Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  I washed my son, and dressed him, and I did what was necessary. When I dream badly, or when I am afraid and sleepless for whatever reason, it is not his ghost that comes to me, but the ghost of the box with its fine marquetry and endlessly regressing angles chased in metal around the lock. I see it, in the dark by my bed, or being carried through the door. I hear the heavy tread of the bearers and remember their faces, their eyes skittering away from mine. I smell the wood and the honey, hear the creaking hinges, and I awake and scream and shiver. I do not ever go back to sleep after that dream. I take myself downstairs and work, or cook, or clean, until the sun comes up and I can open all my doors and know that the box is not hiding there, waiting for me.

  I am the only woman on earth haunted by a coffin, and not its occupant.

  *

  In the lost library, I step forward because I am his mother, and the features shift beneath the hood. Now the face is Augustine, and as I take another step, Monica. When I retreat, I see Adeodatus again, as if emerging from behind a cloud. I step back, around, forward, and the face changes with each movement. This is the familiar geometry of death. I see him, but I cannot touch him. I cannot reach him from here.

  ‘It is known that the Enemy made peacocks to prove that he could create beauty as well as ugliness, but while he could make an elegant show he could not complete the work, and thus the voice of the peacock is like the screaming of a soul in Tartarus or the shriek of burning stone,’ the demon says. ‘Though it should be acknowledged that any bird, closely regarded, is nothing more than a crocodile in a pretty dress.’

  ‘Where is my son?’

  ‘Catabasis is a journey. The dead cannot be awarded, they must be won. If you would return a soul to the living world you must go down, and risk.’

  ‘Others must. Not I.’

  ‘Yes, you have the Alkahest – and yet you do not know how to use it. Will you make a test of your magic with your son? Bring him back all out of shape, or leave half his soul in Hades with your haste?’

  ‘Your face is a lie. Why should I believe your voice?’

  ‘That is the risk.’

  ‘You said he was torn.’

  ‘Isn’t everyone?’

  ‘You said he was cast on the ocean of Apeiron.’

  ‘You have my answer.’

  ‘But I do not understand it.’

  ‘Your story touches my heart.’

  ‘I could command you.’

  ‘Indeed. That is my point.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You possess unlimited power, but finite knowledge. You do not know how to frame your assertions to achieve your ends; you do not know the nature of death, so you cannot readily undo it. What you command without certainty is not achieved. I possess the knowledge you lack. You might command me – but in doing so, the possibility of error is recursive. If you knew what to demand of me you would not require my help. Indeed, your risk is increased, as I seek to find ways to exact revenge for your domination.’

  ‘I could wish myself wiser.’

  ‘So long as you know already what constitutes wisdom. Changing one’s own mind is always troublesome. You could wish for knowledge, of course – but you might accidentally create things that do not exist in order to know about them. Beasts. Persons. Worlds.’

  ‘Absurd.’

  ‘Indeed. I cannot think of a single instance in which you have accidentally instantiated an object of universal importance. Am I lying? I certainly intend to be. Yes. Yes, in fact, I am.’

  ‘That was before.’

  ‘Indeed. Just imagine what you might achieve now. Oh, so much opportunity. I’m giddy.’

  ‘We are to trade, then?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘I will require a gesture of good faith.’

  ‘Apeiron is boundless. It has no shore, and no bed. There are no waves, because there is no division between the sea and sky. Yet it is also invisible, because ubiquitous. Apeiron, Phlegethon, time, space – it’s only thought that distinguishes, in the end. All else is vanity.’

  ‘Says the demon in the peacock feather coat.’

  ‘The coat is a consequence and not a choice. Demon? I suppose. I am legion – but so are you. Very well: I will show you the door, in exchange for the scrolls, and you will bring back the dead. Which of them is up to you.’

  For any other soul, I might hesitate. ‘The scrolls, and precise instructions for my appointed task.’

  ‘I am not to be made a shortcut.’

  ‘Oracular instructions, then.’

  ‘Irritatingly vague ones.’

  ‘Specific, and decipherable without madness.’

  ‘Challenging. Obscurantist.’

  ‘And your name, from your own mouth, so that I can call upon you if I have need.’

