The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  “Will you tell me everything you see, or think you see?” she said softly.

  “Yes, of course, Aunt.”

  Rowena left her and went downstairs, not really understanding the look in Meta’s eyes.

  There were now eighteen crates in the overgrown courtyard and Rowena was still watching from her upstairs windows, a vantage point that she discovered was best for overlooking the courtyard. This was the next best way to catch the culprit red-handed. But her sentry duty was becoming more difficult because of the continual fast growth of trees in the courtyard. She had tried to hack the persistent vegetation back, but it was a losing battle, and sometimes when she was down there, tools in hand, she felt as if she were being watched by someone or something. She had her mother’s curiosity and wanted to rip open the crates, but would never go against her aunt’s wishes. She then went once again to confront the actual boxes. The wind outside was warm and damp; it blew leaves about the cobblestones, where they stuck in the grass and weeds that were growing in the cracks between them. The hard, polished appearance of the yard that she thought she remembered was being softened, smoothed out of focus by the new tufts of green that now seemed everywhere. Even the walls were tinged with it, a haze of moss growing over the surface. She walked to the nearest box, the second one to arrive, and pushed against it, feeling the weight of its resistance. She hammered on its surface with her long slender fist. It was not empty. She knew she was tempting her curiosity to greater needs and that she had to stop. Perhaps in the changing weather the wood might fatigue and a glimpse of the interior would become exposed. Perhaps the wind might tip one over and…and…and…

  She told her aunt about her thoughts and Meta felt a snatch of envy. It was what she so wanted to do. To communicate with her dead father. She once believed it could only have been Mutter haunting the courtyard and stairs. Bringing the crates and boxes again. Didn’t ghosts always perform what they did in life, seeking recognition in continuance? She even listened for the sound of his horse and wagon on the cobbled streets outside. But nothing was heard. No wagon or cart moved in any of the streets of the dead city. A blank, unmoving silence was enveloping everything. She told Rowena of her desire and how she had first thought that the manifestations of the boxes in the yard was a sign of Mutter’s restless spirit. Now of course she knew it was not. The growing number of upright crates was a very different kind of haunting. Rowena saw the anguish in her kind aunt’s face and wished that she could have summoned the old reprobate for her, even for a moment, a fleeting second to soothe the sadness that lived in Meta’s heart. A few days later another crate appeared in the unkempt yard. This time the girl did not report it. Better to leave it unsaid. But she guessed that Meta knew when the pendulums sang again in the eaves. At such times Meta always went to the strings or the camera obscura for consolation. Always expecting to see Mutter somewhere in the square.

  Then it happened! At first she thought it was her abused channels of perception weakly coming back, then she realised it was a scent, a smell. It was his tobacco somewhere nearby, somewhere in the house. She had vowed never to leave her eyrie again, but this once must be an exception. She descended the wooden ladder onto the upper landing and the smell dispersed to nothing. How could this be? If he was not wandering the house, then it meant that he was in the attic with her. Surely she would have felt him before, sensed his presence nearby. She paced the landing and looked down the long stairs. Only a trace of the distinctive tobacco was there. She turned and climbed the creaking, excited ladder back into the active twilight. Yes, it was stronger here. He had been here. Her heart was overjoyed. She knew that in life he hated climbing all those stairs and especially the ladder with its small portal that he had found so difficult to squeeze through. But he had done it now, done it to comfort her, to settle the wounds and lace together her hopes. Even if this had been his only sign, then it had been enough.

  The song Meta and the strings played had such emphasis and mode that it stopped Rowena, who had been busy in the kitchen, and she climbed through the resounding house to see what Meta was doing. She called from below the ladder and then climbed up, putting her head and shoulders into the singing air. Meta stopped and came over to her; the strings continued holding on to her voice, which they had tuned themselves to.

  “He came, Rowena. He came to tell me that everything was right.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes, Poppa came, up here, just for a moment to tell me.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No, but he was here, here somewhere smoking those stinky cigars that only he liked.”

  Rowena looked around the room in a rather theatrical manner.

  “Don’t worry, child, he has gone now. He just came back to say that he was his old self.”

  Rowena had nothing to say and in the dim light she seemed to flush and hesitate. Meta saw this and felt as if she had overburdened the girl with her emotion.

  “I am so happy, Rowena. Forgive me for saying too much, please come back later when I am more settled.”

  “Yes, Aunt,” the girl choked out as she hurried down the steps, not stopping until she had reached the first floor, where she stood panting, her eyes brimming with tears. She did not mean her little act to have become so significant, so devastating to her aunt. She did not really know what she had done or why she had done it. And now it had turned into something that must remain untellable between then. The only thing in the world that she must always lie about. The responsibility outweighed the guilt but nevertheless left a stain.

