Levels: Fantastic and Macabre Stories

by Nathan Shumate

  But as I have said, Rory Calloran was studious and intellectual, perhaps more so owing to the imbalance between mind and body. He was aware from an early age that even as he enriched and expanded his brain, the fragile body from which it drew its sustenance would continually degenerate until he was left imprisoned in a withered husk. And thus it was also from an early age that he turned his greatest resource, his mind, to the solution of his overshadowing doom.

  Owing to both the university library’s impressive holdings of antiquarian books and manuscripts and the Calloran family’s history of considerable financial support to said institution, Rory was allowed to explore the dusty stacks to his heart’s content, far beyond the liberty accorded to his fellow students. Accompanied by his Negro servants, who were entirely illiterate and thus could not report back any unease stemming from the nature of his self-directed studies, Rory made himself the master of the library’s holdings beyond the mastery of any of the librarians paid to maintain the collection. He plumbed storerooms in which the contents had been stored uncatalogued for years beyond counting, ostensibly waiting for a resource of expertise among the staff which such specialized curation would require, but in actuality neglected because those few of the staff who had ever known what those holdings included had shrunk from intimate contact with such questionable materials.

  Questionable? In truth, there is little question about the knowledge Rory found, for tucked into the far corners of the library’s vaults and basements, hidden by dust and willful ignorance, were codices and manuscripts containing the heterodox wisdom of ancient fraternities and cults, caretakers of mouldering knowledge handed down with sacred care by lineal brotherhoods stretching back to the dimmest reaches of human antiquity, back to aeons so far removed from the prosaic nature of modern human experience that intimations of congress between the sons of men and denizens of other realms—be they divine, infernal, or beyond such definitions entirely—seemed somehow plausible. For Rory had seen the limits of the paltry knowledge amassed by the scientific men of this scientific age, and was thus prepared to transplant his faith to that knowledge bequeathed to an earlier age of mankind by beings beyond the ken of the plodding advances of those so-called men of science.

  Having studied in those library vaults for all the years of his university education, it was still four months past his graduation before he finally felt expert enough to undertake the enterprise whose execution had suggested itself to him in those worm-eaten volumes. He first called the family solicitor and swore him to secrecy about the work which he was about to perform. The solicitor begged and pleaded not to be pressed into service, but Rory had in his possession documentary proof of a dalliance which the solicitor had unwisely undertaken, and inasmuch as the solicitor’s holdings and community standing came from the family into which he was married, he was constrained to assist, however reluctantly. The document Rory had the solicitor draw up was a Will of sorts; it codified the transfer of all of Rory’s theretofore-received inheritance, including the trust from which he drew his sizable livelihood, and all rights to the considerable additional estate he would receive upon his parents’ demise, to... He left the name blank, but had the Will recognize as valid the future declaration of transferee in a separate document to be filed later.

  With the legal paperwork prepared, Rory had his servant take him to the common jails of the city, perusing those being held for various infractions and charges. Both his community standing and his generosity with funds to those holding the keys allowed him access of a kind not casually bestowed, and Rory reflected on the fact that his material resources were, indeed, a kind of compensation for the ill blow of fortune struck him in the degenerative malady which was so intrinsically a part of his mortal flesh. He perused those poor unfortunates, mostly of squalid upbringing and intemperate natures, whose ill-advised habitual actions had landed them in the grimy holding cells of several precincts, searching for one who was suitable for his schemes.

  At last, he found one Thomas O’Brien sleeping under a stinking blanket in the back cell of the police precinct in one of the more degenerate parts of the city, a neighborhood so fouled by its tenement-dwelling denizens that his Negro manservant had gone to the limits of servile propriety and somewhat beyond to dissuade him from visiting there. But Rory would not be dissuaded, and O’Brien was the reward for his perseverance. He was a strapping lad in his early twenties, broad of shoulder and square of jaw; Rory, who had spent most of his life envying able-bodied young men in their prime, could see that despite his ancestry of criminal and destitute immigrants, his physical frame was as yet unmarred by the dissolution to which those in his station were inevitably heir.

  With the commanding officer Rory then reviewed O’Brien’s criminal record. O’Brien was not an habitual drunkard, though more from a robust ability to hold his liquor than any tendency toward temperance. He was known to the police for frequent brawling and other forms of violence; in fact, his current imprisonment was the consequence of his having beaten severely a prostitute the night before. The police were not as concerned for the well-being of the prostitute as they would have been for that of a woman of virtue, though, and with Rory’s offer to pay O’Brien’s outstanding charges and an additional honorarium to compensate the officers for the irregularity, the officer was agreeable to releasing O’Brien directly into Rory’s custody.

  Conversing with O’Brien as little as possible, Rory had his manservant bring him to their carriage and thus back to Rory’s apartments in the family estate which, in deference to Rory’s maturity, his parents had arranged with separate entrances. Rory brought O’Brien, still manacled as he had been on leaving the precinct, into the parlor of his apartments, which he had cleared of furnishing in preparation for this event.

