by Farris, John
"Would you like to see the generator first? It's been operating down here continuously for half a century, unattended; it was designed, by a genius named Tesla, to need no attention for at least a hundred years."
While he was talking, Jacob had managed to place himself, as unobtrusively as possible, between Whit and the dark entrance to the passage on their extreme left.
"Where does that lead?" Whit asked, pointing behind Jacob.
"A small chamber. It was used as a workroom by Langford or perhaps Tesla, the wizard of the lamps; but they left nothing of importance there. I've turned it into my library, stored thousands upon thousands of cuneiform fragments that I someday hope to find the time to translate."
"Are you sure that isn't the way we came in?"
Jacob stared at him with wounded blue eyes.
"You said you wouldn't leave. You promised to listen to me."
"Only if you could explain a few things. The aviary, for one."
"Just give me—"
A sound came chillingly to them from far down one of the passages; it was something like the screech of a jungle cat. Jacob's lips trembled; he bit them.
"What was that?" Whit said. "Are there animals down here?"
"No, certainly not! Sometimes the wind at night—blows a certain way through the natural chimneys that ventilate these caverns. That's all you heard." He took hold of Whit's sleeve again, obsequiously. "If you'll follow me—the generator is a marvel, you must see it. It creates an ambient force field, just how, no one has ever been able to discover. I keep some food in a larder nearby—nuts, cheeses, wild fruit—and a few bottles of chilled white wine. I know you must be hungry. If you'd like to bathe before we eat, the temperature of the pool below the generator is precisely that of the human body—amniotic, you might say."
The catlike yowling was repeated. Or was the sound more human than animal this time? Whit couldn't be sure. Jacob's attempt at a smile was that of a man suddenly frozen in ice.
"It isn't so difficult to get used to—once you've been down here for a while. Come; there's nothing to be afraid of."
They walked together down the gently sloping passage toward the cavern that contained the waterfall; a slight wetness in the air glistened on chiseled stone but the spaced tubes of light were unaffected, so many of them mysteriously, coldly alight after countless thousands of hours; they composed a parade of Whit's and Jacob's mismatched bodies, a crisscross of spectral shadows surging, then receding, along the walls and the floor.
"How did you become so obsessed with Edgar Langford, Jacob?"
"Obsessed?" Jacob turned his head as if to spit out the word, but thought again. "Yes, I suppose that's accurate. Since I've come to know him, as well as the man can be known by sifting through his published works and the impressions of his contemporaries, he has never been out of my thoughts for long. I've even dreamed about him; unpleasant dreams at times. A genius, but paradoxical, as are all great and ambitious men: consider his brilliant scholarship, his foolish intrusions into magick, his dark vendettas, his romance with old and dangerous gods."
"You called him Caliban, didn't you?"
Jacob chuckled too loudly; the sound rang from the stone enclosing them.
"An apt comparison. He was—is—cunning, classically paranoid, a notorious misanthrope, a warlock by inclination and in practice. Always leagues ahead of his competitors in the science of Assyriology, which is, as you know, my field as well. It was common knowledge that Edgar Langford looted the sites he discovered, that a treasure-house lay buried beneath this mountain, and was likely to remain buried for all time. But as I researched the last years of his life, studied the architect's plans for the chateau, read accounts of extensive excavations inside Tormentil, I was convinced that many of his unique discoveries were still intact, waiting to be rediscovered. I was right. But never imagined that I would find so much else in Wildwood; that the—the horror of Midsummer Eve, 1916, would be revealed to me."
"The night the chateau was destroyed."
The waterfall was near; Jacob raised his voice.
"The very night Mad Edgar's most elaborately conceived illusion became a dreadful reality for all of his five hundred guests—when he at last went too far, and has yet to return. No one returned alive, unaltered—except for his beloved son."
Whit said wearily, "Jacob, I don't want to go into that again."
