Forest of the Mind (The Book of Terwilliger 1)

by Michael Stiles

  Then, as quickly as the change had come over the teacher, it left him. The Guru shook his head, blinking at Ed in confusion. He let go of Ed’s arms and pressed both hands to the sides of his head as though he needed to hold his skull together. When he spoke, his voice was a trembling whisper. “An evil thing,” he said. “Never do what you just saw him do, Ed. Never use your ability to control someone else. You have no idea how awful that feels.”

  Ed rubbed his upper arms. He could already feel bruises forming. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me,” the Guru said. “But how can you be sure, eh?” He chuckled, but the laugh turned into a cough. “I’m sorry you had to see that. Arthur thinks he can break me down. I won’t let him.”

  “But how can he—?”

  “He is stronger than I am, that’s how. Very, very strong.” He made a small, helpless gesture with his hands, and Ed could see those hands were still shaking uncontrollably. “I need to rest,” the teacher said softly. He reached down to grasp his wheels, but his sweaty hands couldn’t find a grip.

  “Here,” Ed said, getting to his feet. “I can push you.”

  “Thank you,” the Guru whispered. “I don’t think I can... don’t think...” Another violent attack took him. He thrashed around in his chair, straining the joints and making a terrible noise. Ed called out for help as he backed the wheelchair toward the door.

  The door opened a crack and Rayfield poked his head into the room. Seeing the Guru, he gasped and flung the door open wide, knocking Ed out of the way. Rayfield rushed to the wheelchair, followed closely by Doris, who was carrying three mismatched teacups. She hastily handed these to Ed, sloshing hot tea all over his hands and wrists. He hardly noticed the pain as he set the cups down on a nearby table. His attention was locked on the Guru.

  Doris was holding the Guru’s head against her shoulder. He was still jerking and twitching, but seemed to be calming down now that she was there. Doris held him until he was still again. Then Rayfield picked him up out of the wheelchair and, directing a disapproving frown at Ed, carried him to his room.

  Doris and Ed stayed behind and sat together on the couch, staring at the empty wheelchair.

  “I hope I didn’t make him worse by coming here,” he said. “Talking to me seemed to agitate him.”

  “It’s not you.”

  “I’m sorry I waited so long to come back. It was hard to get away.”

  Doris took a deep, shuddering breath. Her eyes were wet. “You’re here now.”

  Ed said nothing for a while. “Did you ever meet this Nathaniel person?” he asked finally.

  “No. I’ve heard about him, but he was gone before I came around.”

  Ed got up and took one of the cups of tea from the side table. It was still very warm, but not quite hot. He took a sip and sat back down next to Doris.

  “Nathaniel knew the guy who owns this house.” She picked up the other cup from the table, but didn’t drink from it. Running one finger up and down the handle, she gazed into the cup. “I don’t think any of the others liked him. Especially Rat. Nobody ever talks about Nathaniel when Rat’s around.”

  Rat’s voice from the doorway made them both jump. “Go back to your sandbox, little girl! Stop digging in the garden.” Ed thought he must be talking to Doris, but Rat’s pale blue stare was directed at him.

  “Are you talking to me?” Ed said.

  “Keep sniffing around,” Rat growled, “and you might get your nose bit off. Get out of here! Go home!” He shuffled away down the hallway, muttering to himself.

  Ed put down his teacup and got to his feet. “I should go.”

  “No!” Doris caught his sleeve. “Don’t leave. Stay for the night. I... He might want to talk to you again.”

  Ed gently extracted his shirt from her fingers. “Tom will never let me hear the end of it if I don’t show up at home tonight. Besides, I don’t want to wake up and find Rat looking at me.”

  “Don’t worry so much about Rat. He’s just crazy.”

  He smiled. “I’ll come back tomorrow, okay?”

  Doris folded her arms and gave him a dangerous look. “If you don’t, I’ll send Rat over to eat you.”

