“So it was in secret that a man and woman decided to begin a family, and soon the young woman gave birth to twin girls. Now the midwife who attended the birth was also a respected seer in the village. When she looked upon the twin girls she immediately turned her head away, for she could not bear the awful vision of their future.
“‘Why do you look away?’ asked the mother. ‘Tell me what you see?’
“The midwife averted her eyes and said, ‘There is a girl who glows with all the beauty in the world, and another who sulks with all the world’s ugliness.’”
In her sleep, she mumbled, “I see her.”
“The mother,” continued the man, “asked the midwife to take away the ugly baby. The midwife had to do just as she was told, for the father was in some distant land in pursuit of a monster, and could not offer her and the babies protection. With despairing heart the midwife, who was herself considered ugly, bent to pick up the girl with the unpleasant features. As she did she saw the other girl smile, gurgle, and giggle. The midwife paused. She looked at the baby in her arms and saw eyes mournful and pleading. She set down the first girl and picked up the second instead.
“And even as she cast her into the river, the pretty girl kept smiling and laughing.”
She laughed in her sleep, rolled over, and drifted away.
* * *
She felt her body caressed by chill air, and she shivered awake. A bright light shined down upon her from almost directly overhead. She could see only an immense grandfather clock against the wall, its pendulum swaying too quickly.
She flinched at the appearance of two pasty hands floating into the light above her. The fingers wiggled diabolically. She could not see the person the hands were attached to beyond the ring of blinding light.
“You knew this would happen,” a man said.
His voice sounded familiar, like the one that had spoken to her on the telephone. The homeless man had identified him as Zambullo; but she felt his presence touch her more deeply, to her soul.
“You would not have come otherwise,” he said.
Whether she knew this would happen or not, she did not know. She was certain only of a desperate craving within her body.
His hands reached around her and raised her to a sitting position. The rest of the man floated into the circle of light, and she threw her arms around him.
Her soul expanded as fast as the universe. She felt released from her carefully constructed shelters, open wide to the experiences of life. No longer could she deny her need for communion with another, the one thing, she was now certain, her father had left behind for her. At last, as she stared at those hands fluttering through wild wisps of her hair, she could acknowledge the emptiness she had tried to hide.
With her eyes shut tightly to hold back tears of joy, she said, “Father, I’ve missed you so much.”
She opened her eyes, swooning in the sudden onslaught of her senses. Her heart swelled inside her head. Her mind raced with unknown images conjured out of feelings she had never before encountered. She could see in all its shining glory a new world she had discovered and would claim for herself.
She could hear her heart. She could taste her glory. She could feel her father’s presence in the champagne sensations of her body. But even more distinct and sure she could feel herself. She was there not only in her mind and in her soul, but there in her trembling body. It was not traitorously but authentically she.
“I apologize,” he said. “For everything.”
She did not move or speak, but only held him.
“It is I who is the victim, if you only knew.”
He began to explain why he had left. He told a story about a Regime coming to power, and forcing people into a total subversion of mind and body.
“Eventually they demanded I do something that I refused.”
“What was it?” she asked.
He shook his head and looked away. “Even now, it is too horrible to say, especially to you.”
She grasped his hand and squeezed.
He smiled. “It was that moment that I was pulled from the rubble of my own moral collapse. And I knew if I did not disappear, they would hurt you.”
“Where did you go? How did you survive?”
“Far away, and not very well. But that is not living.”
Somewhere inside or under this church a vast private museum had been created. The haphazard arrangement she had witnessed told her it had not been constructed as such, but put together suddenly, with the collection gathered hastily, out of necessity. She had the feeling of being hidden in the countryside away from the barbarian hordes. She had an intimation that in this place lay the truth.
Though free from the Regime, her father seemed imprisoned here in this monastery of artifacts and wisdom. He could never leave his darkened existence. In a strange way, he was already dead.
“I saw Death,” he said, “standing over you, while you were sleeping.”
