by Matt Cardin
He looked directly at me with an absence of expression so complete that it looked forced.
“He was their librarian.”
5
I awoke from black dreams of a titanic struggle whose outlines fled from memory the instant I tried to reflect on them. I had been watching two enormous, shadowy shapes poised opposite each other, waiting to clash in battle, and I had known in a wordless but definite way—definite because it was wordless, with a certainty beyond knowledge—their true nature and the reason for their imminent clash. But upon waking, this all fled to the back of my brain, leaving me with just the opaque image of towering opponents shaped like mountain peaks.
I was disoriented in the darkness, and I sat bolt upright with a sudden fear that I might still be dreaming. But then I remembered the party, with its strange conversation and disturbing conclusion, and I lay back down on the comforter where I had fallen asleep in my clothes without turning down the sheets. Darby’s dislike of digital clocks left me with no way of gauging the time on that moonless night, and I felt somehow unmoored, adrift in an eternal nocturne.
I must have dozed off again, for the shrieks startled me out of the beginnings of yet another nightmare. My body froze with shock as a series of blood-curdling screams began slicing through the oppressive night air. I stumbled off the bed and groped my way to the door even as they grew louder.
In the upstairs hallway the sound seemed to be coming from below. Nothing on earth should have been able to experience the sustained agony expressed by that voice, and I nearly tripped twice as I flew down the curving staircase, through an arched opening, and down a hallway toward a door that stood ajar.
It was the door to Darby’s room.
Screams like hell, screams like death and flames and impossible horror, exploded from behind that oblong barrier. I looked down and saw flashes of a strange luminance spilling out from beneath the edge of it, and as if in a dream, I watched my hand reach out to push it open. The door swung back to reveal a scene that my eyes and mind could not adequately encompass.
A humanoid mass thrashed and writhed on Darby’s canopied bed, staining sheets and pillows and mattress with blood and pus from a constellation of ruptured boils riddling its meaty form. Twined about it and winding their way in and out of these gaping holes were scores of thick, white, ropelike strands. As I watched, one of them snaked out of a hole in the figure’s abdomen and wrapped its entire segmented length around a convulsing leg. Cold white flames wreathed the body, burning and sizzling the raw flesh without consuming it. A sudden jet of flame darted up from the foot of the bed, drawing my uncomprehending eyes to yet another figure.
Something standing or hovering. A black shape, ropes of fire leaping out of its depths. So dark. Cut from the natural shadows of the room. Darker than darkness. A hole in the night. A hole in darkness itself. A howling void. The end of everything.
I was screaming at it. My voice shouted insanely at it to stop, stop, stop! And when the shape seemed to notice me, when it seemed to turn toward me while its tormenting flames still shot out to caress the corrupt form on the bed, when it seemed to look deep into my eyes—I saw a face like a red mask hovering in the air, a mask with the shadow of a smile still playing on its lips.
I fled. I ran, stumbled, crawled down carpeted hallways, through darkened doorways, across tiled floors, past china cases and bookshelves and paintings and other empty remnants of a life that had now passed out of existence with a finality greater than death. At last I found the front door and burst out into the chill November night, where the screams still polluted the air. I raced to my car, fumbled for the keys with trembling hands, turned the ignition, slammed the gears into reverse. A moment later I was kicking up gravel and whipping fallen leaves into an inferno as I roared away from the house that had once belonged to my friend Darby.
Even as I flew down the darkened streets leading into Terence, my ears still rang with the distorted shrieks of a creature that had come face to face with its creator, a creature that now writhed and danced on puppet strings of white fire in an agony of eternal putrefaction.
6
In the ensuing weeks, I freely answered a great many questions that were posed to me by law enforcement officials from various levels of the local and national bureaucracies. It was easy, because the great lie at the center of my responses was completely concealed by the truthfulness of the many minor details. I truly did not know where Darby had disappeared to, nor what, in a practical sense, had become of him. It was easy to say that I had attended a party at his house, drunk a bit too much, and spent the night in one of his guest rooms, only to awaken and find him gone the next morning. Easy, because nothing seemed out of the ordinary when the police went to the house to investigate. There were no signs of forced entry, no signs of a struggle. According to the housekeeper, there were no signs of missing clothing or suitcases.
(No signs of a burnt, bloody mess in the master bedroom.)
He had simply vanished with the proverbial lack of a trace. In the end, law enforcement agreed that I had no real bearing on the case, and so I was cut loose and left to drift in my perpetual shock. I later heard the F.B.I. was looking into a possible connection between Darby’s disappearance and the unnamed business he had been conducting during his overseas visits, but I knew they would discover nothing conclusive.
I continued to try to write. I tried to go on with my life as it had once been. But I soon began to notice a disturbing trend in my work: I could no longer lie. Especially on mornings after the worst of the nightmares that now disrupted my sleep, I simply could not generate the false persona that was necessary to any form of writing other than private journaling. My columns, my reviews, my essays were now impossible, for I found that I could write nothing but words and phrases appropriate only to a madman’s diary.