  ‘I was the hunter, and gazed in a pool and saw myself. My reflection was affronted. I was the heir, the serpent, and now am cast out. Or in. It’s hard to say.’

  ‘I said a name, not a precis.’

  ‘Alas: impossible. I am torn.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’

  ‘That would be funnier if you knew what it meant.’

  I look within the demon, with the eyes I had in my dream, but upon its bones is a confusion of signs that could not be a word. ‘A name agreed between us, to which you will answer.’

  ‘Then I shall be Quaerendo.’

  ‘I will not call you that.’

  ‘Suggest something.’

  ‘How about “Know-all”?’

  The demon laughs. ‘Indeed. Very well. Go through the door. Hades is a puzzle box, a fivefold lock, and it requires a multitude of keys, keys of words and keys of blood and the flavour of your soul. Something you have, something you know, something you are, and these latter two must be proven twice, so that five proofs unlock the Pentemychos. Each layer of guardianship has its price: Cocytus, Styx, Lethe, Acheron and Phlegethon. You must cross the five rivers of Hades and do your will in the place set aside for you.’

  ‘And I shall have my son again?’

  ‘That is your quest. I cannot say what you will eventually attain. Much is prepared for you; some you must perform. You are a turning of this war, Athenais Karthagonensis. I would have you raise the dead, but there are powers – pursuivants, judges and witnesses, authorities and smiths – who align against me. Indeed, they set me against what I now would most dearly win. They look in, and are dismayed. The ending of your quest is their undoing. Or mine.’

  ‘Nonsense. I am a mother in search of her son, and that is all.’

  ‘You bear the Alkahest. Yesterday you were a mother, and perhaps that was a small thing, though it seems to me that carrying lives within and bringing them out is the definition of godhead in the first place. Today your footsteps move ten thousand worlds. Your anger births suns in the outer dark. You make worlds and destroy them.’

  ‘I do no such thing!’

  ‘It sounded as if it might be true. Shall I check? Before now, you grew hair and nails and healed the cut upon your finger without ever deciding it. Your chest rose and fell – a most diverting action of itself, my compliments – without the direction of your will. The Alkahest is like your heart. It performs its function even as you sleep.’

  ‘And how do I use the Alkahest?’

  ‘It is not a thing to be used by you. It is not magic, it is divinity – a state, not an action. That is the first mystery. It is in you, and everything you do. Trust the goddess that all will be well. The execution of the Alkahest falls to another.’

  ‘But it is in me?’

  Know-all lifts long fingers to the ceiling as if to say: Knowledge and conversation of a demon in a burning library of books that don’t exist. You want something more reassuringly magical than this, you’re going to have to tell me what it is.

  I just know that this is not enough. ‘The Chamber of Isis is a lie.’

  The demon tuts. ‘It was a map without a country. Now the country is made beneath your feet: you stand in a fire and you
are not burned; you command a spirit and you plot a path to the kingdom of the dead. If you have not the Alkahest, then at the very least you seem to make do.’

  I pile up the scrolls on the table, feeling a little jolt with each one. The Great Wheel by Empedocles. Pythagoras’ Treatise on the Naming of Mountains. Ennoia and Chokmah by Simon Magus. Three, five, ten more from my belt and shirt. Another from each leg. I am paying for my son with a thousand years of knowledge, with books to benefit every person on earth. Apollonius’ secret Book of the Ogdoad joins the others. I feel the prick of the last scroll in the small of my back. I could keep it.

  ‘What will happen to them?’ I ask.

  ‘It does not matter,’ Know-all says, and extends its hand. ‘Come. You have already decided to give it up. You are too wise to do otherwise. Imagine, if you regained your son, only to lose him to me in payment of a debt. Or perhaps you would simply never find him. Who can say? But everything is paid for.’

  I do not look at the writing on the case. Know-all does, and sighs. ‘Bahu’s Paradoxes. Ah, well.’

  Bahu’s Paradoxes: the earliest known mathematical work, listing problems derived from philosophical logic whose solutions alter the original values, and from these premises deducing or inducing the divine. I think a piece of it was written on the wall of the Chamber, beneath the benediction of the Virgin – I could make a life untangling just one of the secrets it contains. I could make academic history with a single line torn from the roll.

