“A double shudder of panic afflicted me at vile rat darting from the chamber and toward the stairs, and then at first glance of its abnormal head by inconstant firelight, muzzle too blunt to encompass crooked fangs, irises blue instead of glassy black, ears like a man’s, flat against the skull. Goody Mason’s imperious whistle retrieved slinking creature to her heels. I undertook no second glance. ‘Later for that!’ she hissed at it. ‘Mustn’t violate prescribed order!’
“As if to trivialize that warning she grinned, and bared teeth winsome as her pet’s. ‘My master may choose you for advancement! Prepare yourself!’ she crooned. Her jubilation was of a savory piece with her grin. And had she been more bookishly inclined, she’d have noticed I was preparing, with volume three of Newton’s Principia by my wainscot chair, as I’d been preparing studiously since that fateful jaunt to Boston.
“She railed, ‘You and I are of like humors, are we not? No seasonal rounds of drudgery for us, no fetters of domesticity, no paltry span of threescore years and ten! Of what merit is any ambition bound by human limitations? Hasten, the Black Man finds rich promise in you!’ That praise alone reaffirmed for me the Black Man was not you. She warbled how we’d be partners till the end of the world, and when I confessed unease at making her savage pet jealous, she scoffed, ‘His perquisites are his own, and they’re nothing to you!’
“In the hearth’s cavernous maw had formed, by none of Goody Mason’s doing, tracery of more royal purple than hers, staunch amid the flickering orange glow, etched from the crane for the kettle, the pair of crescent andirons, the cracks in fireplace back wall, and the blazing logs. ‘Go on! Why do you hesitate?’ Goody Mason scolded as I charily leaned forward and smelled the hairs on my knuckles singe. From behind, animal chatter added to the scolding, and selfsame gullet, I’d swear, squealed, ‘Go!’
“I turned in confusion, and spiteful vermin sprang at my face as from a cannon, a sneer upon blunt snout that no rat could shape. This treachery startled an unmanly shriek from me, and I recoiled tottering into infernal heat and through the violet gateway as my cheeks began to sear.
“My skin still stung, and smoke stank in my nostrils, as I fell to my knees on the yonder side, onto a black floor that was not stone or wood or metal. At the outset, the retention of my fleshly body, instead of mutation into tandem globes, mystified me. Nor had the Goody changed appearance, and her worshipful gaze conveyed she was kneeling deliberately.
“Her creature, meanwhile, scampered between us, and between a plain black altar and plain black lectern with an open tome of black pages atop it, and up shallow black steps onto a black dais, from the center of which rose a rugged black throne. On the throne, the recumbent figure of a man was black and featureless and immobile as everything else, and at his heels frolicked the misshapen rodent, whining in uncouth rhapsody. To survey these outmoded trappings of religiosity, of sheer charlatanism, made me wary and dispirited.
“What’s more, this adoration of a statue, as seemed the case, soon paled on me, and I sought for the source of reflected mercurial sheen on every black surface, like the to-and-fro of white minnows in a dark eddy. On observing the stupendous cataclysm that enveloped us I was instantly dizzy and overwhelmed. Our platform sheltered under a pellucid canopy of silence, in the calm eye of infinite storm wherein cyclones and pinwheels and explosions in every hue of the spectrum arbitrarily collided or rebounded or fused.
“And lacking any sense of scale or perspective I couldn’t hazard if the turmoil was composed of stars or dust or atoms, and indeed all may have been as one, in this anarchic theatre that made a farce of harmony or any music of the spheres. Nor could I attest whether seconds or eons were ticking by beyond our refuge. Whatever the actuality, wherever we were, the spectacle functioned as billowing stage curtains for the dumb show to which I lowered my daunted sights.
“More discomfiting yet, the greeting ‘Welcome!’ accosted me in a voice not high nor low, devoid of timbre, accent, or any memorable qualities. Freakish rodent now gamboled about a statue bolt upright and fixing upon me features so regular and nondescript as to give memory nothing to latch onto, like sculpted equivalent of the impersonal voice. This hairless, sexless statue moreover was of no human blackness, but in fact matched that of altar, throne, and lectern, and I was stupefied to recognize it also as that black of secret tendrils and reticulations penetrating all visible substance.
