by Jeffrey Ford
When I looked up to watch him, I realized that he had led me back to the entrance. Bataldo headed out of the city toward the tree line of the forest, and I could hear him weeping. As he disappeared into the darkness at the edge of the wood, Misrix instantly appeared from the very same spot. He walked toward me, his wings outstretched.
"I'm better now, Cley. We must continue," called the demon as he approached.
"Is my body doing well?" I asked.
"You are sleeping like a pup," he said. "Come now." With this, he moved behind me and clutched me beneath the arms. A cry of agony cut through the forest as we lifted off the ground, dried dirt billowing around us from the action of his wings. We hovered above the city, and for a moment I could make out the entirety of its spiral design.
"I feel strong now," said the demon, as we flew at top speed through the cold night again.
"I met one of your victims from the Beyond," I said, as he changed direction straight upward toward the now fully risen moon.
"Regrettable in hindsight," he said. "But back then he served me well."
"And will I serve you also?" I asked.
The demon stopped flying, laughed, then plunged headlong out of the sky. The sudden rush of the wind was a roar that stole my scream. He put his mouth to my ear, and shouted, "You will serve us all."
9
I FOUND MYSELF SITTING IN A GREEN-CUSHIONED CHAIR in the corner of a large parlor. There were windows without glass, bookshelves, a chandelier, a thick pink rug with an interwoven design of flowering tendrils. The warm night breeze drifted in over the four figures sitting at a table in the center of the room. They were drinking cocktails and conversing about the disintegration of something. There was a woman and three men, and when one of them noticed me and pointed, they all turned and stared.
"Your specimen has arrived, Anotine," said the man who first saw me.
The woman smiled and waved her hand for me to join them. "Come over," she said.
"Have a drink," said the thin man to the right of her.
My head was still spinning from the fall, but I got out of the chair and walked unsteadily toward the table.
"What is your name?" asked the woman, adjusting the strap of her yellow dress.
"Cley," I said.
"Anotine," she said, and put her hand out to me. Her hair and eyes were dark. She was smooth-skinned, perhaps a year or two younger than myself.
I did not touch her for fear that my palm might pass through hers, but I nodded and smiled.
She pointed to the man across the table who had first seen me. "Doctor Hellman," she said. A small, bearded fellow with spectacles and prominent ears shrugged, and said, "Welcome," as if he were asking a question.
"This is Brisden," she said, laying a hand on the shoulder of the man to her right.
"Are you light-headed, Mr. Cley? Sometimes when the specimens arrive, they complain of lightheadedness," he said. His suit was wrinkled where it wasn't stretched by his obesity. The watery eyes, the weary measure of his speech told me he had already had quite a few sips from the dark pint bottle he held.
"I'm fine," I lied, as the third man handed me a drink.
"Nunnly," he said, pulling out the chair that sat between the doctor and himself. "Good of you to come."
I sat down warily at the table and took a sip. The instant I brought the glass to my mouth, I smelled the warm floral scent of Rose Ear Sweet. It was the first taste of it I'd had in years, and it flooded my senses.
"Rose Ear Sweet," I said aloud, not meaning to.
"Have as much as you like," said Nunnly, pushing the bottle closer to me.
I took another drink, and Anotine said, "Where are you from, Cley?" She moved her dark hair behind her ears and leaned back in the chair, folding her arms.
"Wenau," I said.
"Never heard of it," said Doctor Hellman, and the others agreed.
"You'll be helping me with my discoveries," she said. "Occasionally, your duties will include assisting the gentlemen here in their own pursuits. The term of your service is one year. Do you have any questions?"
"Is it common for people to simply appear before you?" I asked.
They smiled and looked at each other.
"How else?" said Nunnly. "When one of us orders a specimen, like yourself, the subject usually coalesces in that chair over there."
The aplomb with which my strange entrance was greeted silenced me. I worked on my drink as well as my composure while the others continued with their discussion. The Sweet was just what I needed to calm myself. "Now, if I only had a cigarette," I thought, "things might almost be tolerable." My mind was still swimming upstream through the implications of my meeting with Bataldo amidst the mounds of the Pali-shize. The conversation of my hosts seemed intriguing and serious, but when I tried to follow it, my head began to throb. I let their words pass over me.
At one point, after my third Sweet, I came to my senses and heard Anotine say, "It's all in the moment."
"No," said Doctor Hellman. "In the memory of the moment."
Brisden cleared his throat and cut in on the Doctor. "The present is a doorway—a randomly located aperture assigned its location by ourselves, arbitrarily, contradicting the totality of the void."
By some sleight of hand, Nunnly lit a cigarette without my noticing. "The three of you," he said, "your words are like the mechanisms I design—purposeless. Your theories are desperately searching for a reason to exist. And Brisden, someday I'll have a vague clue as to what you are getting at. My god, your drivel is a crime against humanity."
They laughed, Brisden hardest of all.
"Well, let's not let it ruin the day," said Doctor Hellman, pushing his chair back and rising.
They all stood and I followed their lead. Each of the men stepped up and shook my hand. I was not sure if it was a good thing that I did not pass through them. "Good night," they said as they left.
