The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco Read Free Book Online Page B

billow on his face; Ollimer turns and freezes—the Divinity Student ducks behind a gargoyle. Was he seen? Crouching in the dark, behind a hunched back and folded leather wings, he leans forward to peer over its haunch.
    Ollimer is staring up the street at nothing. Then just as abruptly as it came, his trance seems to pass and he gets going again.
    The Divinity Student lets him go on a bit more, and then starts after. Turning a corner the road ends, he stops—oak trees spreading in the spectral light beyond the pavement, grass white and black, the same dust shining in the air now like tiny silver flakes. Just visible in obscurity are the same domes and spires he saw over the trees at sunset, it’s precisely the same place.
    Cautiously, he steps into the glade, taking care to avoid the trees. With his black coat drawn close about him he blends in with the dark. Around him the trees whisper as he passes, growing quiet after him. Unsure, he makes his way to the oro’s oak. Ollimer is there. The Divinity Student flattens himself on the ground, watching him, completely silent. Ollimer is still apprehensive but he does not notice the Divinity Student.
    Hesitant, he starts feeling around inside a hole in the trunk of the oro’s tree until his arm is swallowed up to the shoulder. His eyes look upward, the tip of his tongue visible in his straining face as he feels around with his hand. Then he pulls out a scrap of paper and steps into the light, peering at it. After reading it over several times, he pulls out his wallet, stuffs it in, and hurries back up the road.
    The Divinity Student takes a different route back into town, knowing that Ollimer will approach him tomorrow with another fragment of the catalog.
    The Divinity Student finds refuge at an all-night cafe. Chairs and tables spill out in a circle of orange light to fill a corner of Candle Square, lost in San Veneficio’s tangle of streets and closed to traffic. A single streetlamp burns at the far corner, the walls all around are dark silhouettes before a more luminous cobalt-colored sky. The interior of the diner is a brightly lit rectangle cut into the dark, like an aquarium in an unlit room, two sleepy waiters wearing white aprons drift to and fro, tidy up, tend a few late customers, or play dominoes on the counter.
    Having given up his hammock, the Divinity Student falls into a chair at the farthest boundary of the lights, and dozes. He has a puzzling, desultory dream about lifeless mountain roads cut into shafts of solid rock and lined with boulders. Once he thinks he can see a tiny window carved in one of the larger stones, and possibly the suggestion of a door as well, with a faint strip of light along the bottom of the jam.
    A noise wakes him up—somebody has set a glass down firmly on the table in front of him. Looking up, he sees a big dark-skinned man in a shabby suit of violet satin walking away across the circle of light. He sways over to an elaborate organ under an awning, sits down at the keys, turns a few knobs, and sets it going. In the light from the console, the Divinity Student can make him out—bald and heavy, baby-faced with black filigree tattooed around his eyes. A sign on the organ lights up, “The Clown Filemon” it says. Little blue and yellow lights wink over the organ pipes and keys, luminous strands of clear syrup draw a web in the air over his head, clinging to rigid silver wires, and translucent tubes, gathered around the console, glow with bubbling, phosphorescent green liquid. With slow and deliberate motions, Filemon begins playing—a mysterious, confidential humming in the pipes—but his eyes remain fixed, watching the Divinity Student. After a few minutes, he makes a quick gesture, as if lifting a glass to his lips, and jerks his head at him.
    The Divinity Student looks up, and then picks up the glass in front of him—all right so far?
    Filemon nods, and raises his eyebrows.
    The Divinity Student empties the glass.
    Filemon