Sublime

A bristling clump of those trees, monkey-brown with a tarry reek, their trunks nightmarishly tangled, still grows at the left side, facing across an untidy lawn to the big curved window of what used to be the living room but which Miss Vavasour prefers to call, in landladyese, the lounge.

The albatross spread his wings wide and stretched out his throat towards the Ceiling. He made a sort of clacking, whirring sound in his throat, which I took to be his way of greeting me. The backs of his wings were dark, almost black, with a white shape like a star on each one. I returned to my work of gathering seaweed. The albatross walked about

Alicia held the black candle, still burning as it had in the golden ruin at the end of time. Rachel and her phantom children whispered among themselves of the futures that would never be. The twins, Peter and Richard, watched intently as the librarians filled out the twelve points of the abbreviated circle, studying some deep order that everyone

The missionaries’ tension grew like fever. Their suspense and fear were made still worse by Hazel, who spoke wildly of the jungle and could talk of nothing else, describing obscenely the obscenity of the flowering and rot, the pale phallic trunks and dark soft caverns, the rampant hair, the slime and infestations. Once she ran naked from the hut at

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

Below, the Hound had sunk back down upon its eight incredible insect legs and was humming to itself again, its multifaceted eyes at peace.