The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  “You mean, like why are you only … a head?” asked August.

  “Not bad for a start. Pay attention.” Larchcroft’s head turned to face the man with the red carnation in his lapel, who had gone to stand by the door at the far end of the room. “Baston,” called the Man of Light.

  “Sir,” said the butler, looking up.

  “Tell Hoates to play a few bars,” Larchcroft called.

  The man by the open door leaned through the entrance and yelled, “Hoates, a few bars, old boy.”

  A second later, the music again filtered down from the room upstairs. “Should I be listening for something?” asked August.

  “No,” said Larchcroft, “watching, and watching intently.” He then closed his eyes and hummed along with the tune.

  August watched but was confused as to what he was supposed to be watching. This is certainly the strangest night of my life, he thought. And then he began to see something he hadn’t seen before. There was a very vague outline descending from the bottom of the great man’s head, where, if it had a neck, that neck would be. August squinted and saw more of this line and a moment later saw a line descending on the other side from the bottom of the head. More seconds passed and it began to become clear to him—the vague shape of Larchcroft’s body.

  At that juncture, Larchcroft called out, “Enough,” so loudly that the man with the carnation didn’t have to transfer the message upstairs. The music ceased and when it did, the faint lines that had begun to define the Man of Light’s body suddenly disappeared. August snapped his head back and blinked.

  Larchcroft’s eyelids lifted and he smiled. “What did you see?” he asked.

  “I began to see you,” said August.

  “Very good. I’m wearing a suit: pants, jacket, shirt, gloves, shoes, and socks, all the exact same torpid velvet green as the wallpaper. The light acoustics in this room, if we can call them that—the barren space, the grayness of the floor, the height of the ceiling, our mass, and, of course, the glow of the chandelier, soft as liquid fire—conspire to make all but my head invisible against this background. But when Hoates plays his cello on the floor above, positioned directly over the chandelier, the vibration of the instrument travels through the ceiling and is picked up by the crystal pendants, which vibrate ever so slightly, altering the consistency of the light field and sundering the illusion.”

  “And you are sitting on a bench or chair upholstered in the same green?” asked August in an excited voice.

  “Precisely,” said Larchcroft.

  “Ingenious,” said the young man, and laughed.

  Larchcroft laughed uncontrollably for a time, and August thought the sight of it was both wonderful and somewhat horrible.

  “You’re a smart lad,” said the head, nodding in approval. “I have every bit of faith that you’ll come up with the right question.”

  At first August felt confidant that he wouldn’t disappoint. The question seemed right on the tip of his tongue, but after sitting with his mouth open for a time, he found it had never been there at all and the sensation of its presence dissolved.

  Larchcroft rolled his eyes. His head lurched forward and lowered itself toward August. The mouth opened, and, when words came forth, the young reporter could smell the warm, garlic-laced breath of his subject. “The Creature of Night,” came the great man’s whispered message and was followed by a wink. Then the head ascended and moved back away.

  “Can you please tell me about the creature of night?” asked August, bringing his pencil to the ready and resting his notebook on his knee.

  Larchcroft sighed. “I suppose,” he said, “although it’s a very personal story, and I shan’t tell it more than this one time. I will have to fill you in on some preliminaries first.”

  “I’m ready,” said August.

  “Well,” said Larchcroft, closing his eyes briefly as if to gather his thoughts. “Light is a creative genius, an inventor, a sculptor. For proof of this we look no further than in the closest mirror at our own faces, and precisely into our own eyes. Can you think of anything, my dear Mr. Fell, more intricately complex, more perfectly compact and thoroughly functional than the human eye?”

  “No, sir,” said August.

  “I thought not,” said Larchcroft. “Consider this, though. Our eyes were created by light. Without the existence of light, we would not have eyes. Over the long course of man’s evolutionary maturation to his modern condition, light sculpted these magical orbs, making subtle adjustments through the centuries, until now they are capable of the incredible process of sight. This most vital sense, not only a means of self-preservation but the single most important catalyst for culture, is a product of the inherent genius of light.

