classics and stressing penults with a series of cheap tutors, hadn’t equipped me to untangle that syllogism.
So I collected skulls, delighting especially in those that were malformed in odd ways or had been pierced by weapons, measuring them and labeling them and entering jejune speculations on them in notebooks. Rarest of all were perfect specimens, since almost all that I found had been gnawed by animals, as my tutors said, or by ghouls, as Mother and the servants insisted.
“I won’t have that thing in my house,” Mother said when she saw one that had been furrowed especially deeply by fangs. “What if the ghoul that gnawed it developed a taste for it? What if he comes back looking for it? ‘Where’s my skull?’” she creaked in a singularly hideous whisper, “’Where’s the boy that stole my nice, tasty skulllll?’”
Mother could be fun when she wasn’t lamenting all her grievances, but she was quite put out when I laughed at her performance. She didn’t realize that she had succeeded in scaring me, but that I enjoyed being scared. I didn’t laugh from disrespect, but from delight in my fear and from appreciation of her talent. Unfortunately I didn’t have the words to explain that when I was twelve, and my reaction enraged her. My entire collection was shoveled into the trash; whence I retrieved it and transferred it secretly to the loft of a disused stable. She would never have entered such a dark, cobweb-draped refuge, and it was far beyond the range of our most robust servant’s totter.
I had seen plenty of rats and dogs on my expeditions, and I carried a stout stick for protection against them on my tours of the necropolis, but I longed to see ghouls. I took to haunting the most desolate and ominous sections, even sneaking out at night to do so, without finding a trace of one—with the possible exception of a broken tusk that, according to one of the scientists at the Institute to whom I excitedly brought it, came from a wild boar. He was not impressed by my argument that some few people had claimed to see ghouls, but no one had ever claimed to see a wild boar within the city limits of Crotalorn.
“You want to talk to Dr. Porfat,” he said with a dismissive contempt that convinced me Porfat probably knew more about it than he did, but I was never able to find that scholar in his office.
* * * *
Necropolis, city of the dead, is not too fancy a word for Dreamers’ Hill. Thousands upon thousands have been buried there, and its upper slopes are very like a city. Elaborately rendered in miniature, palaces and temples line streets that would take days to explore and years to appreciate.
Even if those buildings were not cubicles for moldering corpses, if they carried no morbid associations whatever, but had been erected through artistic whim, their effect would be disquieting. The place is like a bad dream, in that it is so like real life but so arbitrarily different. Space has been compressed, the distance we expect between one house and another is missing, for the dead have no need to take the sun in their gardens, they have no use for privies or stables or servants’ quarters or any of the other clutter that surrounds a home.
At night, when I took to wandering those streets, there were no idle strollers, either, and few human sounds but my own footsteps among the still little buildings. I heard strange noises that I ascribed to night birds, to contentious cats or curiously articulate dogs, and some that I could ascribe to nothing on earth, but what frightened me more than any sound was the unnatural scale of the houses and the insane perspective of every vista. Surrounded by so much unreality, how could I believe in a real world to which I might return?
Under the circumstances it was ironic that I should sometimes have been jerked back from the brink of panic by the tramping of the watchmen and their raucous bawling of tasteless songs:
Got a bone for a head, got a bone for a dick,
Got
So I collected skulls, delighting especially in those that were malformed in odd ways or had been pierced by weapons, measuring them and labeling them and entering jejune speculations on them in notebooks. Rarest of all were perfect specimens, since almost all that I found had been gnawed by animals, as my tutors said, or by ghouls, as Mother and the servants insisted.
“I won’t have that thing in my house,” Mother said when she saw one that had been furrowed especially deeply by fangs. “What if the ghoul that gnawed it developed a taste for it? What if he comes back looking for it? ‘Where’s my skull?’” she creaked in a singularly hideous whisper, “’Where’s the boy that stole my nice, tasty skulllll?’”
Mother could be fun when she wasn’t lamenting all her grievances, but she was quite put out when I laughed at her performance. She didn’t realize that she had succeeded in scaring me, but that I enjoyed being scared. I didn’t laugh from disrespect, but from delight in my fear and from appreciation of her talent. Unfortunately I didn’t have the words to explain that when I was twelve, and my reaction enraged her. My entire collection was shoveled into the trash; whence I retrieved it and transferred it secretly to the loft of a disused stable. She would never have entered such a dark, cobweb-draped refuge, and it was far beyond the range of our most robust servant’s totter.
I had seen plenty of rats and dogs on my expeditions, and I carried a stout stick for protection against them on my tours of the necropolis, but I longed to see ghouls. I took to haunting the most desolate and ominous sections, even sneaking out at night to do so, without finding a trace of one—with the possible exception of a broken tusk that, according to one of the scientists at the Institute to whom I excitedly brought it, came from a wild boar. He was not impressed by my argument that some few people had claimed to see ghouls, but no one had ever claimed to see a wild boar within the city limits of Crotalorn.
“You want to talk to Dr. Porfat,” he said with a dismissive contempt that convinced me Porfat probably knew more about it than he did, but I was never able to find that scholar in his office.
* * * *
Necropolis, city of the dead, is not too fancy a word for Dreamers’ Hill. Thousands upon thousands have been buried there, and its upper slopes are very like a city. Elaborately rendered in miniature, palaces and temples line streets that would take days to explore and years to appreciate.
Even if those buildings were not cubicles for moldering corpses, if they carried no morbid associations whatever, but had been erected through artistic whim, their effect would be disquieting. The place is like a bad dream, in that it is so like real life but so arbitrarily different. Space has been compressed, the distance we expect between one house and another is missing, for the dead have no need to take the sun in their gardens, they have no use for privies or stables or servants’ quarters or any of the other clutter that surrounds a home.
At night, when I took to wandering those streets, there were no idle strollers, either, and few human sounds but my own footsteps among the still little buildings. I heard strange noises that I ascribed to night birds, to contentious cats or curiously articulate dogs, and some that I could ascribe to nothing on earth, but what frightened me more than any sound was the unnatural scale of the houses and the insane perspective of every vista. Surrounded by so much unreality, how could I believe in a real world to which I might return?
Under the circumstances it was ironic that I should sometimes have been jerked back from the brink of panic by the tramping of the watchmen and their raucous bawling of tasteless songs:
Got a bone for a head, got a bone for a dick,
Got
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