The boys took turns digging a grave.
After a full minute of argument, I convinced them to give me a turn digging. Colin timed it with his watch, and I piled my dirt into a pile separate from the one the boys had been making. When, in the same amount of time digging, my pile was bigger than their combined piles, Victor put me in charge of the burial detail.
They wouldn’t let me touch the canvas potato sacks the corpses were in, though. Digging a grave was woman’s work, but only manly men can touch a sack with remains in it, I guess. Go figure.
Now it was Quentin who argued. He was much quieter in his voice than I was, but more insistent. He wanted to bury them right, and say a few words. For different reasons, Vanity and I both backed him up.
Colin scoffed at us, saying, “You three are being silly. If you close your eyes, the sun doesn’t go out. Spirits can move from place to place, but they can’t ‘die.’ Can a concept die? Can a god? It’s all the same substance. There is no reason to make a ceremony out of it.”
Victor’s face showed less emotion but he scoffed, too: “These bodies are composed of the same amount of atoms before and after vital functions ceased. There is no quantitative difference, no reason to get sentimental about it. Quentin, say whatever words you want to say and make it quick.”
At Quentin’s polite request, Colin chopped down four branches, and we used a hank of twine from one of our bags to make two crude crosses to mark the graves. Colin drove the crosses into the frozen earth with blows from the back of his hammer. He must have been angry, or “putting energy” into the blows, for he drove the uprights nine inches or so into the ground with one blow each.
Quentin said a few words over the bodies. “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord, Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God those whom we have carried to this place, their names unknown to us; and we commit their bodies to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” That sort of thing. Simple and moving. I did not know who these people were or how they got into Boggin’s clock. I did not know if they were children or if they had just shrunk because they were mummies. I did not even know if they were human beings. But I felt sorry for them.
Then, after praying like a proper church-going Christian, Quentin took one of the kitchen knives we had stolen, cut an unsightly hunk of hair from his head, and tossed some of it into either grave, as if he were suddenly a pagan again, and he threw in four tuppence from his pocket change, two into either grave. He took out one of the bottles of pop we had taken from the kitchen, shook it, and sprayed it against the roots of the tree, asking the Meliad Nymph of the tree to kindly guard the remains, in return for the libation he poured out.
I had only shoveled about four great spadefuls into the first grave, when there was a motion in the near distance, and Mr. Glum’s dog, Lelaps, trotted into the clearing.
We all stood motionless, staring at the huge hound.
The dog sat on his haunches, tilted his head to one side, and let his tongue hang out.
Vanity pointed away South. “That way. We’re going that way.”
The dog barked once, and immediately trotted off the other direction.
“Nice doggy…” said Vanity softly. Then she said, “I am beginning to get a good feeling about our chances.”
A few minutes later, and we were under way again. I shouldered one duffel bag, Victor carried one, and Colin and Quentin flipped a coin to see who would take the third.
Because Lelaps was likely to lead any pursuit astray, we shared Vanity’s confidence, and did not set too hard a pace. We talked as we walked, and some of us, envious of Quentin’s walking stick, had asked Colin to cut staves for us from the branches around. Colin used the axe handle as a cane, and leaned on the axe head, in a fashion I thought most unsafe. He had also been running with it in his hands. I thought it was only a matter of time before someone got cut with it.
I said to Quentin, “What was all that ‘Lord make his face to shine upon you’ stuff back there at the grave? You’re not a Christian anymore. You told me so.”
“I’m still English,” he said mildly.
Vanity said, “Are you going to tell us what happened to you last night?”
Colin agreed, “Let’s have the tale, Quentin. Do tell, do!”
We trudged along beneath gray skies as he spoke, in the crisp air beneath the woven white lace canopy of frost-touched trees, and in the highest spirits we had ever known.
14
I Do Not Like Thee, Dr. Fell
“I did not see him in the snow when I stepped out onto the roof, because he was buried in it. He was laying face up under about an inch of powder, and he sat up. All he was wearing was a white lab coat. How he got by without breathing, I don’t know.
