Pax Omega

by Ewing, Al

  My father shed no tears, nor did he visit. When I was finally well enough to eat at the table, he acknowledged my presence with a curt nod – nothing more.

  I, for my part, was grateful to have survived my illness and my visions, and thought nothing more of them. Now, I can only wonder what message those grim visitations were trying to impart.

  IN THE DREAM, the storm is getting closer, and the pull of the wind bids to tear the kite from its frail human mooring, but the man does not let go of the string...

  ABRAHAM, FEARFUL OF my father’s continued wrath, urged me to let the matter drop; however, although my fever had broken and I was regaining my strength, the printer’s face continued to haunt my sleeping hours, and I found my waking ones consumed by thoughts of who he might have been and how he came to such an ignominious end. Surely, I thought to myself, it was neither right nor Christian that a man simply be buried and forgotten like that, with no grave marker to signify his passing.

  Plagued by these thoughts, I eventually persuaded Abraham to accompany me into the town to see the Sheriff, Landon Reed. I knew that talking to a man of such authority would create terrible trouble, for he would surely swoop down on our farm like all the angels of God, demanding to know why my father and my tutor had conspired to hide the murder of a man from the public record, and yet my young conscience would allow me no other recourse. The Sheriff, I was told, was not in his office, and so I decided, against Abraham’s better judgement, that we should see him at home. Trembling, I knocked upon the door, and when it opened the whole story flowed out of me as if a dam had burst.

  Landon Reed listened with a weary ear, his face drawn and haggard, and then quietly informed me that I was a very foolish boy, and I should pay attention to my betters and keep my nose out of what did not concern me. He would forbear from informing my father of my foolish excursion, since to his mind I had suffered enough, but I was to go home at once and forget the entire business, or at least speak of it to no other living soul. Having officiated at the death of my mother, I can only assume that he knew full well that were he to tell my father of my visit, the next beating would likely lead to another death in the Steele household.

  As he closed the door on me, I caught a glimpse of Reed’s daughter Deborah, a young and pretty girl and much admired about the town. She was crying inconsolably.

  All my expectations had come crashing down around my ears, and I was left confused and stranded, seemingly without further recourse. I had no idea of who to turn to next, and when Abraham quietly suggested that we make our way home before my father noticed I was gone, as if such a thing were likely, I could only nod in dumb acquiescence.

  It was at that moment that I saw Donato Scorpio again.

  He was emerging from a hostelry with a wide grin, doubtless after some great gambling win or priapic exploit, and when he saw Abraham and me, he bounded over, shaking Abraham by the hand and tousling my hair. Glad though I was to see him, my spirits were still in low condition from my encounter with the Sheriff, and at first he assumed I was sulking because he had left my father’s employ, and planned to leave the state of Pennsylvania entirely as soon as he had decided where to go; the Newfoundland settlements, he thought. He was relentless in curing me of my sour mood, allowing me the rare treat of riding atop his shoulders and telling stories of all the fishing he would be doing when he reached Newfoundland, but I retained my sullen demeanour and eventually the truth came out.

  Scorpio reacted with disbelief at first, then astonishment, then anger at my father, who he had little respect for, and my tutor, who he considered firmly in the wrong on the issue. When I related the meeting I had just had with the Sheriff, his emotions circled again to open disbelief. He did not think me a liar, but such a reaction from a man ostensibly tasked with upholding the cause of justice seemed to him so bizarre as to defy all credibility. Surely I must have misunderstood?

  I insisted that I had not, and gradually he came to understand that I was telling the unvarnished truth. I had up until this point assumed that it was I who was somehow in the wrong, for surely all of these figures of authority must know more of such situations than a young boy, but seeing Donato Scorpio so astonished by their behaviour brought home how right I had been. Something was rotten in the house of Denmark, and Scorpio declared that he would investigate to the best of his ability on my behalf, that we might all know the plain truth of the matter, starting with the assumption that Landon Reed, Dr Newton and my father evidently had some unknown reason to see this killing hidden from the eyes of men.

  I thanked him profusely, feeling truly confident for the first time since the sorry business began, for I knew that Scorpio would not fail me, neither in this regard nor in any other. Abraham, likewise, seemed buoyed by the promise of some resolution to my private sorrows; however, on the trail home, his spirits fell, and he muttered darkly that such a path would lead to unforeseen consequences, and perhaps we had set things in motion better left alone. I refused to hear him. He was an uneducated slave, I told myself, and I put his qualms down to some innate superstition that I imagined was common to his race.

  I was a foolish child, and Abraham a wiser man that I will ever be. I was delving into an open, festering sore that it was far beyond my power to heal; there would be precious little justice done as a result of my actions, and the price for them would be far, far higher than I would ever have chosen to pay.

  IN THE DREAM, the storm is coming closer and closer, and the man pulls down the string, carefully tying it to a wooden stake, firmly hammered into the wet ground...

