With my limited memory, I could not be certain if the passenger was deranged, edified or comical. I felt it was the first and I tried to shift the conversation. “What happened to all the farms?”
“Stolen by the man who promised redemption with every utterance. A silver-tongued charlatan who bought everything before he burst into orange flames. But I am relieved that you put that into words because it shows you have a soul. So, I am going to be frank with you. How do you save the living? Allow me to answer your question. You do it by making choices. I can already hear you asking if that is the only option and I must answer that regrettably, it is. Cubes and die. It’s a harlequin spin. One day I am going to put that into song because I hear it singing in my head.” I heard him humming to his dog before he said, “Your questions tell me that you looking for someone.”
“Would you pipe down there?” The driver’s voice held the disinterested – bored, even – tone of a man accustomed to delivering this particular request.
Surprisingly, the man got quiet and in a low voice, he told me, “His name is Fuckjowl and he transports the inhumans. We are natural enemies even though we are, at this moment, engaged in an identical undertaking. I could force the life out of his body with a single clap, but everyone has a function. Here’s a question for you to consider. How would you deal with a man who levelled a village not because he enjoyed the sight of squirming children but because he believed it was his duty? Do you believe in consequences, brethren?” In the same whispery tone, I told him, “I don’t know what you are talking about, but was it you who did an act with wings of some sort? In the town we left?”
“You have hit on one of the most unassailable laws of the universe. We are forever performing and forever judged by our last performance. I am truly amazed at your insight.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“You, my friend, are too modest. I, on the other hand, shout from the treetops.” He had spoken loudly and I noticed the driver eyeing his Thermos. A few minutes later, my nose began to tickle from the smell of sulphur. “This is the quietest place in the world and for this and no other reason I travel this route. Still as a statue with living eyes and a lost soul.” He got up and told me, “Please keep an eye on my herald.”
I was about to protest when he walked to the front, scrambled the driver and flung him out of the moving bus. For a second or so the act seemed funny. Then the man got behind the steering wheel and, in his remarkable voice, said, “I return things to their rightful positions. You can say that I shorten the pilgrimages by cutting out all the deviations.” He watched through the window. “There’s a humming in the air tonight. Do you feel it, brethren? Do you understand that because of this we are all joined like birds weathering a storm? When we glance at the face of a stranger it’s only because we are standing too close.”
Panic began to set in. “Why did you do that?”
“When all is said and done, I am nothing but a performer. Did you by chance see a little sprite about?”
I got up. “You might have killed the driver. Why did you do that?”
“I have returned him to his natural environment.”
“There is nothing outside. Just red dust.”
“There is a house somewhere about.”
“Where? I can see nothing.”
He began to talk to himself. “A travesty is what I would call her. A sprite who talks with the birds but soon she will lose this gift when I catch up with her. A matchstick placed at the wrong angle can bring down the entire universe. A mutational meltdown. No one can outrun their consequences is what I am saying. There is too much fluttering in the world. Stability is what we need.” I heard his dog growling and I realized I had no choice. I got up, pushed open the back door and jumped out.
STAGE
THREE
11 THE GIRL BEHIND THE DOOR
I vaguely remember a bus and a burning field dotted with underground vents that threw up some kind of vitriol that clung to my throat and eyes. I remember walking within this conflagration and falling to the ground and pulling myself up only to fall again. I have no idea how long I kept this up before I arrived at this house. I have this image of a child helping me along, but I realize this is impossible because no one could have survived the crash in this desolate, volcanic place. I am using the word crash because I assume it is this event that had left me stumbling on the road, my memory wiped away. Three times over the last few days, I have attempted to retrace my steps to determine if there were any survivors or even luggage and equipment left behind – if in fact the vehicle is still there. And each time I was forced back by the wind, which whips up red spirals of dust so thick and foul they feel like burning mantids crashing to Earth. But my brief moments outside afforded me a sense of the house in which I have found refuge.
When I piece together the hurried glimpses from outside, I come up with a three-storey wooden house with a large attic that seemed to be collapsing on itself, giving the structure a strange inward curvature. My first view had seemed to show irradiating scales painted or carved on the walls, but my subsequent observations revealed the pattern had been caused by leaves from a huge sycamore tree blown against the house and stuck to the resinous wood. The house seems to have been built a century earlier and it shows in every square inch: in the lopsided windows, the rotting walls, the dented roof and attic. The sort of exterior that suggests a caved ceiling and piles of rubble, but its interior is remarkably well preserved. At first I felt that the last occupant had tidied up for a sale and I wondered who would ever choose to live in this area. I considered it might have been an archeologist of some kind. But that was before I discovered your letter and the notebook in which you instructed me to record my observations.
Because I cannot recall anything before the accident or crash or whatever had sponged away my memory, I have tried to determine our connection and, more precisely, the nature of our collaboration. Why were you expecting me? Were we working on some scientific project; perhaps a measurement of the wind or an examination of the red dust it throws up or an investigation of the vents or geysers? I have tried to push aside the solid fear that we may have been travelling together and you had perished in the accident. I hope that you will soon turn up and explain everything.
