Queen City and Other Dimensions. E.C. WellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
a Capitol Hill fixture, a celebrity. You are the woman around whom the world revolves.”
“Really? Do you really think so?”
“There might be a few who wouldn’t agree with the revolving world stuff.”
“There’s always a few out to get me. It is always best to know who they are. Who are they?”
“How would I know, V?
“Exactly. Maybe I should forget about it.”
“Forget about what, V?”
“Posterity. Maybe I should forget about posterity and say fuck it!”
“That’s the spirit. Fuck it!” Lily had finally found something with which to agree as she offered up her empty teacup for refilling. By coincidental happenstance the cup and the subject were dropped.
Pudgy Penny and Piggy Peter came barging through the bird’s eye maple double doors that entered into the parlor. These custom-made doors were adorned with naked smiling cherubs bearing shields and swords, anchors intertwined with hexagons and rhombi, roses and ribbons of leaves, and most ornate is the three-foot tall dancing Dionysos that splits in two whenever the doors are slid open. Shady Sanctum was, after all, the residency of the late Reverend Kirby Victor Aires. The late reverend knew the worth——just short of pompous——of a pious atmosphere.
The twins Penny and Peter were a last minute gift to Uncle Max from Cousin Harriet the night she decided to fly the coop, as it were, with her three husbands——Jacques, Sean and Bonito. The twins were twelve years old when Cousin Harriet gave them to Max nearly ten years ago, and they haven’t grown a day since. No one is really sure from where they originally came. One day Harriet just showed up with them and said she had found them. “I found them. Here. They’re yours.” And, though the twins were not identical, they were similar. Pudgy was noticeably fatter than her brother Piggy whose pumpkin-red Buster Brown was cut not quite so butchly as Pudgy’s.
The twins returned early that morning from Haiti together with their Uncle Max who folded spacetime in order to spend five weeks with a mulatto family to study dark migratory short-horned locusts. The twins entered the parlor wearing an assortment of beads, trinkets, and oh my god are those human teeth?
“Auntie Vickie!”
“What now, Peter?”
"Is there any way of getting in the basement, if say Penny and me was locked out ‘cause somebody went and bolted the door from inside or something like that so there’s no way to get down there if say somebody wanted to so what would you say to that?”
“Yeah, what do you say, Auntie?” Pudgy Penny asked with unremarkable indifference.
“I would say don’t call me Auntie,” V twisted a venomous smile and added, “Coal slide, I imagine.”
“So did we,” grinned Pudgy Penny, looking like a jack-o-lantern stuck atop four and one half feet of coagulated gelatin. “What else,” continued the irritatingly impatient Pudgy Penny, “would you say?”
“I would say that’s it, kiddos,” answered V.
“We’re not kiddos!” Piggy Peter shouted.
“Of course not,” V snickered.
All the while, Lily sat and watched quietly. She would not look directly——as a blackbird flies——at the children. Lily made it a point to keep her glances as short as possible for fear of frightening the twins with her brutal thoughts; of which she was certain the twins could read.
“Can we have it?” Pudgy Penny asked while fingering her beads and human teeth. “It’s dark. It’s damp. It’s dirty. It’s moldy. It’s smelly.”
“It’s just perfect,” chimed Piggy Peter. “Will you give it to us?”
“Oh, my,” sighed Lily, sotto voce, from behind her hand covering her mouth and nose.
“Hello, Auntie Lily.”
“Hello, children…” then begrudgingly added, using five or six syllables to squeeze it out, “…welcome home.”
“We’re not children!” Piggy Peter corrected.
“Well, you’re home anyway. How wonderful.” If there were ever sarcasm in Lily’s tone, this was it; and that was as far as Lily’s interest could take her. She thought better of asking them how their trip had been; she didn’t want them in her head. Lily did not much care for anything about anything having a single thing to do with the children. To her, the twins were a mutant virus; one of life’s calamities——like floods, famine, pestilence and death.
“Well, are you going to give it to us or what!?”
“What?” V asked.
“The basement! Weren’t you listening?” Pudgy Penny took an annoying air that smacked of condescension diluted with a lethal amount of exasperation.
“Nobody uses it anyway,” added Piggy Peter, no less gelatinous than his sister, peered through two narrow slits beneath the red bangs of his slithery hair. “Since Uncle Kirby went over and out and all those goof balls who used to meet down there took a hike, its been abandoned.” Piggy Peter said with great care to imply a sense of solemnity by not disturbing the seldom talked about memories of V’s father, whose interest in matters theologically paranormal took him and his small circle of illuminati to the basement where he kept a most impressive library of old and rare books. There was a worktable where he wrote his psalm books; publishing and selling them himself. (There were metal folding chairs leaning against the far wall.) Much of Kirby’s personal income had come from the sale of sacred relics. The genesis of those sacred relics remain a mystery, as does the nature of their sanctity.
Before Kirby Victor Aires met and married V’s mother and before he became the renegade high priest of his own theologically incorrect, surreptitious cult——The Brotherhood of Solar Agnation——Brother Kirby had decoded ancient and forbidden books in one of the sub-basements beneath the Vatican Palace. Brother Kirby was the pet of the Cardinals. He was considered Cardinal material by the Pope, until Brother Kirby had an epiphany.
Things don’t always work out the way we imagine they should, as proven by Brother Kirby who instigated a heated argument with His Holiness over the existence of God vis-a-vie the ability of the individual to become their own God. “I am God!” he shouted at the Pope.
“You are a fucking idiot!” Arshmann shouted back, but not in his usual shriveling old man voice. It was certainly not the Pope’s voice that boomed with ungodly hatred from deep within the pit of Hell; or maybe there are many pits in Hell. Like Dante, perhaps. Surely, it wasn’t the voice of God, unless, this God was unique to Arshmann himself; which only goes to reinforce Kirby’s point.
The encounter ended with the Pope on the floor holding a burning candle in his clenched fist and Brother Kirby holding a brass candlestick over the skull of His Holiness.
“I curse and excommunicate you!” proclaimed Pope Arshmann. “Big fucking deal,” said the former Roman Catholic Brother.
The following day Kirby was escorted off the sacred Vatican grounds by an attachment of Swiss Guards. Never again would he acknowledge the infallibility of the Pope; that self-important German Nazi, the bitter ideologue who had memorized the party lines. Moreover, he was stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid!Brother Kirby was out the door and on the street. Soon afterward, Brother Kirby started his own anti-Catholic Brotherhood of Solar Agnation with the book he walked off with from the Vatican’s immense storehouse of misappropriated loot, and the largest known collection of the world’s treasures. The late Reverend hid the book in the back of his trousers. As the Swiss Guards escorted him off Vatican property, one of the guards observed, “That man has the squarest ass I’ve ever seen.”
“Well? Will you give the basement to us?” asked Pudgy Penny in a demanding sort of tone.
“If the two of you