Twice I gave in to my need for answers. Once was in the month of December, when I saw posted on a telephone pole an advertising flyer for a special program at the Terence public library. The flyer said the program would deal with a recent archaeological discovery in the Middle East. At the library, I looked around desperately for a pretty blonde woman and her dark-haired brother, but neither was present. I also kept an eye out for a smarmy gray-haired man who claimed to be an employee, but I found it thoroughly unsurprising when he was nowhere to be found, nor when the staff claimed never to have heard of him.
Then, when I took my seat among the folding metal chairs along with the dozen or so other library patrons in attendance, and when the elderly female volunteer introduced the archaeology professor from the local university, and when the lights went down and the professor began to present a slideshow about an ancient library in the old part of Cairo, a library found buried under a section of the current city, a library that might once have belonged to a hitherto unknown sub-cult within the Coptic church—when this happened, I rose and exited with a wave of nausea in my gut and a faint sound of shrieking in my ears.
The only other time I gave vent to this need for answers was a month later, deep in the frozen depths of a bitter January. I was driving east on Interstate 70 on some now-forgotten errand. The iron gray sky lowered with the threat of impending snow. I switched on my headlights and saw illumined in their beams a green road sign announcing “St. Louis 140 miles, Fillmore 2 miles.”
Two miles later I exited, turned right at the top of the off-ramp, and soon found myself driving through what might have passed for any anonymous Missouri town in the no-man’s land separating Terence from St. Louis. Sagging houses and storefronts looked as if they had been cut from a single bolt of colorless cloth. The entire town was on the verge of collapsing from sheer exhaustion. The attendant at the town’s single gas station, which still displayed a sign offering full-service fill-ups, pointed me in the direction I asked, and within ten minutes I found myself parked in the woods outside of town, in front of an old wood-frame building that looked as if it might cave in upon itself at the faintest hint of a breeze. I could
just make out the faded letters painted above the front door. They said, “Temple of Jehovah.” I tried to work up some private humor at the thought that Darby’s uncle’s money had obviously not gone very far, but the attempt failed utterly. A crow barked out its raucous cries from the branches of a nearby tree as I forced open the door.
The temperature inside was no warmer than outside. The church looked as if it had been closed for decades. Ancient pews held a thick carpet of dust, and the tall windows lining either side were blackened with what looked like soot. An old wood stove was planted in the center of the building, right in the middle of the aisle. The flooring creaked dangerously as I skirted the squat iron structure.
At the front of the church stood an altar, a simple, unadorned wooden structure like those found in small churches around the world. I looked at it with fascination, although I couldn’t have articulated what drew me to it. Then I looked up at the pulpit, which bore a crudely formed wooden cross that was shaped more like a capital “T” than the conventional symbol.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was kneeling at the altar. In this unfamiliar posture of supplication, I silently asked myself what I had expected to find there. An answer? A hope? The company of two people who had at least been present at Darby’s final party? In the deathly silent atmosphere of that abandoned church, where reality held its breath, I could almost believe I had merely dreamed the entire incident.
When I looked back down at the altar, I was gripped by a sudden compulsion to feel it with my bare hand. I removed my right glove, reached down, and brushed my fingers lightly across its pitted surface.
The touch of the frozen wood seemed to bring me out of a trance. I quickly rose, replaced my glove, and exited the church. The crow still cried out from the bare branches of the tree as I started my car and drove back toward the interstate.
The skin of my hand began to peel three days later. I was sitting in my den attempting to read a light novel, but I could not concentrate because of an insistent itching in my right palm. When I finally went to examine the problem in the harsh light of the bathroom, I saw a faintly darkened circle edged with white, dying skin. At first I tried to remedy it with lotion, but it quickly became apparent that this was no ordinary dermatological condition. During the next three days my entire hand scaled over with a raspy layer of dead skin that flaked off in thick white strips. Eventually the whole outer layer was gone, and still the hand burned with an agony of itching. Then it started again, and then again and again, in cycles of increasing frequency, until the skin was sloughing off daily. It became difficult to shake the delusion that the flesh of my right hand was struggling to rip through its garment of skin, as if it were trying to shout at me, “Here I am! The real you!”
One morning I noticed the dark spot on my palm had ruptured and become an actual hole, a tiny moist opening at the center of a brownish purple ring. As I looked at it more closely, a fat white shape poked its tip out, struggled to squeeze its bulk through the opening, and then dropped squirming to the floor. The screams I heard erupting from my throat sounded strangely familiar.
7
Now I understand. How simple. No distance between body and soul. No “spirit” here and “flesh” there. The worms have taken over completely, in the food, in the furniture, in my library.
Yesterday I opened one of my books and found it completely eaten away, but I could read a new Word in the contours of the pulsating mass that had replaced the text.
Today when I looked in the mirror, I paused too long and saw beyond my mask to the truth. The strange part is, I felt no surprise.
