Fantastic Mr Norris
Un
The stranger arrived at midnight, when clocks ticked and bells tolled out in the cobbled streets. Not even a mouse scurried in the lampless hotel. Here, the walls and floorboards breathed aged cork smells, like wine casks in a cellar, and the thick carpet drank in sounds.
Under cover of night and a towering top hat, he let himself in the front door, and padded up the stairs, which never creaked– only because nobody ever stepped on them. In velvet soft as muffled footfalls and black as silence, his swept around the banister and up to the landing.
His cane was topped with the polished, white skull of a raven. Gems the colour of dusk gleamed in each of its eye sockets. This cane rested lightly beneath two of his fingers. In his other, gloved hand, he held a lily, white as porcelain. A cape of ebony slithered behind him on the ground, where his shadow should have been.
Thin fingers of moonlight reached out to touch him as he climbed the final flight of stairs to Mr Norris’ door. Effortlessly, the stranger evaded them. The clutches of night were no opponent for him beside death, whose agents he had escaped for centuries. As he pivoted, his cape billowed, like a phantom or a dust devil evoked.
For a moment, he seemed to disappear.
Then, he was there, in front of the door of polished oak, beyond which lay the office. The whole apartment was the office, although there had previously been a foyer, a bedroom and a tea room, the stranger thought. Once, it had been a spacious suite. As Mr Norris had become more and more familiar with it, it had shrunk, until finally it was exactly as large as his personal space.
The clutter of books, old volumes in musty leather, had spread as the dust and silence had expanded, until the whole placed was infused with quiet warnings. Those books were not ordinary books. Each might have been a prize in a collector’s library, but in Mr Norris’ office, their teetering stacks comprised the furniture as often as they buried it.
Some were erudite. Others were small and curious, with ribbons like protruding tongues. Still more sinister volumes kept hush between their covers, locks pressed to their lips in secrecy. Only Mr Norris knew what venomous things were written inside them, or could guess at the meanings of their twisted diagrams.
In the graveyard quiet, the intruder raised his knuckles to the timber. He rapped once.
Under cover of night and a towering top hat, he let himself in the front door, and padded up the stairs, which never creaked– only because nobody ever stepped on them. In velvet soft as muffled footfalls and black as silence, his swept around the banister and up to the landing.
His cane was topped with the polished, white skull of a raven. Gems the colour of dusk gleamed in each of its eye sockets. This cane rested lightly beneath two of his fingers. In his other, gloved hand, he held a lily, white as porcelain. A cape of ebony slithered behind him on the ground, where his shadow should have been.
Thin fingers of moonlight reached out to touch him as he climbed the final flight of stairs to Mr Norris’ door. Effortlessly, the stranger evaded them. The clutches of night were no opponent for him beside death, whose agents he had escaped for centuries. As he pivoted, his cape billowed, like a phantom or a dust devil evoked.
For a moment, he seemed to disappear.
Then, he was there, in front of the door of polished oak, beyond which lay the office. The whole apartment was the office, although there had previously been a foyer, a bedroom and a tea room, the stranger thought. Once, it had been a spacious suite. As Mr Norris had become more and more familiar with it, it had shrunk, until finally it was exactly as large as his personal space.
The clutter of books, old volumes in musty leather, had spread as the dust and silence had expanded, until the whole placed was infused with quiet warnings. Those books were not ordinary books. Each might have been a prize in a collector’s library, but in Mr Norris’ office, their teetering stacks comprised the furniture as often as they buried it.
Some were erudite. Others were small and curious, with ribbons like protruding tongues. Still more sinister volumes kept hush between their covers, locks pressed to their lips in secrecy. Only Mr Norris knew what venomous things were written inside them, or could guess at the meanings of their twisted diagrams.
In the graveyard quiet, the intruder raised his knuckles to the timber. He rapped once.