“The Black Man averred that while I lacked instruction to realize who he was, he could see I astutely realized who he was not, by which I gathered he meant you. With an unnervingly artful smile, he registered approval of me. ‘The God of your people you condemn as fable,’ he intoned as if scanning it on my brow, ‘and you would follow erudition’s road to its end, there to uncover what underlies all illusion, cant, and religion. Yes, let us depose sham God in favor of the genuine Prime Mover.’
“Both Goody Mason and her alter ego abandoned their piety and harshly dissented, and rodent’s ear for English no longer gave me least pause. Despite their muddle of agitation I managed to catch Goody Mason’s gist, her disbelief in my readiness, her objection to granting me unearned privilege. Their outburst, as if it were the buzzing of flies failed to swerve unblinking charcoal focus. We’d defer the formality of my signature in his book, he decreed, for I’d shortly have fewer compunctions about signing.
“Before my escorts could oppose this fresh breach of protocol, the claptrap of black furnishings, and our floor, faded into transparency. I hadn’t the presence to note whether the Goody and her pet also swayed off-balance as the swirls like vague white fish at our feet became the churning tempest of the spheres. Concurrently, our canopy cracked open with a thunderclap that shook my marrow, and I had scant chance to cringe at colossal vortices bearing down on us like a host of Olympian boot-heels, when everything in a heartbeat underwent reversal.
“It was, as the song goes, ‘The World Turned Upside-Down,’ save that we were on no world. We stood firm though not upon ground, my head felt clear and refreshed though falling sky had been about to crush it, and the dazzling tumult had become a lambent black, wherein fleeting white arcs and flecks glimmered on whirling spirals and polyhedrons. And in lieu of that earsplitting collapse of celestial roof, a bass pulsation, more palpable than audible, kept time with none of the black gyrations, and a hoarse piping, sans beat or rhythm or visible pipers or association with aught else, was nonetheless somehow intrinsic to all.
“My grasp of perspective and scale was, if anything, more askew here. Each towering black configuration may have revolved at arm’s length or across vast gulfs, and to raise my eyes set me reeling as upon a well-sweep till the zenith became the azimuth. I dared not peer downward. The Goody and her familiar and their master were at different distances whenever I regarded any one of them, feet or yards or furlongs away, yet I never saw them move.
“The single fixity, the one commonality between our prior environs and these, was the black throne, the ever-calm center within rank instability. For this arrant stage dressing to follow us beyond the realm of ‘cant and illusion,’ I conjectured the strict literality of this vista must have been subject to the Black Man’s mediation. Why doubt he had the craft to filter reality through an incisive metaphor, for the benefit of our limited human brains and senses, or to humor Goody Mason’s naive preconceptions, writ large in her devout gaze?
“Her adulation of him who replaced the Black Man on the throne was grievously misguided, for who could reasonably ignore the vacant slouch, impulsively flapping hands, aimless, guttural laughter, slack-jawed drooling, and fecal miasma of an idiot? The Black Man, suddenly by my side, commended my clear-sightedness in seeing the Prime Mover for what he was, which the Goody, in her prayerful genuflection, and her pet, with ecstatically switching tail, patently did not. Their mute veneration was doubly pathetic because they failed to acknowledge their deity’s milky eyes were blind as any icon’s.”
“Ah, but prove yours were not the disordered senses. How
prideful to assume the inferiority of others!” Archfiend’s smug grin only broadened as his deflection of the Goodman’s train of verbiage triggered a fit of gulping and snorting for air.
“A pox on you for distracting a poor codger with so few breaths to him!” croaked Goodman Brown. “I remind you, the Black Man himself saluted my clarity, allowing for my limited sensorium. No guiding intellect, he confirmed, presided at the core of everything. All was a random production of blind, mindless forces, as personified upon the throne, the divine inanity made manifest as the mechanical pulse, the tuneless piping. How the slobbering creator created himself, or otherwise came to be, abides as a sole intractable mystery.”
“Yes, unless your sorry shambles of a ‘Prime Mover’ is no such thing, but one mere creature more of the God you once revered,” the Deceiver argued.