In the meantime, I will follow your instructions in the hope that I may discover why we were heading to this place. My investigation of the house so far has revealed that it is stocked with food for a month or two. I have also ascertained that it been previously occupied by a scholarly person as there were two sturdy desks set on opposite ends of the room, both bookended by wooden filing cabinets. On the desk on which I found your letter and notebook, I saw an old Russian-made camera and a pair of heavy binoculars, and in one of the drawers, I discovered three dozen rolls of film scattered among a compass, a measuring tape and a spirit level. The other drawers were either locked or shut tight from the warped wood. Beneath the desk, there is a Gladstone bag with what appears to be antique medical equipment – rusted forceps and terrifying amputation saws and trephines and an assortment of syringes. The bag had some red stains in the inner lining and I pushed it with my feet closer to the wall.
A thick cream curtain hangs behind one of the cabinets and when I first moved it aside, I saw a bookcase that had been built into the recessed wall. The books bore fascinating titles and they all seemed concerned with demonic possessions, lobotomy, bloodletting and etherization. There were also slim periodicals with obscure articles on trepanation and childbirth and others with diagrams of electric chairs and pulleys. The books were strange, to say the least, yet they all seemed familiar.
This morning, while I was waiting for you – or some rescue party – to show up, I plucked out two books from the middle shelf, A Sentimental Journey Into the Mind of a Cannibal by Mausi Rampart (translated by the Reverend Thomas Loft), and The Miserly Mind by Anonymous. I placed these aside with the intention of reading them later and walked around the huge room, observing the interp
lay of gloom with the light reflecting from the slanted wall mirror next to a fireplace with surprisingly fresh logs. There was a sturdy couch close to the fireplace and when I sat, I saw my reflection in the mirror, that of a smallish man in his mid or late forties with a puce colouration, as if my skin had collected all the dust blowing outside. I also saw what I had previously missed: the reflection of half a dozen clay figurines arranged on a window ledge just above a beige couch. The figures seemed to be of a man, each more disfigured than the previous. The last was so deformed it seemed to be of a centaur-like creature with extra limbs.
These figures, as well as the books and the Gladstone bag, seem out of place in the house of a geologist and I can only infer they have been left there by a previous owner. I have not yet explored the entirety of the building so I cannot say if there are more surprises. I have been to the basement, though, and I can tell you that it is huge and one end seems to lead through a short tunnel to a garage or a stockroom. The other end holds a small darkroom. There are trays and canisters of some colloidal substance and five packs of linen printing paper. While I was looking at the equipment, I realized that my familiarity with the procedure for reproducing the photographs and my ignorance of the tools in the drawers upstairs suggested I may have been your photographer – while you roved around collecting samples of rocks or calcified lava.
There is also an upper floor that I have been unable to explore even though there are two sets of stairs – leading to the same area! However, both are so rotted they are impossible to climb.
Last night I pulled out a slim tract from the recessed bookcase. Organ Stop by RH Bromedge, and when I opened it, I saw detailed illustrations of medical experiments and surgical procedures. The writing, in a cursive script, was too tiny and extravagant to decipher and the illustrations were not to scale as there were huge heads, small bodies and engorged organs next to withered bones. Sometimes this was reversed. Some of the medical implements reminded me of those in the Gladstone bag I found beneath the desk. In one of the illustrations, a man with flowing hair was in a transparent water tank that resembled a huge aquarium, his organs floating in the liquid and connected to his body by what seemed to be an electrical current. Three men were seated before a desk, observing the man.
There are also slim manuals on madness. The books seem to be collaborative efforts as there are three names on the jacket of each. One of the books, The Worm Runners Digest, described in a breezy manner a procedure for memory reassignment in planarian worms and astoundingly hinted at a process for storing memories outside the body. Because of its style I could not tell if it was fiction or not. Same with one of the manuals that reported an experiment where a crazy woman was forced to regress through hypnosis to the most traumatic events in her life. The woman, not given a name, was described as if she were an ape or some laboratory animal. It was only at the end that I read she had been found guilty, some time earlier, of infanticide. A companion book with the same faded green cover with intersecting lines detailed a similar procedure conducted on a woman who had murdered a man after he had abruptly presented her with the news he was her father.
Because of the missing and rearranged chapters, the books are difficult to follow and I cannot determine if the criminals who underwent these unusual rehabilitative procedures were plucked from a brutal place called Adjacentland or if they were eventually sent there. I have to wonder at the choice of reading material in this library. Take this pamphlet, for instance, with its long and meandering essay that seemed to posit the existence of points when the past and the future merged. At these intersections, the writer claimed, it was possible to modify the future.