To Whit's relief (a mild claustrophobia almost unnoticed when they first entered the tunnel had become stifling, traumatic) the passageway widened and descended gradually; they were in the cavern that contained the waterfall, the generator, and several other machines that looked dead, entombed, perhaps never used; their design and purpose were a mystery to Whit, although he had a degree in engineering. The cavern was rugged, natural, with stalactites. The waterfall poured from a rift in the face of the rock thirty feet high and opposite the ledge on which they were standing. The ledge had been shaped, leveled, enclosed by a pipe railing still thickly protected against rust by gray paint. There was a resonance in the rock on which they stood, from the turbines. A mist hovered above the pool where heated water was gushingly discharged from the machine.
"Have you heard of Nikola Tesla?" Jacob asked.
"No."
"He was Serbian. Even before he left his native land, as a very young man, he had already conceived his plan for this simple induction motor, which has almost no parts that will wear or break down. His invention made alternating current possible and practical, so that electricity could be cheaply transmitted over long distances. Unfortunately he surrendered his claims to future royalties to the Westinghouse Company when that company was threatened with bankruptcy before the turn of the century. As a consequence, he was always desperately in need of funds to further his research. And that is how his distressing alliance with Edgar Langford came about."
"Why was it distressing?"
"Each man was a genius with visionary qualities. But Nikola Tesla's inventions, his pioneer work in radio and robotics, were important and useful. Edgar Langford's great contribution to science, adapted from the Babylonian sorcerers he revered, ultimately became so dangerous it was a threat to every living thing. Tesla has alluded to this in his diaries, which I saw for the first time three years ago in Yugoslavia. He remorsefully accepted blame for the disaster that took place here. But I'm certain Tesla had divorced himself from Mad Edgar's schemes just before Midsummer Eve; otherwise he would have vanished with the others. He also made note of the fact that Edgar's machine, which had no working parts to wear out, may be even more powerful now than it was in 1916."
Whit looked around. "Which machine is that?"
"No, no, those are just some of Tesla's playthings—smaller polyphase motors and a primitive atom smasher. The first workable cyclotron, constructed long before the Manhattan Project."
"Cyclotron? Could it have had something to do with the disappearance of the chateau?"
"I'm telling you it was Edgar's machine that must have drastically altered the electromagnetic field surrounding Tormentil! It has no name—in English; but the Mesopotamian adepts called it "Star-eater." Which is another way of saying its energy came from cosmic rays. All of which are invisible, just as the machine can no longer be discerned, though it continues to exist, and grows, as Tesla feared, ever more greedy and powerful, an extension of the lethal mind of Edgar Langford."
Staring at the waterfall, Whit felt something horrible in his own mind, a humped and hairy tarantula of disbelief, freezing reason with each tetchy, fingering step it took. He leaned against a railing and gave his head a hard shake.
Jacob said, "I think you should bathe now. It will relax you. The stairs to your right go down to the pool. You need only to be careful of the current; there is an outlet deep in the rock on the other side, and you could be sucked underground for miles. I'll be gone for only a few minutes."
Whit looked up. "Where are you going, Jacob?"
"I told you. I have food. And there are photog
raphs I think you must see."
Jacob picked up one of the wireless tubes from a rock shelf; it began immediately to glow in his hand. He went quickly back the way they had come. Whit wondered if he should follow him; he doubted the man's sanity and didn't trust him; but his own mind, knocked sidewise and senseless in time, was not reliable. It was pleasant in the rainy cavern, in this closed weather without death in it, away from the strict stone gazes of warrior deities. He walked to the steps and looked down into the green and foaming pool, mist rising to the level of his face, wetting his eyelashes. Inviting. An antidote for depression. The resonance carried through the ledge of rock from the generator had begun to lull him.
He stripped off his clothes and walked naked down the steps cut into the side of the ledge to where the pool lapped over stone. He sat down, submerged to his chest. Ah. Better than Jacob had described it. There was room to lay back and he closed his eyes, hearing underwater the downpour of the waterfall and the thrum of the generator like a primeval heartbeat.
