by Felix Gilman
He unlocked a door and stepped through into darkness. His voice echoed back, “Their ways are more complex than perhaps you might imagine.”
He struck a match. He was standing in a short corridor ending in stairs down into the basements. He took a gas lamp from a shelf and lit its flame. “Down here.”
Liv followed him down into the tunnels.
“The truth is that they welcomed him in, Doctor. The truth is—and I would not tell this to just anyone, but I very much respect your judgment, Doctor—that he recorded that they visited him in dreams; that they crept into town; that they called him to this place. That they showed him what I am about to show you. It’s quite common, of course, for sufferers from schizophrenia to believe the Folk speak to them in their dreams, but I do not believe my father was mad. It does happen. They can do things we can’t. They operate according to different and in some ways looser rules.”
She remembered Mr. Bond saying, Sometimes they bring storms.
“So. Previously it had been undiscovered. Once it was theirs. Then it became his. He had money, of course, which they did not. Did they know what would happen? He thought they did, or so he wrote. They willed it to be, and it was. But what possible purpose—?”
He suddenly passed her the lamp. “Take this. There are steep stairs here. Be careful.” He walked down ahead in the dark, as if he knew each step by heart.
When she rejoined him at the bottom of the stairs, he was smiling again.
“So. Doctor. Where were we? More to the point, where are we? Very nearly on the farthest western edge of creation. Out west of us, there’s Gooseneck, I suppose, then a few farms, then nothing at all that’s ever had a name. Nothing that has been made into one thing or the other. Unborn land. And this hospital is scarcely twenty years old, and Greenbank is little older, and before that—this too was nowhere.”
“It feels older than that. It feels as if it’s been here forever.”
“It does.” He put a hand on her shoulder, directing her down the passage.
“They say,” he said, “that if you go far enough, then the distinctions between land and water and air and fire break down, and there is a churning Sea of sorts, from which the most extraordinary things might emerge, things that make no sense in the made world, but here . . . Egregore is the technical name my father coined for such Spirits, from I believe some unpronounceable word of the Folk.” He suddenly hunched over the lamp and attempted to look menacing and wild. He barked “Ek-Ek-Kor! Kek-Rek-Gok!”
He straightened and adjusted his cravat, and gave a small smile. “Or something like that. A technical term for something that hardly admits of technicalities.”
He unlocked another door and stepped down into deeper, cooler, subbasement tunnels. The corridor ended in a heavily barred door, which the Director unlocked. On the other side, the tunnel was made of rough red rock.
“The natural caves go very deep here,” he said.
The rock beneath their feet was worn smooth. The rock of the tunnel walls was traced with red veins, the work of the Folk. It was all abstractions—whorls, spirals, sharp-edge intricacies. Complex; obsessive; beautiful. The Director moved too quickly, still talking, and she had no time to inspect them.
“My father,” he said, “was the first hairless man ever to be taken down here.”
“Hairless?”
“Yes. Ah.” He stroked his short wiry beard. “I imagine the Folk think of us as hairless. Stands to reason, don’t you think? Even your very long and fine hair is nothing next to the long and wild manes of the Folk. Of course, we don’t live long enough to grow such manes, do we? We die. They come back. Forever and ever. Imagine: they must see us as tiny and fractious and ignorant and hairless and naked children.”
“I have no idea, Director. Possibly.”
“Possibly? Certainly. Stands to reason. A Hillman is not an adult until he’s lain once at least in the dirt and risen again. Lacking that talent, we may never win their full admiration.”
He stopped with his hand on a door.
“My father,” he said. “They respected him. He was a strange and distant man, and he and I were not close. But this is what it says in his journals. The Folk brought him here. There were three of them. Their names, insofar as it is meaningful to name them, were Kek-Kek, Kur-Kur, and Kona-Kona. They showed him what I am about to show you, and he felt what you are about to feel. He sat down by the water and he cut his arm open from his wrist to his elbow with Kek-Kek’s stone knife. Such strength of will! A risk-taker; how could he be sure it would work? How did he know? He did not. He only believed. The Folk respected his ability to bear pain, he wrote. They respected endurance. They respected will and belief. And he bound the wound with his shirt and he slept there in that cave for seven days. The wound did not grow infected. The blood thickened and did not spill. In seven days, he was all but healed. Afterwards there was the most terrible scar and he never recovered full use of his fingers; but he had proved what he set out to prove. Later he came back with iron. There was no place for the Folk here anymore. It was wasted on them, he used to say. He had a vision. He built this House.”
The Director opened the door.
“My mother had been injured,” he said. “A stray bullet. The Spirit could not give her back the use of her legs, but I believe it eased her suffering. Of course, she’s dead now.”
“Oh! I’m so—”
He smiled wanly. “I would be very interested, Liv, in your opinion as to whether he acted correctly.”
“Director, I—”
“As an outsider, I mean. I really don’t know. Please don’t answer at once.”
He blew out the lamp. The cave ahead of him glowed with a warm red light.
The Director stepped aside into the shadows to let Liv pass.