  Already drawn on the floor was a crawling circular diagram painted in a paste made from the ashes of burnt goats, scrawled by Rory himself on his hands and knees after a pattern shown on an old manuscript written on crumbling papyrus. He had his manservant lead the bewildered O’Brien, who had said very little of the events since leaving his cell because of the effects of confusion on his uncultured brain, to a chair in the center of the maelstrom of weird characters on the floor, after which Rory dismissed the manservant and instructed him to lock the door on his exit. It was with, I think, mingled trepidation and relief that the servant left the prepared room.

  Using his crutches for mobility, Rory first seated himself at a small writing desk and asked O’Brien his full name, the first full sentence which he had addressed to his charge. O’Brien answered, although he was unable to help on the spelling: Thomas Patrick O’Brien. Rory filled out the prepared declaration which would be appended to the documents drawn up by the solicitor. Then Rory prepared himself for the culmination of years of questing research.

  The particulars of the ceremony shall not be recounted here; my time is a finite resource, and the newspapers have speculated and gloated over the dark deeds enacted in that chamber with varying levels of accuracy but with no insight into its true purpose. Suffice it to say that candles were lit and dark beings were supplicated in languages not heard ever before in civilized countries, and scarcely in the benighted corners of the globe in the last four thousand years. Rory nearly exhausted his weak frame in the execution of the rites which he had purposed, and in fact it was only the awareness that faltering in their performance after a certain point was warned to bring the blackest retribution of unrestrained occult powers which enabled him to continue after he had stretched his meager endurance beyond any exertion he had undertaken in his anemic life.

  At the culmination of the rites, which the manacled but otherwise unrestrained O’Brien had endured with a resigned bemusement and appreciation for novelty giving way slowly to dull forebodings of doom, a darkness filled the room like a smoke, almost obscuring the candles lit at the cardinal compass points around the mystic circle. Rory felt a tingling in all of his skin as if a lightning strike was incipient. He opened his mouth t
o shout out the final syllables of the incantation which he had laborious transliterated into Roman characters for recitation, and as the words were formed they were torn from his mouth by an almost magnetic power inhabiting the clouded air of the room. Then the candles all went out at once, O’Brien screamed, and Rory knew no more.

  The period of unconsciousness is yet nebulous, as Rory made no true return to consciousness for several hours, despite the vivid flashes of sensation punctuating the dreamlike maelstrom that was his only awareness until he came to himself in unexpected surroundings: a cell. It was not the same cell in which he had found O’Brien, but it was of a type—a temporary prison used by the police to hold miscreants until they were either released or remanded to the custody of the courts.

  Rory stood and tried to see beyond the shadowed bars which demarcated his confinement. Then he started: he had stood, unassisted! He looked at his hands, and they weren’t the reedlike bundle of scholar’s fingers twisted by years of handling crutch or wheelchair; they were thick, meaty, calloused, and decorated with small cuts and scratches from which the dirt and blood had not been cleansed. He drew breath into a robust chest, filling his glorious frame with oxygen which energized his hale, energetic body. He, Rory, had accomplished his purpose: he was in O’Brien’s body, having transmigrated according to the dark promises of manuscripts he had found hidden and unrecognized below the library.

  His exultation, though, was short-lived, as his shouts of celebration had roused to his cell door the officer with charge of the prisoners. It was only through earnest supplication of this worthy that the events between the dark ceremony and Rory’s return to awareness, and the reason for his present confinement, were explained to him, and Rory’s spirits, which had reached a celestial height at confirmation of the accomplishment of his designs, were dashed to stygian darkness.

  He understood now some of the inscrutable warnings from the books which he had glossed over in favor of more concrete instruction. Rory’s soul, incarnated for so many years in a body which had had very little power of motion or energy, had suddenly found itself the master of an engine, as it were, of great abilities, of virility and passion, none of which he had ever learned to control as had O’Brien growing up with them. The transmigration had left him semi-insensate, and the instincts so long repressed in Rory’s own spindly frame were suddenly given free reign in O’Brien’s, untempered by any restrictive influence which his conscious mind would have provided. Unrestrained, the invalid in the athlete’s body had rampaged from the estate and through the surroundings, hungering for the sensations and expressions which had so long been denied him, to a degree which he had not been aware even resided within his essence.

  The policeman ended his account with a grim tally of his savage activities: three murders, two rapes, and countless severe injuries and injustices, all vouchsafed by multiple witness who had stood aghast at this feral man’s appetite for perversion and destruction. This, the list of concrete numbers which concluded the policeman’s diatribe, sealed Rory’s doom—or O’Brien’s rather, for Rory had been conclusively identified as O’Brien by the police who finally cornered and restrained him, many of whom had had previous encounters with him in less extreme circumstances. And also laid to the blame of O’Brien was the death of the invalid Rory Calloran, whose lifeless body was found in the parlor from which O’Brien had burst by force, the victim of severe if as yet unexplained violence.

