by Mark Frost
ON BOARD THE EXPOSITION FLYER
Before reaching Albany, the train parted company with the Hudson and muscled west, taking on in its place the unwavering companionship of the Erie Canal. Buffalo, New York, came and went shortly after dinner: bloody steaks and great piles of mashed potatoes at Pepperman's table. He made a vain attempt to evoke the great spirit of adventure about their journey—"Look, Lake Ontario, one of our five Great Lakes; bet you've never seen a lake that big before!" and so on—but the man was once again left puzzled and slightly deflated by the Doyles' polite, lukewarm responses.
Occasional glances passed among Doyle and his companions dining at nearby tables—Stern and Presto together, Jack alone. The Major took no notice and consoled himself with an extra serving of strawberry shortcake, a dish new to the Doyles that prompted their most enthusiastic outburst of the trip, elevating Pepperman's hopes for an improved camaraderie only to have them immediately dashed when the brothers declined an invitation to repair to his berth for a few hands of whist.
Doyle had determined he must take advantage of their confinement on the train to lay siege to the wall of silence surrounding the lost ten years of Jack Sparks's life. Before venturing any further into danger, Doyle felt a compelling responsibility to crack the mystery of the man who was taking them there. Earlier attempts based on sincere, straightforward concern had failed; time to give subterfuge a try.
Doyle nicked a bottle of brandy from the bar and found Jack alone in his sleeper, reading by the light of a sputtering gas jet. Jack immediately concealed the cover of the book— a perfectly innocuous scientific treatise on the principles of conductive electricity—but secrecy was by now so second nature to him, under the seat it went, on top of Edison's mysterious suitcase.
Doyle ceremoniously settled himself across from Sparks; Jack refused both the brandy and an offered cigar, reached up and nozzled down the gas, bathing his half of the berth in a flickering half-light from which he watched Doyle with sharp, hooded eyes. Doyle said nothing and took no apparent notice of Jack's scrutiny, lit his Havana, savored his brandy, and feigned a high level of self-absorbed contentment.
Jack stared holes in him.
Fine; if all else fails I'll outwait you, Doyle thought; I made it through five years of medical lectures, I can sit here until one of us rots.
Jack grew uncomfortable under Doyle's mild, disinterested gaze; a single fidget, a restless finger of his mangled hand tapping on his knee. Minutes passed. Doyle blew smoke, smiled absently, peering thoughtfully behind the shade at the darkness outside.
"Hmm," he said, before closing the blind.
He glanced back at Jack and smiled again. Jack shifted in his seat.
Doyle ran a hand over the mohair seat, leaned over to inspect the seams.
"Hmm," he said.
Jack folded his arms across his chest.
Now I've got him on the ropes.
Doyle held up a foot and inspected the laces on his boot.
Jack exhaled heavily.
Time to apply the coup de gr&ce.
Doyle began to hum. Aimlessly, tunelessly. A bit of this, a snatch of that; nothing at all. Spikes driven under one's fingernails could scarcely have been more effective. Three minutes of this before ...
"I mean, really," said Jack.
"What's that?"
"Must you?"
"Must I what?"
"Are you deliberately trying to aggravate me?"
"Why, that's not my intent at all, Jack—"
"Good God, man."
"—whatever do you mean?"
"Barging in here. Brandy and a cigar. That appalling noise. This isn't the reading room of the Garrick Club."
"Oh, am I disturbing you? Terribly sorry, old man."
Another patient smile. Not the slightest twitch of intention to vacate. Jack looks away. Another minute elapses. Then. Begins moving his head slightly from side to side—silent humming—while he conducts the imagined music with small waves of his cigar.
" What?" said Jack, exasperated.
"What?"
"What do you want?"
"Not a thing; perfectly content, old chap; thanks, ever so—''
"Monstrous; rude; invasion of privacy. Not like you at all."
