[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
would do. Their invisible nostrils twitched with the prescience of blood. The
shoulder to which she raised the rifle now had the texture of plush.
His prey had shot the hunter, but now she could no longer hold the gun.
Her brown and amber dappled sides rippled like water as she trotted across the
clearing to worry the clothing of the corpse with her teeth. But soon she grew
bored and bounded away.
Then only the flies crawling on his body were alive and he was far from
home.
Reflections
I was walking in a wood one late spring day of skimming cloud and
shower-tarnished sunshine, the sky a lucid if intermittent blue -- cool,
bright, tremulous weather. A coloratura blackbird perched on a bough curded
with a greenish may-blossom let fall a flawed chain of audible pearl; I was
alone in the spring-enchanted wood. I slashed the taller grasses with my stick
and now and then surprised some woodland creature, rat or rabbit, that fled
away from me through long grass where little daisies and spindly branches of
buttercups were secreted among gleaming stems still moist at the roots from
last night's rain that had washed and refreshed the entire wood, had dowered
it with the poignant transparency, the unique, inconsolable quality of rainy
countries, as if all was glimpsed through tears.
The crisp air was perfumed with wet grass and fresh earth. The year was
Page 56
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
swinging on the numinous hinges of the solstice but I was ingenuous and sensed
no imminence in the magic silence of the rustling wood.
Then I heard a young girl singing. Her voice performed a trajectory of
sound far more ornate than that of the blackbird, who ceased at once to sing
when he heard it for he could not compete with the richly crimson sinuosity of
a voice that pierced the senses of the listener like an arrow in a dream. She
sang; and her words thrilled through me, for they seemed filled with a meaning
that had no relation to meaning as I understood it.
"Under the leaves," she sang, "and the leaves of life --" Then, in
mid-flight, the song ceased and left me dazzled. My attention abstracted from
my surroundings, all at once my foot turned on an object hidden in the grass
and I tumbled to the ground. Though I fell on the soft, wet grass, I was
shaken and winded. I forgot that luring music. Cursing my obstacle, I searched
among the pale, earth-stained rootlets to find it and my fingers closed on, of
all things, a shell. A shell so far from the sea! When I tried to grasp it in
order to pick it up and examine it the better, I found the act unexpectedly
difficult and my determination to lift it quickened although, at the same
time, I felt a shiver of fear for it was so very, very heavy and its contours
so chill that a shock like cold electricity darted up my arm from the shell,
into my heart. I was seized with the most intense disquiet; I was mystified by
the shell.
I thought it must be a shell from a tropic ocean, since it was far
larger and more elaborately whorled than the shells I'd found on the shores of
the Atlantic. There was some indefinable strangeness in its shape I could not
immediately define. It glimmered through the grass like a cone of trapped
moonlight although it was so very cold and so heavy it seemed to me it might
contain all the distilled heaviness of gravity itself within it. I grew very
much afraid of the shell; I think I sobbed. Yet I was so determined to wrench
it from the ground that I clenched my muscles and gritted my teeth and tugged
and heaved. Up it came, at last, and I rolled over backwards when it freed
itself. But now I held the prize in my hands, and I was, for the moment,
satisfied.
When I looked at the shell more closely, I saw the nature of the teasing
difference that had struck me when I first set eyes on it. The whorls of the
shell went the wrong way. The spirals were reversed. It looked like the mirror
image of a shell, and so it should not have been able to exist outside a
mirror; in this world, it could not exist outside a mirror. But, all the same,
I held it.
The shell was the size of my cupped hands and cold and heavy as death.
In spite of its fabulous weight, I decided to carry it through the wood
for I thought I would take it to the little museum in the nearby town where
they would inspect it and test it and tell me what it might be and how it
would have arrived where I found it. But as I staggered along with it in my
arms, it exerted such a pull downwards on me that, several times, I nearly
fell to my knees, as if the shell were determined to drag me, not down to the
earth but into the earth itself. And then, to complete my confusion, I heard
that witching voice again.
"Under the leaves --"
But, this time, when a gasp stopped the song, the voice changed at once
to the imperative.
"Sic 'im!" she urged. "Sic 'im!"
Before I had a chance to do more than glance in the direction of the
voice, a bullet whirred over my head and buried itself in the trunk of an elm
tree, releasing from their nests in the upward branches a whirring hurricane
of crows. An enormous black dog bounded towards me from the undergrowth so
suddenly I saw no more than his yawning scarlet maw and lolling tongue before
I went down on my face beneath him. The fright nearly bereft me of my senses.
The dog slavered wetly over me and, the next thing I knew, a hand seized my
shoulder and roughly turned me over.
She had called the dog away and now it sat on its haunches, panting,
Page 57
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
watching me with a quick, red eye. It was black as coal, some kind of lurcher,
with balls the size of grapefruit. Both the dog and the girl glanced at me
without charity. She wore blue jeans and boots, a wide, vindictively buckled
leather belt and a green sweater. Her tangled brown hair hung about her
shoulders in a calculated disorder that was not wild. Her dark eyebrows were
perfectly straight and gave her stern face a gravity as awful as that of the
shell I held in my hand. Her blue eyes, the kind the Irish say have been put
in with a sooty finger, held no comfort nor concern for me for they were the
eyes that justice would have if she were not blind. She carried a sporting
rifle slung across her shoulder and I knew at once this rifle had fired the
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]