She laughed and moved around the table to the unfortunate. She untied the napkin and tenderly wiped his vacant face and the undeveloped hands. She kissed him passionately on the forehead. "You think it is possible to love only perfection? You couldn't love one like this, or an old woman, or a corpse?"
Lampley ran from the room, past a curtained entrance, and stumbled through a hall lit with yellow, grease-filmed light. The hall smelled of food, acrid, sickening. There was a swinging door at the end, padded, outlined with brass nails. Many were missing, their absence commemorated by the dark outline of where they had been. He pushed through it.
The kitchen was oddly constructed. Its ceiling seemed to be two stories high; just under it were niches for sooty plaster figures, all horribly distorted, figures with one arm twice the length of the other, phalluses long as legs, monstrous heads, steatopygian buttocks, goiters resting on sagittarian knees. Through a rose window yellow-pink beams streamed to the flagged floor. Scrubbed and sanded butchers' blocks splattered with gobs of fat, drying entrails, scabs of hard blood stood against the wall. Gleaming knives and cleavers were racked in the sides of the blocks. Tomb-like ranges were hooded in a row; opposite them empty spits turned before cold, blackened fireplaces.
The old man was seated on a stool before a slanting table, methodically chopping onions in a wooden bowl. He turned his head. "She gave you a hard time, hay?"
Blackmail, extortion, exposure, disgrace. "I don't know."
The old man wrinkled his forehead. The peculiar light made the creases unnaturally deep, like well-healed scars. "Who does know?" He laid down his cleaver. "Come."
Will-less, the Governor followed. The old man had a limp, formerly unnoticed. They went past the ranges to a massive steel door with a red lamp beside it. The old man lifted the tight latch. Lampley noted a safety device preventing the door from fully closing except from the outside.
They were in a large refrigerator. Sides of beef, barred red and pale, hung from hooks. Whole sheep and pigs, encased in stiff, unarmoring fat, thrust dead forefeet toward the unattainable sawdust-covered floor. Barrels of pickling brine, boxes of fish and seafood (the lobsters waving feelers uncertainly) were arranged neatly. It was cold; the Governor shivered. Plucked fowl dangled in rows. Beyond them wild ducks and geese, still sadly feathered, were suspended in bunches, three ducks, two geese to a bunch. The Governor touched a mallard's breast as he passed; the down was strangely warm in this chilling place.
They crossed an empty space. The whole carcass of an animal hung from gray hooks curving through the tendons of its legs. It had been skinned and gutted but the head was intact and untouched. The shaggy hair drooped forward, the horns pointed at nothing. The glazed eyes absorbed the light, the tongue, clenched between dead teeth, protruded.