Anotine turned to me, and said, "Come, Cley, it's late. There is a lot to do in the morning." We followed the men down a corridor lined with arched window openings that led to a terrace. Once there, in the moonlight, they all went off in different directions.
I followed like a shadow behind Anotine, weaving somewhat from the effects of the Rose Ear Sweet. It felt good to be outside. The air was clear and filled with the mixing scents of various night blossoms that grew everywhere from planters built directly into the architecture.
We went down a wide stairway to another level, then turned left and passed an open-air hall of columns to the right of which was a pool, perfectly still, reflecting unfamiliar constellations. She walked slowly, stopping from time to time and staring up.
The place was an unraveling mystery, a series of terraces built at all different levels with rooms and halls and courtyards of every conceivable shape connected by long and short stairways. There were fountains and sculpture at different locations. I passed dozens of entrances without doors, windows without glass. Everything was open, dark, and perfectly quiet.
"Where is everyone?" I asked, as Anotine stopped beside a fountain to watch the arc of water falling from the breast of a stone pelican.
"Everyone?" she asked.
"The rest of the people who live in all of these rooms," I said.
"It's just the four of us you met tonight, Cley," she said.
"No others?" I asked.
"We are fairly sure there is someone in the tower, but I've never seen him," she said, pointing over my shoulder.
I turned around and looked up. The height of it made me take a step back, and I came near to losing my balance. It rose more than a hundred feet above the terraced village that surrounded its base. The glass dome at the top of the brick structure glowed like a lighthouse beacon.
"The Panopticon," she said. "The term implies that we are being watched."
"Are we?" I asked.
"Most definitely," she said. "I only wonder if what is being seen makes any difference."
She began walking and said
no more to me. We climbed a last set of steps and came to a series of lighted rooms. She led me through an open portico and an arched entrance.
The smooth walls of the room were whitewashed. It was furnished with only a bed, situated in a corner beneath a window opening, a brown rug, a small table, and a chair. A hall-way led off from the middle of the left wall of the room, and at the back there was another, larger window opening.
"You may sleep on the rug if you wish" said Anotine as she turned down the spire lamps so that their light was the equivalent of a single candle.
I walked to the back of the room and sat in the chair next to the table. From the shadows, I watched as she sat on the bed and removed her shoes. When she stood and unhooked the straps of her dress, I realized that she was going to disrobe.
I coughed weakly to remind her of my presence.
She let the dress slip off her onto the floor, then turned and asked me if I had said something.
Her breasts were exposed, and I studied them closely as she leaned over to remove her underwear.
"No," I replied, as she turned around and bent over to pick up the dress.
She tossed her garments down the hallway and turned to face me one more time. I took in her entire figure. Anotine smiled and said good night before lying down on her bed.
She slept atop the covers on her stomach with her legs apart, and the candle glow of the spire lamps dissolved the dark enough for me to see everything. I was somewhat beyond the perpendicular as I sat there staring. There were two things I repeated in my thoughts: "Nothing is real here," and "Everything means something."
I finally tore myself away from the sight of Anotine by standing and staring out the back window. With the help of the moon and the dome of the Panopticon, I was able to see out across a field that lay below the window. The grassy expanse was bounded by a wood which seemed to encircle the village as the village appeared to encircle the tower. I was exhausted, but I decided to take a walk and think through the complications of my quest. There was a moment of trepidation in which I wondered if I should ask permission of my host to go out, but I reasoned that it would be a shame to wake her. Besides, there was a limit to how far I could wander, seeing as we were on an island.
It took me the better part of an hour to traverse the maze of stairways that led to that field, but I was glad for the puzzle, hoping the concentration might clear my thoughts of Anotine's body. Finally, I ascended a long set of steps and, upon reaching the top, strode onto the grass. Although I should have been sleeping, I needed to see if Misrix's description of the island had been accurate.
The trees were almost perfectly straight, and the entire forest seemed so strategically laid out in a crisscrossing, geometric pattern, I was sure it must have been planted. Leaves fell around me in great numbers as I kept to a crude path that snaked through the shadows. I walked quickly, thinking that each one of the trees, even the leaves, could be a symbolic representation of one of Below's grand schemes. But when I touched the rough bark and smelled the sap, I could only think of them as devoid of anything but reality.
"Cley," said a voice from within the dark outline of a tree.
I turned quickly, half-expecting to see the Mayor again. "Who's there?" I said.
Nunnly, the engineer of useless machines, stepped forward so that his lean face and frame emerged from the shadows.
"Out for a walk?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, unsure if I was supposed to be on my own.
"You are curious about the edge of the island, no doubt," he said.
"I am," I told him.
"How did you hear of it?" he asked.
"I can't recall."
"Follow me, Cley," he said, and started off ahead of me.
"You are lucky that you are Anotine's specimen and not Brisden's," he said. "The last one that old gasser had, he literally talked into a coma. We had to send the poor fellow back and request another one. By the time we took him to the chair in the parlor, he was extraordinarily dull, as if Brisden's babble had eaten his wits. Anotine, on the other hand, will do anything for her specimens."
