Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [42]
One night after he had fled the stable, where enough rancor was brewing between his parents to set the horses snorting in their stalls below, he happened upon a Lyceum-like institution that called itself the Illumination Society. The establishment was filled with horn-rimmed fusspots arguing about a magic-lantern lecture on the life history of the bee. Was it too bold? Too suggestive? The opinions were hot on both sides of the debate, and no one noticed Lloyd slip into the adjacent library. He was starving for intellectual stimulation in the same way that he craved sex.
In the hushed, stuffy book room he found copies of Shakespeare and Horace. But when he went to look beyond one of the rows, in the darker part of the room, he pulled out a heavy volume on the history of the Punic Wars and found on the shelf behind it another book tucked away, as if in secret. In the dim light, he strained his eyes to take in the contents. The pages were filled with illustrated pictures of men and women. Naked men and women posed in positions that he hadn’t even thought of! His heart leaped. Page by forbidden page, the pictures lubricated his imagination. Fortunately, the members of the Illumination Society were now immersed in an earnest discussion regarding dues and the privileges of officeholders. Oh, how he longed to steal that book—so crammed with fantasies and flesh! But it was too large for him to slip under his shirt. He noticed a small card glued inside the front cover. It read RARE BOOKS & MAPS, and was followed by a St. Louis address—on Fifth Street, not far away. His whole body quivered at the prospect! Perhaps there were more such books to be found there.
The next afternoon, following a show where sales of LUCID! hit a record high, Lloyd went searching for the shop (with the express intention of locating and stealing a forbidden text). The address in question was a very narrow shop front, not much wider than the single door, with just one small window. The pane was so caked with mud and crusted insects that it was impossible to gain any idea of what type of business was conducted inside, but the moment Lloyd was inside the door he knew that he had found what he had been searching for. The shop was much deeper than he expected, laid out in a series of small plaster-peeling rooms and alcoves built off one long hall lined by a tatty Oriental carpet. On the wall behind the door hung a Dutch map of some section of the coast of Africa, and on the floor below lay a transparent celestial sphere and a page from an illuminated manuscript depicting a sleeping peasant being inspected by a family of hedgehogs. The place was silent but for the buzzing of a bluebottle butting the inside of the clouded glass. As there was no one about, Lloyd peered into the first room. More maps covered the wall—or pieces of maps—some framed, some torn and decomposing. Piles of books lay everywhere.
He found amid the mouse dirt and cobwebs a fat vellum volume concerning the history of military fortifications. In the neighboring alcove he found the travels of Hakluyt and the Wildflowers of the Southern Alps, which had several blood-smeared mosquitoes smushed between its pages. At last, however, on top of a crooked chimney pile of texts, he came upon an edition of Nicolaus Steno’s famous anatomical work on the ovaries of sharks, which gave him hope that he might have hit on a heap of biological or medical texts. Perhaps somewhere near the bottom was hidden the documentation of some forensically vivid mating ritual or a diagram of the female organs. He became so engrossed in this possibility that he was not even aware of the hint of witch hazel