The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six

by Jonathon Keats

  When he wearied of seeing people toil—whether sowing or spinning or butchering cows, their jobs were as repetitive as the tower bells—Tet would visit the warehouses. There the boy could eat all the delicacies he wanted, wearing clothing woven of silk and gold, seated on a throne of cut gemstones. He’d pretend that he was the emperor of an exotic land, where everyone worked for his pleasure. If he wore a fur mantle, he envisioned a manservant wrapping him in it. If he ate a crown of figs or a round of cheese, he pictured a maid bringing it to him on a golden platter. His maids always had ample breasts and his men were sturdy like livestock. He couldn’t imagine a finer retinue, yet, no matter what he had them do for him, his fantasies felt a bit empty: There was nobody to enjoy his leisure with him.

  It was not for want of effort on his part. A hundred times he tried to come up with conversations to detain the servants in his reveries. A thousand times, he contemplated ruses to be-friend them. But like the people he watched in field and shop, those who populated his fictions were beholden to the carillon. He simply didn’t know how to dream up folks who weren’t.

  Tet asked his father why nobody ever used the luxuries that the town produced.

  — Those goods are sold.

  — Who buys them?

  — Merchants. You know that, Tet. You’ve seen them come in with their lorries and haul away all that they can carry. You see them practically every week.

  — Then what do they do with all the goods they get? Do they use them?

  — They barter the goods. That’s what makes them merchants.

  — They barter the goods with people who use them?

  — They barter the goods with other merchants.

  — And those merchants . . . ?

  — Can’t you see I’m busy? Why do you care? Why aren’t you upstairs, polishing the carillon bells, Tet? You know the chime must be bright. You know the town depends on that.

  — But when the merchants take away our goods, what do we get?

  — They give us credit. That’s what makes us the richest town in the kingdom. It’s why we’re admired.

  Tet didn’t ask more. He climbed the height of the tower. The carillon song rang in his ears as he stood beneath the swaying bells, polishing rags piled at his feet. He surveyed the landscape, stacked high with industry set inside a garland of lush farmland. The warehouses were beyond the farms, clustered on a crest above the stone quarries. The rest was uncut forest, through which ran roads traveled by merchants to villages known to Tet only through legend. He’d heard that they were desperately behind the times, these realms, that their bells rang but once a day. He peered down the belfry at his father, a knot of musculature toiling away the years. Tet tried to picture himself in Sol’s place, but he could envision it even less than the most outlandish of his warehouse fantasies. He yawned. He was bored. By the time his father called up to ask how the polishing was coming, he’d already slipped away.

  Nobody saw Tet for a while after that. Folks didn’t speak of it, any more than they discussed the ways of rivers or stars. He was known to be a loafer, inalterable, spared rod or exile only out of deference to his father.

  Maybe a day went by, possibly two or more, before a laborer passing from one task to another happened upon the boy’s body, sprawled out under a tree where the forest began at the edge of town. The laborer called out to others. Cluster heaped to crowd. Questions tossed around. Was Tet mauled by a bear? Slain by a thief? His body bore no mark of death. Soft and fair, Tet appeared barely to have been touched by life.

  Then somebody saw his eyes open. The crowd drew back. They knew the look of a demon, that species of dybbuk the size of a human soul, that takes possession of the dead as a comestible home. This one was peering out the windows of its new abode. The crowd shuddered. The body stiffened. Its mouth opened. Where am I? What happened to me?

  Tet staggered to his feet. He stared at the ground where he’d lain. He stirred the dirt with his foot. Then he turned around and asked the mob what had become of the town.

  — The town is fine.

  — Why is everyone here, then?

  — This is where we found you. This is where you died.

  — But I think that I’m alive.

  — It will probably pass. A moment ago, you were flat on your back.

  Tet didn’t remember. All that he recalled was walking out to the woods, as he occasionally did, sitting under a tree, and watching time go by. He found that it moved faster if he closed his eyes, like an unwatched pot coming quicker to boil, but what had happened in this instance was most unusual: He’d shut his eyes and the day had simply vanished.

  Some of the older peasants remained wary, but on the whole it was agreed that, if he could stand, he could work, and that was the only criterion anyone had when it came to questions of life and death. He walked back to town with several laborers and climbed up the bell tower, where he renewed his efforts on the carillon, polishing the brass with rags. A miracle, folks said of him. A resurrection. Then they returned to their cattle and forges and ovens.

  Tet, on the other hand, was only beginning to reckon where he’d been. As he skirted around the pealing bells, he recollected a landscape quite unlike the one reflected in the trembling metal. The hills had all been in their customary places, as had the river that powered the mills, yet none of the great waterwheels had been there to turn stream into machine, and the forest had lapsed all the way down to the shore. Tet did remember seeing some buildings, most particularly the tower where he was presently standing, yet broken down with weeds growing up within. Most haunting of all, though, had been the quiet, the total absence of people. He went to his father.

  — Where do folks go when they aren’t here?

  — Nobody in this town ever abandons his duties, Tet, not even for a moment. When you grow up, you won’t either. It’s time you learned that this isn’t a place for idlers.

