Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

  I dipped my hand into the cool water and stroked the petals of the lilies. I smiled at the beauty of it all. Unlike the faded grandiosity of the castle, the walled garden had been reclaimed by something greater. It gave an illusion of a sublime infinity imperfectly captured and imperfectly held, like rainbows in water.

  “What is the history of Gethsemane?” I asked.

  “Of Gethsemane? You mean this place?”

  “The history of this castle, this garden. It’s obviously old. Who lived here before, well, us?”

  The changeling shrugged. “No one.”

  “But–”

  “No one I know of,” she added hastily. “There was the previous missionary, Roche, of course, but I don’t know more than that. This place is built on secrets, after all.”

  “Too many,” I murmured to myself, but I did not press her further. Her first answer felt meaningful though, given as it was, unwittingly. This verbal tug of war reminded me all too much of luring answers out of teachers at school, when ambushes worked better than stubborn interrogations. Still, some things had to be bargained for.

  Miss Davenport idled by the roses. Having plucked one, she was absorbed by the dismantling of its petals, carefully tearing each one off.

  Wind rustled the branches and wafted over the rich scent of mint. It drew me down the path and into the cedars. Laon and I used to crush mint in our hands until they were stained with scent. We would look for it in the wild or steal it from Tessie’s garden. Laughing, I would put on airs and proclaim myself a London lady and daub it behind my ears.

  A round tower stood in the middle of the trees, too small to be more than a single chamber.

  The pendulum sun was overhead, granting a warm glow to the ivory-white stone. Part of the tower was joined to the castle by a narrow, roofed bridge. The bridge was not of white stone; it was red brick. A curio, certainly, but arguably no stranger than the rest of the garden. And, like the garden, it seemed a moment suspended in time, drawn from the imagination of a long-dead monk. I could imagine his shaking hands dappling shadow onto the covered well and smooth, pale stone.

  The door was too big for the tower. Its snarling knocker was green with age and stained my hands such when I used it.

  I peered inside.

  “Hello?” My voice echoed within the stone chamber.

  I eased open the door and it gave a low creak.

  There was a coppery tang to the still, undisturbed air. I felt as though I was unsealing an ancient tomb, breathing again the stale air of the past.

  Sunlight lancing through the windows suspended dust in seeming timelessness. At the far end of the room, beyond the broken benches and toppled candlesticks, was an altar, slightly recessed into the wall. An altarpiece stood upon it, the triple frame of tarnished gold imposingly empty and the colours of its panel painting made muddy by the river of time. Soot and grime from long years’ candles and incense smeared its surface. Shadows obscured all but the round, gilded halos that framed each of the faces.

  Only their holiness remained.

  I drifted towards the altar, entranced by the destruction that had been wrought upon this chapel. The benches had overturned and were scarred by a heavy blade, an axe, perhaps.

  A chill came upon me as I wondered who could have desecrated this chapel. Popish it may be, I could not believe the hands that wrought this destruction meant me and my brother anything but harm.

  On the floor was spilt a dark, ominous stain and a chalice. A communion table lay on its side; battered Bible, silver dish, wafers and candlesticks lay scattered upon the bare stone besides it.

  Do This in Remembrance of Me.

  I was not so enamoured of the new fashions in theology as to think the wafers sacral outside of their ritual, but it still seemed wrong that they were left in the dust and dirt. They may not be the literal flesh of Christ but His touch is on them. They are more than bread.

  I picked up the Bible. Pages had obviously been torn from it. My heart felt again the cold clutch of fear.

  Taking a step closer to the lonely altarpiece, I thought I could make out the outline of Christ upon the Cross in the central panel, the huddle of three by his feet the three Marys. The left panel depicted a kneeling, haloed Christ within the garden of Gethsemane, begging his heavenly father to spare him the cup of suffering. Behind him were his apostles, barring the way of the shadowed, benighted figure of Judas. From that, I had expected the right panel to show Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, but the composition of figures was wrong: Only one large shining figure stood at the fore of a red door of sorts with a small, paler figure clambering either in or out. Blocky birds swarmed behind.

  With a handkerchief, I tentatively cleaned the panel. The grime clung to the altarpiece, only smearing further. Frowning, I spat upon my handkerchief and scrubbed a little harder.

  It was not a red door, but the yawning maw of a monstrous beast. The small, pale figures were fleeing, even as the beast’s lashing, forked tongue was wrapped around one such figure. The birds that blacked the sky behind were demons.

  Slowly, it dawned upon me. I was uncertain if I was making it clearer or if I was becoming more familiar with the subtle colours of the faded piece, conjuring details to make sense of the fragments.

  Yet the answer became inescapable: it was the Harrowing of Hell.

  The painting was done in a different style to the other two panels, its human forms less lithely elegant in their composition. Even as they screamed and clutched at each other in their cages, I guessed the painting older, perhaps medieval, and then later added to this altarpiece for eccentric reasons. The Harrowing was not a popular subject for altarpieces, after all.

  “There you are,” came the voice of Miss Davenport. “I didn’t mean for you to come in here.”

  I heard her footsteps entering the chapel.

  “What is this place?” I asked, gazing at the white lattice of ribs within the mouth of the hell-beast.

