by John Crowley
“This one again?” Winnie asked him when she opened the case that October. Pierce only took it from her, without apology: he knew how much there was in it yet to read, or to reread. Winnie distributed the other books. Hildy’s allotment of Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames (Hildy played it safe, and ordered her books in named series: the only danger then was getting the same one twice, which after the passage of a little time she didn’t notice). Winnie’s own novels, dense and pictureless. Bird’s horses and Warren’s, his surmounted by cowboys. They all went their separate ways then with their piles, like starvelings, to consume them in private.
Abraxas. Adocentyn. Apollyon. Ariel. Ars Notoria. Azael. In the Angelic Conversations of Doctor DEE (q.v.), Azael is the Interpreter of God. What did “q.v.” mean? The first thing to do after staring again long into the vast ruins pictured on the endpapers front and back—broken antique torsos, huge headstones covered in clearly cut but unintelligible words, toppled pillars sunken in tufts of grass, arches, urns, capitals, obelisks—was to turn to the page whereon he had found the name of his secret lodge or club, the one Joe Boyd was now President of (though he didn’t know it). It wasn’t far from the front, in an entry on Alchemy (the dictionary was broader than its name suggested, almost any odd name or notion could get an entry); the book almost fell open there, so stared at was the page.
There was the row of small dark etchings, the creatures brought forth from base matter by alchemical processes, but how: the Red Man and the White Woman, the Green Lion, the Child of the Philosopher, the Androgyne (one breast, one half a beard, convolute privates too ill-drawn to study). Below them, a picture of the Alchemist, in bathrobe and complex hat, the smoke of his cauldron and the flames of his fire drawn with the same harshly cut black lines as the pleats of his robe. Too absorbed in his mysteries to notice a crowd of long-nailed curly-tusked bat-winged devils swarming through his window, glad to see him at the work that would damn him. Below him, another picture: a miniature castle, its drawbridge drawn up, the inhabitants within at work on tasks of transformation or studying big books or firing guns or arrows out the windows.
Only this castle moved, or was supposed to have moved, on four spindly cartwheels at its corners. It looked comically little, insufficient, like Humphrey Pennyworth’s house in the funnies, and yet grave and minatory: not a joke. A finger from heaven pointed to it, and a wind from there filled the sails by which it traveled. It was, said Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle in a caption almost too small to read, the Invisible College of the Rose Cross Brothers, and it was evident from the dress of the people, both the wise men within and the ignorant outside, that the moving college had gone its way long ago, in the past. It was certainly gone now, if it had ever truly been; gone with the past wherein it had existed, wherein the other beings listed here in their alphabetical order had also existed, the people and events and the facts strange but true.
The past: these ruins.
In the past, once, somewhere, somewhen, kings and gods had gone naked: armed and crowned and shod sometimes, but naked where it mattered, filled maybe with the same grave elation that filled Pierce when in private games he as liberator, as ancient king come home again, would order his people to throw off their garments, and be as they had been—he leading the way, putting aside his (bath) robe and reclining in easeful nakedness, a Royal Crown in his hand and magnanimity in his heart, the world returned to antique gaiety. In the past there had been a Golden Age.
“This was before Columbus,” Hildy said.
“This was the Old World,” said Pierce.
In the past, in the Old World, there had been empires whose geographies were now lost, the maps no longer had room for them, filled up as they were with classroom countries; empires still somehow in existence, though beyond the demarcated globe, undersea or underground. Pierce committed to memory lists of their interchangeable gods and godlets, the air and water had been crowded with them then, potent but not omnipotent—a comfort somehow, they were strong friends or difficult enemies but not all-seeing, not everywhere at once; the wise could compel them, back then (or maybe that was sometime later, when they had grown smaller): could bring them to mirrors, draw them into statues, talk with them. Magi, said Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle, a word from PERSIA (q.v.).