But, distantly, a baby cried unattended in an expensive perambulator. Why had he been so furiously jealous? Nanny staring red-eyed in a fouled birdcage, blasphemously transformed into a dead thing. Dead from—an army surgeon once had explained to him what killed soldiers who otherwise appeared unscathed. Something called the vagus nerve became paralyzed at moments of extreme tenor. Jacqueline, who in the words of Jacob Schwarzman had "crossed over." But from where?
Yes, he knew her. Her Parisian scent, her dressy rustlings, her lullabies, her handclap and stern wordless rebuke when he was up to something she didn't approve of. Those hands, so white with a tint of purple in the nails, firm without fondling as she washed him in his flotilla-laden tub, buttoned him into pajamas, tucked him in his princeling's bed.
Mother often came then, into the nursery, almost too late, to say good night and kiss his cheek as he was nodding off to song or story. . . .
He had loved her in the beginning. Then love had come apart like a straw boat in a torrent. Mother: yet despised, flaxen, fading, yellow as a pear, delicately bleeding primrose into the deepening night from which he had escaped, to wander in a dusty trance through low cacti and greasewood.
When he trudged up the steps from the pool, his head heavy from the weight of despair, there was a grayish, nearly worn-out towel draped over a pipe railing. Jacob had returned. Whit had no idea how much time had passed. Jacob's back was to him, discreetly. He had brought a large rush basket with him, a couple of folding canvas campstools. Whit pulled on skivvies and joined him. On one of the canvas stools Jacob had spread a spartan dinner: nuts, dried fruit, mushrooms. Whit felt an off-balance yearning for damask cloths and canapes, cold unblemished silver. He was handed an opened bottle of white wine.
Jacob pointed to the vacant stool. "Please. You sit there. You're my guest. I don't mind standing."
"What are we eating?"
"The fruit is crabapple, persimmon, and peach. Those are walnuts and pecans, very nourishing." He was chewing with his mouth full; little white bits of nutmeat sprinkled his black beard. "The mushrooms are excellent with that wine, you must try them."
Whit looked suspiciously at the mushroom sections. Some, spongelike, looked familiar and edible. Others did not.
Jacob shrugged. "I know what you're thinking. But I'm an expert mycologist. My hobby for years. I know what is deadly, and what isn't." He picked up a whole mushroom and plunged it into his mouth. "These are morels. Common and harmless. The oyster mushrooms are also exceptionally tasty."
"What about the brown ones?"
Jacob swallowed, and reached for another morel. "An ordinary boletus, you find them everywhere in Wildwood. Enjoy your wine."
Whit sipped. It was delicious. He reached for a handful of nuts and chewed them, then sampled the fruit and mushrooms.
"Are you feeling better now? The water has mineral properties I find rejuvenating."
"I have a lot of questions, Jacob."
"First, why don't you examine some photographs? They could be more revelatory than any explanations I have to offer."
From a rucksack he removed several fiberboard folders and began looking through the first one, which contained a loose assortment of old pictures. He mulled over certain ones.
"I own the most complete collection of photographs pertaining to the development of Wildwood, also biographies of nearly everyone who came here, who built and staffed the chateau. Literally hundreds of them. But, as I told you, there are no photographs of Caliban. There exist scores of wedding pictures of your—" He glanced at Whit's face, then amended what he had been about to say. "Of Sibby Langford, her family and bridesmaids, even the groom's attendants. But Langford is conspicuously absent from all of them."
"His phobia."
"Exactly." Jacob began handing the photographs, some cracked and peeling, to Whit.
"There you have the house on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, where Sibby Waring Langford grew up. That is her mother and father. The young man with the derby in the crook of his arm is her older brother, nicknamed 'Boshie.' The other boy, wearing a Fauntleroy suit, is Sibby's younger brother, age three at this time. He was known as 'Peevie,' perhaps because of a temperamental disposition."
"Why should I be interested in them?"
"All of Sibby's family were guests for the Midsummer Eve gala which Mad Edgar conceived to celebrate your sixth birthday and the completion of his chateau. The gala that went so catastrophically wrong. It was the fall of the house of Usher and the masque of the red death all in one grisly moment. And this is Sibby Langford on her wedding day. Looking, despite her best efforts, somewhat pensive."