  “The other chapel.”

  “Other?”

  “It doesn’t really matter, just another old place in a place full of old places.” She gave a nervous laugh. “None of it is real anyway.”

  “Who was–”

  She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. It should have all stayed locked.”

  “You need to explain. You can’t show me a secret second chapel with the remains of some interrupted communion and expect me to stay silent, Miss Davenport.”

  “We should go.” She cast her eyes to the dark corners of the chapel, to the altar.

  “No.”

  “We shouldn’t be here.”

  “An answer for a step.” It was a ridiculous bargain, but I stood my ground.

  “I’ll tell you when we’re outside.”

  “Tell me now.”

  Miss Davenport swallowed before speaking. “It’s just a folly. The fae stage these all the time. Like how you might arrange teacups in the woods to trick children into thinking fae are picnicking there. Or arrange toy soldiers in a scene of escape from their tin. It’s a game.”

  “But who was meant to see it? If it’s a game, there must be a player.”

  She was trembling but her voice remained steady. “No one yet. It’s not ready.”

  I waited another heartbeat as her hands agitated, folding and unfolding by her face. I relented and took a step towards the door, accepting her answer even as I distrusted it.

  The relief upon her face was immediate.

  I murmured my apology as we stepped outside the chapel. It assuaged my conscience even as Miss Davenport did not hear it. I only hoped that the answer was worth my guilt.

  We walked back in silence. At the foot of the stairs that led to my room, Miss Davenport apologised for having brought me to the garden.

  “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry,” she said, avoiding my gaze. “I shouldn’t have brought you there. It was my fault.”

  “Would you
like to eat with me, at least?” I remembered what she had said about salt that morning.

  “Changelings don’t really need food. For all the feeling of hunger, we just like it. And unsalted food doesn’t–” She took a deep breath.

  “Why do you ask me to invoke the covenant of salt for you then?”

  She studied the floor for a long moment. “It would be best if you forgot the garden behind the veil of ivy.”

  With that, she wished me a good day and turned to leave. Part of me wanted to bid her stay and ask her to tell me what had been weighing down her words, but I knew I shouldn’t. We were not friends. For all her talk of protecting me and the time we spent together, we discussed little of substance. I had already strained what we had with my earlier interrogation. To overstep again our intimacy would only drive her further from me.

  As my hand lingered on my door, a feeling of being watched came over me. The hairs at the back of my neck stood on end as I felt the scrutiny of a thousand eyes, like the rush of heat when brave fingers dart through naked flame.

  There was a rustling noise: a jostling of wings or the rippling of leaves.

  I turned. But for my shadow, the space behind me was empty.

  “It’s you, isn’t it? Salamander?” I called out. “You helped me that time…”

  I heard a high, bell-like laugh. Or perhaps it was bells that sounded like laughter.

  “In the dark. With the lantern. I remember.”

  I followed the sound, but the castle was as empty of people as it always was. I stumbled down an unfamiliar corridor.

  “Won’t you talk to me?”

  The sound of bells grew fainter until I was certain I was alone.

  I sighed and returned to my room, winding up the tight knot of stairs. I was troubled by Miss Davenport’s departure and further unsettled by the elusive Salamander.

  Of the mission’s inhabitants, I had yet to meet the aforementioned Salamander. When asked, Mr Benjamin merely muttered darkly about the dangers of fickle fire and his attention would wander off, abruptly changing the subject to a remark about the weather.

  I had pieced together some impressions of the presumably fire-aligned fae. I was, after all, well acquainted with the theories of Paracelsus that proposed all fae were fundamentally elemental in nature, and I had no reason to believe this untrue at present. The Salamander was allegedly in charge of the household, with Mr Benjamin as merely groundskeep, but there was little trace of the Salamander’s work.

  Sighing, I pulled out the papers I had hidden from Miss Davenport that morning. This all, at least, allowed me time to work on the Enochian manuscript.

  The shapes of the symbols were slippery in my mind. My unfamiliarity with them meant that I found them difficult to differentiate. My inability to even guess at Enochian’s pronunciation meant that I wasn’t even able to sound them in my mind, making it wholly an exercise in matching glyph to glyph. Each word required a painstaking cataloguing. I remembered trying to learn Greek from my brother’s textbooks and how my eyes rebelled against an alien alphabet. I laughed now at how heartily I had complained at him about Greek’s awkwardness. Enochian was far, far worse.

  I imagined myself Jean-François Champollion reading hieroglyphs for the first time. Laon and I read of his breakthrough in our father’s periodicals.

  The lists of words were incomplete, to say the least, and the spellings were not always consistent. Most of it was even glossed in Latin rather than English and I cursed my own feminine education.

  It was a sort of madness.

  One of the oddities that struck me was that there was a series of glyphs that only ever appeared by themselves. They were never repeated with any of the other letters. It made me question my assumptions. There was no reason to expect this to be an alphabet like the Cyrillic script or even runes. There was no reason to expect texts written in the same alphabet to be in the same language. Surely to an outsider, a page of French and a page of English would look similar enough.