  “In ancient times it was believed that our eyes were like beacons, generating beams that issued forth, mingling with the light of the sun as like is to like, to strike things and return to us a reflection that we would then register as sight. Now we understand that the eyes are only elaborate sensors by which light communicates with us. Make no mistake about it—light is sentient. It directs our will. Is both a taskmaster and a protective parent. This I understood very early in my investigation of it. From the time when I was five and I saw a beam of sunlight entering a room through a pinhole in a window blind, striking a goldfish bowl and being dispersed in the guise of its constituent colors, it was but a few short years of intellectual pursuit of the phenomenon before I realized that everything we see and seem is merely the detritus of pure light, or so I thought.”

  “One moment,” said August as he scribbled madly. “You are saying that everything in existence is merely a product of the breakdown of light?”

  “More or less,” said Larchcroft. “This theory led me to a deep enough understanding of my subject to perform some feats of illusion that caught the attention of the public. But after I had gone to university and learned the mathematical formulas that neatly boiled down into numbers my youthful, groping discoveries, it seemed I could go no further with the subject. I’d come up against a kind of impenetrable wall, blocking me from the quintessential secrets. What it came to, I realized, is that light communicated with us through the eyes, but the eyes were merely receptors, so it could tell us, lecture us, demand of us, but there was no recourse for dialogue. I could manipulate the processes of light to some degree, as it would allow me, but the cold, hard fact remained: my relationship with the mind of light would always remain limited.

  “Then one night, during the months in which I was suffering a kind of depression from the realization of this limitation, after a late dinner of curried lamb, I took to my bed and had a vivid dream. I found myself attending a party in the one-room schoolhouse I attended when I was a child. There were about a dozen guests, including myself, and the teacher, who was no teacher I remembered but a very lovely young woman with golden hair and a peaceful countenance. All of the desks had been removed and there was only one table with a punch bowl on it. We conversed for I’m not sure how long. The strange thing was, no candles had been lit, and we stood in the dim shadows, able only to see by the moonlight coming in through the windows. Then someone noticed that the teacher was missing. An old fellow with white hair went to search for her, and he soon came upon her lying next to a window, bathed in moonbeam. He called to us to come quickly for it was evident she’d been murdered. There was blood all over, but this was weird blood with the consistency of string or thread, and it wrapped around her like a web.

  “All present somehow came to the conclusion that I had killed her. I didn’t remember doing it but felt very guilty. While the rest stood in awe, staring down at the odd condition of the body, I very quietly sidled away, one small step at a time. Upon reaching the side door of the schoolhouse, I silently let myself out, walked down the steps, and fled. I didn’t run, but I walked quickly. Instead of heading for the road, I went in the other direction, behind the school, through the trees, toward the river. There was snow on the ground. It was chilly, and the night sky wa
s brilliant with the full moon and thousands of stars. The silhouettes of the tree trunks and barren branches were so visually crisp. I felt great remorse as I moved toward the riverbank.

  “Once at the river, I removed all of my clothing. I now found myself holding a very large, round wicker basket without a handle, its circumference wide enough to cover the area from my head to my waist. I stepped into the water of the river, which came to my upper thighs, expecting it to be frigid. It was not. Then I leaned forward onto the basket and let myself be taken by the flow of the river. I passed beautiful snow-covered scenery lit by the resplendent night sky above. This smooth journey seemed to go on for hours, and then I watched the sun come up before me, as if the river was heading directly into its fiery heart. The light from the sun washed over me and whispered that all would be well. I stood up and left the river, and thought to myself, ‘You’ve made it, Larchcroft, you’re free.’ Then I woke up.

  “An odd dream, but no odder than most. The instant I opened my eyes, the thing I focused on was not its symbolic meaning. Instead I wondered, and this was the greatest revelation of my entire career as a lightsmith, ‘Where does the light in dreams come from?’ Within an hour of pondering this question, it came to me that there must be two types of light in the universe, the outer light of suns and candles, and the inner light, originating from our own idiosyncratic minds. Eureka! Mr. Fell. There it was!”

