Free The Great Lover by Rhys Hughes, Michael Cisco

so that his body will screen it from view should anyone be watching behind him. His embarrassed gestures don’t match the expression on his face. Hulferde peers into the dark for a few seconds, then waves vehemently at something to come to him out of the shadows. The ember at the end of his cigarette traces a lingering zig-zag in the gloom. The figure pauses, the head rises up against a blue light. Hulferde leans forward and waves his dry floppy hand at the sodden, spiky head. The shape glides toward him and then stops fifteen feet from the platform edge. Hulferde resolutely steps down to the purple gravel of the tunnel floor and crunches a few feet into the shade.
    It’s late; there are no trains. The tunnels are eerily still. The dense air sliding over them both smells of ammonia, graphite, and rust, which smells like cold blood. The Great Lover is standing there by a heap of trash, his arms hanging down, returning Hulferde’s gaze with a slack, stupid look, eyes glistening like mercury in a face masked in grime. He’s wearing a hat that fits like a skull cap; the brim is folded back and stands upright, the fabric cut into regular triangles all the way around, like a crown of dingy black felt. He sports a very sophisticated-looking silk cravat around his neck.
    “ I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Hulferde tells him peevishly.
    “— Well?” His voice is cloggy, like he’s got a wad of hair stuck in his throat.
    “ The others told me about you.” Hulferde has been interviewing Great Lovers for weeks — fleetingly he remembers talking to one, a male with a flat golden chain around his turtleneck... “Oh that — that one... I’d say he knows more about nerve projection than any of us. I mean it is his entire technique.” The fragrant man had made a dusting gesture with his middle ring and pinky fingers, indicating panache.
    In the present, Hulferde looks squarely at me. “You died.”
    “ That’s right.”
    “ ...How did you come back?” This is off the subject, but Hulferde is curious.
    I shrug. “I don’t know.”
    “ Did you do it yourself, or was it done to you?”
    “ I don’t know...” I’m tired, suddenly irritated. I don’t like being made to talk. “Stop asking about it.”
    “ Well, I have something else I want to ask you about. My name is Hulferde.” He has the wary formal demeanor of someone who doesn’t deal often or well with people, and whose chief concern in a conversation is to avoid contamination.
    Nothing in the Great Lover’s appearance changes, and he does not answer.
    “ Would you be so kind as to give me yours?”
    The Great Lover’s behavior is a weird mix of weariness and punctilious exactness, like an uncertain performance. “I have none to give. You must refer to me in the second person.”
    A mounting self-consciousness is making Hulferde uncharacteristically hesitant, dilatory. “You... abide down here?”
    “ Here, and in the sewers.”
    “ And... what do you do, when you are not above ground?”
    “ I collect specimens.”
    “ ...Of what?”
    “ Of whatever.”
    “— In this filth?”
    “ My condition is not noticed here.”
    “ You seduce women in their dreams — is my information correct?”
    “ No.”
    He looks annoyed. “I don’t believe I’ve made a mistake.”
    I wave my hand a little. “Close enough.”
    “ But you never pursue a physical consummation.”
    “ I am not presently able to do so.”
    “ You’re saying you’re impotent?” Hulferde asks.
    “ You,” I say without really understanding what I’m saying, “and others of your kind are unable to touch me because I am below your level.”
    “ You were human once...”
    “ I was demoted.”
    “ What are you now?”
    He gazes directly at Hulferde smiles for the first time and says through his threads, “ I am a character in a book. ”
    “ Don’t say that! Don’t say that! Don’t say that!”
    Hulferde flaps up and down the length of the platform in