Green Eyes Page 0,84

switched off, and someone could be heard above the hubbub calling for a doctor.

Otille flashed a perplexed look at Donnell, then pressed into the crowd, Papa Salvatino clearing a path before her. Downey craned his neck, gawking at the spot where Dularde had fallen. Simpkins folded his arms.

'My, my,' he said. 'We're purely havin' a rash of coincidences. Ain't we, Brother Downey?'

Their bedroom was on the second floor, as were those of all the pets, and though the furnishings were ordinary, Jocundra had spent a sleepless night because of the walls. They were paneled with ebony, and from the paneling emerged realistically carved, life-sized arms and legs and faces, also ebony, as if ghosts had been trapped passing through the tarry substance of the boards. Everywhere she rested her eyes a clawed hand reached for her or an angelic face stared back, seeming interested in her predicament. The faces were thickest on the walls of the alcove leading into the hall, and these, unlike the others, were agonized, with bulging eyes and contorted mouths.

Donnell, too, had spent a sleepless night, partly because of her tossing and turning, but also due to his concern over the man who had fallen. She didn't fully understand his concern; he had taken worse violences in stride. She tried, however, to be reassuring, telling him that people commonly survived far greater falls. But Dularde, said Otille, when she came to visit early in the afternoon, had suffered spinal injuries, and it was touch and go. She did not appear at all upset herself and insisted on showing them the grounds, which were fantastic in their ruin.

It had rained during the night, the sky was leaden, and peals of distant thunder rolled from the south. They walked along the avenue of pines where long ago Valcours Rigaud's daughter had wed beneath a canopy of gold and silver spiderwebs. Now the webs spanned even between the trunks, creating filmy veils dotted with the husks of wasps and flies. Otille slashed them down with her umbrella. The entire landscape was so overgrown that Jocundra could only see a few feet in any direction before her eye met with a plaited wall of vines, an impenetrable thicket of oleander, or the hollow shell of a once mighty oak, itself enwrapped by a strangler fig whose sinuous branchings had spread to other trees, weaving its own web around a series of gigantic victims. The world of Maravillosa was a dripping, parasitical garden. Yet underlying this decay was the remnant of artful design. Scattered about the grounds were conical hills fifteen and twenty feet in height, matted with morning glory and ivy, saplings growing from their sides, like the jungle-shrouded tops of Burmese temples. Paths entered the hills, curving between mossy walls, and at the center they would find broken benches, fragments of marble fountains and sundials, and once, a statue covered in moss and vines, its hand outheld in a warding gesture, as if a magician had been struck leafy and inanimate while casting a counterspell.

'Valcours,' said Otille bemusedly, rubbing away the moss and clearing a circular patch of marble.

From atop one of the hills, between walls of bamboo and vines, they had a view of the house. Black; bristling with gables; speckled with silver magical symbols; a ramshackle wing leading off behind; it had the look of a strange seed spat from the heart of the night and about to burst into a constellation. Beyond the hills lay an oval pool bordered in cracked marble and sheeted with scum, enclosed by bushes whose contours were thrust up into odd shapes. Valcours, Otille explained, had been fascinated with the human form, and the bushes overgrew a group of mechanical devices he had commissioned for his entertainment. She hacked at a bush with her umbrella and uncovered a faceless wooden figure, its head a worm-trailed lump and its torso exhibiting traces of white paint, as well as a red heart on its chest. A rusted epee was attached to its hand.

'It still worked when I was a child,' she said. 'Ants lived inside it, in channels packed with sand, and when their population grew too large, traps were sprung and reservoirs of mercury were opened, flooding the nests. The reservoirs were designed to empty at specific intervals and rates of flow, shifting the weight of the figure, sending it thrusting and lurching about in a parody of swordsmanship. The only ants to survive were those that fled into an iron compartment