Whit took the large stiff-backed photo from Jacob and gazed at the young woman he had been assured was his mother. He felt, for a staggered moment, that he was going to fall off the campstool.
"Of course you recognize her," Jacob said quietly. "No. No, you're wrong. It's just that—"
"What?"
"You said that he was—a monster of some kind. And she's—"
"Frail but lovely. Certainly she was not blind."
"Then how could she marry him?"
"A madman? A monster? It came to that. But when Sibby met Edgar Langford he was, in addition to being indecently wealthy, renowned for his travels, his scholarship, his discoveries. And no one who knew him ever denied that he could be a fascinating conversationalist; a spellbinder. Sibby, who was just nineteen, resourcefully sheltered and very immature, was simply talked into believing she loved him. Or perhaps her love was real; her diaries vanished with her and I have only copies of the reams of letters she wrote to her family assuring them of her deep happiness. It may well be that she was happy with Edgar for a short time, until the less attractive aspects of his personality became dominant. There are strong hints of sexual perversions practiced in the Eastern brothels he frequented during his expeditions. If Sibby soon fell out of love with her husband, well, there was Mr. Travers. He seldom left Wildwood for the thirteen years required to complete the chateau. He was a lifelong bachelor, never linked with another woman."
Jacob produced a photo of the architect, on horseback, hat brim pulled low as if he were looking into the sun. A full mustache, a good chin-line, were apparent. He sat his horse with an ease Whit himself had never achieved; although he had grown up with the U.S. cavalry, he had been unable to develop any fondness for the animals.
Whit held the photos of Sibby and Travers side by side.
"They were lovers?"
He had bitten his tongue, an unexplainable spasm. Love, envy, hatred—but whom did he hate, and why? The doomed girl in the heavy wedding dress with the soft, chastened eyes of a saint committed to the stake, or the tall architect in his highwayman's slouch hat, poised for a getaway on his high-headed horse?
"I have proof," Jacob said smugly.
"A letter? A diary?"
"An eyewitness to their affair."
Whit swallowed more wine from the bottle. Jacob, busy sorting through dozen
s of photos, pausing to look at labels he had pasted on the backs, had stopped nibbling. Whit reached for a remaining section of mushroom and ate it. A good woodsy astringent taste he hadn't appreciated in his other samplings; it cleared his palate, heightening the effect of the wine which he craved, for its silvery lightness, the tranquility it bequeathed in the darkness that was most troublesome, those depths where the heart lay stunned. He picked up the photos of the bride and the architect, only to put them down again. His heartbeat, now, was rapid, he had begun to breathe unconsciously through his teeth, drawing down cold that shook his spread and luminous rib bones. Jacob stopped what he was doing and gazed thoughtfully at him. Sweat rolled like rivulets down Whit's forehead and cheeks.
"How could you have an eyewitness?" he asked the archaeologist.
Another photo was thrust at Whit. He took it with numbed fingers. He had to look closely to see anything. The light in the cavern was brighter, auroral, but the face of the woman emerged slowly from the murky background of the photograph like something elusive floating beneath him in a pond. He sensed beauty behind the pleated wing of a black Spanish fan, all that was alluring canceled except for one keen cheekbone, a hot and forward eye, a flash of bared white temple above which, in her massed locks, a rich comb perched egotistically as a peacock.
"Who is she?"
When Jacob didn't reply immediately Whit looked up. His face above the black cataract of beard was changed, shy and drained, yokel-looking; temporarily he was reduced to the vaporous state of the lovelorn.
"Her name is Pamela; Pamela Belford. She is—was—Sibby Langford's personal maid." He drew a breath and pleaded, "Lovely, don't you think?"
"Is? Was?"
"Pamela is living here, with me. The Walkouts don't know. It's a violation of our agreement. If they should find out, well—not only would they take Pamela from me, they might also sentence me to death. So you see, I must be very careful. I hardly ever leave her, except when I need to go into town for mail, or other necessities. The medicine she needs."