  When she had found Mutter’s cigar in the stable, she’d had no purpose for keeping it safe. She had not intended or planned to tiptoe up the ladder and puff the horrid smoke into the attic room while Meta could be heard moving elsewhere, in the tower of the camera obscura. She did it on impulse, expecting only a little wonder for her sad aunt. Never the overwhelming meaning and total joy that she had just witnessed. She sniffed and walked back to her sentry post at the upper window, which she opened slightly to clear the air and let its freshness drive out her culpability. In the courtyard the knee-high patches of grass waved in the slight breeze. The scent of foliage and trees was everywhere. Now that the mills and rubber works were silent and a great majority of the citizens had left, all the human-manufactured odours had flattened or dispersed.

  She had heard some say that the Vorrh had walked into Essenwald to reclaim it for its own. And she imagined that outside the stout wall of Kühler Brunnen the city was changing, with roots, trunks, branches, twigs, and vines embracing everything. The crates looked oddly part of it now; they had lost their new-wood blankness. Lichen and moss began to write over their surfaces as they stood there waiting to be opened, stood there like sentinels or statues of emperors and poets from some long-forgotten empire in some long-forgotten ruin in its overgrown garden. Rowena knew that one day after Meta had gone, she would be alone with the crates. When the courtyard had given up its meaning and all the cobblestones had been overturned from beneath by verdant, insistent growth, she would be left standing among the fully grown trees, crowbar in hand. She was held in this thought for a moment until a gust of wind from the Vorrh shook the glass.

  She lowered her eyes and looked out into courtyard below; she was just about to leave when she saw a small movement. It was not somebody moving into view or passing but rather something moving out of sight—a going.

  EPILOGUE

  And as the rose is felt by his odour and as the fire is seen in his sparkles…For the virgins shall have the crown that is called aureole…after the feast of All Hallows he should establish the commemoration of all souls.

  —The Golden Legend

  LONDON, 1940

  Breakfast was set for them in the bar, which smelt stronger than before, the stale beer and tobacco wrestling with the astringent disinfectant.

  “Ah, England,” proclaimed Nicholas, l
ooking around the empty room. Outside the sun was tugging between green and yellow. Rain or shine.

  The child of the house brought steaming bowls to a recently washed table and indicated without a word that it was for them. Hector was ravenous and dug into the inert volume of the thick grey paste before him.

  “This is very good. What is it?”

  “Porridge, I think,” said Nicholas.

  “Remarkable,” said Hector, emptying the tiny cracked sugar bowl into his dish.

  This was followed by thick slices of undercooked bacon and runny fried eggs.

  “Delicious,” said Hector, forgetting all of his years of astute table manners and speaking through his mouthfuls of food. “What is this?” He waved the bacon rind on his fork in front of Nicholas.

  “Pig,” he answered without interest. “Swine flesh, I think you call it.”

  Hector stared at the impaled fat for a difficult time, then devoured it, saying, “Delicious.”

  “Enjoy it, my friend, it’s the last you will taste for a very long while.”

  Hector did not hear it. His tongue had overcome his ears in wallowing delight.

  An hour later they were walking back through the tall grasses where the summer morning had won in earnest over the shadow of rain, its warmth bullying its way past the initial chill. The brightening light and vastness of sky was making everything shine and sharpen each particle of its existence in the world.

  They reached a high, lopsided gate that had been repaired and remade many times.

  “A chronicle of the parish,” said Nicholas as he stretched up to lift the black iron chain, whose weight held all in place like a sleeping necklace.

  On the other side and farther on they climbed over a step in another fence and then halted and sat there for a while, silently smelling the sea getting closer. To their right was a rolling cornfield that glared with optimism, exchanging yellows with the unfettered sun. Hector watched a far-off grey steamer sail slowly through it, the boat seemingly floating across the hushed swaying waves.

  “It is time to go,” said Nicholas, who stood up and looked out towards the lolling sands, their colour shifting between the descending water and the ascending light. The beauty of the morning was flooding every space around them. Birds filled the air, calling against the vanishing clouds; gulls wheeled in their freedom and starlings massed in smoky swirling flocks. Soon the swallows would arrive. The sea had withdrawn, drank itself into a trench between the jutting rocks of land, snuggled into some hollow a thousand fathoms deep. The fresh water of the hills had been pulled down into the sluice of London’s gritty aorta, sucked out towards salt in the estuary’s million tributaries and veins. You could hear all the tricklings as one, whispering over the breathing mud that was popping, gulping, and letting go, sighing as it resigned itself again to ponderous gravitation.