The cave was womb deep and womb dark. The ground was smooth damp earth, which sloped steadily downward to a still pool, as large perhaps as the Academy’s duck pond. Tall rocks surrounded it, like women taking laundry down to the river to wash; or, Liv thought, like supplicants coming to be baptized in some very old-fashioned religion.
The water glowed with a soft red light.
The cave’s walls were painted with designs of a strangely delicate character; they hung in the misty half light like the branches of the willow trees that hung over the Academy’s river.
Self-consciously, she sat cross-legged on the floor.
The light emerged from below the surface of the water—like, Liv thought, when one held one’s hand in front of a candle, and the light passed warmly through it.
“The light is very beautiful,” she said.
She felt a little flushed, and she fanned herself with her sleeve. The cave was oddly warm.
“Director Howell?” She turned around, and was surprised to find that he was no longer visible. The cave was larger than she’d realized, and its depths were in shadow, from which the red markings glittered like stars.
She turned back. Something immense and invisible rose from the water and held her in warm arms and she cried out. There was a smell of earth, blood, tears. It surrounded her, and she could see nothing. It forced its way hungrily inside, probing, reaching. It found, near the surface, a knot of humiliation over her failures with her patients D and G, and a vein of misery and loneliness and resentment of the House staff’s general coldness to her. She gasped as those things were brought into the light. It took them from her and lapped them up and she sighed with relief. Her nerve tonic, in all the years she’d been taking it, which suddenly seemed a simply absurdly long time, had never been so swift, so powerful, so determined.
It found and quickly devoured a nightmare concerning the Line’s Heavier-Than-Air Vessel and its hideous insectile gun. It remained unsatisfied. It probed deeper, looking for deeper wounds. . . .
CHAPTER 20
THE WOUND
~ 1871 ~
The front the August Hall of the Academy of Koenigswald presented to the outside world was dignified, impos
ing, severe—a closed face of gray stone. At its rear, its square form collapsed slowly into a chaos of arched buttresses, exposed plumbing, conservatories, shadowed verandahs and cloisters, experimental greenhouses, a surprising profusion of gargoyles, a cluster of tool sheds where pale students might at any time be found smoking—though not today—a pen for Dr. Bey’s goats, and down to gently sloping lawns.
The lawns were rolled and tended by old men in bowler hats, each of whom Liv knew by name, each of whom she greeted on her way outside with a Good morning, Mr. ———, just as she did every morning. One by one, the old men smiled and took off their caps to her.
She wore a white dress in a plain style. She had a book under her arm, as always. She had a sun hat when she came outside, but she left it perched on a hedge; she liked the summer sun on her skin.
Sunlight is essential for a growing child, her mother always said. Healthy body, healthy mind. (Only she said that in a strange old dead language, which Liv had not yet begun to learn.) She therefore made sure that Liv’s tutors sent her out into the grounds for at least two hours each day, though Liv’s inclinations were bookish.
Her mother was the Emeritus Professor of Psychological Science. Liv had a great many tutors, because the students were always eager to curry favor with her mother, and her mother was always busy, and her father was No Longer With Us—an ill-defined state he had inhabited for as long as Liv could remember.
Liv passed the croquet lawn, where the hoops were rusted and spiderwebbed and the balls grown tuberously over with dirt and grass. She walked around the edge of the pond—saying good morning to Dr. Zumwald, the ichthyologist, who leaned over the water, taking notes, conducting observations. The fish were exotics, bright blue: they flickered in the weeds like hot young stars. She crossed the rose garden, where Mrs. Dr. Bauer was cutting samples.
There was a famous oak at the end of the lawns, in the gnarled wood of which a less sophisticated child might have seen faces. Past the oak, the grass ran wild and unweeded as the garden sloped down to the river. Liv broke into a run, panting as she jumped the oak’s twisted roots and vanished into the violet of the wild jacaranda. She always started running at the oak. The old men watched her go.
Liv always started running at the oak; but that day she had particular reason to do so, because the book under her arm was stolen, and she’d imagined, as she passed under the oak’s vast shadow, that she’d heard her mother’s voice calling angrily after her. (It was, in fact, only two students from the Faculty of Metaphysics debating the Logical Necessity of Other Earths in raised voices.)
Her mother’s rules were very clear. The books on the north edge of her mother’s library: Liv was Too Young for those books. Criminal and Deviant Psychology—her mother’s area of principal concern—was not a healthy interest for a child.
The stolen book in question was Gross’s Criminal Psychology, third edition. Liv sat on her favorite log down by the water and opened the book, but she was quickly lost and bored, and she put it aside with a scowl.
The Academy was built on a bend in the river. This clearing was on a pond that she thought of as the River, but in fact, it was only a tiny side-trickle. The great water itself rushed past half a mile away, looping around by the bridge and the road, and down through the town and on to the capital, and south into the Principalities of Maessen, about which Liv knew nothing at all, except that she once memorized a very strange chart of heraldic devices of the Princes, all eagles and lions and gryphons, which were both eagles and lions at once. . . .
The actual river thronged with barges and noisy boat races, and its banks were paved and crowded with carts and dray horses. This silent clearing was her River.
