“No.”
He nodded understandingly, taking the photo from me, and gave me a four-by-six black-and-white picture in exchange. “How about the one on the right?”
I saw two white men on a pier. The one on the right. The surgeon in the blood-drenched coat forces the pincers between the eyeball and the socket.
I flinched and covered my right eye in a knee-jerk response.
“I see you know him.”
I think I stammered for the first time in my life since puberty. “How the fuck … ?”
“He was a South African of Boer ancestry; became a doctor in Bloemfontein. In the early eighties he joined a community of young Afrikaners who meant to settle in the north. Actually they ended up living off African hospitality and stocking up on shaman drugs. He somehow ended up in Rwanda with permanent psychosis. Took advantage of the genocide last year to perform some creative surgery.”
I sit up and grab the surgeon’s skull and shove his face into a rack of syringes, needles up.
“Did that really happen?”
“I saw his corpse. The doctor’s, that is. I never found the victim’s body, but I don’t think he lived much longer after that. Phoenixes rarely grasp any more than some extra minutes.”
I feel the breeze through my fingers inside the cavity. I shoot my way along the corridor, guerrillas with Kalashnikovs splattering their useless brains on the walls.
“This is impossible.”
“I presume you have other folders like this,” he said.
“Yes.” My mind was unfocused, distracted by atrocious memories of soldiers burned alive. “Numbers 4 and 7. And we think 15 is here somewhere, but we didn’t find it.”
“15 was pretty early this year; it must be filed already,” was his speak-of-the-weather comment. “Number 4 was the techno musician, right? Catchy. So Cutler found her?”
“He sent a CD.” I kept rubbing my eyes, trying to sweep off the confusion. “Number 7,” I stuttered, “she was a Mexican woman, holding a baby. Somebody sent a police file. A woman looking just like her.”
“Not just like her. It must be her.”
I looked down at Niamh—she was twitching on my lap.
“What’s happened to her?” I asked again. “What did she see inside that sphere?”
“Nothing. You don’t look inside it. It looks outside. It’s an eye.”
And he pointed to, and I looked at, the hideous thing we’d retrieved from the minotaur, lurking from its hideout under my jacket.
“I always tend to give things more credit when I read them in print,” he said, standing up. “Allow me; Ambrose has some good bibliography on the subject.”
EXCERPT FROM G. L. BURGESS’ RELICS OF A BIGGER WORLD. NEW YORK, 1957
* * *
Nonetheless, as Berkeley put it, “History, not only myth, defies materialism.” The past described in ancient chronicles is populated by ideas, not objects or subjects. It is speculation to vouch for the existence of such objects between allusions in books. That all-seeing mirror that the Byzantine historian George Hamartolos believed to be in possession of Alexander the Great may or may not be the same one that Herodotus and Dio Chrysostom attributed to Gaumata the Magian. Or Gaumata’s mirror might actually be the “omnivident window” atop the Tower of Rulers near Erzurum, said by Pliny the Elder (Natural History, xxx.103) to overlook the whole universe “without shrinking.” (This tower, incidentally, might be the one that Galland places in Ethiopia.) In 1666, Borellus (Alchemy, XIII) borrowed from Pliny the adjective omnividens to describe a crystal ball in the unidentified palace of Amber, inside which “the reflections of all living creatures in the universe dwell.” Here the Frenchman might have been quoting Zosimos of Panopolis, who claimed to have seen such an object in a Scythian temple; or Abulfeda, who placed it in Amr, Iberia, and averred it was “the eye of a pagan god.” Avicenna retook this legend and linked it to that of the Aliph, an orb “the size of a speck, which contains the whole universe within.” In modern times, Sir Richard Burton and von Slatin still register the mosque of Amr in northeastern Turkey. The idea of an all-seeing crystal has thus endured centuries and mutations to break into the present time in the form of ruins. But in Berkeley’s words, “Ruins might have been always ruins; some human skeletons were never humans.”
