Nightspawn

Начало книги

I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man. I think my life is diseased. Only a flood of spleen now could cauterize my wounds. This is it. Hear the slap and slither of the black tide rising. The year has blundered through another cycle, and another summer has arrived, bringing the dogrose to the hedge, the clematis swooning to the door. The beasts are happily ravening in the sweltering fields of June. How should I begin? Should I say that the end is inherent in every beginning? My hyacinth is dead, and will never bloom again, but I keep the pot, like Isabella, and water with my tears in vain the torn and withered roots. What else is there for me to do? They took everything from me. Everything.

The island torments me. I open the box and there it is, an image cut from jewels, quivering between the azure lid and bed of sapphire silk. At dawn the sky bloomed with a warm wet shade of pearl, at evening was suffused with a delicate heartrending lavender. At first I knew no rest there. My life was fitful, disturbed by savage dreams. The land appeared arid and irretrievably dead, forsaken by the seasons. The sea was stupefying in the monotonous regularity of its tides. I scurried over the rocks, averting my eyes and mind from the harshness of the desert around me, saying, my life is more than this, the value of my life lies in the sum of all I have lost by coming here. But always I was left, alone, stranded, gaping at the blazing brown hills, the shattered sea, my brain a bright blank void. I lived on a spit which turned me slowly through the heat of the days, my vision fractured by light from the sky, from stark white walls, by light clattering on the sea in shards. Sometimes even the sheen of sweat on my own skin was enough to scorch my eyeballs. At last I surrendered.

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