This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber

Author:Adam McOmber [McOmber, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Historical, Collections & Anthologies, Horror, Short Stories (Single Author), Alternative History
ISBN: 9781934414514
Google: Lu-pcQAACAAJ
Publisher: BOA Editions
Published: 2011-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

29 August

TODAY, I VISITED the newly opened catacombs of St. Michael’s cathedral on the arm of Alain de la Tour. He arrived at my rooms in a hired carriage with a charming yellow pansy in his lapel. We must have made an odd pair. I’m sure some of the women assumed I was his mother or a dowager aunt. At any rate, the crypt of St. Michaels, as advertised in the Times, had been refurbished and made into, of all things, a tearoom—and it was a truly astonishing space. A year before, the crypt was a festering tomb full of caskets, but it has been fastidiously cleaned and lit with gas lamps. Tea was served on lacquered tables and taffeta floated between the columns like aubergine clouds. Women of society promenaded through the catacombs as if in some quiet park on a sunless day, and I heard two of them remarking on the handsomeness of a medieval knight engraved upon the wall. Alain thought the whole thing ridiculous. “Have these people nothing better to do than wallow in their cult of death? ” he whispered.

“It does seem a bit odd, doesn’t it? ” I replied, sipping my tea.

“More than odd,” Alan said, dabbing sweat from his brow with a napkin. “If you wade too far into this black ocean, Miriam, you’ll soon be swept away.”

I told him I was not as morbid as he seemed to think. Most of my interests were quite normal: theater, novels, gardening and the like, which is how I’d become involved with the Metropolitan Gardens Association to begin with. I did, however, recall for him that as a child I’d witnessed a production of Romeo and Juliet in Regent’s Park and had become rather fixated on the final set—Juliet’s tomb, where the heroine lay in a magical state of both death and life. The players decorated the set beautifully with an ivy that nearly consumed the stage; twinkling lamps shone from between the leaves. How that place must have smelled to Romeo—not of decay but of vertiginous life with a tincture of apothecarean poison. “I pretended that my girlhood room was the tomb of Juliet,” I said, “and I waited there for Romeo—not to kiss me back to life as does the dull prince in Sleeping Beauty, but to kiss me deeper into death.”

Alain finished his tea in one gulp, leaned across the table, and kissed me brightly on the cheek. A fierce blush overtook me and I glanced around the crypt to see if anyone were watching. “This does not disprove my theory that you’re a strange one, by the way, Miriam,” he said. “Deeper into death? Come now.”

I cleared my throat. “As I said, I was young, and Shakespeare can be quite romantic.”

Alain grinned. “Your Shakespeare, too, is dead.”

“The rose of yore is but a name,” I quoted, and we stood to leave that place and return to the street above.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.