Vastarien, Vol. 1, Issue 2 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grimscribe Press
Published: 2018-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

William Silas Fonthill was a minor footnote in a family of diluted aristocracy but immense wealth. He was mentioned in the correspondence of both Horace Walpole and William Beckford, who referred to him as “singularly vicious,” but Fonthill's correspondence with either gentlemen appeared to be lost or overlooked in collections. Fonthill's younger sister became a countess, and in her rather dry memoirs mentioned only that her brother William had fallen into “bad practices and unorthodoxy,” and perhaps financial and sexual scandal, and was forced to flee to Italy where he was taken in by his friends, the Casserattis, and not heard from again. An afternoon struggling through Luchino Casseratti's correspondence yielded nothing, not even a mention that he knew Fonthill. Exhausted and defeated by failure and Luchino's idiosyncratic Italian, I leaned back in the chair in my office and closed my eyes.

It was easy to draw up the perfect image of the portrait. Were those the signs of vice and cruelty in the depth of his eyes, the set of his mouth? Were those picturesque ruins his fortune and name? What secrets did he clasp in that book, what closely traced symbols covered the binding? The sense of his presence was overwhelming. It was as if I stood in the grand ruin of a Mannerist garden and he spoke—but, because it was a dream, in neither English nor Italian, not even French or Latin—softly and quickly so that, whatever language he spoke, it sounded like distant weather or the ambient drone of summer in that grand Italian garden.

I felt a shadow fall across my face like a hand. I opened my eyes, absolutely awake but my ears still ringing with that chattering drone, to see Henry Spinther. I almost caught him then, I almost saw him, but I flinched back instinctively.

“Are you very busy?” he asked politely, and then, boldly ironic: “Have you found anything?”

“Who...” I caught myself. “Who sent you up?”

“I've been doing my own research,” he said. There was no other chair in my office so he sat, without invitation or the pretense of apology, on the edge of my desk. “I talked to Cathy's maids. They said they remembered the portrait but she'd had it put away years ago.”

“You never noticed?”

“Yes?”

I pushed my chair back and stood, sorting through the papers and books on my desk and moving carefully away from him. “You didn't notice when she had it moved? I thought the two of you were close.”

He laughed. “You must know Cathy so well by now.”

“But you knew her better. Aren't you her brother?”

He glanced down then raised his eyes and fixed me with a look of such satisfaction, such monstrous repletion and excitement. “Ah... am I?”

“Aren't you?”

“Aren't I...? Something like that?” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “That's how it's said, isn't it?” He laughed lightly, a rill of gentle delight and wonder. “Yes, she would say that. She did say that.”

“Did you? Are you, really?”

“But it's all settled.” There was again that nauseating incongruity, the

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