“Then who created that God, or how came He to be?” With a wave both feeble and disdainful, the Goodman dismissed further dispute. “Of the idiot god’s features, like the Black Man’s, I could retain nothing, as if the Black Man were some finer-hewn avatar or emanation of the Prime Mover. The Black Man must have read these intimations in me, for he proposed, ‘Are we not each of us more or less felicitous rearrangements of primal disorder? The victims or darlings of almighty imbecility? You’re correct to appreciate my ways and substance are too complex for human rationality. But your schooling’s done for now.’
“In a topsy-turvy blink, the Black Man was restored to the throne, our sheltering canopy was overhead, and the prodigious black upheavals were dazzling and prismatic again. Goody Mason was at my elbow, and her pet had importunate forepaws on my shin. The Goody held open in outstretched hands the black book from the lectern, and unwholesome glint in her eyes made me dread her master’s next words. ‘And like any schoolteacher,’ he continued, ‘or ferryman if you prefer, payment’s due me, nothing too exorbitant in light of what you’ve learned.’
“With a peremptory flourish he drew my attention to a bowl I’d not observed earlier on the altar, of a somber burnish like an alloy of silver and the black material of our surroundings and the ‘master’ himself. I then descried beside the bowl a round-hafted dagger forged from that same alloy, and I was also positive it wasn’t there an instant ago.
“The Black Man was on his feet as precipitously as before, and between him and the altar hovered a purple contour that testified to his adeptness, for it was woven of no more than the arrested drafts and stirrings of the air. I was at once contemptuous of the added flummery with knife and bowl, this pandering to the Goody’s taste for heathenish props, yet was I also chagrined at these dire harbingers, and at the total opacity of inhuman aims and pleasures.
“As if in essence to decoy me, Goody Mason thrust the book a hairsbreadth from my waistcoat and demanded, ‘Sign it! Sign in blood!’ Her rodent, meanwhile, was up on hindquarters, scrabbling at my leg.
“A childish whimper redirected my attention to the Black Man stepping from the purple contour, and cupped in his untender grip was my swaddling boy, lolling as in drugged torpor. I was aghast at apprehending the odious bargain I should have foreseen when the Goody’s accomplice tried scurrying to my bedchamber. The Black Man’s mirthless smile rendered me more deathly dumbfounded. ‘You who have so aptly learned the value of earthly life,’ he declaimed, ‘and of family and posterity and all other sacrosanct follies, how could you scruple to dispatch your firstborn, what worth can he possess in your elevated view?’
“The dagger, cool and smooth and weightless as talc, was inexplicably in my hand. The Black Man shook my boy’s muslin blanket free from his bare chest, and pushed him toward me with the gravity of Yahweh offering Abraham a glorious covenant. My wayfaring comrades were meanwhile pressing closer till my breath mingled with the putrescence of theirs, and the Goody exhorted, ‘Sign it in his blood! That should temper your precocious swagger!’ Her rat, whose face I still shrank from scrutinizing, chided stridently, and I’d warrant I could sometimes discriminate syllables in some mewling language.
“I was mortified at how the brute rhythms of this clamor had come to throb within my veins, eroding my will. My fingers tightened their clench upon the haft, and my arm involuntarily began to rise. As I struggled against despair and base capitulation, against knuckles that refused to loosen around the knife, I could not say then, and cannot now, whether I acted out of love and loyalty and resurgent Christian virtue, or out of cold repugnance at this bloodshed as waste and foolery, an insult to august science, a sop to foul superstition, for what authentic purpose could such sacrifice serve?
“In their passion to humiliate me, drag me down to their murderous level, and confute I was their better, Goody Mason and her pet could no longer contain themselves. Supporting the black book in one hand, she wedged it against me to keep it open, while her other hand seized my forearm; I bridled at the effrontery of her touch. She fairly crushed what control I had of my arm to wrench it with dagger in fist toward my fretful baby. Each second, despite my utmost resolve, the blade inched closer, and the Black Man coolly nodded as his underlings labored to fulfill his inscrutable ends.
“The rodent, with gouging claws, raced up my breeches and vest too swiftly to cuff away, and pounced on my left arm as I flailed haplessly. Sawtooth fangs chomped on my wrist; foul beast clung to my sleeve, hindered my efforts to lift my arm and flap it loose, and twisted to jeer at me. The face from which I’d diligently shied now met mine full-on, and shock and outrage staggered me at cognizance of blasphemously mannish blue eyes, hooked snout, and scraggy beard, like unto Goody Mason as a son or brother.