Then, as if a subject he'd been meaning to bring up had come rushing back into his mind, Doyle fixed Sparks with a benign physician's eye and paused dramatically before asking, "How have you been, Jack?"
"What sort of a deeply moronic question is that?"
"I can't honestly say I don't have my concerns about you____"
"Now you are really making me angry—"
"Perhaps if I express it this way, Jack: There are certain ... behaviors you exhibit that, as a doctor, one can't help but take notice of."
"What?"
"Certain symptomatic tendencies—"
"Stop mincing around and come out with it: What do you mean to say?"
Doyle regarded him with a thoughtful series of nods. "It occurs to me that in the years between our periods of acquaintanceship, you may have become mentally deranged."
Even in the shadowy haze, Doyle could see blood rush to his face like mercury up a raging thermometer; it seemed to require a supreme act of will for Jack to contain the violence that fireballed inside him. For a tense moment, Doyle feared his strategy had backfired and he might have to physically defend himself; he knew how to box but Jack knew how to kill. But instead of attack came the rigid pointing of a scarred and crooked index finger and a voice strangled with fury.
"You ... don't know ... a bloody thing ... about anything." Corners of Jack's mouth flecked with white. Snorting like an agitated bull.
"I don't know the facts, of course," said Doyle, somehow keeping his pitch at the same infuriating even keel. "All I have are my observations. What else have you given me to go on?"
"Would you like to hear that there were times when I begged whatever passes for intelligence in the Creator of this world to let me die? That I got down on my bloody knees and prayed like some simple-minded vicar to a God I don't even believe in? Is that what you want, Doyle? Because that would be true. And I am pleased to report that there is no God of the kind they try to sell us, because nothing bearing a resemblance to such a being would have left one of its creatures alive in such a state."
Right, thought Doyle, now we've primed the pump.
"So instead He ... left you alive to suffer, is that it?"
"What a stupid, common presumption: Didn't you hear a word I just told you? Regarding our fate no decision is made; no one presides, no being, no thing even bears witness. Can you begin to understand me?"
Doyle stared at him mutely: Let him talk.
"No great or lesser intelligence takes any notice of our existence whatsoever because we are alone, Doyle, every one of us, left adrift in cold and empty space. That's the dirty joke on the washroom wall: It's all a mistake; cruel, random, and senseless as a railway accident...."
"Human life?"
"I mean creation."
Jack leaned forward; the piercing lightness of his eyes like diamonds in the dark of the carriage. His voice fell to a whispery rasp. "Every stone, every blade of grass, every butterfly. Man most assuredly of all: no design, no underlying purpose; it's a folly, our so-called mind, a japery; if there's poetry in our nature, it bleats out of us with no more conscious intention than the babblings of an ape. But the world of man—society—conspires to keep this secret from us. Don't you find it curious? With all your scientific training?"
"What's that?"
"Animals are born with instinctual drives for survival and develop techniques to ensure it. Man is the only creature that needs to delude himself into believing there's a more elaborate reason he's alive; we flood our minds with lies and fantasies about love and family and a benign God in the heavens watching over us.
"But it's only a survival instinct, drilled into each of us from our first breath; it's vital to a society's survival that its members be preven
ted from discovering how squalid and meaningless their existence truly is. Otherwise we might lay down our tools, leave all this soul-destroying work behind, and where would your precious society be then?"
The silence lay deep between them, broken by the distant, rhythmic clacking of the rails. Jack never blinked, never moved his eyes from Doyle's: Doyle looked through them to darkness, thick and churning.
"Picture another possibility: What if the origin of our world is worse even than this? What if there is a Creator who worked to give our earth design, forethought, shape and contour? And what if this creature is completely and utterly insane?"
"Is that what you believe, Jack?"
"Do you know what you find, down here"—he stabbed a fist sharply into his gut—"when every article of civility, every habit, cherished memory, every manufactured shred of this puppet we assume ourselves to be is stripped off us like the skin of an animal?"