  Know-all flips it into the blaze. We watch as it flares and fades away.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  The demon shrugs, bird-shouldered, and says again: ‘There is a war in heaven.’

  ‘A cataclysm?’

  ‘Not in the way you mean. Gods contend. The directions of the compass are at odds.’

  ‘And who’s winning?’

  A flash of teeth. ‘I am, I suppose. One way or another.’ A pause, and then the peacock-cloaked arm rises, pointing: ‘You should go to your son.’

  And here, at last, is the damned catafalque, the unwelcome coffin, arrived as it always does between the moments so that I cannot see and stamp on whatever kobold drags it in.

  Know-all walks over and lifts the lid. I turn and stare off to the side: I will not look. The demon waits by the open box.

  I turn my head, and see not the honey-smothered face but a staircase leading down. Down, of course, because that is where I must go.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ Know-all says as I pass by. ‘There is a war in heaven. Don’t look back.’

  *

  The first steps are made of stone, and the air is dry and musty. After the turning of the stair, my feet find wood, and I smell dead leaves. After the second turning, the treads are made of ash, and then after the third I am no longer descending a stair at all, but walking on a desert of black sand. From the dune beneath my feet down to a wide river delta, there is no colour other than black. It is, though, a rich black, fertile with textures and depths, so that although there is no sun in the endless darkness of the sky, still each stone and stunted tree is quite distinct from everything else, made so by its peculiar arrangement of shine and roughness.

  Et in Erebus ego, I suppose.

  I discover, when I stumble, that I am leaving thick, pale prints upon the ground. Beneath my hands as I lift myself to my feet, the ash turns silver. Am I leeching the dark from the stones? Or is it battening upon me? I look back along the trail, and then flinch because Know-all told me not to – but no bolt of black lightning strikes me, and no gorgon pursues me along my track. Just my glimmering footsteps, mute reminder of where I have been. The flow of time and memory. No. The injunction was not the same one served upon Orpheus. Rather, it occurs to me, it was almost a kindness. I am a mortal woman, and however my soul and even my body may be buttressed, my mind is still what it was yesterday. My heart is a mortal heart. In traversing Erebus, it is written, the traveller must traverse the corpse of the beloved. Five rivers, five parts to the body – two arms, two legs, the torso and head counted as a single piece – and each concealing secretly one of the elements that make the mortal world. Fire in the right hand, water in the left, earth in the right foot and air in the left, the torso and head the twin vessels of the soul. The sand conceals the skin, the rivers are made of tears. Dig too deep in Erebus, and you will find a heart.

  I have no desire to recognise my son’s corpse in this dry soil.

  I wonder what would happen if I walked the length and breadth of this kingdom. Would every inch of it turn to moonlight?

  I look at the trail I have left and wonder what might live here – or at least, make its home here, if ‘live’ is not entirely the right word – and decide that it would be as well not to tarry.

  I walk towards the rivers.

  *

  I am not sure how to measure time in Erebus. There is no sun to rise and set. The endless night is uniformly radiant. I’m not even sure there is time here. If I burned a candle, would it be consumed? Wax, destroyed, must come here. Does it take time (that word again) for the ghost wax to travel to this place? How long? Is the elapsed instant long enough that the flame would progress along the wick? Or would the rate of return match perfectly the progress of the flame? Come to that, if I were to blow it out, would the flame also come here?

  I realise I have spent great parts of my life thinking about death as a horror to the living, and none at all about death as a place.

  I count my steps, and wonder if I am walking in a straight line. My silver trail seems to be direct and not meandering, but the desert is a bad place for a traveller without a guide.

  Well, I might go mad for lack of company. But sooner or later, surely, I must begin to encounter the spirits of the dead, and then I won’t be alone any more.

  After five thousand steps, I come to a cairn.

  I see it as a tree or a spike driven into the sand. It is off to one side, and I consider ignoring it. Then I realise that it is the only point of reference I have found, and the first sign of intelligence. Then, too, I wonder if it has always been there, or whether it was raised just for me.