“This was before Jesus,” said Hildy. “They would have believed in Jesus.” As all the good and wise who had not heard of Him no doubt would have if they had had the chance, Invincibly Ignorant because of when they lived, and where were they now? Limbo.
Maybe, Pierce said, but he couldn’t himself fix his empires in time, they were under or over or occurring elsewhere, undecidably; in the dates AD that grow smaller toward the beginning or in the mirror-dates BC proceeding the other way and growing larger with distance, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Stone Age. When Jesus came the gods had died or hidden, the air had emptied; and at that time too, though maybe not all at once, and not because of His coming but only because the existence of a new order somehow canceled out the other even retroactively (a wind blowing backward through time that brought down the colonnades and temples and the groves of oak), those empires had Fallen. Persia had Fallen. Rome Fell. Byzantium Fell. Pierce looked again into the ruins inside the Dictionary’s cover: Fallen. One sad square of split marble half-engulfed in forgetful earth bore a single deep-incised word: ÆGYPT.
From empire to fallen empire they wandered, in exile, alone but for each other; their weapons were resourcefulness in invention, the pledge they had made to one another, and a pot of medicine carried from their unforgotten motherland, a medicine so powerful it could raise the dead if the soul had not yet departed: these, and their invisibility, which like Mandrake’s wasn’t real invisibility so much as a kind of exalted anonymity that clouded men’s eyes to their presence. They had swords too. “And guns,” Warren said, unwilling to give up his own.
When Warren played, the game was an endless series of fights, subterfuges, challenges, and escapes; Bird, mild and willing, would be set upon, imprisoned, rescued, defended in age upon age. Their enemies were imaginary, for there was no one to embody them, but three Invisibles could represent any number, up to migratory thousands, crossing out of their home places and into Old Worlds endlessly unfolding. Hildy disdained pretend (though she loved theatricals, pageants, the reenactment of saints’ lives and the founding of nations), and so she would be the dying king or prophet who handed out commissions, urged crusades, bound the Brothers with oaths. What the younger ones did with her instructions she didn’t know. Now and then as she sat reading she would see them go by outside, caped and armed, intent on their errands; Warren would return to report, in garbled notions real to him, their progress.
Pierce would forget, as all adults forget, the effort required of children making believe, the concentration, no, the expansion, of the will, the conscious effort to erase the conscious decision to pretend (which kids tend to do one kid at a time, mesmerizing the ones who find the trick hard, bullying the holdouts if necessary); and then the constant pruning and tending of the products of the imagination—cancel the contradictions without a thought, discard the used adventures, roll the ball ever into the undiscovered. When those gardens were all shut up in him, those wells capped, Pierce would not remember how good he had been at it. Through the limbo of that hot October, he and Warren and Bird quested daily at Hildy’s direction over the hills burned or yellow (the ragweed, astonishingly, sprouting again in the ashes they had made), furthering the story at both ends until they could no longer find one another in the gathering dark.
“They have this city,” he said to Bird and Hildy, they in their beds, he in his, long after lights-out; “this city underground …”
“How can you build a city underground?”
“It used to be aboveground,” said Pierce, “but then it Fell. Now it’s underground.”
“But they can get in it.”
“They know how to get into it, because there’s entrances in lots of places. Where you think it’s just, li
ke, a cave mouth or a space in the rocks; then you go in, and it leads to this city.”
Pursued by badguys (because of their jewels, their secrets, their medicines) the little band enters in.
“Joe too,” said Bird.
“Joe too.”
Push away the rock, thrust a torch within: hollow drip of water, flare of firelight on stone; but after a few stumbling steps you come upon stairs, cut into the living rock, stairs leading down. Generations have passed and all knowledge of the way has been lost; in wonder the Invisibles (Joe Boyd too) follow the carved figures sideways-walking down the walls. The chambers are growing larger, the way lit from unseen sources. They could not now find their way back again, but they feel no fear. Down there: the dim glow brightens, and there are sounds of life and labor. Step out onto the belvedere overlooking the vast inward space, the ravaged ruined city half-rebuilt, the bustle of folks at unimaginable duties in the artificial sunlight that warms it.