  24

  The Four Zoas

  The trees in this forest were widely spaced, allowing ample light to filter through to the ground. Ed sat on the spongy ground and enjoyed the gentle breeze on his face. The air smelled so unlike smog that he was sure he must be a thousand miles from Los Angeles. He looked around to try to get his bearings, but all he could see was forest in every direction.

  When he turned back around, the gnome was standing in front of him.

  “Where are we?” Ed asked it.

  The creature stared up at him in silence.

  “The Guru said you’d be back.”

  Still without making a sound, it blinked its one eye at him.

  “So what do you want, then? If you won’t leave me alone, then just tell me what you want!”

  The creature slowly rose up into the air and floated, a foot off the ground, watching him.

  Ed pursed his lips and tried to do the same, but his backside stayed firmly planted on the ground.

  No, the gnome said silently. Relax. Float.

  Ed closed his eyes and tried again. Nothing happened. He shut his eyes more tightly and tried once more. Half a minute later he opened his eyes again and discovered that he was floating several inches above the mossy earth. He was so startled by this that he fell back down, landing painfully on his tailbone. The gnome cackled. Frustrated, Ed closed his eyes one more time. Soon he felt something brush against the top of his head, and when he opened his eyes he found that he was among the lowest branches of the trees. The gnome was hovering just a foot or two above him.

  The silence was broken by a long, drawn-out cracking sound that came from somewhere off to Ed’s right, followed by a crash that resounded through the forest. It sounded like a tree had fallen—a large one. A few leaves, shaken loose from nearby branches, fluttered down around them, and all was quiet once more.

  The gnome, paying no attention to the noise, floated up ten more feet, then twenty. It looked down at him expectantly, so Ed followed. For a moment they were inside the canopy of leaves; then they emerged from the treetops into a strange sort of light. The gnome stopped again and looked up. Through the mundane shell, it said. Ed recognized the quote from William Blake.

  The sky was the strangest thing Ed had ever seen. There was no sun. Everywhere he looked, he saw stars in a deep purple sky. They shone in a multitude of colors, some so bright that Ed felt his head would burst from the intensity of light.

  The forest stretched out below as far as he could see in every direction. It appeared peaceful, but again Ed heard the sound of a tree falling far off in the distance.

  The gnome was floating upward once more. Curious, Ed followed it up into the sky until they were among the stars. Ed could see them clearly now: each one was a different color from all the others, and they all threw off sparks that sped off silently into the depths of space. When one of the sparks touched him, he felt a cold tingle and his mind lit up for an instant as though a strobe light had been turned on. Images flashed before his eyes and were gone in a heartbeat, and then the spark had passed through his body and continued on its way into the purple void.

  The gnome led him closer to one of the stars, which, as they came closer, Ed discovered was not a star but a huge, red planet. Soon they were descending through filmy white clouds into a wilderness such as Ed had never seen. They flew over a rainforest where tangled trees grew a mile high or more, with vines connecting the treetops in a crisscrossing pattern that resembled an enormous spiderweb. From there they passed over a valley filled with what appeared to be ferns, but the fronds were covered with wicked, barbed thorns. All of the foliage had a reddish cast to it, the same as the red hue Ed had noticed when observing this planet during their approach.

  He and the gnome touched ground at the edge of the valley of ferns.
The spot the gnome had chosen was rocky and bare; there was rust-colored grass growing a few yards down the slope from where they stood, but at their feet were only rocks and dirt.

  “Where are we?” Ed asked, but since he hadn’t received an answer to the same question before, he had little hope of getting one now.

  “Think,” the gnome said.

  Ed frowned. “Think about what?”

  “Anything,” it snapped. “What you had for lunch.”

  Half-smiling, wondering whether it was making fun of him, Ed thought of the first thing that came to mind: Doris.

  The gnome grunted in a way that almost sounded like a laugh. “Now,” it said, “dig a hole.”

  Ed got down on his knees and poked at the ground. The soil was full of little stones, sharp enough to cut his skin; he carefully dug a small hole in the dirt with his fingers.

