The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

the surface clouding darkly where it landed, then swirling, the dark blot expanding across the page. Miss Temple gazed into it with sudden dread—an indigo knot opening like an orchid or blood blossoming from a wound … it was perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, though she was filled with fear at what would happen when the dark unfurling had covered the entirety of the page. But then it was done, the last bit of shimmering blue blotted out and she could no longer see through to the lower pages … only into the depths of the indigo stain. Miss Temple heard a gasping sound—dimly aware that it came from her own mouth—and was swallowed.
    The images writhed around her mind and then with a rush passed through it, the singular point, both terrifying and delicious, being that
she
did not seem to be present at all, for just as with Mrs. Marchmoor and the card, her awareness was subsumed within the immediacies of whichever sensation had entrapped her. It felt to Miss Temple that she had plunged into the experience of several lifetimes piled up in delirious succession, so wholly persuasive and in such number that they threatened the very idea of Celeste Temple as any stable entity … she was at a masked ball in Venice drinking spiced wine in winter, the smell of the canal water and the dank stone and the hot tallow candles, the hands groping her from behind in the dark and her own delighted poise while she somehow maintained a conversation with the masked churchman in front of her, as if nothing untoward was happening … creeping slowly through a narrow brick passage, lined with tiny alcoves, holding a shuttered lantern, counting the alcoves to either side andthen at the seventh on her right stepping to the far wall and slipping aside a small iron disk on a nail and pressing her eye to the hole beneath it, looking into the great bedchamber as two figures strained against each other, a young muscular man, his naked thighs pale as milk, bent over a side table and an older man behind him, face reddened, frothing like a bull … she was riding a horse, her legs gripping the animal with strength and skill, one hand on the reins and another waving a wickedly curved saber, charging across an arid African plain at a flying wedge of horsemen in white turbans, faces dark, she was screaming with fear and pleasure, the red-coated men to either side of her screaming as well, the two lines racing at each other fast as a cracking whip, lowering her body over the neck of her surging mount, saber extended, squeezing the horse between her knees and then one split second of slamming impact—the Arab’s blade lancing past her shoulder and her tip digging into his neck, a quick jet of blood and the hideous wrench on her arm as the horses pulled past, the saber yanked free, another Arab in front of her, screaming with exhilaration at the kill … an ecstatic waterfall the size of two cathedrals, she stood among squat red-skinned Indians with their bows and arrows, black hair cut like a medieval king’s … mountains of floating ice, the smell of fish and salt, a fur collar tickling her face, behind her voices speaking of skins and ivory and buried metals, in her large gloved hand an unsettling carved figure, squat with a leering mouth and one great eye … a dark marble chamber gleaming with gold, small pots and jars and combs and weapons, all golden, and then the casket itself, little more than the body of the boy-king close-shrouded in a thick hammered sheet of gold and knotted with jewels, then her own hand snapping open a clasp knife and bending down to pry out a singularly fetching emerald … an artist’s studio, naked on a divan, reclining shamelessly, looking up into an open skylight, the pearl-grey clouds above her, a man with his skin painted blue between her legs, playfully holding her bare feet in his hands, raising one to his shoulders and then turning, as she also turned, to ask the artist himself about the pose, a figurebehind an enormous canvas she could not see as she could not see his face, just his strong hands holding the palette and brush, but before she could hear his answer her attention was drawn pleasantly back to her posing partner who had reached down to luxuriously drag two fingers, just barely making contact, across the length of her shaven labia … a stinking sweltering room crowded with dark, slick bodies in clanking chains, striding back and forth, her boots against the planking of a