by Laird Barron
Later, she was brought to by the sound of a groan emanating from the dark back of the tomb where the winter’s harvest lay frozen. When the enormous stillness had swallowed the noise, Emily was unsure if she’d really heard it or only heard it in her thoughts. She turned in her chair and looked into the shadows. “Hello?” she called. While she waited for a response, she realized that as long as she’d been in the tomb, she’d not been hungry, she’d not slept, and had no call for a chamber pot. No answer came back from the dark.
She put the tulle around her shoulders and opened the door of the tomb. She was surprised by how easily the enormous weight of it slid back. In a moment the blizzard was upon her. She took two steps out into a drift that reached to her thighs and looked up into the snow-filled night. It wasn’t long before the fierce wind forced her to retreat. Once back inside, the tomb door closed, she swung the water cauldron out over the perpetual fire. Tea and whiskey were her only pleasures. She’d noticed that, when she wasn’t looking, the decanter refilled itself.
Waiting for the water to come to a boil, she rubbed her hands together in front of the fire, and once they’d warmed she shoved them into her dress pockets. When first she felt the dried gentian petals, she thought them just some scrap of paper she’d jotted a line on at some point. But when she touched the child’s nail, she remembered. The water boiled, and she made the tea she’d dreamed about, lacing the brew with a generous shot of whiskey to offset the taste of the boy’s nail that twirled atop its plum-colored depths.
In the dream the gentian tea, tasting like the sweetest dirt, had made her mind race, and now too, beneath the ground, her mind raced. Phrases flew, their letters visible, from every grotto of her mind. She stood at the center of the storm, scythe in hand, cutting through the dross. Eventually she lifted the pen and drew ink. The first line came strong to the paper, and there was a pause—a moment, a day, a year—before she hesitantly began on the second line. Slowly, the poem grew. Midway she sat back and wondered which came first, the words or the visions. Her thoughts circled, and then she leaned forward and resumed her work. When she finished, she read the poem aloud.
The night woke in me—And I rose
blindly wandering in a Snow
To the Sunken house—
its Cornice—in the ground.
Parlor of shadows—in the ground
The distant Wind—a lonely Sound
Winter’s orphans and Me
Undoing knots with Gentian tea.
The instant the last word was spoken, she rejected it; too obvious to undo a spell of life. She crumpled the sheet and tossed it into the fire. A belief in complexity and complication crept into her thoughts and with that the years fell like an avalanche. She drank tea, and stared at the blank sheet, went outside, and listened for groans in the dark back of the tomb. A million times, a place to begin arrived, and she would think of Arthur trapped in his high chair at dinner, and the line would vanish, too insubstantial to survive.
Later, she was brought to her senses by the sound of something shuffling in the dark behind her. She spun in her chair, her heart pounding. It sounded like weary footsteps. Realizing the sound was approaching, she stood and backed against the writing table. Out of the gloom and into the glow of the fireplace, a wasted figure staggered, an old woman, dressed in black, wearing a black muslin cap atop her white hair. Her face was wrinkled and powdered with dust, and there were patches of ice on her brow and sunken cheeks. She clutched a Bible in her crooked hands.
“Hello,” said Emily, surprised as she did so. Even before the old woman stopped and looked up, the poet knew it was the same woman who’d come that time to the house for directions to a place she might stay.
“Excuse me, miss, could you tell me where I might seek lodging in town?” Her voice was low and rumbled in echoes through the tomb. Emily noticed part of the woman’s nose had rotted away and that there was something alive in her glassy left eye by the way it bulged and jiggled.
“Go that way, into the dark,” said the poet and pointed.
“Thank you for your kindness, dear.” The woman turned and shuffled into the shadows.
Emily stood numb from the encounter. “Is the gentian tea still steering my mind?” she whispered.
“No,” came the old woman’s reply from the back of the tomb. “It’s the rising tide of years.”