  My mind was panicking as I studied my great catalogue of words. The pattern of their repetitions suggested sufficient overlap in vocabulary that they were probably the same language.

  That word with the unique letters, though.

  It was in that first line of Enochian I had read beside that Latin.

  In the beginning there was the Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God.

  Of course.

  I laughed to myself at how obvious it was: those letters were the name God.

  I looked at the page before me and seeing it repeated throughout I knew I had to be right. I was holding the gospel in Enochian. This must have been an effort to translate the Bible.

  And yet, why would this language have a unique word for God? For all our own reverence His title in English is merely made of everyday letters. Hallowed His name may be, but there was nothing unique about its writing. Before I had learnt letters, Agnes told me that the letters in God and dog were mirrored; it was a fact that boggled my tiny mind. I had thought anagrams to be a sort of verbal magic that would make one thing into another.

  I thought of Champollion recognising Cleopatra’s name in a cartouche. Perhaps it was only apt that this should be the first word I read in Enochian.

  There were those who would not write divine names or made taboo their pronunciation. There were those who forbade His depiction. Perhaps this was like that, writing the name of God in a way that was alien to the rest of the script.

  But I wanted it to mean more. I wanted it to confirm my wild theories of this being the language of angels, stolen and preserved by the fae. I wanted this to be that sacred first language that God spoke to create the world, that He taught to Adam and that was sundered at Babel.

  And so I pressed on, trying to make sense of the other words. Whilst nothing made sense as passage, other recurring short words began to linger a little longer in my mind.

  As I worked, I thought again of Miss Davenport’s answer at the scene in the chapel. I could believe there to be artifice in the arrangement, that there wasn’t an interrupted act of communion, only someone’s desire to suggest that. But such dioramas were always made to be seen, and if not by my eyes then there must be another pair it was all intended for.

  But who?

  As my candle guttered, my fractured thoughts no longer followed one another and their haze bordered on sleep. My eyes were no longer focusing on the words before me.

  Tired beyond thought, I stumbled towards the basin and splashed water from it onto my face. The water soothed but washed away none of the exhaustion. The bed was but a few aching steps away.

  As my eyes closed and I lost myself to the enveloping sheets, something agitated at the back of my mind. It was like a loose tooth or a stray thread, tugging at my thoughts. There was something I had forgotten.

  That night, I dreamt of Laon.

  He lay under a willow in a garden, resting his head on the lap of a pale, pale woman. She wound her arms around him and he sighed as she stroked his face. Her locks of white gold and brown were draped over his black hair.

  The long, delicate fronds of the willow framed their idyllic scene and my presence felt like an intrusion.

  At the edges of my hearing, they were whispering to one another. Soft and gentle words were pressed against ears, like kisses, intimate and secret.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.

  I did not know her face. It was sharp and strange. She turned and looked straight at me, amber eyes piercing. I was trapped in them; I saw myself reflected in them. I saw myself as she saw me, pathetic and worthless, nothing more than an insect. I felt long-limbed, ungainly and drab, a moth to her butterfly.

  I shrank from her gaze, but her eyes pinned me. I was a moth newly drawn from the bottom of a killing jar and unfolded onto a specimen board, my flaws on lurid display.

  She laughed. My brother gazed at her with worshipful eyes and he could not see me. He drew from the air a
ribbon of bright scarlet and wound it through her white and brown hair, his long, beautiful fingers catching her misty, cloudlike tresses.

  I wanted to call out to them, for him to notice me. I wanted to tell him I had been waiting for him, that I had come all this way to see him, but I found I had no voice.

  I struggled to run forwards but they only seemed all the further away. I could not look away as the distance between them closed, skin against skin.

  The dream continued for some time, and when I finally awoke, I found my eyes gritty and sore from unshed tears, and my heart aching.

  Chapter 8

  The Words in the Book

  Iron or steel, in the shape of needles, a key, a knife, a pair of tongs, an open pair of scissors, or in any other shape, if placed in the cradle, secured the desired end. In Bulgaria a reaping-hook is placed in a corner of the room for the same purpose. I shall not stay now to discuss the reason why supernatural beings dread and dislike iron. The open pair of scissors, however, it should be observed, has double power; for it is not only of the abhorred metal, – it is also in form a cross.

  Edgar Shelley Heartland, “The Secrets of Steel”, Iron: An Illustrated

  Weekly Journal for Iron and Steel, Printed and Published by James Bounsall, at the Mechanics' Magazine Office, 1846.

  My feet were sore from pacing. I did not know how long I had been turning and turning in my circular room.

  Days had become weeks, and my confinement within the walls of Gethsemane was becoming intolerable. Little differed from day to day: Mr Benjamin had continued being nothing but excessively courteous and abrupt in his conversation; Miss Davenport returned each day to sew and knit with me, with long sighs and tales of her human family, and of course, there was no sign of the Salamander.

  The seasons, in so far as they could be understood as such, marched on, and the pendulum sun continued its strange patterns. As the swing of the pendulum decreased, the sun no longer passed overhead. Midday was just a little darker and midnight just a little brighter. The days themselves did not grow shorter, of course, as the length of time it takes for a pendulum to complete its swing remained constant – that much I remembered from my lessons.