Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

  “Byron would–”

  “Oh hush, you are nothing like Lord Byron.” I took the page from him. “Your poetry is abysmal.”

  “Exactly like him then.”

  My eyes scanned the page. It was the translation we had been working on, with the English we were certain about written above the Enochian. I recognised my own writing and I remembered how tired my shaking hands were when I shaped each of the letters.

  But someone had filled in all the gaps. Someone had finished our work.

  But what would I know? It could be that what they said was true.

  The handwriting looked familiar. The letters were crowded and tightly curled, the nib biting deep enough into the paper to tear it. I had seen this hand before.

  That there was indeed nothing, a nothingness more empty, more cold, more void-like than the darkness we call night.

  “But this was on the bed,” I said. “We were working on it just before we…” I trailed off into a blush that was evident in my voice if not on my skin.

  “I know.”

  “We were asleep.”

  “I know,” he said again, obviously unnerved by the thought of someone stealing into the room as we slept.

  “How?” My hands were shaking when I laid aside the page onto my writing desk. “Are there more? I mean, has this person written on any other pages?”

  Laon didn’t answer but he began leafing through the scattered papers of the room.

  By the time the knock on the door came and a tray of breakfast was left outside by the Salamander, we had sorted through all the papers.

  Thirteen pages bore corrections and additions in a hand that belonged to neither of us.

  “I know where I’ve seen this before,” I said. I picked up Roche’s journal and, leafing through it, the answer was obvious. “It’s the person who wrote these passages.”

  Laon squinted at it as he bit into a pastry. “The resemblance is but passing. You might as well compare it to one of the letters from Roche’s wife. It’s a fair hand, but it’s a very common way to write.”

  I laid them side by side as I chewed my lip. He was right. It was not a very distinctive hand, for all the fact that it was tightly wound against itself; the cursive letterforms were very like those we had both practised over and over as children.

  “And there’s no one else in this castle,” said Laon. “It’s just you and me, Mr Benjamin and the Salamander.”

  “I don’t think it’s Mr Benjamin…”

  “There’s no reason to think it can’t be the Salamander.”

  Our eyes met and we shared an uneasy gaze. I winced.

  “Our housekeeper is rather elusive,” I said, glancing down at our breakfast tray. “And does have a habit of just leaving things about.”

  “Her notes, when she leaves them, have been in a different hand.”

  I sighed. “There’s no reason why we can’t just ask Mr Benjamin.”

  Simply asking Mr Benjamin was easier said than done, and both Laon and I had plenty to distract us. Perhaps we both feared the answers that our seemingly devoted gnome would give us, but we both found reasons to put it off until the afternoon and absorbed ourselves with the translation of further Enochian fragments.

  And despite its origins, we were both secretly ungrateful to the corrections and additions in that cramped, crowded hand. We could barely believe what had been written, what the text unravelling before us was, and it was for that reason that we pressed on.

  “I’m not sure we should keep going,” said Laon finally.

  “To know is not a sin,” I said automatically.

  He raised a sceptical eyebrow. “The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil begs to differ.”

  “I rather thought you’d go for the fact that to know can be used euphemistically for a different sin.”

  Laon grinned rakishly at that.

  “And I do concede the point about sin,” I said. “But there have always been apocrypha to the Bible. Maybe this is just another one.”

  “A new one.”

  “Or not,” I said. “We don’t know who wrote this or why.”

  Laon unscrewed his own hip flask and I smelt the thick scent of brandy. He took a swig from it. “I don’t know what we expected.”

  I tried a shrug but my shoulders were aching from the way I had been hunched over our work. I gave a lazy wave of my hand instead. “I don’t know either.”

  He gave a hollow laugh. “The language of angels.”

  “Do you still think that?”

  “I’m not sure what to think, but what else can we think?” He pushed his hair from his eyes in an exasperated motion. “Those two we spoke to, the fae. They seemed to think so. But I suppose it’s also written on the beams in the sea whale. So maybe it’s the language of whales.”

  “The dream I had about Eden. Remember I said I read a tree?” I folded my tongue and clicked it as I thought.

  “Yes…” He was leafing through our pages of drafts for the whale text. It was almost a luxury to have this much paper. I remembered how tiny we used to write.

  “In it I was certain that there was a language that flowed in the veins of the world,” I said. “That language held the world together at the seams. Each blade of grass, each leaf. So perhaps that is what it is. The language with which God made the world… except here, here it is different. It’s rougher here, a scrawl.”

  “We can’t prove that.”

  “I know… just the name of God. It is special in this language, or perhaps it isn’t even in this language. Maybe they’re not writing it in this language and are doing the equivalent of writing it in Sanskrit…” I took a deep breath. “But what does it mean?”

  “Perhaps nothing more than that the fae have a lost book of the Bible. A book of apocrypha. Like you said.” He took another deep drink of his flask and passed it to me. “And I never thought that I would ever call that the least of the revelations.”

  “That doesn’t actually tell us what it means.”

  The words fell into place. We scrabbled about the lists of words; our hands and eyes could not work fast enough. We excitedly muttered to each other, trying to describe the letters and next word we needed to find. We never did manage to work out how to pronounce it.

