The Divinity Student

by Michael Cisco

  It’s even quieter still. She feels smoke in her chest, something frightening like a slow kick in the stomach. Whatever it is, she sneers at it and pads up the stairs and right up to his door.

  She can hear something. The door is locked, but she can hear a noise through the door, a windy, scratching sound. For a while she fumbles for what it could be, what’s making that noise? Then he stops to take a breath, and she understands she’s hearing two sounds. A pen scratching paper, and him. Reedy, and whistling, and hollow, and only a veil over a silent nothing so that even she stops her ears with her hands and runs downstairs, she hears him screaming without a voice, whisper-screaming, without stopping.

  sixteen: the final interview

  Miss Woodwind talks in her sleep. She wakes in mid-sentence—she’s in the house, the Divinity Student is curled asleep at her feet. He’s rolled himself up into a ball in his heavy coat at the other end of the bed. She didn’t hear him enter the room, didn’t remember when she’d fallen asleep. His spectacles are getting bent, pressed up against his face. Light from outside is bursting on the windowsill and glaring at her from burning patches on the floor. She blinks, dazzled, and windows and carpet corners flicker in green and purple under her eyelids. Getting up, she nearly steps on a cloth-wrapped charm that the Divinity Student had made for her, by request—she will hang it in her house, and it will compel everyone who visits to close their eyes and keep them shut until they leave. She picks it up and picks a little at the rough string binding it shut—he’s told her that if she unwraps it to see what’s inside, it won’t work. Impatient, Miss Woodwind plunges through the door and into the central shaft of the house. Here in the gloom the light-doubles turn to blurred black blind spots hovering immediately before her eyes, and she follows the banister railing downstairs, sloughing off curled scales of paint with the edge of her hand. There’s the front door. She stands looking at it for a moment, then thinks again of the Divinity Student sleeping upstairs. What is he doing? She decides to stay longer.

  She goes to the kitchen, drawing back too late, remembering what lay there cold on Desden’s cutting table—but Niffruch’s body is gone, the butcher had already disposed of him. The marble top is antiseptically clean, the knives are racked and shining, cuts of meat, expertly prepared, glow red in the display cabinet under shining glass, unmarred by so much as a single fingerprint. Miss Woodwind purses her lips and walks out. There’s the front door.

  She wanders past and into the living room. The windowpanes are gray with dust, admitting only the shrillest light glancing hysterically across peeling walls. The furnishings look like bundles of twigs, elongated spiny chairs and listing endtables on precarious spindly legs. She sits for a moment, perfectly still, and stares into space. After a few moments she hears, for the first time, a faint low sound—a yawning rumble from an indeterminate source, either far above or far beneath the house. Its tone is so low as to be more a sensation than a sound. Not constant, but intermittent, she can only just feel it as a current passing through the floorboards. The house emits no other sound, nothing coherent or discrete, no creakings or settlings, only that sourceless roaring. She mutters a little to herself, stands, and weaves back into the rooms, passing through each and not lingering. In this house, it seems to her, the spaces are always the wrong size, either too large or too close, and everywhere the same disrepair and neglect. She feels it closing around her like a shell, and she longs to burst it apart and expand into the opening. Apart from the furniture, spare and fragile and seeming to be parts of the house themselves, there are no artifacts, nothing left behind, except the things they brought with them.

  There is the front door again, but she won’t leave yet.

  With the passing days she stays with them, goes with them at night to cemeteries and churchyards, holds lanterns over straining backs and flashing shovels, keeps watch while they curse and drag bodies heavy with rot to the cart, tries to read undistracted while lights flicker under the door upstairs—she always goes to the landing; she always stares at the door; she never goes in.