  I SPENT THE next two days dividing my time between my studies and my usual leisure pursuits of watching the men in the fields and wandering the farm, though I was forbidden from the top field and knew better than to risk a further beating by disobeying my father’s edict. The time seemed to pass slowly, agonisingly, as I waited for any word from Scorpio. It crossed my mind that he may have been simply humouring me, or that he had asked a few questions and then given up, and that thought made the time pass even slower. I languished in my studies, prompting stern lectures from Dr Newton, and in my playtime I would trudge morosely up the trail leading to the town and sit at the side of the road for long spells, greeting each passing rider with renewed hope, only to be disappointed again.

  At the end of the Friday, after a seeming eternity of waiting, I sat in my room and stared angrily at the ceiling, listening to the sound of the wind and rain outside my window as a flickering candle picked out the shadows on the wall. The air all day had been uncomfortably humid, and the storm finally broke at sunset, a deluge unlike any in my short memory that seemed on a par with the Biblical flood; on another day, I would have listened excitedly to each crack of thunder, gasped in mingled fear and delight at each flash of lightning, but now I simply lay on my bed and sulked. My father had left the house earlier that evening to attend some meeting of philosophical minds, so I was free to stay up as I pleased; Abraham would occasionally poke his head into the room and see how I was keeping and enquire when I planned to settle down for the night, and each time I would simply scowl at him, as though he were the root cause of all my woes. He did not deserve such treatment from an ungrateful boy, and I bitterly regret it now, especially in light of that evening’s events.

  Just as I was about to blow out the candle and prepare for another sleepless night, there came a gentle tapping on the shutters, and I opened the window to see Donato Scorpio stood in the pouring rain, with a look upon his face as though he had ridden straight from Hell with all the devils of the underworld at his heels. Ashen, he whispered to me to let him in, and I did as I was bid.

  And there, as the thunderstorm raged and the lightning arced across the sky, he told me the dreadful story of the printer, and of how his body had come to lie in that shallow grave.

  IN THE DREAM, the kite flutters and soars in the midst of the raging storm, and the man watches the glint of metal at its tail – the glint of an iron key, tied securely to the fr
ame, the key to a new world, a bright future of light and power, the key that will unlock doors to knowledge undreamed of, the key to the future of the human race...

  DONATO SCORPIO WAS not a man used to the solving of mysteries, but he did pay attention to local talk, and the recent chatter in the town had concerned the Sheriff’s daughter, the same girl I had glimpsed weeping when I visited him at his home. The local scandalmongers had it that the poor girl had been involved in some dalliance with a printer named Benjamin Franklin, and some gossips even claimed that he had left her with child. Franklin had since vanished from the town, apparently leaving his home unoccupied and his business in the hands of his partner, Hugh Meredith, all without a backward glance. There was talk that he had somehow learned of the pregnancy and swiftly fled before he could be forced to marry the girl; although the existence of the prospective child was naught but rumour and hearsay, most had come to accept this explanation as the gospel truth.

  As Scorpio recounted this, I felt the blood run from my face and my knees weaken with the shock. The gossip of adults rarely reached my ears, and until that moment I had possessed no inkling that the body was not that of a wandering drifter, as Father had maintained. But now there could be no doubt that the missing man and the corpse twice-buried on the outskirts of our property were one and the same. For a moment, in my childish innocence, I wondered how the Sheriff could have remained so unmoved by my story, given that the vanished printer was so closely connected to his own family; but then the scales fell from my eyes and understanding dawned.

  Was that the moment of my death? It was as if I, like Adam, had bitten into the fruit of knowledge, for I had in that terrible instant gleaned the hideous wisdom of adulthood, and the taste was sour and bitter and reeked of corruption. Like Adam, I in that moment saw humanity for what it was – a naked, rutting animal! – and, like him, I would never know even the meagre paradise my innocence had afforded me again.

  I staggered back, sitting on my bed as my legs finally gave way, and though my mouth fell open I found I could not speak.

  Of course Landon Reed had known.

  He must have known from the start that the body I had spoken to him of was the same man who had lain with his only child; I was not too young to know that here was motive enough to leave the crime uninvestigated, if not to commit it. Stammering, I asked Scorpio directly: was our Sheriff the murderer? Had the man we entrusted with the keeping of the law committed this most grievous breach against it?

  I should have known nothing could be so simple.

  There was a long pause from my friend, as he weighed in his mind whether to leave me my illusions. But the world is cruel, and Donato Scorpio knew it better than most; so he took a breath, steeled himself, and told me of the Junto.

  IN THE DREAM, an arc of blue-white light streaks down from heaven to the kite and the key, and God’s finger brushes Adam’s, and Prometheus brings the first fire to mankind...

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WAS a man with a quick wit and a powerful mind. In his native town of Boston, he had written various amusing letters for The New-England Courant, the famed news-sheet, albeit via subterfuge; as his brother, the editor, would not take the work from his hand, he slipped them under his door while hiding under the pseudonym of a middle-aged widow, a ruse that ensured fourteen of the missives saw print. Would that I had possessed such spirit at the age of sixteen! However, I was already well set on my present course, journeying into lassitude and despair. Franklin fled his apprenticeship in the face of his brother’s wrath; I cannot bring myself to quit a household I have grown to despise.