  My hands were shaking and I found myself blotting the page over and over. I could barely write. I swallowed again and again; my mouth parched as I croaked out the words to myself.

  “Laon, this is the origin of the fae.” I sat back, hands fluttering between my mouth and the page. “This is their genesis.”

  “If this is true…” his voice trailed off.

  “Does this make them Nephilim? Born of a human woman and son of God?”

  “I don’t think that’s how they’re defined…”

  “Would you even call her human?” My mind racing. The implications both profound and mundane were too many to count.

  “Does it matter what I call her?”

  “If we have souls because Adam has a soul and Eve has a soul because Adam has a soul… then does she have a soul?”

  “It begs the question of what those words even mean,” said Laon. “If only descendants of Adam and Eve have souls then no one else can have one. Like apples all born from the different cuttings of the same tree, I suppose. If there is a completely different tree…”

  “An apple having seeds doesn’t mean, I don’t know, a pomegranate doesn’t.”

  “Pomegranates don’t have apple seeds though.”

  “But they do have seeds…”

  “I feel we may be reaching the limits of this metaphor.”

  I laughed at that, and the tension was broken.

  After that, we joked often about souls and orchards. Puns on fish and feet suggested themselves, and we indulged in every one. Even as we both accepted their revelation, we were yet unready to speak of it aloud.

  There was a madness there that we had yet to entirely embrace.

  That night, we left open the door to empty air
.

  And so, I dreamt of Ariel Davenport.

  I was on a roof as a bright, earthly sun was setting. I had become so used to the fact of it receding into the distance that to see it dip below the horizon was strange and alien.

  Woven bird traps covered the slate roof. They surrounded me, hemming me in. There was no step I could take that would not trample one underfoot.

  A chorus of caged birds baited these traps. Scarlet songbirds were lured down into each one. They snapped shut in a flurry of feathers and the plaintive cries were mistaken for more song.

  Beautiful, painful song.

  I reached down and picked up each of the birds. I felt their little trembling hearts as they beat their brittle wings against my hands.

  With fine white thread I sewed the birds into the corpse of Ariel Davenport. Each stitch stained my white thread red. The birds came apart bleeding string and thread and yarn. All red.

  Spools of red thread tangled in my hands until they bit into my fingers like wire.

  One by one the birds fell silent around me, but I kept sewing.

  Ariel Davenport was a broken doll, after all. Why shouldn’t I be able to make her out of a patchwork of dead birds?

  I woke screaming.

  We did not try to leave the door open again.

  Chapter 36

  The Truth Between the Lines

  In that womb and grave of nature, He sculpted a world, telling it to Himself like a story, word after word. This part of the story you already know, although most would have you believe He made it idly, effortlessly, summoning it into existence like a dream, but I tell you now – and I am telling you tales – He slaved those six days. He hammered out the heavens, flat and smooth, like a mirror. He kneaded the mountains out of mud, built pillars to hold up the sky and smoothed the basin for the sea. He carved each and every tree, scratching out the grooved bark with His fingernails and tearing dark eyes into the skin of the white birch.

  Each creature – not all unique, not all beautiful – He made and moulded. I like to imagine Him joyful in the exertion, but I think of Him more driven half mad by the sheer enormity, complexity of his undertaking.

  He picked faces out of the clouds and gave them form. They were as beautiful as the blushing dawn, as the twilight sky, as the morning star. His voice He gave to them, and they spoke his own words back to Him.

  Angels, He called them.

  They were almost company, chattering back to Him in their lofty, echoic voices. They praised all that he did and urged him on with indulgent smiles, blinking their empty eyes at Him.

  But how long can one mind, however fragmented by madness, be content with hearing only echoes of Himself?

  Translated from Enochian by Rev Laon Helstone and Catherine Helstone

  He first found Mankind in the mud. Unlike His first creations, made like shadow-puppets out of His hands, man was not imbued with His own voice. He no longer wished to hear His own words echoed back to him. He craved newness. He needed another mind like and unlike his own.

  He did not know so yet, but He wanted a mirror, something that was Himself, like Himself, but not Himself.

  And so in the mud He saw a face. Or the suggestion of a face. Like a child picking out eyes and nose and mouth from the patterns around it, it was meaningless.

  We were made together, Mankind and myself. He was created as my equal and I his. By the lineages of creation, he is my brother.

  But he wanted neither sister nor equal.

  I ran away with a dragon who stole a mind for itself and Mankind would love himself so much that he would marry his own rib. My children I had to hide away from a Creator still angry about our betrayal; his children inherited the earth.

  Translated from Enochian by Rev Laon Helstone and Catherine Helstone

  For all that we were both consumed by our work on the presumed apocrypha, Laon gave a simple sermon on love that Sunday. It was strange to hear him be quite so gentle in his exhorting of his parishioners in their love for another. The dark currents that had often gripped his speech had been tempered, though the steely conviction that I had always admired remained. He also spoke inconclusively on the muddy history of apocrypha, listing the various theologians who had curated the books of the Bible and describing briefly their disagreements.

