The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop Page B

long time since I forgot the dry odour of the bombyx, and now it’s that smell of decay that invades the air. A flask of that black juice that the octopus child vomited spreads over the bellies of the angels, a putrid ink that goes through the mattress, drips on the floor, a pestilential sap that intoxicates me like that of the mandrake. This liquor came slowly from them, though it’s water from a very ancient source; it chortles with an embarrassed voice from the edges of their intestines, leaps up, and pours out. Their eyes fall back into the inside of their skulls, as those of the delicious old Marie-Jeanne once did. In them, I think I have found all my dead ones again, even if none of them that I loved ever got to such an advanced state. Not even little Henri.
October 30, 19...
    That’s already the third time that someone has rung my bell and knocked furiously at my door. Bad sign. The concierge calls me: “Don Luciano! Don Luciano!” I hear whispers, discussions, muffled exclamations, footsteps.
    I don’t want to go out. I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday, but that doesn’t matter. I have some whisky left and tap water, awfully chlorinated, true. Sometimes I have the impression that my angels get up and walk around the apartment, making sure that I don’t notice them.
October 31, 19...
    Someone just slipped something under my door. I distinctly perceived the miniscule rustling. Under the door to my room, I can already make out a pale, flat spot on the somber marble of the vestibule; it threatens me, though it’s only half visible on the threshold, an arrow that links my universe back to that of the living.
    I advance slowly, bend over, and pull, hoping to see it dissolve in a cloud of steam like a bad fantasy. No. A message. I won’t read it in the room, temple of the Dead, nor in the salon, but in the work area, the bathroom, or the kitchen. Yes, the kitchen. In opening the letter, I already know what it contains. “Convocation de la Questure” — that’s what they call the judiciary police here — “for an affair concerning you . . .” That could easily pass for an international jargon of low Esperanto. “For an affair concerning you . . .”
    I place the paper on the kitchen table, slowly, very slowly, and the very moment the yellowish form — covered with official stamps and fingerprints — touches the plastic surface, I know that, truly, there is only one, sole affair that still concerns me.
    An affair concerns me . . .
    I look at my watch. In a few hours it will be November.
    November, which always brings me something unexpected, though it has always been prepared. . . .