Some piece of eternity later, she sat with pen poised above paper, her arm aching for how long it had been in that position. She barely recognized anymore the crackle of the fire, the distant wind. The pen’s tip finally touched the blank sheet, and she heard a new sound that distracted her from her words. The nib made a fat black blotch, and she drew her hand back. “What was that noise?” she said. In her loneliness she now spoke all her thoughts. Finally it came again, something outside. “A person shouting?” No, it was the barking of a dog. She leaped up from the chair and rushed to the door of the tomb. Opening it, she stepped out into the blizzard.
Sitting a few feet off, up to his chest in snow, was Carlo, her Newfoundland, a bear of a dog. He barked again and bounded the drifts to reach her. She was overwhelmed and blinked her eyes to be certain he was there. But then she felt his furry head beneath her hand and he licked her palm. It came to her as if in a dream that she was freezing and she stepped back into the tomb. The dog followed. After closing out the winter, she sat in her writing chair, leaning forward, hugging Carlo to her. “You’re good,” she repeated, stroking his head. When she finally let go, the dog backed away and sat staring for a long while. His sudden bark frightened her.
“What?” she asked.
The dog barked three more times and then came to her and took the sleeve of her dress. Carlo tugged at her, long his sign for her to follow. It came to her, with his fourth tug and tenth bark, that he was there to take her back. “You know the way,” she said to him. The dog barked. She turned to face the writing table and lifted her pen. She quickly scribbled on the blotched sheet, “Gone Home. Mercy.” Dropping the pen, she stood and wrapped the tippet around her shoulders. The dog came to her side and she took hold of him by the collar. “Home,” she said, and Carlo led her into the dark back of the tomb.
They walked forever and before long he led her by way of a narrow tunnel back into the world. When the moonlight bathed her, she felt the undergarments Quill had given her vanish like a breeze. The dog led her down a tall hill to the end of Main Street. Walking the rest of the way to the Homestead they encountered no one. Quietly, in the kitchen, she gave Carlo a cookie and kissed him between his eyes. After taking off her boots, she tiptoed up the stairs to her room. She removed the white dress and hung it in the closet. She swam into her nightgown and got back into bed.
As her eyes began to close, she felt a hand upon her shoulder. In her panic, she tried to scream but another hand covered her mouth. “Shhh, shhh,” she heard in her ear, and feeling cold breath on the back of her neck knew it was Quill. “Lie still,” he said. “Let’s not wake your parents.”
“Leave me alone,” she said. She lay back on the pillow without getting a look at his face.
“I intend to,” he said. “I merely wanted to tell you that the piece you left in the tomb worked the trick. Three simple words were the key to the spell’s lock; a mad but marvelous thing. Arthur is resting peacefully, so to speak.”
“So I owe you nothing.”
“I’d like to ask you a question, if I may.”
“What?”
“All these poems you’ve written and hidden—so many poems. Why?”
While she thought, morning broke and the birds sang in the garden. “Because I could not stop,” she said, and he was gone.
Michael Blumlein
* * *
SUCCESS
Michael Blumlein is the author of The Movement of Mountains, X,Y, The Healer, and The Roberts, as well as the award-winning story collection The Brains of Rats. He has been nominated twice
for the World Fantasy Award and twice for the Bram Stoker Award. His second story collection, What the Doctor Ordered, has recently been released. In addition to writing, Dr. Blumlein is a practicing physician. You can find out more about him at michaelblumlein.com and at facebook.com/blumleinonline.
Dr. Jim lost his job at the University at the unripe age of thirty-six. As brilliant as he was (and this was one brilliant man), his eccentricity had mushroomed during his tenure, and in the end this made him a liability. In his early years at the U, he had published extensively, dozens of papers, all of them notable and a few truly groundbreaking. Then, abruptly, he stopped. Not for lack of results or new ideas (or, for that matter, requests from eminent journals for a submission—any submission—he might deign to send their way), but because, in his words, he had better things to do with his time.
“Better? Meaning what, exactly?” the chairman of his department had asked.
