Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [31]
Shoes have played a very important part in the history of the noble Karabekians.
Fred led me to the foot of the staircase down which Marilee had tumbled, which would deliver me up to one end of the holy of holies, the studio. It looked dark up there. I was to climb the stairs alone. It was easy to believe that there was a gallows tree dangling a noose over a trap door up there.
So up I went. I stopped at the head of the stairs, and perceived an impossibility: six free-standing chimneys and fireplaces, with a coal fire glowing in the hearth of every one.
Let me explain architecturally what was really going on. Gregory, you see, had bought three typical New York brownstones, each one three windows wide, four floors high, and fifty feet deep, with two fireplaces on each floor. I had supposed that he owned only the townhouse with the oak door and the Gorgon knocker infected with verdigris. So I was unprepared for the vista on the top floor, which seemed to violate all laws of time and space by going on and on and on. Down on the lower floors, including the basement, he had joined up to three houses with doors and archways. On the top floor, though, he had ripped out the dividing walls entirely, from end to end and side to side, leaving only those six free-standing fireplaces.
The only illumination that first night came from the six coal fires, and from pale zebra stripes on the ceiling. The stripes were light from a streetlamp below—cut to ribbons by nine windows overlooking East Forty-eighth Street.
Where was Dan Gregory? I could not see him at first. He was motionless and silent—and shapeless in a voluminous black caftan, displaying his back to me, and low, hunched over on a camel saddle before a fireplace in the middle, about twenty feet from me. I identified the objects on the mantelpiece above him before I understood where he was. They were the whitest things in the grotto. They were eight human skulls, an octave arranged in order of size, with a child’s at one end and a great-grandfather’s at the other—a marimba for cannibals.
There was a kind of music up there, a tedious fugue for pots and pans deployed under a leaking skylight to the right of Gregory. The skylight was under a blanket of melting snow.
“Ker-plunk.” Silence. “Plink-pank.” Silence. “Ploop.” Silence. That was how the song of the skylight went as my gaze probed Dan Gregory’s one indubitable masterpiece, that studio—his one work of breathtaking originality.
A simple inventory of the weapons and tools and idols and icons and hats and helmets and ship models and airplane models and stuffed animals, including a crocodile and an upright polar bear, in the masterpiece would be amazing enough. But think of this: there were fifty-two mirrors of every conceivable period and shape, many of them hung in unexpected places at crazy angles, to multiply even the bewildered observer to infinity. There at the top of the stairs, with Dan Gregory invisible to me, I myself was everywhere!
I know there were fifty-two mirrors because I counted them the next day. Some I was supposed to polish every week. Others I was not to dust on penalty of death, according to my master. Nobody could counterfeit images in dusty mirrors like Dan Gregory.
Now he spoke, and rolled his shoulders some, so I could see where he was. And he said this: “I was never welcome anywhere either.” He was using his British accent again, which was the only one he ever used, except in fun. He went on: “It was very good for me to be so unwelcome, so unappreciated by my own master, because look what I have become.”
He said that his father, the horse trainer, had come close to killing him when he was an infant because his father couldn’t stand to hear him cry. “If I started to cry, he did everything he could to make me stop right away,” he said. “He was only a child himself, which is easy to forget