The house that was a city grew and, as is the way with cities,
buried its past beneath an ever-advancing present. In the cellars of the
Queen, where three corridors met to form a Y, three stone heads graced
the capital of a buried pendentive. The heads were malign at first
glance, a dead craftsman’s nightsweats and horrors: vaguely a cow, a goat, and a manticore.
Each had some resemblance to the beast it portrayed—and not without an
idiot twinkle—but seen through a glass cast with a ripple in it, reflected
in a mirror with peeling silver. They were figments, and existed nowhere in nature.
They were the past and they were buried. They had been surrounded, enveloped and eventually forgotten in a subcellar of the great masonry sprawl as addition after addition was piled over them.
—The Return of the Orange Virgin
|