Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Where was Dan Gregory? I could not see him at first. He was motionless and silent—and shapeless in a voluminous black caftan, displaying his back to me, and low, hunched over on a camel saddle before a fireplace in the middle, about twenty feet from me. I identified the objects on the mantelpiece above him before I understood where he was. They were the whitest things in the grotto. They were eight human skulls, an octave arranged in order of size, with a child’s at one end and a great-grandfather’s at the other—a marimba for cannibals. There was a kind of music up there, a tedious fugue for pots and pans deployed under a leaking skylight to the right of Gregory. The skylight was under a blanket of melting snow.