  The Divinity Student is changing. He speaks less and less. Miss Woodwind can see him being drawn not so much into himself as outwards into something else, as if he were hanging half in and half out of himself. He’s getting pale and moist-eyed, he complains of strange pains, he can barely stand in the heat of the day. He has ceased perspiring altogether—to keep cool, he must spray himself with atomizer filled with formaldehyde. Eliot was the next target after Niffruch and Dreyfic, and after Eliot came Penfield, then Mira, then Gomes, then Carrasene. He sleeps in the same room with them all, dimly shining glass vats wired to the distilling chamber. He takes all of them on at once; he can do that now, easily. She watches him go out every day, tilting down the street with his rolling gait, now much slower than when she met him, easily distracted, more particular than before, bringing in fresh barrels of formaldehyde every day, and she knows he’s stopped going to see Fasvergil (whom she now knows by name, from the telephone), that he’s been out beyond the city walls, walking alone in the desert with the monitors. He knows which body to collect next without having to consult with Fasvergil or his agents—the divining machines tell him everything. Sometimes, he’ll jerk abruptly back, as if he’d been called by name, or turn, with a flickering expression, to the windows of the house, staring at something invisible over her shoulder.

  When she sees him next, his great coat is so black and terrible it’s almost leaking darkness, it smudges the air around him like a pall of coal smoke. Even Desden, the devoted friend, will stare at him in disbelief sometimes, when his eyes disfocus, and he’ll be slapping himself, struggling to finish a sentence. When he does talk, he stifles every other word, and she knows jealously that he’s trying not to use their words—the dead minds upstairs.

  Miss Woodwind wants to see his notebooks, but he refuses to show them to her. She wants to go to her father, but she doesn’t. It’s what she doesn’t understand, it’s really nothing that keeps her in the house. She spends her days reading in her room, and feels the current of the house tumbling through the floorboards.

  The Divinity Student drifts in twilight under the trees. He can see the oros clearly now, poised and silent, some asleep, others staring at the road and wailing to each other in low whistling voices. Pedestrians mill about aimlessly; they’ve gotten harder to see clearly—occluded, indistinct figures. Much sharper are the others he had never seen before. Carried along by the sight of them, he can do nothing else but look. Not just familiars and animal souls, the street is a reef, inhabited by insubstantial things skulking under the pavement or flitting effortlessly above the people’s heads, coiling between their legs, lashing out at each other from windows. There are shades like torn umbrellas convulsing up through the air, past the rooftops, like jellyfish, long white smears and clouds of tiny multicolored phosphorescent shapes with jagged edges. A flat manylegged object exhaling odorless blue smoke scuttles over his left foot; he’s not disgusted, he doesn’t flinch. Behind everything he can hear the Eclogue whisper in little puffs that set everything in motion.

  The house floats into view like a shipwreck, rocking gently in the air. An inhabited wreck, there are lights on inside, just dimly visible yellow lambence strained and diluted by silvery windows. The Divinity Student pushes through the long grass beyond the fence, barely touching the ground, then flows to a stop at the bottom of the steps. A thin veil of blue light flutters across a windowpane. The room beyond is empty. The shutters frame a blue face crying out the window, black mouth drawn wide and cheeks pulled back, eyes two shining crescents, wet brow—it slips away. He watches those features fill with shadow and retreat—they submerge. Something’s happening, he’s seeing them all the time, every day he sees them. Ghosts. Desperation seethes in him, what’s happening? Run, but no, he won’t run, this feeling’s not worthy of me, I’ve got things to do. He goes up into the house.

  When the sun sets, he tests his newest divining machine, an afterimage light-sc
ribbler, inspired by a note he’d taken earlier: “arrange lights at random in a dark room, enter dancing, read the afterimages in your eyelids. Takes practice and long study.” He turns out the overhead light, and sits in the dark in front of a wooden box with a single gear on the right side. Turn the gear to the first cue position with the gentle pressure of fingertips, a muffled report, and a series of tiny shutters in the box’s face fall back into dark openings of all shapes and sizes, some interconnecting to form irregular grooves and channels, at random. The Divinity Student presses the lever to the second cue position, and tiny multicolored lights wink on inside, either staring out from single holes or poised at the top of a groove or channel; from a slot just below the “lid” of the box, a broad black damping bar clunks into position, hinged to pass at regular intervals down over the face of the box. The Divinity Student pulls the gear a few more notches.

  The damping bar rolls down, disappears through a slot at the bottom of the box’s face, the lights shunt back and forth, some moving at random, others trace the pattern of the shutters, the damping bar reappears through a slot at the top of the box’s face and sweeps down again. Watching, he then shuts his eyes and reads the residual streaks beneath his eyelids, the afterimages, scribbling notes on a pad by his hand. He pulls the lever a few more notches.