  “It’s a fine day,” Nicholas called out, more to the birds and the brightness than to Hector, who sat bundled and unsure, tightly wrapped in his overcoat on a plank that bisected an old wooden fence. Nicholas had called it a “stile.” Hector’s hat and scarf obscured his face. His gloves, shoes, and the cuffs of his trousers were patterned with sand and splashed mud. His eyes had been watching the glittering water subside and the long beaked waders paddling against the speed of its flow. The turmoil that had been his understanding had also drained away. A major dose of God’s “kindness enzyme” had been delivered during his sleep. He found no fear ahead, no trepidation of what lay beneath the waters. After all, this was at least his third life. He had given himself up to death by colourless filtration in the Rupert the First all those years ago in Heidelberg. He had played out his demise in its constant temperature and the settling of all his memories and little achievements into one of the many sleeps to nothing that the home had been made for. There was no one there to mourn or even notice his departure. His enjoyable exercises in irritation might be missed by Capek in the form of relief, if indeed he outlived him. The way things were going back in the fatherland meant that all the rules had changed, even the elemental ones that controlled and conditioned life and death itself. Nicholas had been right to prevent his return. The spitting poison that he had heard in the Erstwhile’s cat’s whisker radio had all come true. He would never see the Germany he had lived in for so many years again. A curlew laced the morning sounds and Hector turned his head to try and locate it, bobbing out and back of his thoughts, which were vanishing one by one as he moved on to the next. Anyway, that Hector would have never dreamed of the London adventurer: the hunter of madmen and angels, conversationalist of corpses, raconteur of villains. Had all that been true? So much life instigated by so much long-term death. All compressed in a few short years. He grinned under the woolly scarf. So much fun. It had been beyond his wildest dreams. So much greater than his anaemic youth, made cumbersome by books and saturated in oily pride. What would he have made of Solli then? Let alone talking scarecrows.

  Only his time with Rachel remained untarnished or dimmed by the London escapades. Her face never vanished, and often he found that explaining all this strangeness to her helped him come to grips with its impossibility. In the last few years she had been with him high above the streets of Whitechapel. Ever since the phenomena on the first floor, since his attack and what Nicholas had disturbingly called “his enlightenment,” she had been more and more vivid to him. But he knew she was not here now. The next transaction was reserved for him and Nicholas alone. The thought did not sadden him, because she was deeply enfolded in him and not in his attic room, which was now a very long way away.

  “We should begin,” called Nicholas, and Hector arose and took off his overcoat, gloves, and hat, his long lustrous hair falling around his ears. He hung the garments over the fence and put his foot on the crossbar of the stile and started to undo the lace.

  “What are you doing?”

  Hector twisted his head back towards the estuary.

  “Taking my shoes off.”

  Nicholas laughed and clapped his hands together.

  “Hector, you are a caution, extra points for that one. We are here to invest the plural. To lay ourselves down to make a protection, not to go paddling.”

  “But I thought…” muttered Hector.

  “You’ll be wanting a bucket and spade next.”

  Hector just grinned back, holding out his arms and hands, palms up, and shrugging. “What do I know?”

  “Nothing, nothing yet, my dear friend, but very soon everything.” He held out his hand and Hector walked over to join him, one shoelace drawing a swaying, skittish line behind him in the placid mud.

  As they set out across the yellow-grey flanks of smooth sand and mud, Nicholas started stamping on the surface and in and out of the puddles, building up a regular rhythmic stomping motion forward.

  “Why are you dancing like this?” asked Hector, who was merely shuffling behind.

  “I am testing the strength of the surface, in case of gullies and crevasses.”

  Hector nodded earnestly as if he understood.

  “It’s my Ghost Dance,” Nicholas said.

  “I read about those once, a long time ago. Is it part of the ritual of the plural? Are we summoning our ancestors to help us stand against our foes? Should I be dancing too? To make the calling better.”

  They were up to their calves in water and Nicholas sloshed over to his friend, who was beginning to move from one foot to the other. He put his hand gently on his shoulder.

  “You make me laugh, Hector, extra points for that. I meant my Ghost Dance at the Pavilion, when I was in the chorus of Indian braves. I didn’t only play cowboys, you know! It’s only pretend. But it does test the firmness of the mud. Let’s dance together.” He took Hector’s arm and they stamped forward until they were up to their knees and then their waists.

  The sun was high and its brilliant reflection dappled and swa
m energetically in the water, casting rippling light upwards into their faces. They were getting near the middle and Hector suddenly stopped, a look of loss and emptiness filling his face. He stared at Nicholas. Fear started to bloom in his vacancy. Nicholas put his hand over Hector’s head, held it flat, and made the circular sign of a halo over his sleek, shining locks. They spoke a few words that could not be heard because they coincided with a squadron of raucous geese arguing midair with several laconic cormorants.

  Hector regained his composure and purpose and strode on ahead of Nicholas, sinking an inch or two with each step. The Erstwhile halted him before his chin touched the water. He was at least a foot and a half taller and the returning water had not yet reached his armpits.

  “We should do this bit together,” he said. “I don’t want you to be afraid once we are below. We still have a long way to go, and if we hold each other tight, then we won’t slip or be washed back up.”

  Hector nodded at the obvious sense of Nicholas’s statement. They linked arms and moved ahead and downwards with great caution and deliberation. Just before the salty sea and the earthy Thames covered his mouth, Hector said, “Thank you, Nicholas, for selecting me. Thank you and the other ones for giving my little life such a purpose.” The last words were spluttery because the water was over his nose and he had to stretch to say them. “Thank you for letting me help save foolish humanity.”