Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1)

by Josiah Bancroft

  Feeling a little disquieted, Senlin went to the podium and began to compose his letter. He did not deliberate. He’d written and revised the letter a dozen times over in his mind while lying amidst his knotted sheets that morning.

  Dear Ms. Olivet Berks,

  I know you will be relieved to hear that all is well and we are enjoying our honeymoon in the Baths. The snails here are quite delicious, and they remind me fondly of the periwinkles back home.

  We are enjoying ourselves so thoroughly, in fact, that we have decided to extend our holiday a few weeks more. As my kin, I am writing to request your assistance in preparing for the eventuality of my delayed return. The school year will commence in four weeks, and so I humbly ask that you use your considerable influence to lead the town in selecting a fitting substitute in my absence.

  This is not a resignation, but merely a request for an extension of Isaugh’s goodwill. I shall return with Marya before the end of harvest.

  Your Loving Cousin,

  Thomas Senlin

  P.S. I am aware that you warned Marya against accepting my proposal, and I hold no grudge in the matter. She is a treasure. I strive every day to be deserving of your confidence, and so remain ever your faithful friend and servant, T. S.

  He folded, addressed and sealed the letter with the post office’s wax and cygnet. He paid the dust-pile clerk a shekel more to post the letter. Again, the clerk only halted his scrawling long enough to take Senlin’s money and to shove the letter into a slit in the wall behind him before he resumed his work on the vanishing chapbook.

  Watching the mail slot gulp his letter, it occurred to Senlin that the chute might empty into a fire pit and he’d never know it. This realization of his helplessness filled him with a sudden fit of pique, and he said, “I’ll buy that book you’re ruining for another shekel,” before he knew why he’d said it.

  The clerk shrugged and slid the half-blacked-out chapbook under the bars without ever having uttered a word.

  Returning to the street, Senlin resumed his usual route, reading the chapbook as he walked. He continued in this way, dazedly walking and reading, until the work so absorbed him that he had to remove himself from the impatient pedestrian traffic and perch upon a shoreline bench. There, he finished what he hoped was a work of maudlin fiction. It certainly couldn’t be true.

  The Confidences of a Wifemonger

  by

  Anon.

  A wifemonger, simply put, is a man who identifies, isolates, primps and delivers women who are fit for wifedom to willing and wealthy gentlemen. A competent wifemonger will have no fewer than three and no more than six women in his charge. Fewer than three prospects and gentlemen will feel starved for option, and more than six will make would-be-husbands suspect they have blundered upon a harem.

  Identifying the Would-Be-Wife

  The Tower of Babel is lousy with waifs, but princesses are in scarce supply. A wifemonger will spend most of his time spotting wifely talents among the feminine masses. Mongers anticipate three essential virtues of their wives-in-waiting.

  Virtue One: Healthy. Wives must be fertile and free of disease, lice, and deformity. Ugliness is naturally considered a deformity. Personal experience suggests that seventy percent of the female population fails to embody the first virtue. The gentle reader will be unsurprised to learn that ninety-five percent of would-be-husbands might graciously be described as unhealthy.

  Virtue Two: Wholesome. Wholesomeness is less a positive force than the resistance of a negative quality. Or, in the parlance of my profession, “floozies make bad wivezies.” While husbands would, of course, prefer to be joined with an unblemished woman, a wife need not be a virgin so long as she maintains some vestige of innocence, modesty, or, at the very least, coyness. Mothers, of course, are excluded out of hand. Of the remaining Babella stock, one out of two women will be suitably whole. Husbands-to-be, of course, remain whole regardless of how many partners they’ve broken in half, quarters, or eighths.

  Virtue Three: Charming. Charm is perhaps the most elusive of virtues, and many a wifemonger has been ruined by his inability to judge a woman’s charm. Novice mongers often confuse the bosom for charm. Charm, in my experience, is necessarily mysterious. Charming women will leave their masculine audience with questions. If the woman installs no curiosity or confusion in the man, then no charm exists in the woman. Men with the least amount of personal charm are most devoted to this quality in their spouses.