  “Now plant the thought,” said the gnome.

  It was Ed’s turn to laugh. “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “Plant it! Hold it in your hands like you hold it in your mind, and bury it!”

  Still smiling in disbelief, Ed closed his eyes and envisioned the thought of Doris as a seed in his hands. He put the imaginary seed in the ground and then moved the dirt to cover up the hole.

  “See?” said the gnome.

  Ed opened his eyes. Where he expected to see a mound of dirt on the ground, there was a tiny plant. Its three-pointed leaves had a bluish tint that stood out jarringly in this red place. He reached down to touch the plant, and as he brushed its leaves, an image of Doris appeared in his head.

  He gasped. “How did that happen?”

  “Never mind how. Do another one. A whole memory. Not just an image this time. And don’t touch any that aren’t yours.”

  Ed dug another hole next to the first and thought about his earlier conversation with the Guru. He closed his eyes, imagined that he was burying his memory, and covered the hole again. When he opened his eyes, there was no plant, just a pile of rocky soil.

  “Not too much at once!” groused the gnome.

  He tried again, this time focusing his mind on one thing the Guru had said: “Darjeeling would be wonderful.” Ed had no idea why this particular statement had stuck in his memory. When he opened his eyes this time, there was another little bluish-green plant growing beside the first.

  “Do another,” the gnome said. “Keep doing it.”

  “Is this something Arthur taught you?”

  “No! Arthur doesn’t know. Don’t let him find out.”

  “I don’t understand. What is this accomplishing?”

  The creature made an impatient noise. “Whatever you don’t save, they’ll take.”

  “Who?”

  “The servants of Urizen. Keep planting. Do more.”

  “You didn’t answer my other question,” Ed pressed. “Where is this place?”

  The gnome turned away from him and started to rise into the air once again. “Doesn’t matter where,” it said.

  “Tell me, or I won’t do any more of this... planting.”

  It stopped, hovering in the air just overhead. “Every world is a mind,” it said.

  “We’re inside someone’s mind? Whose?”

  “We’ll go to different worlds,” it said, ignoring his question. “Some will take your plantings easily. Some won’t. Leave a lot in each place. Leave the same one in a lot of places. Don’t touch anything.”

  “But why do you want me to do this? I still don’t get it.”

  “Wake up.”

  * * *

  Ed awoke with a start, baffled by his surroundings until he realized he was in his own bedroom. Shaking his head to dispel the strange dream, Ed looked at the clock and decided he wasn’t going to get any more sleep for a while. He put on an old bathrobe and wandered out to the living room, where Tom was snoring softly on the sofa.

  Ed’s father’s collection of Blake poems was in its usual place on the end table. Ed sat in his blue chair and picked up the oversized volume. Taking care to avoid damaging the old binding, he opened the book on his lap and began flipping through pages.

  He lingered for a while on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a late 18th-century work that described Blake’s conversations with Isaiah and Ezekiel. Ed had always wondered just how literally Blake had expected his readers to take his description of his visit with the prophets.

  Much of Marriage consisted of proverbs in imitation of the Biblical Proverbs, except that Blake’s Proverbs of Hell made little sense to Ed. “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” “He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.” Ed was struck by those two, after his experience with the gnome. Several of the proverbs had to do with the four elements. “Dip him in the river who loves water.” Could anything be made of that? “The fire burns the earth. The needle pierces the water,” said another. “The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.” That one made Ed think of Arthur, and he quickly turned the page.

  The next section, A Memorable Fancy, was the part that described Blake’s meeting with Isaiah and Ezekiel. A passage on the fourteenth plate caught Ed’s eye: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” Blake went on to describe a cave under a mill, where an angel showed him an abyss under the roots of an oak tree where black and white spiders and other horrible creatures lived, including chained monkeys that devoured each other.