Another article, torn off from a book and rolled between blank paper in an almost secretive manner, described something called a pivot point, that, as far as I can tell from the few pages, is the point at which creative geniuses snap, their brilliance replaced by psychoses. These psychoses are manifested through hallucinations that carry the whiff of their previous work. The stricken do not, according to this view, gradually descend into darkness but stumble swiftly into paranoia. The final paragraph speculated that there may be some tripwire in the brain that is activated when the inflow of information is too great for the neurons to handle.
Most of the manuals are similar in the sense that they all begin in a reasonable manner before they divert into hypotheses that are completely hare-brained. For instance, in The Miserly Mind there is a section that promises to discuss the process that madness, used interchangeably with the imagination, can hold the cure for a world gone sterile. It’s perhaps the most intriguing of all the books. Unfortunately, apart from the preface, the rest of the pages have been torn out.
The books have clearly been interfered with; it’s as if someone, clearly deranged and offended by the focus on the many forms of insanity, has pulled out entire chapters and switched random pages and covers. The more appalling alternative is that they have been placed here to deliberately confuse me.
It has now been six days since I have been holed up in the place and this morning after I finished a periodical on schizophrenia and demonic possessions, I noticed there was a lull in the wind with the red particles blowing weakly on the road. I decided I would try to retrace my steps until I arrived at the accident site. I took the binoculars and hurried out.
On the road, I heard what seemed to be the cries of an oboe, scratchy and interrupted as if it was played on a springy woundup gramophone, but I soon realized the sounds were from the gusts of steam shooting up from the geysers. (Which really appeared to be small mud volcanoes.) All around were red lichen and battalions of tiny shrubs of the same colour. I must have walked for a mile or so before I felt a ruffle of wind and suspected that the lull was over. I scanned the outlying area with the binoculars and seeing nothing but serrated ground, turned back.
I was coughing badly from the particles blowing around by the time I spotted the mansion. From a distance, it resembled the sort of building that would startle children who instinctively grasp for lines and order and connections. (From where did I deduce this?) I could not recall locking the gate and while I was fiddling with the chain, I entertained the brief hope that you had somehow found your way here. The chain was rusty and I had to stoop to free the bolt. This task took close to ten minutes and when I glanced up, I saw a wicket door on the other side of the gate blocking my entrance. This was strange, as I should have noticed the door when I departed the building. I stepped back to get a better view and saw that it stood apart, not connected to the gate or to any discernible base. It was quite solid, too, with bevelled seams and a thick knocker on the side facing me. I felt it would topple over if I pushed so I decided to squeeze to the side, as I did not want to damage anything on the property. But as I moved sideways, the door shifted with me. I was quite startled as I was sure that someone was blocking my entrance. “Hello,” I called out. “Is it you? The geologist? We were on the bus together. It may have been some other vehicle. Please step aside.” When there was no response, I grasped the knocker, tapped it a couple times and called out once more. Eventually I placed a leg against the base and pushed hard with both hands.
“Please don’t do that.” I jumped back. The voice was airy, curious and female. Childish almost. “Why are you trying to get in? Are you looking for someone?”
“I’ve been here for the last week or so. Were you travelling with us? Were there other survivors?” When she did not reply, I asked her, “Are you alone? Where are your parents?”
“How should I know? I was flying at the time. They dropped like stones into the sea. You saw them pushed off.”
I noticed her fingers tapping the sides of the door as if she was waiting for me to challenge her story. “Were you injured in the accident? We should go inside. Maybe there is some medication that –”
“I knew it! That is how you got everyone else.”
“I didn’t get anyone, child. Now you should really step aside.”
“There was a big
party before we left and everyone was dancing and drinking pink wine from blue glasses. The glasses were huge.” She began to hum a low mournful tune and I felt sorry for this girl who had been traumatized by the accident and had been wandering around for close to a week. Perhaps she had survived by eating whatever she had gathered from the bus. “The mangle men came and they took everyone away and I hid and saw the worms they made disappear into everyone’s ears when they pushed them into the flying cars. Did I leave anything out? Oh, I tried to follow the cars but I couldn’t fly as high.”
“Do you know where these mangle men took everyone?”
“How many times must I tell you? To the other place. To the adj...the adg...”
“Adjust? Adjective?”
“No. They don’t like the last one you mentioned. To the adjay...”
“Adjacent?”
“Yes, that’s it. To the Adjacentland.”
“Do you know why the ambulance...sorry, the mangle men, took them to this place?”
“They were looking for...no...I am not going to say anything more.”
“Are there any other survivors? Did you find yourself here all alone?”
“And I am not going to say a single word, either, about all the monsters you dreamed up.”
I decided to humour her in the hope she would step aside. “So there are monsters about?”
“Don’t pretend. They are from your dreams. All of them. The brute and a man without a tongue and a lady who can see ghosts and a thief. The Citizen Brigade caught them and took them away. All but one. The major monster. I think he is too strong for them. Haven’t you seen him? Or maybe heard him as he is always clanking and grinding like this.” She uttered a low sound as if she was clearing her throat. “I think he is building a nasty bomb.”
“Then we should go inside the house quickly in case he makes his way here.”
Adjacentland Page 17