Adocentyn. Safe now. In the center of the center a machine, under construction for decades, silver disc perfect but immobile, waiting only for the jewel we have brought, the jewel the badguys wanted, the jewel for which we have risked everything, not knowing its worth. The gowned mage, beard white as milk, grave eyes glad, takes it and places it in the starship’s heart. The mountains open up above them to the night sky spangled with stars.
Like Mount Palomar which Pierce had seen on TV, mountain and observatory conflated in his memory. His cousins were asleep now, and Pierce himself would not remember these conclusions tomorrow, but it didn’t matter, there were more where they came from. In that city they had imagined Joe Boyd’s investiture as President to have taken place too, the wand of power given him, the password and the ring, only they couldn’t resist elaborating the ceremonies into absurdity, getting the giggles irrefusably as Joe Boyd was loaded with special hats and shoes, was put through endless rituals, was read to out of great books and scrolls, made to swear, swear again, chivvied from altar to throne as the girls and Pierce shrieked with laughter imagining it.
What Joe Boyd did not have that the others had, though, was a mark.
Warren and Hildy and Bird believed Pierce had invented the mark himself, though they were willing to listen to Pierce’s story (that it was the actual hieroglyph of the last of the just Ægyptians, cast by them to know each other by) as Pierce drew it for each of them on their bodies with a ballpoint: on Hildy’s shoulder and on the wing of Bird’s back and, at Warren’s insistence, on Warren’s grubby stomach:
“Oh Warren,” Winnie said, scrubbing him. “I wish you wouldn’t draw on yourself.”
“I didn’t.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Staring down at himself in wonder, as though the sign had just then appeared, a blue-black spider stigma, how do you like that.
“Well it’s not coming off. Don’t do that again.”
Secretly, as the others did, he refreshed it when it faded, marveling with Winnie at its strange persistence; and finding himself able, years later, to reproduce it on a cocktail napkin or a phone pad, and ponder it.
The last Sunday of the month, and Pierce sat in the living room curled in a chair of black canvas and bony iron, writing his monthly letter to his father. He had started well, confident that with the big fire he’d be able to fill a few pages before becoming baffled and bored, but at the bottom of the first sheet (his words already dipping precipitously toward the bottom corner like soldiers marching off a cliff) he’d remembered what Joe Boyd had said: Your daddy. He didn’t believe it, but it made him pause, caught in conflicting impulses to exaggerate the splendid damage on the one hand and dismiss it on the other: and after a while he gave up. He twisted in the batlike chair, feeling beneath it for the comic book he knew was there.
The television turned from The Christophers to The Big Picture: from the earnest young priest in his study to an earnest Army officer at his desk. Flags on poles stood at his left and right, and slanting bars of light fell across the wall behind him through an unseen half-closed Venetian blind. Then tanks began streaming left to right across the screen. Joe Boyd, lying on the floor, raised his head from the sofa’s lip and took notice. Over these ancient plains of Europe a thousand armies have marched and countermarched, toppling kings and emperors. The tanks clambered over bare hills, fired at imaginary enemies. Today your Army takes a hand in Europe’s defense against the kings of the East.
Pierce looked away. Better to light one candle than curse the darkness. Badguys had somehow got hold of a huge lump of acid-green Kryptonite, and its effect on Clark Kent was dreadful: a leaden, sinking weakness, coma, near-death. Got to—got to—get OUT of here … Awaking then in a squalid alley much later—days? weeks?—with his superstrengths not yet returned, he remembers nothing, not his true nature, nor his fictional one either; not his lost home planet, nor his father Jor-El, nor his kindly stepparents in Smallville. Wanders the mean streets with his hat pulled down and his collar turned up. Who am I? How do I come to be here?