EXCERPT FROM V. LAURENTIS’ OF OUTER CIRCLES. LUCERNE, 1679
* * *
& amongst those Devices employed by Sorcerers, Myrrors and Crystal Balls may be controlled by their Owners to watch over their Enemies; but some Artefacts have a Mind of their own. Crystals may be used to see through, whilst other Crystals are Eyes & they see by their Will. These Eyes do not spy solely on Men, but on Demons & Angels & Forbidden Things that Men are not allowed to see. & for this Reason the Book of Yaël warns, “Damnation to Him Who sees through an Eye, for the Eye sees within his Soul & weighs the Good and the Evil in it. & if It finds Evil in his Heart, Nightmares will haunt Him & the Knowledge of the Hidden World will creep upon his Soul like Spiders.”
EXCERPT FROM F. RAYNAL’S A TRAVELER’S JOURNALS. LONDON, 1908
* * *
September25th—Early in the morning, while Iskandar and his boy discussed the route, I sketched down the unnatural yellow sky over the Black Sea. They chose to lead us into the country along the border, which in this craggy region of knife-sharp mountains is but a line on the map freely trespassed by Turkish smugglers and Russophone Gypsies.
Just some yards inland, the path turned painfully steep, switching from shadowy valleys to magnificent vistas in a matter of minutes. From one of the latter we sighted another cave village across the Yavits River, and I insisted on exploring it. As soon as we took the long slope up, the dwellers swarmed out through the myriad holes in the rocky walls, like soldier termites running to defend their nest, and on our arrival the children took great pleasure in stroking our clothes and seemed immensely amused by my spectacles, while unveiled women offered us food and water. We could not but submit to their hospitality, so we stayed for lunch, which consisted of mashed legumes, cheese, bread, and tea. Gaumont offered the elders some Scotch, but they refused. They still observed some Islam traditions, and yet few of them spoke any Arabic.
The air was cooling when we waded across the river and returned to the main route through the Samzic chain. Gaumont sighted some distinct Byzantine ruins and we newly discussed the many affluent cultures that have shaped this country, from the Eastern Roman Empire, so unlike its Western counterpart, to the Persians, Turks, and Russians. A beautiful proof of this colorful substrata we found at the Azidz Pass: it was the Mosque of Amr, mentioned by Sir Alistair Boleskine in the last volume of his Asian Travels. The mosque (the noun is excessive) is but a sanctified peristyle square within the ruins of a greater Byzantine palace. The imam was delighted with our interest in the broken yet powerful architecture, and he led us downstairs into the foundations: the remains of an older site on top of which the palace was built. Gaumont was dumbfounded at the sight of those proto-Islamic arcs, clearly older than Muhammad and Jesus Christ.
Then the caretaker took my hand and guided me into the deeper end. I confess I felt uneasy wandering among those arcs and columns whose number one could estimate as infinite in the dark, blinded beyond the dwindling pool of light around the guide’s torch. The cracked ceiling incessantly poured trickles of sand into the chamber, so that in the further end the floor was arisen and the capitals lowered to my reach, and the vaults were blackened by the seemingly frequent visits of torchbearers. The imam stopped by a pillar and instructed me to lean my hand on the capital. Despite being aware of a queer, vibrating sound in the dark, at the time I did not remember Sir Boleskine’s mention of the unexplained prodigy I was about to witness: My hand touched nothing but ancient stone, and yet within that stone I felt what I can only describe as a frantic heartbeat. My guide referred to it as the Orb of Allah, and explained that it was kept inside the stone so that no man could see God through it. But once a year, at the sunrise of the shortest day, th
e Orb takes a minute’s rest. Then a man can look inside and the Orb remembers twenty people of its choice, and these twenty will in time speak to Allah in heaven.
There were another two books that Caleb had produced, grossly overestimating my command of Latin. I just skimmed through them and tossed them onto the pile.
“This is bullshit,” I concluded.
“I know how it sounds.”
“I’m not saying how it sounds; I’m saying what it is. It sounds worse.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“No, Niamh does that. I’m the rational one.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
I sighed, just to slow down the pace. “It is hard not to, in this house.”
“Oh, so you saw it.”
“Her,” I corrected. “She’s a girl.”