  Ed grimaced and turned the page, flipping ahead to poems that pertained more directly to his current concerns. The Book of Urizen and Milton both went into considerable detail on Urizen and Orc and how their conflict came to be. The ongoing cycle of their conflict was described in other works as well, such as The Book of Ahania and Blake’s American and European prophecies. Ed had read them all so many times that he could recite passages from memory.

  At the end of the collection were two different incarnations of Blake’s unfinished poem, Vala, or The Four Zoas. The first version, according to the editor of the collection, had been written around 1797, while the second dated to around 1810. This work was where Ed’s limited grasp of Blake’s universe fell apart. The nine parts of The Four Zoas unified the mythology Blake had constructed so carefully in his other works, but also modified it. The struggle between love and reason was recast in this work as something more complicated—a conflict among the four living spirits, the Zoas, that were the competing aspects of the human psyche. Instead of Orc and Urizen, this work pitted Los, the creator of life and imagination, against the rational Urizen for control of humanity.

  Ed lingered for a while on Blake’s description of Golgonooza, Blake’s city of artistic creation. Could Golgonooza be connected, somehow, to the city Ed had dreamed of? But Golgonooza was described as a great city of spires and domes, with a vast furnace at the center; Ed’s Dream City had looked gray and ordinary.

  His father’s old bookmark was still stuck in the same place where Ed had found it more than fifteen years ago, when the book had passed into his possession. It was an old scrap of paper, not a proper bookmark; Ed’s father, a disorganized high school English teacher, had always used torn-off corners of newspapers or old cash register receipts to mark his place. This poem, for all Ed knew, might have been the last thing his father had read before the accident. Blake’s work, and especially The Four Zoas, had been particularly significant to Ed’s father for some reason, and in the years after his death Ed had struggled to understand it. Perhaps, in reading the books his father had read, Ed would come to some kind of understanding about the sort of person he’d been. And yet, no matter how many times Ed read it, the poem’s meaning continued to escape him.

  He turned to the dog-eared page where the paper scrap still marked his father’s place and read a passage at random. It was a story of the children of Los, whose names were familiar to Ed although the details were fuzzy i
n his memory. He recalled that Palamabron stood for pity for the oppressed, and was a personification of Blake himself. His brother was Rintrah, who represented revolutionary fury.

  Rintrah, the gnome said. Ed glanced up and saw it perched on the kitchen counter, watching.

  “I don’t know what any of this means,” Ed replied.

  Rintrah, it said urgently. Big John.

  “What does John have to do with it?”

  The gnome didn’t answer.

  “Do you understand any of this?”

  Arthur does, said the gnome.

  “To hell with Arthur,” Ed said, much louder than he meant to.

  Kajdas woke up from his deep sleep on the couch with a startled cry. He sat up and fumbled under the sofa until he found his gun, which he cocked and pointed at Ed. “Hoom vah?” he demanded. The gnome vanished.

  Ed leapt to his feet with a cry of alarm, dumping the heavy old book in a heap on the floor. “Jesus Christ, Tom, put that thing away!”

  “Oh,” said Tom, lowering his automatic. “I thought you were a burglar.” He scratched his hairy thigh and yawned. “What time is it?”

  Early the next morning, sensing that he had overstayed his welcome, Tom packed his things and went home.

  * * *

  Over the next few weeks, Ed returned to the Guru’s house often to see Doris and talk to the teacher. Occasionally the Guru was lucid enough to converse with him. Most of the time he slouched in his wheelchair and gave no sign that he knew anyone was there. Ed’s hope of discussing Blake’s writings with him dissolved quickly as the Guru’s condition worsened.

  Ed went back to work and was given a welcome-back party by his co-workers. Even Dan Berry showed up, though he looked unhappy to be there and left before they cut the cake. When asked about the accident that had put him out of work for so long, Ed managed to answer obliquely enough that everyone assumed he was disturbed by the experience and didn’t want to talk about it. Bruce Dallman came over and gave him a hug that lifted his feet right off the ground, and Mookie came over to shake his hand. Chaki was there too, although he seemed unsure what the party was for. He ate three pieces of cake and then left.