  Tet tried to work harder. He made the bells so shiny that he could see the sun dizzy with envy. But nothing shimmers as persistently as curiosity. As day fell to night, Tet again abandoned clock tower for forest floor.

  He sat down to think things over. Not being very thoughtful, his mind soon wandered.

  At last he saw the sun rising. He bade it good morning, for he didn’t wish it to begrudge him his work in the bell tower. His voice sounded unusually loud to him, the only noise in the valley. He listened. The carillon was not ringing.

  He hurried into town. Naked brick chimneys stood cold, stripped of their surrounding shops. The marketplace was a field of nettles. He kept walking. He went in the direction from which merchants often came. He took the road many miles, all the way to the next village.

  By then, the sun was in its prime. Somewhere a clock struck twelve times. People crowded the streets, speaking to one another in terms so strange that he forgot he knew the language.

  Folks are such gossips, he heard a girl declare. Since that was a profession with which he wasn’t familiar, he turned to her. Her soft body was too large a bounty for the coarse hemp dress she wore, and, were her blond pigtails less full—falling forward over broad shoulders—her breasts might have been deemed indecent. And what, she said, staring back at Tet, are you looking at?

  He took a guess. A gossip? he said.

  The girl laughed, he wasn’t sure why, but she seemed to take a liking to him, which was more than any other girl had done. She glanced at his broad chest, and then at his face, so unblemished under a first growth of beard that he might have been a squire. She asked him where he came from. He named his town.

  — You’re teasing me.

  — It doesn’t look like much now, but not long ago it was bigger than your village. It was a commercial center.

  — My father once told me about that place. He said it’s a town where nobody sleeps.

  — What’s sleep?

  — You don’t know? You poor man. I think you may be telling me the truth. Sleeping is what you’re doing now.

  Tet was
more confused than he’d ever been. He wished he’d never started the conversation. Even polishing the carillon was easier than understanding what she said. Then the girl took his hand, and he knew that he’d follow her anywhere.

  She didn’t take him far, simply brought him to where she lived, the loft of the barn where she worked as a milkmaid. When they climbed the ladder, she pointed at the hay stacked in the corner.

  — That’s a bed. It’s where people go to sleep.

  — I see. How does it work?

  — When you aren’t teasing me, you’re trying to seduce me.

  She sighed. At least he was more handsome than her peasant boyfriends. She lay down, reached up a hand, and pulled him on top of her.

  For all his hours among silks and furs, Tet had never encountered luxury such as this girl’s flesh. She helped him to empty her out of her sackcloth dress. He gathered the abundance of her breasts. She laughed at him, and, while teaching him to kiss, ripped open his britches. Neither was prepared for the quickness with which the next lesson came, for it was new to both of them.

  They didn’t speak for several minutes. There was just the mutual give-and-take of breath. Then Tet asked the girl to marry him.

  — Marry you? Where would we go?

  — I like it in bed.

  — Nobody sleeps all the time, silly. If you married me, you’d have to bring me home to your town.

  — I’ll bring you wherever you want to go. I’ll take you to my town right now.

  — You expect me to live in a pile of rubble?

  — It’s a nice place when you’re awake.

  He looked at her. He saw that he’d have to do better. He vowed to give her the town of her dreams.

  Reluctantly, he dressed and returned home. He returned to the broken-down clock tower. The carillon had collapsed within. He attempted to lift it, but of course he couldn’t. He found a rag and started to polish. The cloth disintegrated in his hand. What could be done? How to begin? There was nothing where the shops had been, except more disrepair. Forget silks and gold. The town wanted iron and wood and stone. Tet wandered in despair. He sat beneath a tree. He shut his eyes. He had an idea.

  Two lumberjacks, young brothers, were clearing forest together—timbering trees in time with the carillon—when a corpse startled them from their labors. From their mother, they’d heard about Tet’s miraculous resurrection, yet here he was, dead again. Their mother had said that, if he wasn’t the devil, he must be very holy. They bowed their heads, and, after a spell, heard a voice address them: If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you a forest much greater than this.

  Then Tet started to describe where he’d been, explaining that there was a realm of dreams as vast as the land in which they stood, yet neglected for many unslept centuries by their countrymen: a village fallen to ruin, rimmed with unharvested timber, awaiting rediscovery. By the time his story was done, night had come, and they were seated on the ground. He urged the brothers to shut their eyes. And soon they saw all that he had said.

  In their dreams, they chopped down oaks stouter than oxen. They were strong men, and together they landed enough trees to build a mill, if only they’d a capable carpenter on hand to build it. A carpenter like their cousin. The moment they awoke, they left Tet to enlist him.

  On that particular day, the carpenter happened to be enlarging one of the sawmills on the river, tooling it to finish an acre of lumber each hour. The brothers told him that they needed him to frame a mill for them: They’d provide the timber, he’d be their partner, and, where they planned to build, there was no competition. The novelty of opportunity made them dance around him like children.

  In all his years, he’d never seen such zeal, let alone felt it himself. He asked where they’d been. They had him lie down and shut his eyes. They did the same. And, all together, their dreamwork was resumed.