“Meaning I can’t be bothered with publishing papers. Meaning the answer is bigger. Meaning I have an idea how it all fits together. All of it. Molecule, cell, person. There’s a Unifying Theory of Life, and I get a glimpse of it sometimes, and I feel it sometimes, too, in my body, a tingling, a premonition, but I can’t feel it, or see it, for long. Holding on to it is like balancing a pin on my forehead. I need practice. I need time. I can’t be interrupted. Grant applications are an interruption. Bench work is an interruption. Thinking up one new experiment after another gets in the way. I’m not interested in data collection anymore. I need to do research of a different kind.”
These were not the words of a man who valued his professional career, and certainly not of a man who lived to please his employers. Still, the University indulged him. His work was too respected and important not to. But after several years of escalating complaints from colleagues and students—he was rude; he was unprofessional; he was unapproachable; he was monstrous; he was grandiose—they cut him loose.
Over the next year, reports trickled in of continued erratic and unpredictable behavior (spending sprees, email rants, public and professional diatribes), and at length he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. All such admissions require a diagnosis, and his, provisionally, was Mania, of the sub-type Accelerando, of the sub-sub-type Non Fugax. Mania Accelerando Non Fugax, known commonly as Flaming Man Disease. By this point he had been flaming for quite some time and had burned many bridges: he’d spent all his money, lost his home, his professional standing, his friends, and, finally, his wife.
There was some disagreement among the psychiatrists as to his diagnosis. There were features that didn’t fit the classic definition of FMD, one being that he had no history of mental illness. Another: there was no family history of it, either. Most troublesome of all (and most problematic, diagnosis-wise), he didn’t respond to medication. And FMD did, reliably. If not one drug, then another. And if not a single drug, then a combination of drugs: two, three, sometimes four of the bad boys, what they liked to call a cocktail.
But two, three, four had no effect on Dr. Jim. No matter what he took or was forced to take, he remained the man who first was wheeled down the corridor: wild-eyed, wacky, savage at times, brilliant at other times, hyperactive, insomniac, volatile, and unreachable, as detached from his caregivers as a hinge torn free of its door.
A meeting was held regarding what to do next. When a treatment that is known to succeed one-hundred percent of the time does not, there are basically two choices, as his panel of clinicians well knew:
1. Question the diagnosis.
2. Question the treatment.
In the best of all worlds, the questioning should proceed in that order, but time was short, the budget was tight, and there were other meetings to attend and other patients to cure. And while diagnosing a tricky illness was always satisfying, discovering a new treatment, for those impatient to get on with things, was an order of magnitude more satisfying: it was the difference between building a rocket and flying a rocket, between Sherlock and Santa.
A combination of electric, magnetic, and sonic shock, both extra-corporeal (at a distance) and intra-corporeal (by means of a cranial stimulator, linked wirelessly with esophageal and anal emitters), delivered in asynchronous “swan-neck” pulses over a period of hours, was settled on. (The idea, basically, was to shock the bejesus out of him and hope for the best.) The night before he was to enter the pantheon of brave and nameless medical pioneers (in this case, as the first to receive a treatment that would later, god help us, become the standard of care), he was shaved, showered, and dutifully prepared.
At nine o’clock he was seen nervously pacing his room. He looked agitated. His eyes were as wild as ever and he appeared to have no idea who or where he was.
At ten o’clock he was seen lying on his bed.
At eleven o’clock he was still lying on his bed, but this time his eyes, thank god, were closed.
At midnight the room was empty. It was as if he’d vanished into thin air.
The alarm was raised. Patients were roused from sleep. Every inch of the hospital was searched. Eventually, the police were called in, but they had no better luck than the hospital staff in finding him. A day went by, then another. His disappearance fueled rumors among the patients of alien abduction, interdimensional travel, suicide, homicide, and your basic institutional foul play. A meeting was scheduled to squelch these rumors, but the night before, the third night of his disappearance, an orderly and a nurse slipped into his now vacant room for a quick one.