"She already has," I said.
"That's the spirit," he said.
We walked a few more paces, then Nunnly held up his arm, preventing me from going on.
"Do you hear it?" he asked.
Behind him, I could hear a strong wind and beneath that a very distant sound of waves.
I nodded.
"Don't get too close to the edge" he said. "It's very dangerous now." Then he lifted his hand and let me continue.
I walked up a small hill, and when I reached the top, I found myself staring out over the end of the island. There was a fallen tree next to me, which I leaned against as I tried to encompass the entirety of nothingness beneath us. Far below, through the trails of passing clouds, I could see the liquid-mercury ocean, shining a distant silver where the moon and the tower's brightness touched its surface. I felt a great rush of my blood as I stood there staring and wondered how glorious the fall would be from that height.
"Look down there," said Nunnly, who, I just then noticed, had stepped up and was standing next to me. He was pointing to the very outline of the island.
"What is it?" I asked, searching for his meaning.
"The edge of the island," he said. "Brisden discovered a few weeks ago that it is slowly disintegrating. Close your eyes and listen carefully."
I did as he said and tried to listen at a point between the wind and the far-off waves. "I think I hear it," I said.
"Now, look again," he instructed.
Concentrating my sight on a jutting root just at the rim, I noticed, the way one might notice, with the proper focus, the hour hand of a clock moving, that it was almost imperceptibly diminishing in thickness. It seemed to come apart into tiny crumbs that did not fall but instead crackled into nothing.
"Is that bad?" I asked.
"Well," said Nunnly, tapping a cigarette against the back of his wrist and leaning almost elegantly against the fallen tree, "when you are on a disintegrating island, a mile above a sea of liquid mercury, I would consider that cause for a modicum of concern."
"Do any of you know why it is happening?" I asked.
"No," he said, striking a match, "but Anotine has calculated that in a matter of a few weeks or so, we will have to worry about it while we are falling."
"How long have you been here for?" I asked.
"Forever, it seems," he said. "We were all hired some time ago by a fellow none of us had actually met by the name of Drachton Below. Everything was done through correspondence which offered handsome payment for us to come here and do research in our particular fields. Since we have arrived, we haven't seen him. We keep working in good faith, but, my god, I wouldn't mind leaving at this point."
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"I tell you, my head is so full of designs for machinery, I can hardly think of it. I vaguely recall having had a family before I arrived here, but I can no longer see their faces. That's why I come out into the wood at night, to try to remember. I experience all of the loneliness and loss, but for whom or what remains a mystery. I am beginning to wonder if I ever really knew."
We left the edge of the island and walked back through the trees toward the village. Nunnly asked me about my own life and how I had been chosen to serve as a specimen. I told him I had been chosen for my good looks.
"You too," he said, and laughed. "You'll be interested to know that Doctor Hellman believes that neither we nor the island exists. Everything to him is dreams."
"What do you say to that?"
"What can I say? I'm an engineer. My work is with matter, not with mental indigestion."
We walked on across the field, and then Nunnly showed me a shortcut back to Anotine's rooms. Before leaving me, he shook my hand again, and said, "Cley, for a specimen, you are a bright fellow. Be diligent at your work. It would be pleasant to have you around for a while."
I lay down on the brown rug in th
e middle of the room and stared at Anotine's back as it rose and fell with her breathing.
"The Master, asleep in the clutches of the disease, is wasting toward death," I thought. "His memory is evaporating with his life, and that is why the island is disintegrating."
As my eyes shut, and I began to doze, I remembered the drawing of the hourglass on that scrap of paper I had discovered. Particles of light passed through the neck of the figure eight.
10
I CAME AWAKE TO THE GLARE OF SUNLIGHT FLOODING the room reflecting off the smooth whitewashed walls. There was an unreal, immaculate clarity to it, a vitality that offered perfect warmth and submerged me in a sense of well-being that ignored the countless dilemmas I faced. After rubbing my eyes and reminding myself as to who and where I was, I looked around and saw that Anotine was no longer lying on her bed.
"Hello?" I called as I stood up and stretched.
As if in answer, a shrill, steady note, like the cry of a thin-throated pig, sounded from down the hall. There was no modulation to the tone at all, and its relentless nature forced me to cover my ears. In this manner, I proceeded to search out its source. I passed a room to the left, also sparsely furnished and brimming with sunlight. Somewhat smaller than the bedroom, it appeared to be a dining area, for there was a large wooden table, surrounded by four chairs.
A few paces farther along on the other side of the hall was a small, windowless space, almost a closet. I could make out that its walls were lined with shelves and that they were filled with shadowy objects, but by then I realized that the sound was coming from the room at the end of the hall. From my limited vantage point, it appeared to be a much larger space than the others. I moved up to the opening, my hands still protecting my ears, and leaned forward to peer inside.
This room was also bathed in the clear light of morning, and, to my wonder, filled with all manner of strange-looking equipment that demanded my immediate attention. All of it, though, receded out of view as my eyes came to rest on perhaps the strangest scene I had ever witnessed.
