comment on the state of his worldly goods. It occurred to him impulsively that he would quit paying the storage bill and simply let the stuff go. If he was going to make himself at home, he might as well do a thorough job of it.
God bless the generosity of uncles
, Max muttered, reaching for the pull-cord to the ceiling lamp, waving his hand around before looking up and discovering that there was no pull-cord, which confounded him for a moment, because he had the absolute idea in his mind that there should be, and that he had reached for a pull cord a thousand times over the years. The certainty faded into curiosity. He had never, after all, lived in a house old enough to have such an item as a pull cord for a ceiling lamp.
He shut off the wall switch and went out into the living room, where he found Elmer holding an immense dead lizard. If it was a fresh kill, it had been a quick one, given that Elmer had just minutes ago been lounging in the bedroom doorway. “That’ll make you skinny,” Max warned him. “There’s nothing nourishing in a reptile.” In the dim light Elmer could easily be mistaken for a bobcat, and he pretty much had to cram himself through the cat door when he came and went. How he had hauled the saurian back in through the door was a mystery. The battle must have resembled a scene in a Godzilla movie. Dragging the lizard, Elmer walked along the edge of the room toward the kitchen where he vanished into the shadows at the edge of a bookcase, glancing back momentarily, his eyes glowing green.
Max gave the interior of the house an appraising look. The day he moved in he had fallen into the habits of a stay-at-home eccentric, whiling away the hours in study, poring over the collections in the glass and wood cabinets that lined the living room—the seashells and geodes and beetles and antique bric-a-brac. He found himself opening and closing small wooden cupboards in which were hidden trilobite fossils and gizzard stones and petrified dinosaur eggs, reading through old volumes of natural history late into the night, most of it seriously out of date, with imaginative illustrations drawn during a time when science had no real argument with Jules Verne. There was something in the air of the house that lent Max’s brain a retentive quality that surprised him, and he found that the arcane information in his uncle’s library wasn’t a mere collection of dead and disembodied facts, but seemed to call up dim memories, like glimpses of long-forgotten dreams. It was as if he already knew what he was reading, and had simply to be reminded of it.
The old house was of indeterminate age, built when there had been nothing but avocado and orange groves and empty fields in the area. Aside from the occasional coat of paint, it hadn’t suffered any changes over the years. His Uncle Jonathan had inherited the place in the 1940s from his own uncle, the house always having “been in the family.” There had apparently been other uncles. The bystreet outside was shaded by curb trees and had almost no traffic to break the afternoon silence. There was the distant sound of church bells in the morning and evening, nearly the only reminder of the passing of time if the blinds were drawn, which they were. Max had started locking the front door on his second day in the house, finding that he had lost any desire to venture out.
He had been pleasantly surprised to discover that there was enough food in the kitchen cupboards to last through a prolonged siege—jars of string beans and peaches, canned meat and canisters of oatmeal and cocoa, all of it looking as if it had been purchased at an antiques store. But there was apparently nothing wrong with any of it, and something downright pleasant in the thought that he could disappear from the world for months if he chose to, heating up his food on the old gas stove, which was a mint green object on stilt-like legs, built during an era that had an inventive sense of humor, or
God bless the generosity of uncles
, Max muttered, reaching for the pull-cord to the ceiling lamp, waving his hand around before looking up and discovering that there was no pull-cord, which confounded him for a moment, because he had the absolute idea in his mind that there should be, and that he had reached for a pull cord a thousand times over the years. The certainty faded into curiosity. He had never, after all, lived in a house old enough to have such an item as a pull cord for a ceiling lamp.
He shut off the wall switch and went out into the living room, where he found Elmer holding an immense dead lizard. If it was a fresh kill, it had been a quick one, given that Elmer had just minutes ago been lounging in the bedroom doorway. “That’ll make you skinny,” Max warned him. “There’s nothing nourishing in a reptile.” In the dim light Elmer could easily be mistaken for a bobcat, and he pretty much had to cram himself through the cat door when he came and went. How he had hauled the saurian back in through the door was a mystery. The battle must have resembled a scene in a Godzilla movie. Dragging the lizard, Elmer walked along the edge of the room toward the kitchen where he vanished into the shadows at the edge of a bookcase, glancing back momentarily, his eyes glowing green.
Max gave the interior of the house an appraising look. The day he moved in he had fallen into the habits of a stay-at-home eccentric, whiling away the hours in study, poring over the collections in the glass and wood cabinets that lined the living room—the seashells and geodes and beetles and antique bric-a-brac. He found himself opening and closing small wooden cupboards in which were hidden trilobite fossils and gizzard stones and petrified dinosaur eggs, reading through old volumes of natural history late into the night, most of it seriously out of date, with imaginative illustrations drawn during a time when science had no real argument with Jules Verne. There was something in the air of the house that lent Max’s brain a retentive quality that surprised him, and he found that the arcane information in his uncle’s library wasn’t a mere collection of dead and disembodied facts, but seemed to call up dim memories, like glimpses of long-forgotten dreams. It was as if he already knew what he was reading, and had simply to be reminded of it.
The old house was of indeterminate age, built when there had been nothing but avocado and orange groves and empty fields in the area. Aside from the occasional coat of paint, it hadn’t suffered any changes over the years. His Uncle Jonathan had inherited the place in the 1940s from his own uncle, the house always having “been in the family.” There had apparently been other uncles. The bystreet outside was shaded by curb trees and had almost no traffic to break the afternoon silence. There was the distant sound of church bells in the morning and evening, nearly the only reminder of the passing of time if the blinds were drawn, which they were. Max had started locking the front door on his second day in the house, finding that he had lost any desire to venture out.
He had been pleasantly surprised to discover that there was enough food in the kitchen cupboards to last through a prolonged siege—jars of string beans and peaches, canned meat and canisters of oatmeal and cocoa, all of it looking as if it had been purchased at an antiques store. But there was apparently nothing wrong with any of it, and something downright pleasant in the thought that he could disappear from the world for months if he chose to, heating up his food on the old gas stove, which was a mint green object on stilt-like legs, built during an era that had an inventive sense of humor, or
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