He rose, in a resolute history-teacher fashion. The fireplace suited him. I was still on the sofa, Niamh’s delicate head resting on my lap. My right hand played with her ear piercings.
He asked permission to smoke; on my granting it, he started to fill a pipe.
“That sphere,” he began, pointing at the chair with my jacket and the darkly shining object beneath it, “came to Horace Wells in 1892.”
“Did he pry it out of the pillar?”
“What? Oh, no, the one under the mosque is still there, as far as I know. There is more than one. The Suda says five; we have located three. This one he traded a revolver for from a fugitive in Bombay, where his father was stationed. He’d noticed the untouchable had carried it wrapped in a cloth and wore gloves; when Horace touched it with his bare fingers, he learned why. He spent the following year carrying it around India, until a savant back in Bombay told him what it was.”
He lit his pipe. It stank in a very dignifying way.
“That is the Wells’ version. As my own grandfather used to tell it, the fugitive told him about the Eye; then Wells wandered for a year searching for it, and on his return to Bombay he met the savant. In both versions this happened on December the twenty-first. That is when he saw the first Twenty.”
“Twenty what?”
“Twenty people. Twenty visions. Twenty dreams, as you put it, that obsessed him forever. You can read his notes on them, if you wish; they’re in the archive. The Wells have kept notes on every Twenty since 1892.”
“What twenty?” I reversed. “What are you talking about?”
“The Eye’s picks,” he answered patiently, and pointed to the bibliography at my feet. “The Orb of Allah’s memories while it takes its yearly minute’s rest. During the year, the Eye shows nothing more than flashes and shadows. Touching it causes nothing but a violent jolt, and then that.” (Pointing at Niamh.) “Through an insulator, one might perceive an entangled string of images and sounds and smells at unimaginable speed; then, seconds later, that happens too.” (He pointed at Niamh again.) “But every year, at the dawn of the shortest day, the Eye stops its frenzied activity for a minute, and at this time, you can touch it. Then it chooses twenty events in the previous year; twenty milestones along the road—at least according to its enigmatic opinion—starring twenty people, anywhere in the world. A musician in Ibiza. A gun seller in Liberia. A bank robber in Mexico. A genocide victim in Rwanda. Most are remarkable, in a way. Many seem trivial enough. Some are delicious to the senses. Others are so atrocious, they overshadow the rest. The Eye seems to forget them all soon enough, back to its insect-speed watching. But the man who sees what the Twenty saw, feels what the Twenty felt, won’t forget so easily.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait a minute,” I cut in. “Are you … You’re telling me that everything the ball shows actually happened?”
“Somewhere in the world, sometime in 1994.”
“I saw … a person falling from, like, fifty thousand meters, plunge onto a tropical island, and stand up and walk, just like that. I saw a skeleton playing poker!”
Caleb just nodded and smoked, at peace.
“For centuries,” he began, “sources on the Eye perplexedly described its visions as ‘creatures’ or ‘monsters.’ Of course, if the Eye chose an Eskimo, a Cherokee, or an Aborigine, to Muslim pilgrims in the temple of Amr it must have looked like footage from another world. Now the world is almost completely mapped—or so does the layman think. So for every Twenty, even within the realm of the remarkable, there are only three or four that strike us as alien.”
“Mr. Ford,” I insisted. “A. Skeleton. Playing. Poker.”
“The best thing about the Eye is that it’s not just an extraordinary thing. It’s a window to extraordinary things.”
I guess he expected my reason to simply collapse under the weight of the many arguments it would pull out against that.
“So that’s it,” I said. “A crystal ball shows it, so it must be true.”
“It worked for your cousin,” he retorted triumphantly. “Do you know why we’re here? Because Horace Wells managed to locate a haunted house he saw in the Eye. The Ngara girl was number ten in 1896.”
With that he sat down again, before adding, “Tens are all ghosts, by the way. That boy in Africa this year? The one who looks over his shoulder? That was a ghost he felt.”
I said nothing. And he just rocked in his chair and smoked like a happy little hobbit.