The water was still and green. Willows hung over it. It rained in the night, and the wood all around her was wet and lush and swollen. Her dress was already spattered with mud.
For a while Liv simply closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the water and things growing wild. Then, very suddenly, very seriously, she cracked open the book again at a random page and began reading out loud:
“The question of homesickness is of essential significance and must not be undervalued. It has been much studied and the notion has been reached that children mainly, in particular during the period of puberty”—about which Liv knew nothing at all, except that she had once studied a chart of physiological changes—“and idiotic and weak persons, suffer much from homesickness, and try to combat the oppressive feeling of dejection with powerful sense stimuli.”
Liv paused to consider this. She had never gone more than two days’ travel from the Academy, and found homesickness hard to imagine.
“Hence they are easily led to crime, especially to arson. It is asserted that uneducated people in lonesome, very isolated regions, such as mountaintops, great moors, coast country, the West’s red barren plains, are particularly subject to nostalgia.”
Crime, arson—Liv pronounced the words with ghoulish happy relish. She closed the book again as her mind wandered to thoughts of lonely plains and mountaintops and wild people.
The library from which Liv had stolen Disorders of the Criminal Classes was Liv’s mother’s own personal library. It was on the uppermost floors of August Hall, nestled in under a low arched ceiling. It was just down the corridor from Liv’s mother’s office, where she met her subjects. She believed that the light and airiness of the upper floor was good for their minds. She said: Blows away cobwebs!
That morning, when Liv stole the book, her mother had been with a subject. She kept the door to her office open at all times, and encouraged the subject to sit near it. Once Liv had asked why, and her mother had explained:
“It keeps the poor young men from feeling trapped, dear. No one likes to feel trapped, but they especially do not. It prevents them from doing something they might regret.”
“What would they do?”
“Raise their voices, dear. Embarrass themselves. Run along.”
The significance of this irritating habit, from Liv’s point of view, was that her mother sat with a view of the corridor, past which Liv had to creep to get to the library. So she waited at the end of the corridor until she judged that her mother was deeply engrossed in her work. She listened to the subject becoming agitated, his voice rising to a high-pitched quavering sniveling whine, I don’t know how much longer it’s the dreams you see I don’t know how much longer I can. She heard her mother’s voice, deep and calm: Collect yourself. Collect yourself. Begin again. She seized her moment and dashed—
She was safe in the library’s dusty silence. No sound but her own panting. A faint pleasant smell of cigarette smoke, her mother’s and the subject’s, still lingered.
Books lined every wall. Liv ran her fingers along the dust of the spines. She lingered on some of the case studies—arsonists! thieves! women of ill repute—a concept that she understood only dimly—and even murderers. Even something slim that was supposedly a study, from interviews, of an Agent of the Gun, which she understood to be a kind of supernatural monster from the far West, where the world was in the process of making and distinctions between the real and the monstrous were not yet fixed. Something like a vampire? And there was—tucked away on a low shelf—something hand-scrawled on yellowing paper that purported to be a study of the madness of the Engines themselves. The library was like a fairy-tale cave, full of dark and grisly and wonderful treasures.
Liv screwed up her face into an expression of great seriousness of purpose, passed by those frivolous entertainments, and settled on Diamond’s Disorders.
The subject in her mother’s office had gone quiet, so Liv waited for a moment before making her escape. She took a second to flip through the book for the word thief.
It is often intriguing to see the points at which the criminal seeks his “honor.” What is proper for a thief, may be held improper for a robber. The burglar hates to be identified with the pickpocket. I remember one thief who was inconsolable because the papers mentioned that he h
ad foolishly overlooked a large sum of money in a burglary. This would indicate that criminals have professional ambitions and seek professional fame.
Only a very stupid thief, she thought, would want her crimes to be famous! Then she slipped the book under her arm and fled, past her mother’s office, and through the laboratory and its tables full of glass jars, in which floated the brains, pickled in solutions of various beautiful hues, of criminals, fallen women, apes, and—tiny, intricate, jewel-like—rats.
The willow shook in a sudden breeze and loosed rainwater shimmering across the green of the pond. Liv, who’d fallen into daydreaming, suddenly started—
There was a rustling in the trees. A crashing. There were deer on the grounds, and peacocks; Liv turned hoping to see the puzzled face and gorgeous purple tail of one of the Academy’s birds. Instead she saw a man, emerging from the bushes, blundering and snapping through branches.
He breathed in heavy short bursts and his pale moony face was slick with sweat.
On seeing her, he stopped short and stood there blinking. He seemed to be enormously surprised by her presence.
Liv was clever enough to be quite discriminating as to the ages of adults—among whom she spent most of her days anyway. She judged the intruder to be a young man. Hardly more than a boy himself. About the age of the more junior students. He wore an old suit, the sleeves of which were far too short, and a frayed red necktie. He was quite fat.
His pupils were remarkably tiny, making him appear rather alien; Liv wasn’t sure what to make of that.
He dabbed at the sweat on his brow with his necktie.
Liv folded away the book and stood with her hands on her hips. He was short, not a very great deal taller than she. She resented his intrusion.
She said, “Are you a student?”