Mount Terminus: A Novel

by Grand, David

  Revealed to him were the mummified remains of a woman wearing the very uniform he had seen Miranda’s attendant, Adora, wearing in Manuel Salazar’s journal. He reached for his lantern and hung it over her face to find an image he had seen before only in photographs, of the unwrapped remains found in Egyptian tombs. She looked like a doll whittled from mahogany, brown and varnished, with no nose or lips or eyes to speak of. She appeared to be wearing a fright mask too large for her face. Her mouth was agape, her teeth discolored and bucked, all her soft tissue long ago shriveled or decomposed. Bloom sat beside her for some time, long enough to grow accustomed to the sight, and soon he lost his fear to touch her. He touched first her hair and found upon contact it turned to dust. Her skin was a petrified shell, brittle in texture, and when he jabbed at her fingers, which were clasped together over her chest, the digits clattered. He spoke to her now. Promised her that one day he would return to give her a proper burial in the gardens. But for the time being, he covered her over once again, and turned to the box. In it, he found wrapped in cloth, a stack of parchment, each page filled with writing.

  * * *

  Bloom waited until after dinner to show Isabella these papers. When they had finished eating, he escorted her to the gallery, and as they had done that morning, they reclined together, and Isabella translated the testimony Adora had written after she had been entombed alive.

  She writes here at the beginning, said Isabella, she’s been made a prisoner to keep her from telling anyone what she’s seen. Here, Isabella said, she expresses her love for Miranda, and asks God’s forgiveness for having transgressed in ways for which she should feel shame, but can’t, because the sins she’s committed were bound by the love she felt for her mistress.

  What had she done? asked Bloom.

  She writes that Fernando was a savage and a monster, who from the moment he married Miranda suffocated her with an affection she couldn’t return. She recounts the circumstances of their exile. Explains here that the incident between Fernando and the king’s man wasn’t the honorable confrontation Fernando claimed it to be, but rather an act of murder, a spontaneous assault committed against the man for doing little more than make a passing gesture to Miranda in a corridor, a simple greeting directed in his and his wife’s direction. He saw something that wasn’t there, she writes, and he grew so impassioned with rage, he dashed the poor man’s head in with the silver handle of his walking stick. It was for this they were sent away from everyone and everything they knew. And for this, for having solicited the man’s attention, for creating a circumstance in which he was forced to defend her honor, Fernando punished Miranda. He locked her away. Behind the closed doors of the ship’s cabin when they made their passage, behind closed doors here in this house. Her only authority, said Isabella, was over her servants, so she took great liberties with them as a form of rebellion against Fernando.