  Isolating the Would-Be-Wife

  Once a wifemonger has identified bona fide bridal material, he must separate her from the influences of kin, friends, compatriots, colleagues, peers, and all familiar influence. This process, referred to as “stabling,” is generally successful when the subject is in some distress. Experienced mongers don’t try to separate a wife-in-potentia from a spouse or a father. Instead, they prey upon the wandering souls, the lost, the destitute, and the desperate.

  When a woman has already confronted the inevitability of her ruin, she is much easier to separate from any lingering feelings of hope. If the woman is sufficiently terrorized, it may not even be necessary to lie to her.

  It will probably be necessary to lie to her. Common lies include, “This man is a ship captain whose trade route will carry him near your home,” and “This fine gentleman is a Barron/Registrar/Port Authority, and will hold you as his sister until your family can be found,” and “This man has been hired by your loved ones to whisk you back to your old bedroom, still exactly preserved, with your wildflowers pressed in your encyclopedias and your slippers under the bedside…” etc. etc. Under the guise of charity, a desperate woman can be convinced to accompany even the most buffoonish, malformed and tiresome mate back to his princely hovel.

  Primping the Would-Be-Wife

  Avoid the color red when buying dresses for your stabled wives. It is a lurid color and suggests a sexual aggressiveness that may intimidate the pseudo-functional male. Avoid white frocks as well, as these infer a prudishness that does not appeal to the libido of men who are incapable of attracting a mate naturally. Avoid black, too; it suggests severity and independence. Blues, pinks, and yellows are generally appealing to the stunted tastes of the hunchbacked gnomes who slink down from their filth-crusted birdcages and ignoble bloodlines to prey upon unguarded innocents.

  If your would-be-wife is roughly mannered, or shy at conversing, or afflicted with an unusual laugh, do your best to gently train her away from these habits. It is vital that you earn her trust and learn as much about her as possible. The wifemonger must cast lingering glances and lingering praises. Make your evenings long with her. Make elaborate promises. Expound on their elaborateness until you are swearing on your own head and by your own grave. Avoid, at all costs, falling in love with a woman in your stable. Do not forget you are a wretched man, a monster worse than the lecherous princes that slide down the Tower of Babella like dung down a camel’s leg. Avoid, at all costs, falling in love. The door to ruin is heart-shaped and ringed with stone roses…

  The remainder of the book was blacked out.

  It was a fiction, surely, a crude romance written by a cynical man who’d been rejected by his lover. There was no conspiracy to trap defenseless women in unhappy marriages. This was the Tower of Babel! And though he knew it was not an untroubled paradise, it was still, at its core and in its highest bowers, a civil place. No, the book was either a fiction or the ravings of a dim mind. Perhaps the postal clerk had had the right idea.

  Senlin pocketed the wifemonger’s chapbook with a dismissive snort.

  It had been a productive morning. He had not relished lying to Ms. Olivet Berks, and certainly didn’t like having the lie recorded on paper for all posterity, but he knew that raising the general alarm in Isaugh would do no good. If the townsfolk learned that Marya was missing, they might send a search party. Berks would certainly come. And then they would be plunged into the same chaotic mess that he and Marya had blundered into. God knows how many of them would be robbe
d or detoured or separated or otherwise ruined in the turmoil of the Market. No, it made no sense to add to the rolls of the Lost. His only recourse was to find Marya on his own and to return before their train tickets expired.

  He was returning to the Le Gris Hotel to renew his inquiry when his attention was drawn to an amiable-looking crowd gathering about a waterside gazebo. An undecorated black banner hung from one white rail like a long, forked tongue. Believing that a troupe of actors was preparing a play, Senlin followed his curiosity to the edge of the gathering crowd.

  Two men occupied the gazebo stage. The foremost was a young man, perhaps sixteen years old, dressed in the khaki apron common among hotel staff. Except for his anguished expression, he was quite a handsome youth with thick, oil-black hair. Behind him, an unassuming, relatively diminutive man fiddled with his white linen shirt, distracted by what seemed a red spot near his cuff. His round gut and slight limbs gave him a frog-like appearance, and his wide mouth only added to this impression. A broad straw hat hid the rest of his face. Something in his smile disturbed Senlin. It was too fixed and straight, like the carved grimace of a gargoyle.