“I thought you were writing to your father,” Winnie said to him, come in to find her sweater, and in her sweater pocket her cigarettes.
“I was. I am. I will be.”
“What were you writing about?”
“The fire.”
A tremendous energy, discovered at the heart of matter, puts into your Army’s hands new weapons for the defense of freedom. Joe Boyd—and Pierce and Hildy too, it was impossible not to look—watched the weird cloud-flower unfold, low-rumbling. Fading in over it was a legend, E=mc2, the mystic reason for it. Matter, energy, light: all manifestations of one Creation. How shall we use this knowledge wisely? To what uses shall we put it?
“You really can turn lead into gold,” Joe Boyd said. “You can smash their atoms.” GIs in dark goggles also watched the transformation, whitened as a wave of bomblight struck them. Winnie alighted on the piano bench, and lit an Old Gold; not really here and attending, but also caught.
Like the black chair her son sat curled in, the blond piano had been bought for the Long Island ranch house that Sam and Opal had bought unbuilt the year before they left, and which they moved out of not long after it was finished. The rest of the furnishings of that long low house were gathered here too, the red-plastic-covered club chairs with black peg legs, the wrought-iron magazine rack, the pole lamp with ovoid aluminum fruit growing from it, the banana-leaf drapes and the fire tools with brass handles like flames. Crowded against one wall, never to fit exactly no matter how it was disposed, were the nubby puce units of the sectional sofa (“The sexual sofa,” Joe Boyd joked, shocking prim Pierce). They had all seemed terribly sad to Winnie when she found them all still here, divorced from their picture window, their fieldstone fireplace, exiled with their owners to this dowdy place with its gumwood china cabinets and cabbage-rose wallpaper. But it was a long time before she suggested changing them. Not that Sam took much notice of them: that being just the point, as Winnie knew. Sam now came in and took the only large armchair in the room, his chair, which anyone else sitting in would have vacated at his approach. Sam looked as out of place seated in any other chair there as he did seated anywhere in his car except behind the wheel.
“So what was that about?” Winnie asked him. Sam had been called down to the hospital, as he often was on Sunday mornings, usually to repair the survivors of mountain Saturday nights.
“A child with a high fever who’s had a seizure,” Sam said, and Winnie winced in pity. “I think it’s just a febrile seizure—some kids get them with spiking fevers. Can’t tell till he’s over the fever.”
“What if it’s not?”
Sam shrugged, watching the set. “We’ll try Phenobarbital. Send him to Lexington for observation, if his mother’ll go. It doesn’t help any that the kid’s pretty undernourished.” He laughed, remembering: “I asked what she’d been feeding him. She said, ‘Oh, same as ever, titty and taters.’”
“Sam!” Winnie said. The children pretended not to
hear. A white-coated scientist thrust a length of two-by-four into the focus of a huge dish antenna: the board burst into flame. A carful of miners descended into tunneled darkness; one white black-smeared face turned back to grin. The energy of the sun; the energy brought up out of the sunless realms.
“Did you know,” Joe Boyd said, “that diamonds are really just coal in another form? You can make diamonds out of coal. If you put enough heat and pressure on them.”
“Did you know,” Hildy mocked, “that sixty peepers can sit side by side on a pencil?”
“Diamonds are coal,” Joe Boyd said, staring at her. “Just coal.”
“I didn’t say they weren’t,” Hildy said, bringing her own face, unafraid, closer to his. “Anyway I knew that.”
“I bet,” said Joe.
“And,” said Sam, “I have more news.” He waited to gather their attention, which he got, though their eyes didn’t leave the screen. “I ran into Sister Mary Eglantine.” His boss, the hospital’s Director. “And she said she’s found a sister who can be released for tutoring.”
“Released?” Winnie asked laughing.
“‘Released’ is the word she used. I don’t know where she’s been kept.”
Except for Warren, all of them had been schooled by nuns before, in Brooklyn or Long Island. The silence of their watching altered from absorption to foreboding.