Doyle swallowed hard. "Tell me."
"Nothing," said Jack, his voice barely a whisper. "A void. No sight, no sound, no thought; not a ripple or the faintest echo. That's the secret at the base of the stairs no one is supposed to find. They warn you when we're young: Don't look down there, children; stay here by the fire and we'll tell you the lies our parents beat into us about the greater glory of man. Because they know coming face-to-face with that emptiness would obliterate every trace of who you thought you were like a beetle crushed under a jackboot."
Jack held up his ruined hands. "And this is the glorious mistake you see before you: I entered into the emptiness. I'm there still. And I'm still alive. And it means.. . nothing."
Sparks smiled, a death's-head grin, eyes shining with a diseased and twisted triumph. The train shot into a tunnel, plunging them into darkness. Doyle clenched his fists, not knowing if he was about to live or die, but he would have welcomed a physical fight, pain, anything palpable and real in place of Jack's spiraling fall.
"So with this cheery whisper in my ear, I greet each new dawn," Jack continued quietly, his voice worming sinuously out of the dark. "It never leaves, I have no relief, and in this way I go on living. Mentally disturbed? Don't waste your pathetic shopworn judgments on me, Doctor. Posing at enlightenment. No better than the rest of them; you put a name to what you can't begin to comprehend to push the darkness away. That's the first refuge of a coward. There was a time when I could expect more from you than the parroting of empty screed. Or has success seduced the better part of your mind as well as your pockets? Maybe that's it. They haven't cut you down yet; you're still a fresh face, drunk on the adulation of the masses. Prepare yourself, Doyle; a reckoning is due. They won't tolerate any success from one of their own for long. They cut down all the tall poppies."
The train left the tunnel; lights flickered back on. Jack sat only inches away; his eyes trained on Doyle, who didn't know how to keep the fear and disgust off his face. Doubt crowded in on him: This man's sickness was not only of the mind but of the soul, and its profundity crippled his ability to respond. Where had it come from? What had caused it? He had to press forward with his questions: "If you had come to such a pass, why didn't you take your own life?"
Jack leaned back, shrugged, and casually picked a piece of lint off his sleeve.
"This ... place ... is hellish but not without interest. Picture happening upon a street fight: You come around a corner and find two strangers trying to kill each other with every reserve of viciousness in their bodies. The outcome means nothing to you, but the flow of blood, the raw naked spectacle, rivets you; you can't tear your eyes away. Embrace the emptiness and it exerts the same mesmerizing hold on the imagination: How perfectly and regularly human beings embody a vast, horrific meaninglessness. It would almost qualify as tragic if it weren't so deeply hilarious; all the pomp, the effort, the strained, puffed-up self-importance of people, handing out awards to ourselves, parading around; achievement. Working, striving, worshiping, loving. As if it mattered.
"Why didn't I kill myself?" Jack laughed, a harsh, brutal rasp. "You might well ask. Because life is so cruel that it makes me laugh, and that's the only reason to go on living."
Doyle struggled to keep any judgment or emotion from his voice; any appeal to the man's fellow feeling offered no avenue to reach him now, if he could still be reached at all. "How did you come to ... this place?"
"Oh, I suppose you want the facts, don't you? Always the facts with you; fine, why shouldn't you have them? I won't spare you a detail. You can use them like bricks and build a wall to hide behind or put them into one of your little stories. I haven't read them, by the way; I gather you've used me as a model of sorts for your dear detective."
"I suppose that's true, in a way," said Doyle, feeling a rush of anger.
Jack leaned forward with an almost friendly smile and lowered his voice. "Then my advice to you is this, old boy: Don't incorporate a breath of what I tell you into your characters. People won't like to hear a word of it; not sentimental enough, no warm and happy turn. You know how to give them what they want: lies, gilded and framed like a hall of mirrors. Beware of telling them the truth: You'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs."