Now I know where the worms come from.
Notes of a Mad Copyist
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.
. . . this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave.
—Milton, Paradise Lost
1. The Life Hid with Christ
It all began, as nearly as I can tell, with a boundless longing for spiritual transcendence. I was possessed by such a longing from earliest childhood, so it was natural that I should invest my life in the formal pursuit of divine union. When the revelation of darkness began to occur in the third decade of my life, I was in my sixteenth year as a monk in the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel. There could hardly have been an environment more conducive to the nurturing of my spiritual sensibilities, nor a duty more favorable for the exercising of my innate endowments. I had spent the greater part of those sixteen years hunched over a tiny wooden table, copying the words of the Holy Scriptures onto the thick leaves of a parchment tome from a hoary exemplar.
There were half a dozen of us employed in the dim, dusty scriptorium of the abbey. Our stations were arranged opposite each other in severe rows against the clammy stone walls. We presented a supremely pious appearance in our monkish array: crowns shorn, robes rough, feet bare, fingers ink-stained and raw. Only rarely did we speak to each other. We had taken no vow of silence, but our task was so serious and sacred, and our focus so intense upon the duty we were privileged to fulfill, that it seemed we had added an unspoken rule to the explicit rule of the order: Do not defile the Word of God with your own words. Let your speech and thoughts be pristine mirrors of the divine Speech and Thought. And so, having nothing of our own to communicate that seemed worthy to compete with God’s own words, we remained silent. For days and weeks on end, the only sounds to break the silence of the scriptorium were the moaning of the wind through granite hallways and the scratching of pens on parchment.
The abbot would appear at the end of each session, like a pale gray wisp of smoke, to glide silently through our midst; to pause, look over our shoulders, and examine our work. And he would praise us for our progress in this sacred endeavor. “The mind of Christ,” he would say, and lay his withered old hand on a brother’s bald pate. “Allow the mind of Christ to be formed within you. Allow Him to guide you in the transmission of the sacred Word.”
And I would thrill to his praise, his kindness, his touch. His hand was so gentle, his wisdom and compassion so renowned throughout the order, that I felt rarely privileged to be his son in the Lord. Perhaps due to the extent of my love for him, I strove, as I saw it, harder than all the others to know the mind of Christ. I wanted to know what my master knew. I wanted to see with Christ’s eyes, to know with His mind, love with His heart, and record His Word with His own hand.
Even though I knew it was sinful to take pride in my own progress, even though I recognized such pride early on as the bane of my spiritual aspirations, still I sometimes allowed myself to reflect on how pale were my brothers’ spiritual attainments next to my own. I glanced furtively at them as we worked together, and I noted their laxity, their secretive yawns, their irritable expressions on those bitter cold mornings when it seemed as if the wind were determined to scoop the entire monastery up from its precarious perch on the mountain shelf and hurl us all to a craggy death. My brothers were merely doing what was expected of them, out of a sense of duty, or worse, out of fear of reprimand, whereas for me it was a labor of love. I felt as if the words were burning bright and golden within me as I copied them from the exemplar. Sometimes I was overcome by such transports of rapture as should have been the privilege of no mortal man. At odd intervals, unexpectedly—sometimes in the dead of night as I lay alone within my cell, sometimes when I was engrossed in my scribal duty, sometimes, most perilously, during Matins or Vespers—it seemed as if a well were opened up in the depths of my soul, out of which came surging such sweet delights that I felt my flimsy human frame could not contain them all. I never spoke of this to anyone, and I was obliged to take great pains to conceal these occurrences.
2. The Seed of Corruption
When the first evidence of something extraordinary made itself known, I was very nearly unaware of it. I had long since grown accustomed to passing my days like any other monk, with my life arranged according to the outline of the Divine Office. I arose from my pallet in the icy darkness of early morning, unrefreshed after four hours of sleep, to attend Matins. I washed with the brothers in the common basin and ate with them around the common table. I diligently put to use the prescribed hours of public and private prayer. And while the others tended the garden or minded the goats and pigs or washed the scullery, I took my place in the scriptorium with my fellow copyists and labored to preserve and propagate the written Word of God. In quantity, it was a life no different from that of any other monk. But in quality—in the hidden, internal aspects, which are visible only to Him who looks upon the heart instead of the outward frame—I far surpassed them all in depth and scope of passion.
The change first began to appear in my scribal work. I recall looking back over my efforts at the end of an otherwise uneventful day of copying, and noticing with shock the errors that had crept into the margins: a wobble here, a smear there, several uncharacteristic loops and swirls jutting out from the beginnings and endings of lines. My breath caught in my throat, and I must have emitted an involuntary groan, for the abbot was behind me in a flash. I had not heard him enter, although I knew it was the usual time of day when he trod lightly among us to examine our work. My blood froze as I felt his gaze sweep over my shoulder and across the page. My failure was unprecedented, and I could not guess how he would react. But I was astounded when he merely placed his hand upon my head and whispered a blessing.