  To spite him, she dispensed with decorum. To humiliate him, she paraded herself around as she pleased within the confines of her chambers. Every day she prayed Fernando would tire of her antics and return her to Spain. When this appeared unlikely, she changed her tactic and began to pursue Manuel, whom she knew loved her. One day, not very long after the villa had been completed, Fernando rode out into the valley to inspect his cattle, when, on Miranda’s order, Adora carried a message to Manuel. Miranda invited him into this room, Isabella said, and she and Adora together seduced him and made love to him. They repeated this experience for some months until Manuel had grown accustomed to their affections. The women then began withdrawing their warmth, and soon grew cold. He begged them, she writes, to accept his love and devotion. Miranda offered to be his if he could arrange their escape. She said if he returned with her and Adora to Spain, she would devote herself to him entirely. Manuel agreed, and one morning, not long afterward, he sent word with Adora that he’d organized safe passage to the port; the two women, he said, should be prepared to leave that evening. That night, however, passed into morning, and Manuel never came. Miranda sent Adora to him, and Adora found him sitting in his studio on the hill in an agitated state. His work, he told her, his position, was more important to him than he had realized, more important to him than the love he felt for them. He couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice Fernando’s patronage. To have done what Miranda had asked of him, he explained, would mean the end of his dreams. I am a coward, he said to Adora. You chose your hero poorly. Miranda, Adora writes, now grew despondent. Nothing she could do for her would lift her from her despair. And here, Isabella said, is the answer I was searching for earlier today. Miranda decided she would no longer allow these men to enjoy her as their object of desire. She would show them how she truly felt by manifesting her sorrow in her appearance. So she began poisoning herself in the manner we saw in the notebook. It took only months, Adora writes, before she became thin and frail, and a few months more before she was gravely ill, so ill and so ugly to behold, both Fernando and Manuel were grief-stricken at the sight of her. They diverted their eyes away from her when she passed, wept at the mere mention of her name. And when Fernando began to see how her condition affected Manuel, he began to suspect his sadness derived not from a cousinly concern, but from a deeper affection. Unknown to him, Fernando ordered his man, Roberto, to keep a watchful eye on Manuel, and it was at this time Roberto discovered Manuel’s secret chamber. Roberto told Fernando, and Fernando, one morning while Manuel was away at work, climbed the ladder to see his wife take her morning bath, and saw in what manner Adora attended to her, and he saw the poison she had been applying to her face. At the sight of this, Fernando descended the shaft’s ladder and charged upstairs to his wife’s room, and in front of Adora, he brutalized Miranda, who, as she was being beaten, courageously expressed her contempt for him, encouraged him to beat her harder. And he did just that. And the harder he beat her, the more she insulted him, swore to him that any love she ever felt for him was false. As she bled from her nose and mouth, she bragged of her affair with Manuel, told him what great comfort she had taken in his body. She needn’t have said any more than this, Adora writes. She could have saved herself the beating had she only said this at the start, as Fernando in that instant threw Miranda over his shoulder and carried her to the tub, where he submerged her in the bath. With one hand he held her under the water by the throat, with the other he fended off Adora. Miranda struggled for several minutes, kicked and scratched at her husband, but she eventually grew still. Adora, at this point, ran off to hide, but when she entered the courtyard, she saw Manuel descending the steps from the studio. She ran to him and told him what Fernando had done. She told him Fernando knew of their attachment and begged him to run away and hide with her. Manuel, instead, charged off in a rage. Adora, intent to stop him, followed him to the boudoir, where he discovered Miranda on the bed, her body … Isabella lifted her hand to her mouth.

  What is it? asked Bloom. On Isabella’s face was an expression of profound disgust.

  He defiled her, she said. It wasn’t enough to brutalize her and drown her. He went so far as to …

  What?

  He lodged a candle inside her, she said, and lit the wick. When Adora and Manuel walked in, it had just begun to singe the bedspread. Adora blew out the flame and covered her over, and Manuel, he was now in an even greater rage. He called out Fernando’s name. In response, Fernando called his, from somewhere below. And down Manuel went, Adora writes. From the landing she watched Fernando and Roberto drag him out to the courtyard, where Roberto restrained his arms and Fernando drove over and over again the blade of a knife into his chest. They then let him go, to stumble away and fall face-first into the reflecting pool. It was then Roberto turned away from Manuel’s corpse to her. He walked upstairs and grabbed hold of her by the hair, dragged her into the cellar, where he struck her on the head. When she awoke, she found herself entombed, trapped in the void of the villa, where she was left with a pen and some paper, three candles, and one decanter of water. God forgive me, she writes here at
the bottom. And then at the end, Miranda, my love, I am coming to you.

  * * *

  Neither Bloom nor Isabella could have anticipated that this funereal night in which they lay together quietly contemplating the fates of Miranda, Adora, and Manuel Salazar would be their last for the foreseeable future. The following day, Isabella stood in the doorway of Bloom’s studio some hours before they were to meet for lunch to tell him Dr. Straight had received a telegram informing him that his wife, Julia, had fallen gravely ill. Bloom followed her out to her cottage and helped gather her things. When the packing was finished, they paused long enough for Bloom to say, You will come back to me, won’t you?

  She leaned into Bloom and, without saying a word, kissed him.

  Please, said Bloom, tell me you’ll come back.

  Yes, she said, I will.

  As soon as you’re able.

  Yes, said Isabella. As soon as I’m able.

  And that was all. In an hour’s time of hearing the news, Bloom stood at the top of the drive with Gottlieb beside him, and they watched them motor away.

  Do you feel the despair? Gottlieb asked as the sedan dipped down onto the mountain road.

  Yes, said Bloom.