  August wrote madly for a time, trying to catch up with his subject’s story. When he was done, he looked up at Larchcroft’s face and said, “Excuse my ignorance, sir, but there what was?”

  “Don’t you see? I knew that for me to plumb the depths of the soul of light, I needed to somehow intermingle my inner light with the outer light. In order to, as I said earlier, ask the big questions. But how? That was the dilemma. As astonishing a creation as they are, eyes were no good for this effort, for they are strictly organs of reception. For a solid year, I researched this conundrum.

  “Then one day while trying to rest my exhausted mind from the problem at hand, I flipped through a book of prints I’d purchased and never had time to peruse. There was one peculiar painting entitled The Cure for Folly. In this painting was a man sitting back upon a reclining chair, and standing behind him was what I took to be a physician. This physician seemed to be performing surgery, making a hole with a small instrument in the supine patient’s forehead. A stream of blood was coursing down the patient’s face, but despite this harrowing operation, he was completely wide-awake. It came to me eventually that this was a depiction of the ancient practice of trepanning.”

  “Trepanning?” asked August. “Making a hole in someone’s head?”

  “That’s the long and short of it,” said Larchcroft. “The practice goes back to the dawn of humanity. Its medical purpose is to alleviate pressure on the brain from either injury or disease. In occult circles though, in the rarified business of shamans, seers, visionaries, this same operation was performed with the design of opening a large direct conduit to the universe. Reports of these instances are rare, but I’d read a few by those who had undergone trepanning for these purposes. They attested to having experienced a continuous euphoria, an otherworldly energy, a deep, abiding confluence with all creation. As for myself, I didn’t give a fig for euphoria. What I wanted was a way for my inner light to exit the cave of my cranium and join in conversation with the outer light of the universe.

  “I made up my mind to undergo the surgery, and began searching about for a physician who could do it. In the meantime, I foresaw a problem. Once I had a hole in my head, how was I going to direct my inner light to flow outward? All of the testimony I’d read by patients of trepanning gave the impression that the aperture was a portal for the universe to enter. I needed some method of controlling my imagination. What I realized was that I needed to conceive of my messenger to the outside world in some symbolic sense, a figure for me to focus on and express my will through. So I sat down, and, with a modicum of grunting and a maximum of daydreaming, I impregnated my imagination with my desire.” Here, Larchcroft went silent.

  August looked up, scanned the room, and then directed his gaze back to the head. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  Larchcroft shook his head. “It’s just that you must assure me that you won’t take offense at what I’m about to say.”

  “Something about the nature of the messenger?” asked the young man.

  “Well,” said the Man of Light, “my imagination gave birth to the concept of a young man, much like you—inquisitive, prepared to ask the big questions, toting a notebook made, like himself, from the substance of dreams.”

  “I’m not offended by that,” said August. “It makes sense.”

  “Yes, but I don’t mean to imply that you are merely a messenger. You’re a reporter, and proving to be a good one at that.”

  “Thank you,” said August.

  “That said, yes, my messenger was a young man much like you, and once he materialized, I began thinking about him constantly, so I would not forget him and I could call him forth at a moment’s notice. I gave him a name, and then, over the course of many nights, trained myself to dream about him. Once I could insure his presence in my dreams, I worked on taking into sleep with me a command to give him. And so it was in my dreams that I’d see him, walking along a street, sitting at breakfast, lying in bed with a young woman, and I’d say in a low voice to him, ‘Take your notebook, go to the Master of Light, and ask him the questions you have written down. Receive his answers and commit them to the notebook. Then bring them back to me.’ He would dutifully do as I’d instructed, passing old acquaintances of mine, blue poodles, snarling beasts of the night’s devising, and all manner of dream images. Nothing would dissuade his progress until he’d come to a door, painted black. Try as he might, turning the knob, pushing and kicking with all he was worth, he could not open the door. This he repeated every night, and every night, without frustration, he’d come to the door and try to pass through.”