  On arriving in Philadelphia, he spoke often of his desire to found a news-sheet in his new home, even colluding at one point with the Governor of Pennsylvania on the matter; however, despite a sojourn in London ostensibly for the purpose, the idea came to naught, and he soon returned to Philadelphia and his old calling once again. Still, that mind hungered for debate, for discourse, for ideas. All who know Franklin agreed on the spark of intelligence that lit him from within; who can say what that spark might have achieved, had it not been freed so summarily from its mortal shell?

  The spark did achieve one thing before being so brutally extinguished, and that was the formation of the Junto.

  The Junto was a group dedicated to the mutual improvement of its members by means of weekly debates on matters moral, political and philosophical, and to begin with its members were selected by Franklin himself, including his colleagues in the printing trade and various local businessmen whom he had encountered socially. It was by all accounts a fine idea, and a means of discussing ways to improve the community; Franklin himself posited such ideas as a group of men tasked to put out fires, a collected repository of books, and a hospital for public use.

  Or was that Newton?

  I am, I fear, confusing the narrative. None of this was related to me by Donato Scorpio; these were details I found out later, through correspondence with many of the original members. So broken was I that while other boys my age were learning trades and courting their future wives and seeing the world, I was sat in a lonely room provided by a hated Uncle, writing letter after letter in an attempt to force the world to make sense.

  And here I have the entire story, and it still does not make sense.

  James Newton was the thirteenth member of the Junto, and I am convinced he should never have joined. But how could Franklin not invite him? Newton was an intellect on a par with Franklin’s own, and quite possibly the only man in the town who could say such. According to Meredith’s account, meetings would often last into the small hours as the two men sparred and jousted with words and concepts, always on opposite sides; for Newton seemed to lack the essential humanity of Franklin, the dusty tutor acting as a dark twin, a mirror-self...

  When I say that Newton should never have joined, perhaps what I mean is that Newton should never have existed at all.

  Still, he did. George Webb assured me in a long letter that it was Newton who first posited the concept of the neighbourhood watch, while Joseph Breitnall would have me believe it was Franklin; what is certain is that the ideas of the two men overlapped to an astonishing degree, and yet always with that crucial difference between warm and cool, a smile and a frown...

  If Franklin had intended to create a philosophical Eden, Newton was the serpent. Although the Junto had no official hierarchy, Franklin was their de facto leader, and Newton swiftly made himself co-leader by virtue of his intellect and his powers of persuasion. Although there was no warmth in him, he had the power of cold logic on his side; that was often enough to bend his critics to his will, against their own best judgement. Having secured a place alongside Franklin, he began to force out Franklin’s old friends and co-workers, recruiting others to take their places; my father was one of them, for Newton’s cold demeanour appealed to his own stringency. Then there was the Sheriff, and eight others besides. Breitnall was the last to leave, unable to bear the increasing rancour of the discussions, or the puritanical element that had entered into the gathering; on the way out of his last meeting, he warned Franklin to watch himself, or better yet, end the Junto as was and let the newcomers be what they wished under their own name. On learning of Franklin’s disappearance, he assumed the printer had returned to London, throwing himself on the open ocean in sheer disgust at what his grand plans had come to; I had not the heart to disabuse him.

  Donato Scorpio, suspecting Newton and my father were as much involved as he presumed the Sheriff to be, made the decision to discreetly follow my tutor on the night of the storm. It was one week after the murder, and the Junto convened to discuss the matter. Listening at the window, Scorpio heard it all. Some of the newcomers were shaken, and Landon Reed was disgusted with himself, while my father and Newton felt they had committed no sin, and they debated on the moral implications of their act long into the night, and in this manner Scorpio came to know everything.

  The Friday previous, the Junto had convened, and Franklin had made his intent
ion to disband the group clear; no longer would it continue in its present form. He would form his own society, with the friends whose company he had previously enjoyed, and allow Newton’s icy version to continue as a separate entity. Newton agreed, in principle; but there was a formality to attend to first.

  He had to ask the questions.

  Every meeting of the Junto revolved around them; a list of twenty-four questions devised by Franklin to promote debate and discourse among the assembled company.

  Question the sixth: Do you know of any fellow citizen, who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? Or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?

  And the answer came back: “Franklin! Franklin has committed the error!”

  Franklin protested, but the questioning continued.

  Question the seventh: What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately observed or heard? Of imprudence? Of passion? Or of any other vice or folly?

  “Franklin! Franklin is intemperate! Imprudent! Franklin’s passion is vice and folly!”

  And on, and on, and with each new question the wrath of this circle grew. Veins throbbed, and hands clenched, and all the time, Newton watched, sinister as any serpent.

  Question the nineteenth: Hath any man injured you, from whom it is in the power of the Junto to procure redress?

  And at this, the Sheriff stood up quickly enough to knock over his chair, pointed a finger at the trembling Franklin, and screamed: “He made of my daughter a whore!”