to the occasion, thereby fulfilling the interests of science. The warlock raised his glass to mine and toasted: To death.
Since my curiosity had not died yet entirely, I asked him whether there might be a Dead Book of the Dead with naked meanings in it, which would save its reader even at the cost of death to many others, but he replied: Has your name been spoken?
By whom? I said.
Then you’re among the ignorant, said he, baring his teeth. I walked away, but the skeleton followed me, saying: Die.
Goldman was digging a rectangular hole. Even he had begun to shrivel a little bit — but then, don’t we all? One of the articles of our society was that we must resist pitying one another, much less ourselves; anyhow, Goldman, surely the most sensible of any of them, was by that very token my most depressing companion, at least among the living, so his decay touched me less than Sophie’s. — When I took him aside, he said: Analyze the problem. Do what you have to do.
Die, the skeleton advised me.
Accordingly, I took up Goldman’s pickaxe. Mortensen would not approve, and indeed I rarely sanctioned my own deeds anymore; be that as it may, I smashed that skeleton, skull and spine, while other dead sat eating. Mr. Mooncrow and I collected the fragments and threw them into the stewpot, and Sophie, obediently opening her cunt, satisfied Goldman. I tried to remember the way her eyes used to be when she daydreamed. Saying nothing about my transgression, Mortensen ladled out the latest broth. The stench of his breath was worse than my coffin’s. To tell you truth, I hated my existence. I poured out rainwater from an antique ewer, but no one wanted any. Goldman’s corpse-women kept wandering to and fro among the tombs, gathering shrouds with which to feed the fire. Sophie scratched herself with her long black fingernails. Her hair was finer than spiderwebs. The warlock and Mortensen discussed the wisdom of worms, and the interesting operations of decomposing corpses. It was not unpleasant. In a very committed voice Mortensen asked Mr. Mooncrow what, if anything, the dead might feel for us, at which his interlocutor contented himself with so horrific a hoot that all the churchyard owls came wheeling round his grisly head; Mortensen muttered inexplicably: Give and take, that’s all. — I sat remembering how outside the cemetery one often saw a mother lift up her child as it smiled into her face. How many times had that action been carried out in this world? There was certainly no more need for it. I was sick to death of it, and so for a moment I nearly became desperate.