Droisch’s thin white arm was pinned under the sweating weight of his wife’s enormous thigh. The bedroom stank worse than the rest of the house. The radiant night had been shut out and it looked like the blessed sun had never entered. The Travesty sat in a deep chair that was covered in the skin of a beast. He was watching them sleep. He was wide awake and had no intention of sharing or catching any of their squalid dreams. He had come to take their breath, but it seemed such a kind thing to do, so he decided to take their souls instead. It would be dirtier but sanctified.
It took an hour of the “time that flies.” She had been easy, but the white husband had been grudging and tightly curled, like some cur child refusing the bait offered outside the womb. And so, like a practised midwife, he cut it out. Indeed, with such skill that Gotfrid Droisch never woke. He kicked about and jabbered, but stayed unaware of the blessing that was being given to the world. It was the Travesty’s intention to take the souls to the edge of the holy Vorrh and scrape them off the iron rod onto which they had slithered and coiled. Of course he would not taint the interior with such an offering, but there would be something living at the edges that would willingly feed on these morsels. On his way out of the house he could not restrain his curiosity. The smell from the “shop” lured him in to investigate.
Droisch had again been attempting to mate different species. And for the first time he’d had a limited, if repulsive, success. His previous attempts had been little more than forced couplings of different animals and a few botched graftings. He had also collected live and pickled abnormalities from far and wide. They all began to glimmer in their bottles or dance or hide in their cages as the Travesty lit a lamp. He was examining the limping and floating menagerie with great interest when he became aware of their owners standing by the open door. She like a spherical dark nought and he like an anaemic stretched I. The Travesty laughed at the sight as the coils tightened harder on the metal rod, which he carried in the way of a walking stick.
“I suppose you want to come too,” he said wearily to the figures in the doorway.
There was no answer because he addressed the question to perpetual sleepwalkers who were not bright enough to know that they were dying. He knew that they would be lost after the first five minutes, unable to keep up with the pace of his resolute stride. He waved his metal stick with their useless souls sucking onto it like limpets.
“Then let it be so,” he said and opened the door at the back of the shop into a street filled entirely with tall, featureless warehouses. Some were made of brick but most were fashioned in timber—the verticality of the Vorrh having been sawn into horizontal planks that made the huge walls. More meaningless buildings, he thought, as what had been the Droischs followed him. Somehow the three of them made the street look emptier than before. Something about their limp nakedness and the scale of the walls and the Travesty’s detachment made the whole thing look like a minor early Renaissance painting, where the artist is unsure what is most important: the grandeur of the architecture squashed into a compacted perspective or the figures in front of it, who appear to be waiting to receive their lines. The only sound in the long high place was the soft moan of the wind and a tiny creaking from the iron rod as its occupants tightened their grip once again.
Then the wall of the building opposite exploded.