  Good! Now go use it! The small man reached up and turned Bloom’s shoulders, pulled down his chin so they faced each other. I will not tolerate idleness. Not for a moment. There is much too much to do. If you must be forlorn, be forlorn with Death. He awaits you. Gottlieb now turned Bloom in the direction of the door, walked him through to the courtyard, and pointed him in the direction of the studio.

  * * *

  Bloom returned to his work that day, but as much as Gottlieb willed him not to allow his emotions to interfere with his work, but to make it better, Bloom felt such a profound absence of spirit, he wanted nothing more than to take to his bed. He somehow managed to continue his preparations for the production of Death, Forlorn, stopping every now and again to draw for Isabella a small sketch. He posted in the mail two, sometimes three drawings a day, each a small detail of the villa. If accumulated and arranged at the point of delivery, they would have been a taxonomy of his small world’s margins. For some time, he drew objects that hung on walls and in doorways: Oriental cloths, strings of Turkish beads, a Japanese lantern suspended from a silk cord. At other times, he drew bouquets of chrysanthemums, pink, orange, and white. Cushions of Japanese silk. Chinese vases. Elijah in his cage. The view of the courtyard from the windows of his studio.

  He received letters from Isabella not quite as frequently as he sent them, but frequently enough that he didn’t feel neglected or forgotten. He learned, through the month of desert gales following their departure, that Dr. Straight had been made bereft by his wife’s illness, and when she died some weeks after the autumnal gales had ceased, he grew inconsolable. Since his time on Mount Terminus, Isabella wrote, the congenial man who stood with such granite stature had withdrawn from his colleagues and responsibilities and had taken to drinking himself to sleep at night. Isabella wanted nothing more than to comfort him in some way, but found the only way to care for him was to let him be. Bloom considered abandoning his work and leaving Mount Terminus to be with Isabella and Dr. Straight, to help see them through their difficult time. He did know something about loss and its aftermath, after all. But this notion occurred to him too late. Before he could gather the courage to act on his noble idea, he received a letter from Isabella, telling him she and Dr. Straight would soon be departing on a long journey. They had been invited by the Institut de France to conduct their invertiscope experiments in field hospitals at and around the front beyond Paris. The psychologist and philosopher Pierre Janet, who was well known for his studies on hysteria and his experiments in brainwave entrainment, believed the invertiscope could prove a beneficial tool in treating soldiers suffering the effects of shell shock and could, perhaps, be used as an effective therapy to rehabilitate the wounded. I can’t tell you, wrote Isabella, Dr. Straight’s transformation since he received the invitation. He has rediscovered his reason for being. Not only would they be able to put their experiments to work in the field, but also they could very well serve a beneficial purpose. And, what’s more, they would be in close proximity to the battlefield, where they planned to document the war on film. They would collect footage they could one day apply to Dr. Straight’s aversion trials.

  Upon reading this, Bloom wrote a response in which he pleaded with her not to put herself in peril. Should something happen to you, look to Dr. Straight to see what you will make of me.

  I know you understand, Isabella replied. I know you wouldn’t want to dissuade me, or the doctor, from doing our work.

  Aren’t you afraid? he wrote.

  Of course I’m afraid, she replied.

  I’m afraid for you.

  I want to embrace my fear.

  When will you return?

  I don’t know.

  But when we return, she promised, I will return to you.

  I’m diminished.

  Be proud of me. And wish me all the best. Tell me to be brave.

  In his last exchange with Isabella before she departed, he wrote just that. I am proud of you. I wish you all the best and more. Be brave. And he then expressed his love for her not with words, but in a miniature drawing of Cupid and Psyche. Take this with you, he wrote on the back, and think of me always.

  She allowed him the final word.