  Another dull wooden clack, the shutter configuration changes, the lights get a little brighter, they accelerate under the passing of the damping bar, and the Divinity Student shuts his eyes and takes the next reading, one after each pass of the bar. After a few moments, he pulls the lever down again. Faster, brighter, and some lights change color, shutters reconfigure, behind him, and unseen, his shadow flares against an angle of the ceiling. He takes more notes and pulls the lever down.

  Grains of light billow behind him in the dark like wind-stirred snow, but the Divinity Student keeps going, staring at the box until his eyes hurt then grinding them shut. He’s trying to write what he sees, writing so fast his pencil tears the page. He jerks the gear and the box flares like a match drawing streaks along his face and on the walls, drawing flecks of light into patterns swimming through the room. Adjust the gear, and the box spins faster making a rattling sound, and turn the gear and the room goes brighter, long figures resolving in the room, behind his blazing face, arms hanging useless at their sides, drawn faces like cracked shells of blue light with gaping eyes and mouths listlessly watching him at work.

  No time for notes, he’s gradually speeding the box by increments until it buzzes and rattles and shakes on the table. Wide green eyes, fixed and colorless, trying to swallow the patterns whole, while all around him figures mill and weave, taking any shape and color, while cracked blue faces slacken and nod like faces at asylum windows, fixing empty vision on the back of his head, the careening rasping patterns spinning around his face. Breathing hard he grips the gear as tight as he can, turning it bit by bit under white knuckles, peering frantically down, trying to see his way through, the damping bar fans his face so fast it’s little more than a gray blur between him and the lights. Then suddenly the Divinity Student shuts the machine off and screws his eyes shut, falling backwards, even as he hears the engine’s wheezing halt, into a black ocean of stars and streaking bolts of lightning. On the street below, Fasvergil turns his face, saturnine in moribund light, toward the house. He folds his hands. Overhead, stars retreat and the constellations yawn apart, the wind rattles the grass at his feet, and, behind him, empty buildings gape and dribble streams of dead leaves from their gutters. Drawing closer, the house tips precariously, balancing to fall on him, but Fasvergil’s concern outweighs his doubts. All in black with his frayed belt and soft cat-burglar slippers, he pads up the stairs on thin crepe soles and raps his long dry knuckles on the door.

  A woman answers; surprising. Miss Woodwind scrutinizes him carefully, bringing her face right up to his and staring directly at him, as if memorizing his features. He can tell that she wants him to go away. Her expression is disdainful.

  “I am Father Fasvergil. I’m here to speak with the Divinity Student. We have some words for each other.” His face creases softly and mildly, with real priestly reserve.

  Miss Woodwind becomes more annoyed. It’s dark inside; he can barely see her, but it seems her mouth is moving silently. Talking to herself. After pausing to think, she turns and walks stiffly into the house, leaving him to shut the door behind him. In a patch of light falling dead from the neighboring room she turns and indicates one of the stairways with an offhand gesture. He sees her better in the light. She looks tired and pale, and she is talking silently to herself.

  “He’s on the top floor.” A quiet, rich voice, though sighing with fatigue, perhaps she’s ill. He thanks her sepulchrally and slips past, mounting the stairs.

  Miss Woodwind watches him vanish into banister shadows, squinting a little. Behind him he leaves a smell of mothballs and library dust familiar to her.

  Fasvergil knocks and waits, and knocks again. He has a long wait. Finally, the door falls silently open before him, and he steps in quietly to confront the Divinity Student.

  “You haven’t been reporting to me. You’ve been missed.”

  He scans the many silver-shining jars watching from shelves, tables, and mantles. “Nevertheless you clearly continue with the project.”

  The Divinity Student stands mute, disheveled, his face has gone soft and pale as wax, his flesh is turning translucent, he stands in the middle of the room as if he were hung there, twisting slightly on his feet.

  “I can only conclude that you have decided to pursue this entirely on your own, and that you are keeping your discoveries to yourself.”