It was dark, and they didn’t see the shape stretched out on the bed. Didn’t know there was a shape, much less a human one, until the nurse, straddling the orderly’s hips, arching back and uttering a crescendoing series of deep-throated moans as he acrobatically and prestidigitationally multitasked her voluptuous external and internal parts, felt the touch of flesh on her shoulder blade. She let out a yelp.
The orderly, fully aroused, delivered his package, then eased her down to the floor. Hurriedly, they reassembled themselves, then flicked on the light. Lying on the bed, freshly shaved and in a natty new set of threads, was Dr. Jim. His eyes were closed, as though to spare them the embarrassment of having been seen. Neither of them believed he was asleep.
The nurse smoothed her blouse, cleared her throat and said his name. His eyelids fluttered open and he turned his head. He looked surprised to see them, or at least he acted surprised, along the lines of “what a nice surprise,” as though theirs was an unexpected but welcome visit. Pointedly, he didn’t act crazy.
He sat up in bed, and he and the nurse had a conversation. It was lively, amicable, comprehensible, and sane. In short, nothing like previous conversations he had had. What it wasn’t was informative. Dr. Jim offered no explanation for where he’d gone or what had happened. When asked, first by the nurse and later, repeatedly, by a procession of psychiatrists, he professed ignorance. But clearly something had happened.
He was changed in nearly every way, from his appearance, which was no longer slovenly, to his manner, which was no longer like a relationship gone bad. His voice was calm and composed. His speech was clear, his reasoning logical and precise. He looked his interlocutors in the eye when he spoke. His facial expressions were appropriate accompaniments to what he said. He smiled when a smile was called for, knit his brows when a difficult question was asked. His behavior, which, at best, had been bizarre, and at worst, menacing and provocative, could have been lifted from Emily Post.
He was, in short, an exemplary patient. A civilized, approachable, exemplary man and a credit to his—the human—race.
They observed him for a week, tested him, retested him, then let him go. With no job, no house, and no wife, he pretty much had to start from scratch.
Fast-forward five years. Dr. Jim has a new wife. He has a new house, a modest two-story post-and-beamer with a basement and a fenced-in backyard. His dream of finding and elucidating the Unifying Theory of Life on Earth is very much alive, as is
his faith that the answer lies in the biological sphere, and further, in the molecular biological sphere, to wit, the gene, the epigene, and the perigene, the so-called holy trinity of creation and life. There are, of course, other spheres, non-biological ones, along with non-biological answers, and these, he assumes, will make themselves known when the time is right.
For now his hands are full. There’s the house to take care of. There are his daily visits to the basement. There’s his wife, Carol, a stellar woman of unparalleled beauty and intelligence. And of course there’s the dream, which occupies center stage.
For the past four years, Dr. Jim has been working feverishly to put his dream into words, to make it concrete, comprehensible, and readable, so that others can know it, too. He no longer uses a lab of his own, has no need of a lab—his mind is a lab, and it pullulates with thought experiments. In addition, he culls through the work of others. He has learned the rudiments of half a dozen languages, reads extensively, and keeps in touch with researchers around the globe. His name can still open doors (though with roughly equal frequency it closes them); to avoid awkwardness or misunderstanding he mostly uses a pseudonym: Dr. Jean Marckine, a play on the great Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, unjustly disdained and discredited in his own time and for many years thereafter, and presently in the process of being rehabilitated. And soon, if Dr. Jean Marckine has anything to say about it, to be raised to the pedestal upon which he belongs.
Dr. Jim is writing a book. Already it’s more than five hundred pages long. The first three hundred pages describe, in the briefest possible terms, the gene, a hopeless but necessary task. The next two hundred concern the epigene, and he is far from done. The complex of histone, protein, and DNA, the shifting chimera of amino and nucleic acids, forming and breaking covalent and ionic bonds like on-again, off-again lovers, deserves a book of its own. For if the gene is the key, the code of life, the epigene is the hand that turns the key, the force behind the code. The epigene cradles the gene, it gives structure and organization and flexibility to the genome. Elucidating it has been his life’s work, up to now.
