The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore

Author:A.K. Blakemore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

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On the sixth day of July, Year of Grace seventeen eighty-eight, a fine house stands at the green fold where a forest meets a river. By seventeen ninety-eight, the house will be gone, obliterated. Shucked from the earth. The forest thinned, the river banked. For now, here is the house, sitting like a thing carved from moon behind rosebushes and delicate sheaths of geometric topiary—the natural conclusion of a wide avenue of beech trees. A thin black finger of smoke unspools from somewhere behind this beautiful house, climbing high into the radiant summer sky. The crows have seen the smoke and come to strut like bailiffs along the buttresses, to hold court from the shoulders of lissom stone nymphs.

They walk through the gardens toward the house. Fountains stilled. The conical breasts of a sphinx emptied of their clear milk. Squares-on-squares, greenery regimented into spike and orb. Tarare touches one of these strange growths. Perfectly round, like the bottom of an egg. How could a person cultivate such a thing? The only way Tarare can conceive that a plant might be coaxed into these alien, harmonic shapes is if one was able to speak to them, to tell them what they ought to do. Perhaps this is possible. Who knows what kinds of magic money might give you access to? Not Tarare.

A flight of broad steps leads to the great door, swinging open on its hinges. They come to a hall of wonderful coolness; gleaming floors of blond parquet and bone-yellow walls, a high ceiling purled with drifts of plaster cherubim. In the centre of this elegant room, above an overturned table, hangs a crystal chandelier, and from the chandelier hangs a grey dog, twisting at the end of a rope. Above their heads curves a stairway. The walls of the stairway are daubed with words tall as a man, in what there can be no doubt is shit, still-warm human shit, by the smell:

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