Tiny gasps escaped as her body trembled with a feeling she was suddenly within the grasp of Death.
“It said, ‘I am sweet sky mad with desire to rain on you.’”
“You saved me?” she asked, tears again moistening her cheeks.
“It lives there,” said a female voice from across the room.
She stood and walked toward the voice, while her father simultaneously moved away from the voice. In a dark corner, behind a cloud of incense, the seductive woman in black was sprawled inside a coffin the size of a bed, her arm draped luxuriously over her head, finger pointing to the grandfather clock.
She heard someone breathing heavily, and saw the wooden sides of the clock swelling and contracting with each breath.
“She can’t give you what I can,” the seductive woman said, staring across the room.
She glanced at her father, who had his back to them.
“I know what you want.” The seductive woman pursed her lips and beckoned him with her finger. “Come, and I will please you.”
She was not sure whether, in this battle of wills, she was prize, witness, or intruder. She felt her father’s loneliness and fear fall over her as if they were her own. Then he turned and his lips moved. She did not hear so much as experience him say her name.
She moaned and gasped as her strength suddenly faded. She felt claustrophobic, as if the walls were closing around her, as if there were no more room for life. The grandfather clock began tolling angrily.
The darkness fled from a brilliant white light that seemed to emit from her body. She no longer felt the chill in the air, or the constriction in her chest. The clock chimes rang loudly in chaotic fury.
The light from her body expanded all around her and refracted into a galaxy of colors. In the distance, beyond the church walls, she saw her mother, dressed as if in clouds of gas from the farthest reaches of the universe, holding open her arms and smiling. Across the room, her father looked on nervously as the light from her body gradually dimmed, and the chimes suddenly ceased.
“Are you all right?” her father asked.
She heard raspy, unsteady breathing, and approached the coffin. The seductive woman in black lay stiff upon the red silk bedding, smoldering, her face a putrid mask of flesh. Her body quivered with the feeling of her life coming to fruition.
On the other side of the room, her father settled into his chair. A smile spread across his face. As if possessed of some special knowledge, he seemed ready to embrace death, and did not despair but rejoiced, like an artist.
“Of course,” he said, “you know you are free to go at any time.”
Those words bound her tighter than any straps ever could. Though she never expected to find herself in a place such as this, she could no longer remember or imagine what her apartment looked like. It was here, lost in this darkness, that she had the fullest and deepest experiences of living. Would she really know what to do or where to go in the apocalyptic vision she had witnessed surrounding the church? Could she really return to what she had escaped fro
m?
All she had ever cherished had been a sense of security, which now appeared as little more than another enclosure around her life. She had been a prisoner of herself; there was nothing for her to return to.
“I want to stay,” she said.
Her father clasped his hands together and raised them to his forehead. “You are more than I ever imagined.”
Her soul, once immured in the concrete walls of the Regime, took flight around her sweetly. Up until this very moment she had pondered everything that she had not yet done. She had thought how terrible it would be never to escape this dark room, to be trapped here forever. She had feared never marrying and having children. She had feared never becoming an acclaimed artist, never leaving behind a legacy. She had feared never knowing her father. And just as fast as those fears had swept over her, they passed into perfect calm. And with that calm she finally felt she did know her father. Perhaps even as much as a child can be its parent, she was most profoundly her father. And all those fears fell away as superficial and meaning nothing beside her joy, her freedom to experience this joy.
Her father said, “I have been painting you.”
For the first time, she saw an easel beside the chair where he sat.
“Would you like to see?” he asked.
Her body trembled with anticipation. Then a peaceful calm settled over her. She walked slowly across the room.
Her father stood, smiling. He placed one hand on the shelf of the easel. When his daughter stood before him and nodded, he turned his work of art for her to see.
The portrait of a pretty young woman glowed upon the canvas, captured in an exquisite and fugitive moment for all time. The subject projected a smile mute with the secret knowledge that nothing existed beyond art and desire.