  After, we sat on the grass of the courtyard together. Mr Benjamin and Laon discussed the “word weeds” as Mr Benjamin liked to term the apocrypha, with the latter trying in vain to work out a hierarchy of truth within the various canonical texts.

  “But then which is more true?” pressed Mr Benjamin. “If garden more true than weeds, then is there difference in garden. Flower more true than leaves?”

  “I’m not sure what would be the flower or the leaves then,” said Laon. “Do you mean the Testaments?”

  “No, no. Flower can never be truer than leaves. Leaves are always. Always are leaves,” Mr Benjamin muttered half to himself before saying to Laon in his most Oxford voice: “But then which is more true? Which is leaves?”

  “The entirety of the Bible is true.”

  “Yes, yes. All true, like whole garden is real,” said the gnome. “But what is more true? In Genesis it says that God created man in his own image, in the image of God, he created male and female upon the fifth day, but then after the seventh day in the second chapter He makes man again in a garden eastward of Eden. He makes mankind twice and in the second instance he makes woman from the rib.”

  “Theologians have harmonised stories are true in more than one way, that some may be allegorically true–”

  “Two stories,” insisted Mr Benjamin. “Two chapters, two times. Both true?”

  Laon sighed long and hard. I smiled seeing him this way as he answered, “Just as Jonah and the whale is a prefiguring of the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb–”

  “But different!”

  “And in the same way, the two chapters are the same story, just told slightly differently.”

  Mr Benjamin seemed content with the answer, but feeling mischievous, I said, “You could always tell him about the Jewish demon. The one in Faust.”

  “That’s just confusing,” said Laon, rolling his eyes at me. “And is quite preposterous.”

  “The first woman, made at the same time as Adam, was never named. She wasn’t made from his rib, but was instead made at the same time as him, of the same substance. So she must have had a different name.”

  Mr Benjamin was staring at me very intently at this point. He blinked not once and his gaze banished all the levity out of me. Guilt settled in as I knew he took the faith very seriously and for all my lack of a soul, I should not mock him so.

  “She’s citing a German play,” said Laon. “It’s not really scripture.”

  “Less true?”

  “Yes, less true,” reassured Laon, his blue eyes wonderfully soft.

  “But what is name?”

  “Lili–”

  A gnarled hand pressed against Laon’s face as Mr Benjamin tried to stop him finishing the word. “Names have power. Don’t say the name.”

  “It’s just superstition,” I said.

  “Older the name, greater the power,” said Mr Benjamin. “Very old name.”

  It was clear we had stumbled upon something much greater than either of us had intended to unearth, so I changed the subject to the singing of hymns.

  The pendulum sun was waning, growing smaller in the distance. The garden was firmly in the grips of autumn, and the yellowed leaves drifted prettily from their branches.

  We raised our voices in dubious harmony. It was a cacophonous mixture, far less beautiful than many I have heard before, but it was still a strange balm to my nonexistent soul. There was a comfort in ancient, beautiful words, I supposed.

  “Almost sounds like when we sang in past,” said Mr Benjamin, a little wistful as he beamed wide at us with his brown teeth. “Almost, almost.”

  “Can’t be the same,” I said. “There’s three of us now. More voices,
better music.”

  “Ah, but we were three too. Too three.”

  “Three?”

  Mr Benjamin looked nervously at his fingers which began fumbling with the brim of his hat.

  “Who else was here?” I said.

  He said nothing.

  “You don’t often speak of Roche,” I said, as gently as I could.

  “The Reverend is here, I speak often of the Reverend. And to the Reverend,” replied Mr Benjamin. He closed his eyes and his hands continued their agitated movements. He plucked apart the bunch of sedge leaves tucked under the ribbon of his hat. “The Reverend is here. And I am here.”

  “You know I mean the previous Reverend. The original one.”

  “The Reverend is the Reverend,” he said. “Is the Reverend, is the Reverend.”

  “Then when you sang before, who else was here besides the Reverend?”

  Mr Benjamin shook his head and crumpled tight his face, his eyes closed, cheeks sucked in and lips pressed together.

  “You said before that you saw faith. You said… you never said what you saw exactly, but that sacrifice. Is this to do with that?”

  “The Reverend is the Reverend,” whispered Mr Benjamin.

  Laon gave the gnome a pitying look and, meeting my eyes, he shook his head, urging me not to press the matter.

  “The Pale Queen’s orders?” I said, quite quietly.

  He gave the barest nod.

  “It’s alright, Mr Benjamin. You don’t have to say any more.”

  The gnome breathed a sigh of relief and opened his eyes. He smiled again as though nothing was wrong.

  “Thank you, Mr Benjamin.”

  I was staring hard at the handwriting, and the letters were beginning to lose meaning, reduced to simply lines and shapes. We had had dinner in the hall rather than in my rooms and it was upon our return that I picked up the page and began staring at it.

  “I still think it might be…” I swallowed, uncertain of my thoughts. I gnawed at my bottom lip.

  “You’ve been looking at that for a while,” said Laon.