Read Grave Doubts for Free Online Page A

proffered warmth according to his needs, rather than smothering him with the indifference of feathers.Snug, breathing the cool air of the room, he tried to reconstruct his last dream.
    Inevitably, it evaded coherence. There were images of wizened corpses entwined as intimately as their clothing allowed, of skulls with their features contorted into the tight grimace of mockery at the fears of the living, of plaster and bronze torsos and severed limbs, of flesh mounded and shapeless, waiting to be formed into bodies. There was a diorama contrived at Hogg’s Hollow with meticulous care to convey mystery, and a confusion of intent and response. There were intimations of genius, and no question about murder. Heathcliff, Rodin, romantic love, death…
    “What are you thinking about, David? Where is this going?”
    Corpses beheaded, enclosed in an airless crypt, the death of romance. He said nothing.
    “Turning death into metaphor isn’t murder, David. Perhaps murder preceded, but the display is romantic. Don’t you see? Get rid of the heads, let the bodies embrace. It is passion over reason, David, as it should be.”
    His wife was leaning across a kitchen table, challenging him. He had not seen her in a dozen years and they had been divorced even longer. He knew he was in a dream. He felt defensive. He roused himself, trying to wake up.
    “Stay here, my darling. Don’t leave me. We can work this out together.”
    He stifled an answer, refusing to give her presence validity.
    “Don’t you love me? Do you love me?”
    He had no answer.
    “Talk to me, David. Tell me about loving forever. Show me the perfect kiss. How delightful, David — an eternal instant. How abysmally sad.”
    He tried to find her eyes, but they were empty sockets. Her lips were tightly clenched but the voice was clear and unnervingly familiar.
    “Two heads, David, kissing forever. It’s all in the head. Reason over passion, don’t you see? Drop two heads down a chute, no telling what they’ll be up to, perpetually falling. Didn’t you ever wonder about heads in the guillotine basket? Between decapitation and the end of consciousness, did they exchange glances? What secrets and jokes passed among them, David?
    “Was that our problem, David? Minds and bodies didn’t come together? We couldn’t tell secrets from jokes!”
    Morgan spoke at last and his voice was like thunder.
    “I do not love you, Lucy….”
    The sound of his words resounding through the loft awakened him. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling, inconsolably lonely.
    Thoughts gathered of the ring and the crucifix and gradually filled the emptiness. Did the conjunction of such potent talismans lead to death, or was death merely the prelude to staging the scene in anticipation of eventual discovery? What variables were manipulated for our benefit, he wondered, and what for the author’s own? And what were the gratuitous contributions of history, of time passing? He could have no way of knowing our ways of seeing, so far in the future.
    Morgan tried to reconstruct the character of the killer. That seemed the key to understanding his crime. It would have taken considerable strength to manhandle the corpses, even if they had been killed and prepared on the premises, which seemed probable. He would have had to understand something of carpentry and plastering. It’s unlikely a woman of the day would have known these things, but an observant male might be familiar with the procedures without himself being in a trade.
    Given the killer’s morbid imagination, combined with meticulous patience and sanguinary determination, he must have been fairly mature — most likely a British immigrant, as were most of his neighbours — and literate. He would have grown up reading the Graveyard Poets in England, or at the very least been an aficionado of Italianate novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho . His tableau has all the elements. But it is a Gothic mystery in reverse: it invites a kind of