“A remarkable deed, truth be told,” he rambled now, in the way one would expect from a much older wise man. “Finding a ten. Elpenors are early quitters.”
I didn’t understand a word either.
“So it’s true then,” I said to steer the conversation back to minimum absurdity. “The Wells bought this house because it was haunted.”
“Among other reasons. By 1900 Horace Wells knew he would devote his life to the Eye, to try to solve the mystery of the Twenty. He needed a quiet place, a stronghold to keep the Eye safe, and means to finance his research. So he moved to America, land of quick fortunes.”
“And he chose the house with a ghost in it.”
“Wouldn’t you have done the same?”
“Yes,” I replied swiftly.
“And why?” he inquired, his pipe accusing me like a state attorney.
“Because meeting the Ngara girl is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“Now you talk like a Wells,” he said, lounging in his seat. “You understand why the Eye obsessed Horace, why it obsesses us. It is one of the few things in the world that trespasses the boundaries of our comprehension, that blatantly escapes mankind’s consensus of what is real, of what is possible. Not an invisible puff of ectoplasm or a questionable abstract phenomenon: a real, palpable object that defies logic. It is an intruder from myths. A relic of the magical past that made its way to our time.
“Horace Wells had no challenges in life before. The son of a British officer, highly educated, distantly religious. His path was laid; his life was to be utterly mundane; he expected no surprises. And then India gave him one. A godly object. The eye of a god, some say—like that wouldn’t make it a god in itself! It turned Wells’ reality upside down. It gave him glimpses of extraordinary places, impossible people, transcendent things!”
“And he naturally longed for more than glimpses.”
“Who wouldn’t? The Eye does not just see—by the end of the year, it judges. For the first time, you hear an entity above man, a god, speaking. How can you ignore it? Anyone would do what old Wells did: spend his life trying to find those whom the Eye picked, to participate in their greatness, perhaps even to merit the Eye’s attention. For the first time, somebody outside some old dubious sacred book is actually saying what is expected from man.”
“Which is just as soon to solve Rubik’s cubes or indulge in homosexual love as to rob, kill, or maim,” I pointed out.
“The Eye knows no morality,” he probably quoted. “It is unlike all religions. It is not a sacred object turned into a tool by priests who make up rules and ethics to keep the people on a leash. It is just the sacred object, period. It is a god … and we followe
rs trying to figure out what it means.”
We paused.
“The way you put it, it’s beginning to sound less like a secret society and more like a cult.”
“It might be,” he admitted. “The Eye of Amr, the one described by Raynal, is in a temple. We have reason to believe that all the existing Eyes are related to that one; they were scattered at some moment in history. They must have been worshipped at some point. Today, they are little more than a legend, and not even a popular one. Some thousands in the world must have read about it, a few hundred have seen it … and as far as I know, only twenty people have been keeping track of its yearly verdicts for the last century.”
“That’s when Horace Wells founded the Society.”
“Not founded, really. The Eye Society came up by itself. I think in the beginning Horace just wanted to share the revelation. The treasure was too big for one man. So every winter solstice there was somebody new attending the showdown—that is, the recall, the moment of the year when the Eye speaks. My grandfather was among the very first. Spears and Dagenais too; our families sailed together from England. But it wasn’t a society at the time; the Eye was just the excuse for a Christmas gathering. Of course, they saw the magic convenience of expanding the group to twenty people. It was a good number: a chosen number. They reached it in 1908.”
“And I guess at that moment it just seemed logical to distribute tasks: twenty visions for twenty members.”
“Again, at the time, they probably didn’t call them tasks. But yes, before 1910 the assignments had begun. Each member was given a vision to work with; their goal was to put it in context, find out where in the world, who in the world. Just as Horace Wells did in finding Axton House.”
“Was there a prize?”
“No. I guess the prospect of meeting a chosen one, talking to him or her, was appealing enough. Not that he or she would have much to say; they are unaware of their cosmic relevance. Today, though, we’ve forgotten about meeting them; if you just have a name by the end of the year, it’s a victory.”
The Supernatural Enhancements Page 19