“His forehead opened in a vertical split, and behind the split was a third eye, blue as gunmetal, every part of it. He projected his spell from the eye, and it struck me, and I could feel my magic snuffed out in an instant. Do you ever think of your own body as a coffin? That is the way I felt. As if my soul got smaller when his spell struck.
“I walked with him back to his lab. I remember asking him along the way if he was a Cyclops. Amelia and I had seen another man with a third eye earlier that evening.
“He said that his real name was Telemus. ‘You are thinking I am a triclops, aren’t you? But this,’ and he pointed at his own face, ‘is merely an appliance, like the one your fellow inmate Victor Triumph wears… I can see you are curious,’ he said.
“And he leaned down and drew his eyelid wide with his fingertip and asked me to touch his eye. Well, I thought it was my chance to escape, so I took it. I poked him in the eye as hard as I could with my finger, and turned and ran.
“His eye was as hard and as dry as a marble. I had run perhaps twenty yards—a fair distance—and turned to see why he wasn’t following, and I saw him, with a hard little smile on his face, flicking a blood drop from the end of his finger at me. Even though he was too far away to hit me with a little fingerflick, he did.
“It had the shape of a red needle when it hit my pants leg, and it vibrated, like a dentist drill, and sank into my calf. A cold sensation seized my leg. I could feel it spreading through my veins. I fell down and could not get up.
“He walked up and told me the running was to get my heart rate high, so the effect would spread faster. He threw me over his shoulder as if I had no weight at all, and he walked back to his lab. He did not turn on any lights as he walked through the corridors: I think he has perfect night vision.
“He strapped me to a gurney, and—Victor, may I leave out certain details? Well, never mind. We are among friends here. I had dirtied myself when my legs went numb, and he yanked my pants off and wiped my bottom like I was a baby. I was a baby, I suppose, or as good as. He didn’t seem disgusted or anything. I don’t think he noticed I was a person at all. Anyway, that was not the most humiliating thing that happened that night.
“He never did turn on the lights in his office. The only light was a little moonlight coming in through his windows, and shadows of his instrument cases and files were black as pitch.
“He goes over to a cabinet, mixes some things together, and steps up to a table. There was a patch of moonlight there, and I saw what happened. Dr. Fell holds his hand over a beaker, and blood wells up out of his fingers like sweat. He did not cut himself. He stares at his hand and it starts dripping.
“He opens his third eye again and cooks the blood in the light that comes from this eye.
“He says to me, ‘The science of cryptognosis is based on the insight that all structure in the nervous system is based upon previous, cruder structures. The nature of any hierarchy is that different functions are carried out at different levels; for a neural hierarchy, this means that structures in the thalamus and hypothalamus influence the content and priority of sense impressions before they reach the cortex, whereupon other structures in the midbrain organize, file, and recover past
impressions according to the coded signals they receive from other areas of the brain. Whole areas of decision-reflexes are coded and carried out without sending any paths through the cortex. Once set in motion, the reflex cycle automatically completes itself. Anything that mimics or masks these signals can alter signal priorities and set the reflex in motion. This includes both muscular reflexes—’ he squinted at me, sent a dot of blue light out from his third eye, and my whole body jumped’—glandular reflexes—‘and he made me wet myself again’—and neural reflexes. One such set of neural reflexes controls what is passed on to long-term memory, and what is dumped.’
“He stabbed me with the hypodermic needle. ‘I have programmed the molecular engines in the serum to seek out the control-ganglia for memory in your nervous system. The effect should take twenty minutes or so to complete. After that, I can induce narcolepsy by activating the sleep-center in your pons, and turn on your delta-wave function by stimulating your medulla oblongata. When you wake, the last twelve hours or so will be gone.’
“I should mention, he did not walk over and push the needle into me. He pointed, and the needle levitated by itself, flew across the room, and stabbed me. He curled his fingers and the empty hypo floated back to his hand.