  “Has the show begun?” Senlin asked an old woman nearby who was peeking and craning to improve her view. Her starched bonnet identified her as a laundry woman.

  She looked in his direction only long enough to toss her chin in disgust, “Have some respect.”

  “I’m sorry. Are they celebrities?”

  “What are you, fresh off the barges?” She gave him a second, more thorough look. “That’s the Pall Bearer, the Grim Thresher himself. That’s the Red Hand.”

  Senlin smiled at the woman’s dramatic introduction of the actor. “His face is grim enough. Who’s the boy, then?”

  She continued in a crusty whisper, eyes darting to their corners, hunting for eavesdroppers. “A sinless nit. Works at the Mont Cappella Hotel. Least, he did. Poor Freddy.”

  A customs agent emerged from the crowd and climbed the first two steps of the gazebo. He began reading from a stiff sheet of stationery. “Mr. Frederick Haggard, you have been found guilty of theft, embezzlement, defamation, forgery, destruction of property...” The sentence went on an on for some moments. The counts against the young porter seemed impossibly, absurdly numerous. Senlin wondered what the meaning behind the farce might be. “...conspiracy against the Customs Bureau, assault, lewd conduct, trespassing, and rape.”

  “Lies!” hissed the laundry woman at his side. “Freddy caught the eye of a rich old dame, and she tried to start a dally with him. Freddy fended her off, and she called the Commissioner in to sort him out. There’s the sorting.”

  “Does the condemned wish to repent?” The agent, coward that he was, faced resolutely away from the handsome youth. It dawned on Senlin that this was not a play. He had stumbled upon an execution.

  In a voice hardly loud enough for Senlin to hear, the youth said, “I want to see my mother.” It was a pitiful and honest utterance. Even without knowing the first detail of the boy’s life, Senlin felt certain he was witnessing a terrible injustice.

  Senlin wanted to cry out, to rush the gazebo and pull down the black banner… but he had learned to be afraid of the customs agents. And now he was learning to be afraid of someone new. That man— what had she called him?— the Red Hand. Something about him made Senlin tremble.

  Transfixed, he watched as the Red Hand rolled up one loose white sleeve revealing a bronze band about his forearm. Fitted to the metal cuff were six vials, like the barrels of hypodermic needles, each filled with some sort of sloshing serum that glowed like lit-up rubies. With hat drooped over his face, the Red Hand turned a series of pegs on the brass cuff like a musician tuning his instrument. The glowing serum drained from the cylinders and pushed into the Red Hand’s veins.

  A gargling cry, like something from a slaughterhouse, escaped the Red Hand’s mouth, and for a moment, Senlin wondered if the man hadn’t wounded himself. Then he raised his right hand above his head, and the crowd gasped at the luminous red tracery of veins glowing beneath the skin of his palm and arm, shooting out from the bronze brace like roots. The radiant lines speared up his shoulder, showing through his clothes like a wound seeping through a bandage. Soon the right half of his torso glowed red.

  The Red Hand’s posture became apish. Every rope and thread of muscle pressed to the surface. He circled the boy, now chattering with fear, pleading still to see his mother. Before anyone was prepared for it, the Red Hand leapt at the youth from behind. With the astonishing dexterity of an acrobat, he scaled the boy’s back and dug one foot into either shoulder. The boy, staggering a little under the unexpected and awkward weight of the Red Hand, hardly had time to cry out before the executioner bent, placed his hands under the boy’s jaw and wrenched himself straight, carrying the boy’s beautiful head from his neck.

  Blood leapt into the air. The unnatural two-man tower collapsed. Senlin turned away too late, his stomach convulsing, and was sick at the cleaning woman’s feet.

  A short distance behind the gazebo, swimmers floated on their backs in the spangling waters of the reservoir.

