Shame - pg. 32

'Sometimes I found skeletons,' he swore to disbelieving Farah, 'humans as well as animal.' And even where bones were absent, the house's long-dead occupants dogged his steps. Not in the way you think! -- No howls, no clanking chains! -- But disembodied feelings, the choking fumes of ancient hopes, fears, loves; and finally, made wild by the ancestor-heavy, phantom oppressions of these far recesses of the run-down building, Omar Khayyam took his revenge (not long after the episode of the broken wall) on his unnatural surroundings. I wince as I record his vandalism: armed with broomstick and misappropriated hatchet, he rampaged through dusty passages and maggoty bedrooms, smashing glass cabinets, felling oblivion-sprinkled divans, pulverizing wormy libraries; crystal, paintings, rusty helmets, the paper-thin remnants of priceless silken carpets were destroyed beyond all possibility of repair. 'Take that,' he screeched amidst the corpses of his useless, massacred history, 'take that, old stuff!' -- and then burst (dropping guilty hatchet and clean-sweeping broom) into illogical tears.