The Fascination by Essie Fox EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Essie Fox
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical British Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
An Introduction to
THE MONSTERS
Grandfather snatches at his arm and drags him through the study door.
The boy has never been inside, because the room is always locked,
though he has often stood on tiptoe with one eye pressed to the keyhole –
only to see a soup of shadows. But there are smells, and smells seep out.
The ones that puddle round this door are wood and leather and vanilla
from the pipe Grandfather smokes. Is that what stains his teeth so brown,
even the tips of his moustache and the tufts of bristled white that are
sprouting from his ears?
His grandfather looks like an owl, and his nest is very dark, although
some buttered rods of light are creeping in around the shutters closed
across the big bay windows. They form a ladder on the floor leading
towards the painted globe set on a stand beside the hearth. How the boy
would like to spin it, to look at all the greens and blues, the lands and
oceans of the world. But to do so he would need to navigate the tiger skin
lying on the boards before it. The tiger’s head is still attached. The tiger’s
eyes reflect the flames blazing red in the grate. They seem alive, and
dangerous.
Less threatening are the deer heads mounted high upon the walls.
Their softer, melancholy gaze falls across the rows of tables laid with
trays containing beetles, butterflies – or are they moths? – of almost
every size and colour he could possibly imagine. Inside glass domes are
birds and fish, and other animals the like of which he’s never seen before.
At least not when he’s been exploring in the gardens or the fields that
spread for miles around the house.
These specimens – the old man calls them, letting go of the boy’s arm
as he gruffly points them out – are macabre, but beautiful. Some are
embossed with silver pins that fix them down on squares of velvet. Some
hang on wires, invisible between the palest pinks of corals, pearly shells,
or stems of leaves, all being artfully arranged to form the backdrops of
displays that represent the distant places where these creatures had once
lived. Lived, before they died.
Did his grandfather go travelling to find and then to kill them, to bring
them back to Dorney Hall? Sadly, it is too easy to imagine such a thing.
And while continuing to stare the child is all but overwhelmed by a sense
of loss and sorrow. This, he often thinks when he is older, looking back,
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