  Chapter Four

  “Conversations are a tedious symptom of an empty dance card.”

  - Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, IV. VII

  Senlin wandered the shimmering streets, hypnotized by the horror he’d witnessed. Though he hardly realized it, his steps were not without motive. He was searching for some sign of redemption, some hint that the human animal was not only horrible and violent. He needed some encouraging polemic, some cultural accomplishment or artistic ideal. His search drew him to the open shutters of a music hall, and he stood for some minutes listening to the lively play of a string quintet. But what might’ve sounded like a tuneful refrain an hour ago, now sounded like frivolous sawing. Uncured, he meandered toward a romantic fresco of three maids enlaced with ribbons and primroses. Their expressions were both ecstatic and innocent. Their arms and legs were plump and yet apparently weightless. The virgins floated and smiled, exuding an erotic sap that made him feel wretched and alone.

  A group of young children played on the sidewalk. Hoping to hear some naive expression that would fill him with wistfulness for his students back home, Senlin slowed as he passed them. The children were playing hopscotch on a freshly chalked board. Balancing on first one foot, then the other, a young girl recited a nursery rhyme as she hopped. He had never heard the rhyme before, and as is sometimes the case with such minor discoveries, this new-to-him, old-to-the-world verse seemed to have been written especially for him.

  The Tower grows up. The Tower grows down.

  The Tower holds up the hollow ground.

  The hod falls up. The hod falls down.

  The hod fills up the hollow ground.

  The simple verse was sung out happily again and again to the rhythmic stamp of the child’s leather slippers. Senlin pressed one finger to his ear, as if to keep the song and its morbid vision from lodging there. He hurried his step.

  He went in search of Tarrou and the consolation of wine. Finding his friend at Cafe Risso, Senlin imposed himself. He gulped from Tarrou’s glass when his own was too slow to arrive and heatedly recounted the execution he’d witnessed. The words poured from him like a lecture that threatened to become a rage. “How can we tolerate such savagery? I thought the Tower was a moral pillar, but what has it shown me? Torture, sham justice, and public murder. Monstrous men with glowing, bloody hands. Madmen and actors without conscience. This isn’t the sink of humanity; it’s the sewer! Oh, don’t look at me like I’m snoring through another lesson, Tarrou. You know I am right!” Unconsciously, Senlin had begun biting his fingernails, his teeth clicking together in sharp little snaps.

  “Quit biting your nails,” Tarrou said.

  “I’m not biting my nails! I’m trimming them with my teeth because I’ve lost my nail clippers, along with everything else,” Senlin said, swatting uselessly at the coins of reflected light that flared across his face. H
e almost revealed the extent of what he had lost, but stopped himself. “And better my nails than your head.”

  Tarrou reared back in mock fright, raising his hands to shield his face. “Heaven protect me from the spring cleaning of a man’s conscience! Don’t seethe at me, Headmaster. I’m glad your self-righteousness has given you some exercise, but you forget: we are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don’t stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don’t draw equations, our consciences don’t have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us. Oh, stuff your outrage!” Anyone happening past their corner of the patio would never have imagined the two were friends. “You overlook the beautiful and exaggerate the evil.”

  “You didn’t see what the Commissioner’s circus did to that boy! His head…”

  Speaking through a clamped jaw, Tarrou’s voice lowered. “The Red Hand is a ghoul, I give you that. And no, I can’t tell you the first thing about why he glows or how he gets his strength. It doesn’t matter. He’s just a bugbear for your nightmares.” Tarrou, quick as a spark, reached across the table and clapped his broad hand over Senlin’s wrist, nearly upsetting Senlin’s newly delivered glass of wine. His voice was hoarse but forceful. “But you would do well to speak more quietly about the Commissioner’s sins. His ears are everywhere. There are men who would welcome a revolution, but we are few.”

  “Then why don’t you just leave,” Senlin said with disarming honesty, peeling Tarrou’s hand from his arm.

  Tarrou looked as if he’d been pricked. “Of course, I am. In the morning.”