  * * *

  Bloom would receive no letters or telegrams after this. He would hear nothing about Isabella or Dr. Straight from Gottlieb. Nothing of her whereabouts or what she was doing. She would, nevertheless, inhabit him completely, not unlike the way a series of images inhabited his thoughts when he began to contemplate a scenario for a picture. The images, when they manifested themselves, grew inside him, larger and larger, and spread out widely and clearly until they were complete and ever present in his mind. From here he could survey the entire picture at one glance. Wie gleich alles zusammen, Mozart said of this moment when he was composing symphonies. Right away, all together—Wie gleich alles zusammen. In this period of Bloom’s manhood, this was precisely how his moods were composed when Isabella’s image arrived in his mind. He saw her in all her permutations, inside his deepest thoughts, felt her in the innermost regions of his body. Wie gleich alles zusammen. To heighten this experience, he often went to the library, where Isabella and the doctor did their work. In their hasty departure, they had left everything exactly as it was the moment they received the news about Dr. Straight’s wife. They left a crate beside a table on top of which was a light cabinet, beside this, Walgensten’s thaumaturgic lantern, still assembled, its candleholder submerged in rivulets of cooled wax. And hung from the bookshelves before the lantern was a white sheet on which they revived the phantasmagorias they discovered in the wooden boxes. Bloom told Meralda and Roya to leave all these objects just so. They were not to be moved until Isabella returned. Until then, he said to them, I want to be able to look upon everything as it is, to look upon the white sheet, to see Isabella as she was.

  * * *

  In the months that followed the last of Isabella’s correspondence, Bloom found in his deepest solitude the ache of longing. He no longer took comfort in his most solitary moments. Instead he was agitated by his solitude, and for not having been more forceful with her, he was ripe with regret. Had he only fought for her harder, he wondered. Had he traveled to the university to remove her from Dr. Straight’s influence, he thought, perhaps, then, she would be with him now. As he completed his work on Death, Forlorn and began to review the work he had done, he better understood the husband’s obsession and despair. He now knew what motivated him to walk into the apothecary’s shop to drink down the bottle of poison, to take on Death’s challenges, to sacrifice his life for the life of his lover. He better understood why, when he was a child, his father made him swear that he should protect his love when he found it. He knew now that the failed promises of love weighed down the human heart more so than an
y of love’s hardships. He better understood the wounds that festered within Samuel Freed. He could empathize with his irrational need to torment the one he believed responsible for the loss of all his future affections. He better understood the lengths to which Manuel went to watch Miranda, the impulse that drove his father to his gardens every day. He knew now why Simon, it seemed, never pursued love, why he was suspicious of it, avoided it altogether. For the first time, Bloom knew the hollow nature of loneliness. Before Isabella, he felt whole in his solitude. After Isabella, he knew that feeling to be an illusion.

  As he had done for Mephisto’s Affinity, Bloom drew the storyboard for Death, Forlorn. He redrew the images he had spent almost a year composing for his father, made additions, included even more detail. And when he finished his panels, which amounted to more than two hundred, he proceeded to chart out for Gottlieb every aspect of the production. He mapped out frame by frame, scene by scene, every camera angle, point of view shift, approach and retreat. He inserted cutaways and diagrammed lighting arrangements, what lamps belonged where on the battens, in what order they were to be turned on and off. He choreographed each actor’s movement to and from their marks, sketched costume patterns for the seamstresses, made notes for makeup changes that coincided with the lighting changes. He went so far as to design an outdoor set constructed from concrete. It would be fitted with copper tubes through which they could run kerosene to stage a controlled fire for the climax, when the husband entered Death’s embrace. When it came time to build the sets, Bloom oversaw the work until he was satisfied with every detail. He checked and rechecked the lights. Set out the actors’ marks. Laid the rails himself for the tracking shots. They would film the live action first, and then move on to the filming of the miniatures, for which he devised a special track all its own, one that circled the entire fortress wall, so it would appear as if it were being observed by the young couple from their carriage. And for the moment when the wall dematerialized before the husband, he would achieve this through stop-motion animation, by methodically removing one brick after the next. Death would then walk through the opening of a small portion of an identical fragment of wall he would build on the lot. He would then animate the closing of the wall by reversing the process. One by one, he’d replace the bricks in the order they were removed. And on he would move to filming Death’s cathedral in miniature, which Bloom built in such a way he could dismantle it into several pieces. Fit together, he could film its exterior. He would then dismantle it, fill it with lit candles, reassemble it, and hoist it up to the ceiling of his studio, where he would set the camera beneath it and there capture Death’s captive souls.