  The cairn is a pile of stones and dry sticks.

  The sticks are bones.

  From beside it, I can see another one, far ahead.

  I think this is a road marker.

  I walk on.

  *

  At the third cairn, I find myself bored with walking. I don’t need to rest, but I sit down anyway, instinctively looking for the shaded side. I wonder whether, if the sun ever dies, it will come here, and Erebus will see its first sunrise. But then, perhaps this unlight all around is what the death of a sun looks like from the other side.

  It occurs to me a moment later that I have forgotten where I am. Dawn, here, would not be the chariot of Helios rising, but the drawing back of the coffin lid. As the yellow light, filtered through air made of spiced Italian honey, purged these shadows into rags and fleeing rooks, I should find myself looking along a road built on endless miles of the corpse of my son. The gloom is my best hope of joy.

  Best to walk on.

  Each cairn is about five thousand paces from the last, but not exactly. I don’t know if it varies because the cairns are uneven, or if my paces become longer or shorter as I go, or if the ground of Erebus expands and contracts, like breathing. It is a strange place, in the most absolute sense that it is strange to me, foreign and unhomely. It is a place that could never be a home, however long one might remain here. Perhaps that is the first truth of Erebus: death is what it is. It is not an answer, but something that negates questions and answers both, and nothing in life is preparation.

  After the sixth cairn, I begin to see souls.

  At first they are occasional: brief visitations caught in the act of walking or standing or crawling upon all fours. They appear and disappear as I move, as if screened from my vantage by objects I cannot see. Later, though, as I draw closer to the heart of Erebus, they become more permanent. I can see expressions
on their statue faces, read words on their lips in the anti-light. Curses, mostly, and despair. A few, perhaps, are grateful, but not many. Step by step, I see more of them, until there is a great throng of them, dozens wide, stretching away towards the rivers. It is a road, now, this imaginary line I have been following: the main highway of the kingdom of death. Highway, or causeway – and what meridian of my son’s body do we follow? A wrinkle in his brow? The curve of his smile or the rise of his stomach? Will the heart of Erebus be a chasm of torn ribs, or a forest of the sores that killed him?

  I am not ready when the shades begin to move, and speak. I am peering into the face of a woman who looks a little familiar from my student days, and wondering if it is she, or whether eventually if you spend enough time among ghosts you begin to find the faces of your own lost, even if they are not there, when she turns and smiles a greeting. It does not seem to trouble her that I am close – far closer than I would go to another woman in the living world – unless we were very well known to one another. A moment later, as the man behind steps through her chest upon his way, I realise why: there are no elbows among the dead.

  ‘Season’s greeting,’ she murmurs.

  ‘And you,’ I reply. Is that right, or is there something more? I wonder if I should embrace her, the way the congregation does in Augustine’s Church.

  I don’t get the chance. She hurries on, vanishing a moment later and reappearing down the line. I hear her offer the same salutation to a senator, a cowhand and a scribe, and they in turn respond to her just as they do to every other spirit who comes close enough. The susurrus builds on itself, the same words over and over until they mean less than nothing and then until they are a single word spoken by a single mouth: the mad, dead mouth of Erebus.

  It is irritatingly loud. An hour ago I was lonely; now I miss the silence. I walk fifty thousand paces in the endless goose-chatter of the dead, and then I see maggots.

  *

  Maggots in Erebus: my familiar nightmare of these last years. The honey should prevent them from growing in my son. It should keep him, incorruptible, for a hundred years, but perhaps some knuckle or elbow has surfaced, deep down in his sepulchre, and something has found its way in. Perhaps, little by little, the preserving fluid has ebbed, or perhaps it has been eaten by sweet-toothed mice, and now these monsters rise from the black sand like the first pillar of a roundhouse going up, save that each is possessed of a segmented flexion that speaks of a scorpion’s tail. For a moment, that’s what I imagine: the stingers of scorpions hovering over the streaming dead. In one instant I see that they are men, sicarii with long arms and sharp knives, and then I see their faces, mandible and inhuman, and know that they are maggots, born in the flesh of the dead. I am in Erebus, and must fight my way to the heart.