  In the weeks that followed, word of Tet’s discovery gained ground. For the young, it was as if he’d found a new world, one that they themselves could conceive and build. Older folks were less enthusiastic. They’d been willing to overlook Tet’s selfishness when he kept it to himself, but to implicate others in his lazy ways was outright seditious. His followers insisted that he worked harder than anybody, for the greater good, supervising their dreams and recruiting new labor while they were awake. All that the older generation saw, though, was a sham miracle worker who’d staged a humbug resurrection to spread mass delusion. On Tet’s account, the young were working merely twelve hours a day, halving village productivity. Surely a law was being broken, even if it had yet to be written. An inquisition was called, held under the clock tower out of deference to loyal Sol, who wouldn’t abandon the bells, he said, just to witness his son’s execution.

  The trial began. The burghers refused to admit as evidence anything that couldn’t be brought in front of them. Tet’s supporters urged the old men to shut their eyes, to see what lay behind. The burghers jeered: Tet may lead a young fellow by the chin, but justice isn’t blind.

  Put in those terms, by men of wealth and prestige, Tet’s enterprise no longer looked so plausible to his faction. One by one, they aligned themselves with the burghers. They urged Tet to recant, and to go back to work for his father: If only he were useful, the town would never waste him on a principle.

  — I made a promise.

  — First you’re making mills. Now you’re making promises. Who’s going to believe it?

  — I proposed to a girl from the next village.

  — No one will ever marry you, Tet. All you ever do is loaf.

  — She accepted, provided that I make our town a pleasant place to sleep. But now I wouldn’t bring her here, no matter what I vowed. This town isn’t even a good place to be awake.

  At a nod from the head burgher, the lumberjack brothers hauled Tet toward the jail. They reached the steps, where a benighted crone stood in their path. She was as ingrown as an old vine, and as rooted to the ground. The woman was grandmother to several of the burghers, and a great-aunt to many others. Calling them to her, quieting them down, she urged Tet to describe his sleep again. She permitted nobody to interrupt. When Tet was done, she put her hands on his shoulders, and said that, when she was a girl, her grandfather had described something similar, which she’d always thought was mere fable: In his childhood, the bell tower had chimed on the hour, and folk had spent half their time in slumber. Then a terrible storm had come, a black wind, and everything had changed. Folks had no longer found time to dream. The carillon had developed a chronic case of insomnia. Over the years, people grew accustomed to their condition, conditioned to custom. Such things happen. The dream space of prior generations became foreign to the town, beyond the reach of imagination.

  A delegation of three burghers was immediately appointed to explore Tet’s dreams. Three beds of straw were made. When the sun set, the men shut their eyes. And found themselves looking out on a town like their own in another time. They glanced at one another, agape at the potential of such undeveloped real estate. Half-built, the shops stood empty, and the farmland had not been partitioned yet. They mounted the steps of the clock tower, still uncrowned by a carillon, and surveyed the uncut forest, calculating its commodity value by the acre. The numbers were too unwieldy even for all three of them together to handle. It was just as well. None wanted to admit his debt to Tet, let alone share with the others the potential wealth.

  For hours, folks watched the three sleeping burghers, elderly men, well bearded and full-bellied. In their slumber, the men began to snore. They sounded like pigs at a trough. Fearful of what was happening—that their dreams were corrupting them—their wives shook them awake. For a moment, the men looked lost. Then they were talking, all three at once, to establish who owned what.

  Nobody listened to their haggling. While the burghers quibbled through the night, beneath the chiming carillon, the town went to sleep.

  Over the next three months, a little each night, the town was rebuilt under Tet’s watch. Sho
ps were enclosed and occupied by craftsmen, who began to ply their trades as they did while awake. Fields flourished under horse and plow. Most dramatic, though, was the effect of this dual citizenship on the populace: Because neither wakefulness nor sleep was absolute, each put the other into perspective. Each could accommodate idleness as well as work. Each was a refuge from the other, and a respite.

  Tet didn’t take credit for that, though admiration for his enlightened stewardship naturally netted many marriage offers. In one dream, there was even a call to make him mayor. He declined the honor: His job was in the bell tower, ensuring that it rang on the hour, neither less often nor more.

  His father refused to follow such a sensible plan. Sol would not sleep in the bed that Tet made for him, nor would he permit any adjustment to his clockwork. He didn’t believe in dreams, no matter what folks told him. He alone stood awake at night, chiming perpetual noon for no one.

  Only in that respect was Tet’s vow unfulfilled, and the town not yet suitable for his betrothed. He argued and begged, but still the old man would not relent.

  At last he set out to fetch his fiancée anyway. In his dream, he roamed from farm to farm. He found her barn. She was inside, just where he’d left her, only much rounder than he’d remembered.

  She motioned him close. She lifted her dress and brought his face to her belly. She ran her hands through his beard, and murmured, Our baby.

  Then she let Tet kiss her, and hire a carriage to take her away. With help from the coachman, he carried her down from the hayloft and up into the covered hack.

  All the way home, Tet told her about his town, introducing her by description to everyone. Finally he got to his father.

  — He won’t sleep, my papa. He tends to the carillon all night long. It rings and rings and rings, and he believes nothing.