（外文电子版资料）Avram Davidson - Dr. Bhumbo Singh.pdfVIP

Dr. Bhumbo Singh AVRAM DAVIDSON Trevelyan Street used to be four blocks long, but now it is only three, and its aft end is blocked by the abutment of an overpass. (Do you find the words Dead End to have an ominous ring?) The large building in the 300 block used to be consecrated to worship by the Mesopotamian Methodist Episcopal Church (South) but has since been deconsecrated and is presently a glue warehouse. The small building contains the only Bhuthanese grocery and deli outside of Asia; its trade is small. And the little (and wooden) building lodges an extremely dark and extemely dirty little studio which sells spells, smells, and shrunken heads. Its trades are even smaller. The spells are expensive, the smells are exorbitant, and the prices of its shrunken heads — first chop though they be — are simply inordinate. The studio, however, has a low rent (it has a low ceiling, too), pays no license fee — it is open (when it is open) only between the hours of seven p.m. and seven a.m., during which hours the municipal license department does not function — and lacks not for business enough to keep the proprietor, a native of the Andaman Islands, in the few, the very few things, without which he would find life insupportable: namely curried squid, which he eats — and eats and eats — baroque pink pearls, which he collects, and (alone, and during the left phase of the moon) wears; also live tree-shrews. Some say that they are distantly cognate to the primates and, hence, it is supposed, to Man. Be that as it may. In their tiny ears he whispers directions of the most unspeakable sort, and then turns them loose, with great grim confidence. And an evil laugh. The facts whereof I speak, I speak with certainty, for they were related to me by my friend Mr. Underhand; and Mr. Underhand has never been known to lie. At any rate, at least, not to me. “A good moonless evening to you, Underhand Misterje