“And at this insufferable travesty of nature, I flung the arm in Goody Mason’s grip up at an angle she was unprepared to parry, and jabbed the dagger into her obscene familiar. I struck hastily but well enough. Baneful vermin propelled itself away with an agonized squeal. The Goody weakened and wailed at this harm to her boon companion, and no sooner had I, with wrath unabated, broken her clasp than I stabbed her and rejoiced as she screeched and crumpled.
“The book had tumbled thudding to the floor. I hearkened from it to the rill of blood still dribbling from my wrist, troubled at my fate should any gouts have spilled onto the pages. My eyes hove to the Black Man, for he was venting raspy laughter—not at me but at his writhing disciples. My son he carried unmindfully, as if forgotten and liable to be tossed aside on rediscovering him.
“Around this kidnapper softly shone the purple nimbus from the creel of light behind him. I sprinted forth, with fatherly heart goading me at frenzied pitch, planted dagger in the Black Man’s surprisingly gelatinous throat, grabbed my child from his unresisting arms, and shoved against this malefactor’s chest, which was in contrast like smooth black granite, and like a statue he toppled backward. I leapt into the purple, but like Lot’s wife couldn’t help one last glimpse, and was confounded by statue already upright, neck bereft of knife, arms outstretched, and the Goody and her creature crawling toward him on their bellies.
“Momentum hurled me from out the fireplace, with nary a spark attaching to me or the swaddling cloth. I was afeard as much of lurching over and crushing my offspring as of anything else this night, and gratefully collapsed into that same wainscot chair from which I’d embarked. The fire still crackled briskly, begging the question of how long I’d been away. Purple configuration also hung steady amid the flames, and I bounced up and strained my ears for more perhaps than the pop and hiss of logs ablaze.
“So engrossed was I in listening that I was near to entranced when animal gibbering and witchy imprecations emerged distinct from the sputtering combustion, indicating the master had repaired his puppets to chase after me. Bracing restive tot upon my shoulder, I snatched a poker and thrashed vengefully at the firewood, the andirons, the kettle crane, wrecking the geometry on which the portal depended. “And as purple contours receded like incinerating straws, I shuddered at both my narrow escape and at ghastlier shrieks than the dagger had wrought, as if limbs were sheared from torsos, or t
orsos sheared in twain. I heard as well that inhumane laugh of black larynx as I backed bone-weary into my chair, where Faith almost gave me up for dead in the morning, save I was hugging our languid boy to me as for dear life.
“I never saw more of the Goody and her cohort, but pondered then, and ever after, the import if my blood had stained the black book. Did that account in part for the Black Man’s glee? And had rescuing my son amounted to a useless gesture? He grew to independence and resettled beyond the Berkshires, and broken all ties with me; he has been no comfort, and it is as if I’d never fathered him.”
The archfiend’s patrician mask acquired a more contemplative veneer. “At the root of it, though, homely virtues were victorious over cultish brutality; what matter if those virtues were instilled instead of heartfelt? Does that not suggest something?”
“Yes, that you’re deaf as an anvil,” the Goodman carped, but fainter of breath, vitality ebbing now his story was told. “Fortune’s whim, or mayhap the blind idiot god’s, brought me home unscathed. My life or my son’s could as easily have been forfeit, or I could have blandly acceded to his slaughter. My survival to this moment signifies nothing.”
“Bah!” The Deceiver banged his staff against the floor with the disgust of Moses vilifying a Golden Calf. “I can do naught with you! I leave you on your own!”
“Wait!” the Goodman hoarsely bid as his guest gathered up woolen cloak to turn away. “You fancy yourself so guileful, yet likelihood of imperfect candor in others never dawns on you?” Archfiend bared the vicious snarl of a cutthroat betrayed by a cutthroat. “Mightn’t deathbed confession have been a lie? Might I not have patched up differences with fellow acolytes and consorted with them evermore? Shame on you, to be hoodwinked like a silly lackwit imp!” The “lackwit imp” brandished his staff as if to smash a defenseless skull, and he, if not the head of his staff, hissed like a viper. “But here,” the Goodman wheezed, “is a trick I’ve saved for you!”
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