  So now I sit awaiting the appointed hour of execution, when the robust and strong neck and spine of this hardy body will nevertheless meet its match in the hangman’s craft. This writing will no doubt be deemed the ravings of a madman tinged by some instinct for confession; nevertheless, I here declaim and aver that though the thick, work-hardened fingers of Thomas O’Brien are those which hold this stub of pencil, it is the mind and soul of Rory Calloran which directs those fingers.

  The Flooding of River Home

  The homefathers and the exchangers avert their faces, and though they call me by my name WeSa to my face, behind my back when they think I cannot hear they call me “the Remnant of River Home.” My wife, I hear, they call “Lament of the Unmothered.” They do not shun us, of course, and most do not teach their own children to hate us, for no sin can be named to lay at my feet; I am incarnate the tragedy that befell River Home, but I am not its instigator, nor am I any more to blame than those swept away. The only one to revile me openly is my birthsister, forever named ErRu, and she shall have no children to teach her hatred to.

  As grievous as this tragedy was, their whispered scorn would not be so great if I had not chosen as mate one who was already ill-omened in their eyes, she who was LuRa and had no birthbrother save the ungrown lump that was delivered with her. The tale passed down from the Forgotten Times is that those without a birthsibling were given to the River to avert bad fortune, but it is only a tale, and none can say if it was ever true. Still, the shadow of such legends lay heavy over her in her childhood, when she was LuRa and I was ErWe. And when I chose her to mate and to rename her WeRa to my WeSa—her, above all the pleading young women whose birthbrothers had been hale and hearty—then the whispers about her began anew on some lips, this time suggesting that the tragedy had been because of her after all, and by mating her I had invited the doom to linger and strike again, like a dark cloud wedged into the valley that brings no rain but only dry wind and lightning. But people say many things in anger and grief, to vent the ashes in their hearts.

  When my first Longyear came, I was still an infant, clinging to my mother’s fur alongside ErRu. I must have seen the young men enter the River to ride out the Flooding, but no memory of it had stayed with me until my own Longyear. I was not the youngest of the young men in that spring awaiting the Flooding, but my father privately fretted of my chances for taking a mate. “He’s a small boy,” he said when he and my mother thought I was outside. “Thin, too. The water’ll wash him clean out of the valley, all the way down to the sea.”

  “He’ll manage,” my mother said. “The River is merciful, and capricious. You were no hulking brute yourself, remember.”

  “No, but I was older than ErWe,” he said. “And I was certainly enough man for you, wasn’t I?”

  “You were, and are,” she said, warming to his hand on her shoulder. And their conversation quickly moved on to other matters.

  ***

  At least in the spring of Longyear, there was little anxiety about my prospects once out of the Flooding. It is said that one season, several Longyears ago, fevers had raged through the children of River Home, and unhappily taken more daughters than sons. There were simply not enough eager young women waiting on the shores when the newly-manned youths, bedraggled and gasping, hauled themselves from the floodwaters to claim their new names and new mates. Those who had been too slow, too beaten by the ordeal, had sloughed onto shore to find that only the pitying eyes of their parents and the oldsters were watching them, for the laughing girls had already run off with their dripping mudsodden husbands.

  This Longyear, the lamentations would be taken up by at most two or three unmothered girls instead of unmated boys, for by health and happenstance the boys and girls who awaited the Flooding eagerly were almost perfectly matched, though there can always be some few young men whose grip and fortitude fail them in the rush of the waters. These things are taught to us: the frailest of the boys never emerge from the river, and the uncomeliest of the girls are never taken to mate, and thus the people are healthy, happy and beautiful in the River’s mercy.

  And also, tipping the balance even further, there was LuRa. It was casual talk around River Home that LuRa was of course destined to be one of the unmothered, because of the shadow of misfortune around her; some even quietly speculated whether she should not hide herself from the Flooding altogether, lest her presence at the River’s bank bring woe. I let such voices chatter above and around me, and said nothing to gainsay them. But it was my purpose to take LuRa to mate, even then.

 
The vague mutterings of doom around her had never made sense to me in my infancy. To me then, she was simply a girl of my age, without a birthbrother who would push me around as the other, larger children did. We were friends before we went from four legs to two, and to most we were still merely friends, as children will be.

  But LuRa and I knew differently. Her body had rounded and swollen in those places that should be ample in a woman, and the hair on my head had begun to crest. We shared time alone with each other, thinking not as children but with desire and anticipation pounding red behind our eyes. We spoke of it to none, but we looked forward to the Flooding as anxiously as any two other youths in River Home.

  ***

  The eldest of the homefathers, XiHe, had sent his grown son JaZa to be the Far Trumpeter the day before the calendar predicted the Flooding. His leavetaking marked the beginning of the whole Flooding ordeal and celebration for us, the young, who stood on either side of his path as he took the southward road on the east bank of the River, past the low cliffs near to River Home through which the River had cut a channel into the valley, using his worn map to find his way through the high cliffs a day’s journey up the River’s body. The young women dropped flowers after his passing where his feet had trod, an acknowledgment that by the time he returned on that same path, spring would truly have arrived in River Home. We young men stood on the opposite side of the path from the young women, shielding our eyes from the sun and almost trembling with anticipation.