Jack laughed again bitterly. Doyle felt himself go cold inside: to bear this much and now an assault on his dignity. Why should he subject himself to another word of this bullying? What lost quality in the man made him certain he was worth the trouble? The Jack he had so admired was nowhere in evidence; this one sounded like an utter stranger and like no one else now so much as Doyle's memory of his mad brother—and if Edison's moving pictures were to be believed, Alexander Sparks had somehow survived the fight at the waterfall as well. Twin ruptured souls, damned and irredeemable; blood ties run deep. This was not his business: easy enough to walk away and leave them both to burn in their private hell.
But a deeper responsibility rose up in him; if either man posed a danger to other people, to simple common decency, then Doyle knew his obligation to proceed along the path he'd chosen outweighed any wounding to his pride. He possessed reserves of faith and strength they knew nothing about and until proven otherwise he would continue to assume they were a match for the darkness that had flowered inside Jack Sparks. Doyle called on those reserves: If that flower could still be cut, Jack might be redeemed. He needed more information.
"Obviously you both survived the Falls," said Doyle matter-of-factly, giving him nothing to scorn. "Why don't you start there?"
Jack smiled as if the memory were fond. "And what a fall it was; endless, like flight or close to it, a dream of flight. Clutching each other, rocky cliffs whistling by as we dropped.
Pure hatred in my heart; the desire to kill him stronger than any emotion I had ever known.
"I didn't lose hold of him until we hit the river, two hundred feet, that's how far we fell together. Death seemed a certainty, but over thousands of years the Falls had carved a natural pool in the riverbed at its base. I went down into the depth; the concussion of the landing knocked me senseless. I felt a swift current near the bottom take hold and off I went, a leaf bobbing down towards the sea."
"And your brother?"
"I never saw him again. I came to nestled in a bed of rocks; black night around me. Who knows how much time had gone by? A day might have passed, maybe two. My eyes could make only the slightest adjustment; rock walls around and above me; no sky; in a cave, fed by this underground stream, the mountains there honeycombed with these pockets, as I discovered. I lay on the rocks for the longest time, unable to move, in a twilight state.
"A dullness crept over me, my entire body bruised, battered, but no single outstanding pain to speak of. Plenty of water beside me to drink as I needed. I crawled, then walked, defined the boundaries of my confinement—a space ten feet by twenty; I could barely stand and only in the center. My world reduced to that cramped chamber. Comforting really. Not much difference between a womb and a tomb.
"So at a moment when panic should have taken root I felt increasingly peaceful; when you live in d
arkness—sleep and move and wake in it—you come close to your own true nature. No distractions with that face in the mirror; dirt under your fingernails, the backs of your hands. Alone with your self, whatever that is. That ruling voice inside: Who am I? What am I? The first few days my journey began with those questions. Eventually I came to question everything. All the basic assumptions lose their potency, until you realize that all you have, all you are, is what is in your mind.
"I would have stayed there but I had no food, and as I explored my cave I realized there was no other way out; I would have to go back into the river. I waited, building my strength, and then took the plunge. The currents were more negotiable in these subterranean channels and I could swim for some distance in a number of directions, but in the pitch dark and not certain of a place to surface I had to constantly return to my cave. I've no idea how many days passed—how dependent on the cycle of light and dark is our perception of time—but my strength had reached as high a peak as it could without sustenance and would soon begin to dissipate. I staked everything on one last attempt.
"I dropped into the river, swam down into the deep, and passed the point of safe return. Living in the dark had raised my other senses to exquisite levels; I could detect the slightest variation of flow in the river so I let the water guide me: nothing to be gained by struggling. Minutes elapsed. Breath used up, I came very near surrender; how tempting to let everything go... at that moment I saw a light in the water and I called on the finishing kick I had held back. I lost consciousness as I broke the surface and drifted to shore. That's where I awoke, in a bed of bulrushes, like some antiquated Moses. Middle of the night, a secluded bend in the river.
