The house that was a city grew and, as is the way with cities, buried
its past beneath an ever-advancing present. In the cellars of the Queen,
where three corridors met to form a Y, three stone heads graced the
capital of a buried pendentive. The heads were malign at first glance,
a dead craftsman’s nightsweats and horrors: vaguely a cow, a goat, and
a manticore. Each had some resemblance to the beast it portrayed—and
not without an idiot twinkle—but seen through a glass cast with a ripple
in it, reflected in a mirror with peeling silver. They were figments,
and existed nowhere in nature. They were the past and they were buried.
They had been surrounded, enveloped and eventually forgotten in a subcellar
of the great masonry sprawl as addition after addition was piled over
them. —The Return of the Orange Virgin |