She immediately recognized the fragile features, the porcelain skin, the eyes of fulfilled desire.
“Vanessa,” her father said, “how do you feel?”
“Beautiful,” she replied.
Excerpt: The Beggars of Azure
On the day Janet Feffle’s novel Dream of the Seven Sleepers went into a second printing, I received an unexpected delivery. The package, wrapped in plain brown paper, leant against my door. It bore no address.
I turned to the office secretary. “Who sent this?”
She looked up from her terminal. “I don’t know, Mr. Gugel.”
“Was it here when you arrived this morning?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t see it when I put the regular mail on your desk.”
I picked it up, glancing first at it, then back at the secretary, who shrugged. I sat at my desk and unwrapped the package. Inside was a book: The Court of Love, by Ernesto Savonthary.
For me to receive a book in finished form such as this was unusual, unless I was involved in its publication. I had never heard of this title or author. The publisher was a small press called Furst and Sons. I peeked inside for some note or inscription that might explain the book’s appearance on my doorstep. There was none.
I glanced at my schedule and hailed the secretary through the open door. “Will you get Miss Feffle on the line?”
Many of my new authors were tiny stars with originality and charm but whose individual light could not be discerned from the vast surrounding galaxy of the major publishers. Miss Feffle still had a day job to pay her bills — writing, she said, paid her soul. I suspected the continued success of her debut would go a long way toward freeing her days.
The secretary called back to me that they were paging Miss Feffle, and I picked up the handset. While waiting, and hoping to drown out the dreadful electronic music in the background, I turned to the first page of Mr. Savonthary’s book.
Thou hast awakened this book in me, thou hast given me it.
The dedication haunted me. When I heard Miss Feffle’s cheerful voice of greeting, my lips moved, but my mind could form no response. The tether of time had been severed, and I drifted into a mental void. I replaced the handset, disconnecting the call.
The secretary was typing at her desk in the outer office, oblivious to my unease. I walked to the door and shut myself inside. When I turned back toward my desk, the book I saw there appeared inconspicuous.
I sat erect in the chair, directed the desklamp on the book, and browsed the first few chapters. I stopped once, then twice, grasping bits of familiar narrative and dialogue. My heart seemed to be pounding in my ears. Lured in by what seemed like a fantastic coincidence, I scanned several more pages, until reaching the telling words that confirmed the impossible:
The soul remembers how the heart laments.
The words on the page echoed a disembodied voice I thought I would never hear again. At once, the weight of improbability caused me to go limp in the chair.
“It can’t be,” I said, without conviction.
I knew the story, and I knew the author, though not as they were represented in this mysterious book. And there was just one other person who might know of my connection, and that was the author himself. Only he was a man who I was certain had killed himself five years earlier.
The Beggars of Azure
There are plausible answers to every mystery, but reality answers to no one.
In an incredible bookstore called The Beggars of Azure, a reader can find every book ever written—and a list of books that have never been written. But in The Beggars of Azure, what you find is less important than what finds you.
The Beggars of Azure by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2012
Colophon
Tales of Mystery and Truth
Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2013
A Quilldrivers Book
Thanks to Quilldrivers for help with the text. Special thanks to Stella Telleria for invaluable feedback, support, and creative design.
For other Quilldrivers works of fiction, literature, art, and history, visit Quilldrivers.com.
Available Now
Fiction
The Triumphs by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2012
The Beggars of Azure by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2012
The Last Courtesan by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2012
The Last Decadent: A Novel Of Paris by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2011
Non-Fiction
Safeguarding American Ideals by Harry F. Atwood & Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2013
Columbia: America Personified, and Other Essays by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2012
Keep God in American History by Harry F. Atwood
Annotated, and with an Introduction, by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2011
Poems for Patriots Edited by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2011
About the Author
Jeffrey K. Hill is a writer from Illinois whose novels focus on love, loss, and the varied affairs of the heart.
Be sure to follow all his literary adventures on Facebook.
Tales of Mystery and Truth Page 14