“I tried to get him to talk. I said that since I wasn’t going to remember anything of what he said, could he please tell me who I was or what was going on?
“He answered the first question, but then got bored with the game, and sat down and began writing notes or something. He sat there in nearly complete darkness reading from one book and making entries in a journal. I could hear the scratching of the pen on the page.
“I heard footsteps then, and the lights came on. They seemed so bright after the gloom. But Dr. Fell did not blink. His eyes are just painted marbles, after all. He just stood up at his desk.
“Here I am strapped to a table with no pants on, and a drunk Japanese woman comes into the room. Very pretty, like a china doll, if she had been sober. She is wearing a kimono of a blue floral pattern with a wide red sash—what are they called? An obi—with silver tracery running through it. But on her, it is all hanging loose and askew, and her cheeks are all bright pink with strong drink, and you can smell the alcohol on her breath. Her hair is done up in one of those elaborate folded masses, with pearl combs and bamboo chopsticks and little ornaments in it, but it is half-undone, and strands are everywhere. She lost her shoes somewhere too, and is walking around in these toe socks.
“Oh, and she had this thing that looks like a big celery stalk in her hand, a wand about two feet long, twined with ivy and with a pinecone at the top.
“Naturally, the first thing I say is ‘Help me,’ and she drifts over, giggling, and stares down at me. Me, strapped down to this rack, with no pants on.
“She says, ‘This is one of them, isn’t it? I’ve never seen one before. It looks like one of us, doesn’t it? They can do that when they want to.’
“And now she turns and makes a tsk-tsk gesture at Dr. Fell, and she says—well, never mind what she says. She jokes about whether or not he has been molesting me sexually, which didn’t seem very funny to me.
“ ‘You are allowed on the estate under a safe-conduct to attend the meeting, not to go frolicking about. You know the rules,’ he says. She says back in sort of an unsteady giggly singsong voice, ‘Oh I don’t go when Orpheus is there. You know how he feels about us.’
“It was actually funny, but he tells her off in that same dry monotone he uses on us when he tells us off in class. I mean, the same tone of voice he might use on Colin for getting an assignment wrong, the same condescending phrases. ‘I am very disappointed… perhaps had you been thinking, you might have considered…’ like she was a schoolgirl. He was mad because she was supposed to act like a human around us, or where any witnesses might see, and she talks back, and he gets all cold and nasty, and she laughs and sways back and forth. He says to her, ‘Our obligation while we are guests here on the Promethean world is not to interfere with the creatures of Prometheus. Besides, Mulciber has annexed this domain, and we do not want to run afoul of his machines. You know how he feels about killing men.’
“At this point she says Boggin wants to see him right away, something very important, another one of us has gotten away or something. It made me have a moment of hope, because, you know, I thought one of you was coming to save me. But the moment Fell is out of the room, she turned to me with this sly look on her face, and I realize it was just a trick to get him out of the room.
“I ask her again to let me up, and she says, ‘Serve my master and be his man, and I will let you go.’
“I asked her if she could stop Dr. Fell’s potion from erasing my memory. She looks a little puzzled, and then mad, once I explain what’s going on. Her cheeks get even redder than the drink made them, and her eyes get even brighter, her hair more wild.
“She says, ‘Swear, and if you don’t remember tomorrow, all the better. The Master really doesn’t want you to obey him, you know. If you disobey him, that is just as good.’
“At that point I knew that I had better die rather than swear.
“But I say, ‘Tell me something about him, so I can decide. Does Dionysus have any other agents working here? What do you know about the situation at this school?’
“She actually looked a little nervous or flustered at that point. ‘You things are dangerous, even all tied up. How did you know my Master’s name?’
“I tell her I will trade her question for question.
“I am really proud that I had the nerve to say that, and calmly, too, since all I wanted to do was beg her for help and cry like a girl. I was so full of fear that my stomach hurt like someone had kicked it.