  The Divinity Student crosses to the desk with a single step, surprisingly strong and decisive for all his weak looks. He seizes a handful of paper and hurls it in Fasvergil’s face.

  “Now leave,” he says.

  “This house belongs to the Seminary. If you withhold information from us we will be compelled to evict you.”

  “Leave,” the Divinity Student says.

  Fasvergil opens his mouth to speak again, but the Divinity Student is already by his side, seizing him, his breath clouding in Fasvergil’s dry face.

  A single dry gasp of formaldehyde unfurls from between the Divinity Student’s lips, and in it boil a hundred gaping blue faces, and infinitely silent watching things, and many other ones stirring along the ragged edges of the Divinity Student’s breath, and more—a deep empty nothing, spreading behind the walls and surging through the floorboards and shimmering inside him. Fasvergil is stunned. The Divinity Student has a stronger claim on the house than he does.

  That dead hand falls from the back of his neck, the Divinity Student retreats into the shadows. Faltering, Fasvergil is consumed with a new feeling. He struggles to address the Divinity Student, but his words crowd and trample each other, muddling in his mind until all intending is consumed.

  Then the Divinity Student’s face turns back upon him, fixing him with a gaze as steady and impersonal as a star—he sees the Divinity Student’s face silhouetted against itself—and staggers back as if struck, not recognizing anything human in that face. Fasvergil finally backs out onto the landing, looking at the Divinity Student in a convulsion. The Divinity Student stares at him from the far end of the room. The door slams shut between them.

  seventeen: the muse

  Cramped in his room, the Divinity Student shakes awake in the middle of the night. He rolls over and takes his head in his hands, but now even sleep is strange—falling and waking with blunt headaches, half-dreaming all the time in weird fragments, dragged away and thrown in the river, or held down and screamed at, wordless, voiceless howling. Tearing the sleep from his head in shreds, he turns to look out across the expanse of floor toward the wall and its windows. Suddenly, he comes sharply awake, alert, the air seems to vanish, and his gaze accosts the furniture, objects, flowing their outlines into each other in the dark. Caught, they snap back within their borders and their bord
ers go rigid.

  He’s on his feet. Things scuttle in the corners; they whisper to each other, and the Divinity Student is beginning to understand them. One window in particular is asking for him, shining bright blue in a black wall. Padding across the floor, he can hear tiny scrabbling footsteps dodging out of his way, rustling like grass at his feet. He stops, resting his hands on the sill, and looks out.

  There she is! It’s a woman, standing far off on a roof top, looking in his direction. She alights on a chimney and vaults impossibly high, landing on a neighboring gable as lightly as a falling leaf. Dancing bright bounds and leaps, she hurtles from one house to another, always coming closer and moving faster and making no sound. Even at a distance the Divinity Student sees her clearly: compact, a white pinafore with skirts like sea foam and black bands around her waist and throat, each hand gloved in black, fluttering in a lace cuff like a spider in a white blossom. Her long legs are also pitch black and likewise her hair, wrenched back in a tight knot on top of her head. She’s still far away, then suddenly she cartwheels along one roof’s spine and hurls herself out into the air like a thunderbolt, flashing through the air. He hears her touch down over his head, her two feet landing as light as birds. Footsteps tap up and down over his head—she seems to be dancing.

  The Divinity Student throws open the sash and thrusts his head out the window, craning his head in time to see a flash of petticoat. Then suddenly her face appears between his and the sky, peering down. She smiles, and her smile strikes him with a tangible shock, like a hammer blow. Her teeth are jagged as a mouthful of venomous broken glass, her eyes, black and glistening like deep wells, narrow to two happy crescents. The Divinity Student steps back from the window, and in a flash she flips down, hanging from the eaves, slipping lithely into the room. Now she is immediately in front of him, silhouetted against the window. She puts her hands on her hips and looks at him, and her teeth flare in an awful grin when she notices jars on shelves and tables. She takes a step forward, one of her gleaming shoes crackles a spare page lying on the floor; she squats and looks it over—it’s one of his notebook pages—her eyes snap back up to him again, and they shine this time deeper than water, pinning him on the spot.