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Mortensen and the warlock now raised a new toast to necrophores, while a furry, moldy woman paired up with a beautiful dead Gypsy to carry to our larder a body which might still be breathing — an appetizing development which appeared to fascinate the shy, worried-looking woman-thing whose chalky face glowed as she squatted between two graves, lowering her slender arms, casting off her mushroom garments. — Who strikes down the wicked? groaned the blue man.

Why the scene should have wearied me I cannot tell; anyhow, I strolled up out of the hollow, and arrived at a glowing hole in the hillside I had never seen before, doubtless because Mortensen was right, and ever more of whatever contained death was revealing itself as death receded, leaving decorations behind. As I looked in I could see a fair sepulcher, and within it a lady’s corpse, nude and greenish-yellow like some deliciously unripe fruit, and in a ring around her, five hundred worms were chasing each other in such perfect array that I marvelled. When I asked her name, she replied: I call myself alive, but am I rooted in anything?

Remembering the warlock’s words, even if not understanding them, I asked: Has your name been spoken?

Do you have the knowledge to name me, or would you eat first?

Mortensen had rehearsed us on the three perturbations of life: fear, grief and desire. All are but vain reachings after life itself, whereas in death there is nothing but peace — if one sets aside the dead’s angry hunger after the living. — So I said: Would you eat with me?

We’ll eat knowledge down to nothing.

I said: My first duty is to eat death.

When I climaxed inside her, it felt more as if she had climaxed inside of me. I was filled with her death. She asked no question afterward; better yet, I felt even less for Sophie, as if I were lighter in my guts; my gross matter was becoming moss. Sobbing, Sophie stuffed herself with dead meat. As for me, I was eating less than I was supposed to.

And someday, said Mortensen, we’ll make it so we won’t die. Not ever. And all the dead who aren’t too dead might even come back to life. And then cemeteries will never again be places of horror and sadness.

What will they be then? asked Sophie.

First they’ll be museums. And then, when we don’t even need to remember death anymore, they’ll become fields, gardens and homes.

Sophie cracked a marrowbone between her teeth and said: But if no one dies, won’t there be too many people?

That won’t be our problem. We’ll have solved the greatest problem of all time. Let someone else fix that one.

Mortensen sat smiling with love for the future. Goldman, whom I knew less than anyone, kept the fire going, and there were now three more shriveled corpse-women who always helped him, stirring the ladle round and round and moaning like the wind. So we made our toast: To death! Dead children took Sophie by the hand, and led her to places where corruption had advanced so far that there was nothing left to do with its traces but scrape them up and dump them into the cauldron. Before dawn we invariably withdrew into our open coffins, and Mortensen would edify us with such old poems as:

Search while thou wilt, and let thy reason goe

To ransome truth even to the Abysse below.

We three lay staring straight up at the spiderwebs at such moments, and a black marble statue of a nude woman watched over us. Sophie was asleep, her face a purple jelly-jewel, more ovoid than it used to be, her blue hands slightly swollen. My growing indifference to everything deepened my trust in Mortensen, who had so consistently proclaimed that the living and the dead are one.

7

Yes, we were sharing in death, although (with the possible exception of Sophie) we had not yet learned any Names, much less been called by our own. We had achieved first emptiness, then delusion, then the contemplation of delusion, so that we could commence to understand that even emptiness is a delusion. And so we did not care when the warlock, who might have been testing us but more likely was merely lonely, informed us that he knew the whereabouts of hidden treasure. I can’t say whether anything terrified him. Even had he offered to mix the most precious jewels with the most rotten carrion, it would not have fit our program, unless his stones were small enough to swallow whole. Likewise, Mortensen’s reminders of our purpose might as well have been an accountant’s sums. I felt certain that our project could never, no matter how brilliantly it might succeed, lead us into any freshness of being. That might have been another reason that all three of the other members of our society grew ever duller in my estimation.

But Sophie still sometimes reached out, however mechanically, for a dead child’s hand. Twice she devoured banquet-meat as she was expected to, then rushed off to vomit between the tombs. Many a shy corpse shambled after her.

Mortensen enthusiastically informed me: This so-called hateful state she’s in must be her dialectical maximum. It will intensify, and then she’ll be free.

Sophie whispered: I’m not worth anything. I eat filth and death.

Mortensen confided: She’s our treasure. She’s deeper than any of us.

There came the happiness of another banquet, where we and our dead friends all felt like ourselves, throwing the pallid exoskeletons of crayfish out of our abundant boiling-pot, so that the armless, legless dead could graze them up; and Sophie withdrew into the tall chalky corpse-weeds whose leaves were many-fingered hands. Agreeing with Mortensen that the finest course is to face everything, I drank off another bowl of a highly disagreeable soup — although it had begun to strike me that the eating of death might signify far less than I had imagined, for in death even the sorrow dies, leaving mere innocuous moldiness. Was this the secret we had devoured so much to find? If not, how would we know when we attained it? The greenish-yellow lady with whom I had eaten knowledge reached for another tidbit, moaning: Why did no one save my life? — which I interpreted as evidence that she was closer to us than were we to her.

Now it was winter. The corpses had begun to pillage each other’s coffins for firewood, and some of the bolder ones pulled the weaker apart, so there was always something to eat.

We’re on the verge, said Mortensen.

The warlock confided: Soon I’ll be Lord of the Ten Thousand Things.

Looking up from the fire, Goldman asked: What about us?

His three corpse-ladies sang: Die.

I thickened our broth with the contents of a much-cracked cremation urn, and Mortensen revealed more to us about the peculiar perfections and beauties of death, which do not lead to rest. For Goldman I cannot speak, but Sophie and I already knew everything.

8

One very cold night Mortensen, shivering, withdrew, and sat against a decrepit monument, saying: Too much unshared death! No matter what we choke down, we’ll never reach the bottom of the bowl! — At this, his interlocutor, Mr. Mooncrow, hooted, leaping over a family tomb. The fellow had been literally skin and bones, and now look at him! As for Mortensen, he’d become a creature of angles, gaunt and wretched. Thus both approached their zenith, there in the place of marble tombs eroded into dead white woman-silhouettes. Through the dreamy dullness which defined us I felt grief’s bite, but why? Wearying of my eavesdropping, I stole away to inform Goldman or Sophie of our leader’s despair; for in our line of work one of the last enthusiasms to perish is the desire to tell tales. I encountered Sophie first. She was cutting up a dead child. Her hair had gone grey, and she wore dead beetles for earrings. Almost pityingly (although she never opened her eyes), she replied: Now you see the obvious.