“So she says, ‘Sure, why not? You’re not going to remember anything tomorrow anyway.’
“So she tells me what she knows about the school. Lord Terminus sent an expedition to recover certain hostages from the Four Houses of Chaos. He was on the brink of a civil war with his own children at that time, but it hadn’t broken out yet, and so, in order to placate them, four or five of his sons sent different agents along as part of the expedition.
“As it turned out, when Lord Terminus dies suddenly, the expedition has no place to go and no one to report to, and the various people from the various factions are suddenly terrified and suspicious of each other.
“But they find they have to work together, because each of the little orphans from Chaos has a different type of magic, a different version of the universe they draw upon for their power.
“Four types of magic, and each type has one other type it trumps, one it is trumped by, and one to which it is equal and opposite.
“The Athanatoi of Cosmos are descended from the Titans of Chaos. The lesser gods and goddesses, their powers also fall into the same four types. Except for the Phaeacians and the Olympians, who command two new powers created by Saturn and Rhea.
“I am a fallen spirit, a son of Phorcys. My power (Lamia tells me) is theurgy, the study and command of immaterial essences. A very potent power indeed and, in her opinion, the noblest and greatest of the four.
“Just by good fortune, Dr. Fell is here to stop me. He is a cyclopean, an atomist. One who commands matter. Whenever his power and the power of my house come into conflict, his will always prevail.
“I asked her who were the other houses and who stopped who, but she says, oh no, it is her turn now. How did I know she worked for Dionysus?
“I told her I read minds, and she says, ‘You lie to me, little boy, and we had an agreement. You are now in debt to me, and my power can touch you now.’
“She takes one of the combs out of her hair and jabs me in the neck with it. The tines are so sharp I almost don’t even feel anything. She puts her head down and starts licking at the blood dripping from my neck.
“There are bloodstains around her mouth at this point, a little trickle running down her neck. She throws back her head and moans, and strokes her own throa
t with her fingertips.
“She says, ‘For my first charm, I call upon your blood to tell me the truth of how you knew the name of the Vine God, Anacreon, Lord Vintner. I look into your blood, and I see your soul. I taste it, and I know. You did not read my mind, you read a book. Why has Boggin been teaching you about us? What kind of fool is he?’
“I said, ‘I call upon your oath to gag your spell. If my blood answers a second question without your answer to a second one of mine, then your promise to me is broken, and I am released.’
“She took out one of her hair needles and stabbed me in the arm with it. It was a pipette and she sucked at it like a straw. But the taste of my blood must have annoyed her now, for she spat it into my face. It stung my eyes.
“ ‘Ask your question, boy, little boy, clever little boy.’
“I repeated it. ‘Who were the Houses in Chaos? Whose power stopped whom?’
“She said, ‘The Dark rule the dreams and Nightmares of Old Night; Cimmeria their land, Morpheus their king; the Fallen rage in darkest Dis, weeping for lost Elysium, and the lost virtue, which, forsaken, lost them all and everything. The Lost fall through the Abyss, silent and serene as rain, Typhon is their eldest, but the Lost will suffer no one’s reign; the Telchine are their serfs on Earth, Ialysus their golden isle, rich with treasures wonderful and fine. The Unknown live beyond all things, in a Fortress Incomprehensible of uncountable sides and unimaginable design, and, prelapsarian, still laws recall that Uranus knew before his fall.’
“Now she climbed up atop me on the gurney, and began lapping at the wound in my neck like a dog.
“ ‘Oh, now I see,’ she says, ‘Boggin taught you all what you needed to know. He taught the Telchine boy physics and Newtonian mechanics, and taught you poems and myths and lore, taught music to wild prince of Night and Dreams, showed the Prelapsarian girl the strange secrets of strange Einstein, where math proves nothing is just where or what it seems. He has been forging you as a weapon for his own use, then. Right under everyone’s nose, right in the light where they should be the least blind. So the old puff of cold wind just gave you the paradigms you needed. And maybe he thought no one would mind.’
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