  “There was no exit as of yet in your skull. Am I correct, Mr. Larchcroft?” asked August.

  “Well put,” said the Man of Light. “Meanwhile, as I was training my messenger, I was given, by one of my many contacts, the name of a fellow who might perform a trepanning for purposes other than medical. There were surgeons close by to where I was living at the time who knew the procedure, but when I told them why I desired it, they refused to do the surgery, certain I’d lost my mind. The fellow in question was not a doctor at all but had battlefield experience and, as I was told, would perform just about any operation requested of him.”

  “But what made him well-suited for your situation?” asked August.

  “Nothing really, beyond the fact that he was down on his luck; an opium addict in need of ready cash. His experience having tended to the sick and dying in wartime inured him to the sight of carnage, left him with nerves of steel or such a lack of concern about the outcome that geysers of blood, gaping flesh wounds, and the ear-piercing screams of his patients never made him flinch. For all procedures, he’d offer the same anesthesia—a half bottle of Barcher’s Yellow Gulley. Abortions and amputations for the frantic and destitute were his specialty.

  “I met Frank Scatterill (an unfortunate name to be sure) on an overcast day in late autumn in the lobby of The Windsor Arms, a sort of house of prostitution/saloon/hotel. In describing him, the word that comes immediately to mind is tired. He appeared exhausted, his lids half-closed, his hands slightly trembling. Even his face sagged, adorned with a long, drooping mustache. With his sallow complexion and air of utter fatigue, he managed a yellow-toothed smile for me as I handed him the cash advance.

  “He led me to a small third-floor flat, half of which he had rigged out as an operating den with a reclining barber’s chair and a table full of instruments and candles and half-empty bottles of Barcher’s. On the floor were old sheets, still bearing the dried telltale gore of his last operation. While I drank my half bottle of the Yellow Gul
ley, a piss concoction that never really dulled the pain but made me nauseous and tired, Scatterill explained the operation to me. He held up each of the tools he’d be using: the scalpel, for tissue incision, cutting and laying back the folds of forehead flesh; the trephine, like a corkscrew with a circular saw at the bottom; a Hey saw, which appeared a tiny hatchet with one serrated edge; a file for smoothing the edges of the opening; a bone brush for removing the skull dust.

  “I asked him where the incision is usually made, and he pointed to a spot somewhat higher up on the forehead than I’d imagined, near the hairline. I told him I wanted it lower, directly at the center of my forehead in the indentation between the two ridges of brow. ‘Whatever you like, Captain,’ he said in response. I also told him I wanted the edges of flesh cauterized so they would not grow back. I then took from my pocket the emerald you now see embedded in my forehead and instructed him to use it to stopper the hole once the entire operation had been completed—”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Larchcroft, but the emerald—where did you come by that?” asked August.

  “It was given to me in exchange for a lighting job I once did for a dead woman. A wealthy matriarch requested that I light her casket so that it appeared her cadaver’s eyes were still moving back and forth during her wake. She wanted to give the impression to her grasping children that though she was gone she would always be watching them. The job was easily done with a couple of flame-powered paddle fans and the surreptitious placement of reflectors.” Larchcroft pursed his lips and squinted, trying to remember where he’d been in the larger story.

  “The trepanning …” said August.

  “Oh, yes, Scatterill shook like a dried corn stalk in a January gale,” said Larchcroft. “It was obvious this was not from any nervousness associated with the task but from some physical ailment as a result of his affair with the poppy. He was so long at screwing that trephine, I thought he was heading to China. I can’t recall the pain, although I know there was some. My blood flowed freely, and the Yellow Gulley nearly left the gulley of my stomach on more than one occasion. I passed out near the end of the procedure and woke a few minutes later to the fetid smell of my own seared flesh. As I roused, Scatterill positioned a hand mirror in front of my face and I beheld my blood-drenched countenance now transformed with a third eye of brilliant green.