Grim Expectations

by KW Jeter

  “You are this Dower?” Speaking with blunt aggression, he thrust his leonine physiognomy an inch away from mine. “Speak up!”

  “Yes…” Already cowed, I drew back a step. “The Reverend Jamford, I take it?”

  “Right Reverend to you!” His scowl curdled even further. “You’ll be obliged to observe the conventions.”

  “Have you become a bishop then?” Beside us, Rollingwood lost none of his amused air. “The promotion was long overdue, I imagine. You should have granted it to yourself before now.”

  “Wipe away that smirk, you young fool–” Jamford’s gnarled hands clenched white-knuckled on the tome he carried, as though preparing to assault Rollingwood with it. “My Godly work continues apace. The world does not yet recognize me as it should – but it will! If I say I’m Bishop, then bloody well I am.”

  “Consecrate yourself as Pope then, and be done with your upward progress.”

  “Soon enough,” muttered Jamford darkly. A paucity of fellow conspirators seemed no impediment to the vaulting ambitions of his soul. “We live in tumultuous times, Mr Dower–” He fixed upon me once more his intimidating glare; I felt skewered as a specimen beetle by an entomologist’s pin. “You find yourself in the company of scapegraces – such as this sweet-faced idiot, and his lot.”

  “Which would be the lot who pays you,” Rollingwood mildly protested. “When there are not many else who would.”

  “The untransfigured flesh must eat – thus we are caught on the prong of this wicked world.” The hard set of the cleric’s expression was scarcely less murderous than that of the disreputable mourners nearby. “Prepare yourself for the next world, Dower; it comes soon.”

  If the apocalyptic event had happened in the subsequent minute, I would have been happier; anything to escape the attention of another lunatic, of the sort which seemed to constantly gravitate toward me.

  “Perhaps,” I spoke, “if we are all assembled now – that is, if there is no one else whose arrival we are waiting upon – then is there the possibility that we could proceed with that for which we are here? If the hour is late in general, Reverend Jamford, then surely it is in the specific as well.”

  One concern motivated me to prod the others in this way; about us, the shadows of the vine-strangled trees and memorial statuary had already lengthened with the sun’s declining from the noon hour. The ability to perceive shapes and motion through the humid mists had correspondingly decreased, evoking some apprehension on my part. The flesh-rending beasts who had taken up the cemetery as their habitat could very well be keeping their appetites in check until such time as a stealthier approach upon their quarry – including my own person – would be more likely to produce a satisfying result. The irony was not lost upon me that I had fled my hiding-hole on the remote Cornish coast, seeking greater safety in London, and now found myself threatened by animals rather than men, and which – to their credit – made no dissembling bones about their intentions. Ever thus; to paraphrase the metaphysical Anglican cleric, We run to Death and Death meets us as fast.

  Poetry, however, provides greater consolation when one is secure behind the locked door of one’s study; at the moment, I was adrift in what had become the wilds of Highgate, nerves tautened by listening for the pad of clawed feet in the surrounding undergrowth, and the glint of slitted yellow eyes through the wet fronds.

  “Very well.” Jamford gave a single nod of his shaggy head. “I have no desire to tarry here; I find this idle chatter disagreeable. Let us begin, and be done.”

  In short order – facilitated by Rollingwood’s directions to those others loitering nearby, no doubt discussing various criminal enterprises and jailhouse reminiscences – our company was assembled at the gravesite some yards farther on. The coffin had already been lowered into the deep earth, its muddy sides trickling with more tears than from any of the stone-faced onlookers; a pair of grave-diggers, the apparent cousins of those I had last encountered in Cornwall, leaned upon their shovels a respectful distance away, until the completion of the ceremony and the resumption of their labours.

  At the head of the grave, Jamford began his oration, voice growling and stentorian; the immense leaves at our backs trembled as though frightened at the portent of his words. I overheard some snickering among the hired mourners; this was a performance with which they were evidently familiar, its repetition being a subject for coarse humour. The cleric – or bishop, as he styled himself – clasped the leather-bound book in his roughened grasp, but did not open it, the contents having been engraved in memory some time back.

  My attention being diverted elsewhere, the exact content of Jamford’s eulogy was lost on me; I assumed that it was no more than the usual collection of pieties delivered on such occasions, in which the sentimental manage to find some comfort. I listened distractedly, as one might to the rumblings of thunder beyond a distant hill. Under the lid of the coffin, already specked with damp clods from the crumbling earth, was as much comfort as I had ever found in this life; that she might also have dispelled, with but a few words and a smile, these exasperating puzzles entangled about me – that was of little consequence.

  Jamford’s voice grew louder, amazingly so; he had started at such a pitch that I wouldn’t have thought it possible before. I had lost track of time’s passing, as persons of my age are wont to do, either from the depths of our musing or the threadbare fabric of our brains. I brought my gaze up from the grave and its contents; blinking, I listened for a moment before those sounds assumed meaning.

  “Await ye the great machinery of resurrection!” He seemed a man possessed; he saw no one about him, sight lifted above our heads, his eyes fastened onto private visions in the roiling mists. “The teeth of those awesome gears – think ye your flesh is not meat to them? Shall the mainspring of the universe, unwinding but never unwound, be not slaked with your blood? Your bones are not iron – shall they not snap like twigs upon the rack of the escapement that never ceases to count the slow hours of eternity?”

  The man is mad – the thought leapt completely formed to my mind. So often have I voiced to myself that suspicion, only to have subsequent events confirm it in every detail; to hear those inner, unbidden words once more was like the tolling of that long-familiar steeple bell heralding one’s return to native soil. For better or worse, the land of the insane was home to me.

  “Consider, ye wretched, ye heirs of blundering Adam!” To my dismay – a flicker of hope, that I might be wrong, was extinguished like a gnat between thumb and forefinger – the man continued in like manner. “Cog and flame are the instruments of the Lord’s wrath – the first grinds, the second consumes the grist produced thereby. Your feeble repentance will not suffice to save you. Would the Author of this world have designed it with such precision, with such evident annihilating purpose, yet allowed some means of escape? The prisons built by men’s hands are dark, doleful places, but a stray thread of sunlight still penetrates their stones from time to time, a lark’s cheering song floats through the iron bars and succours a weary heart – but God builds more mightily than these! He is the Great Watchmaker! The screws He drives into place do not rust or fail! The mainspring He has wound ticks to Eternity!”

  The frame of the erstwhile bishop’s dementia came further into view, like some dread sarcophagus advancing through the mists, containing within the scraggy remnants of what had once been his sanity. To my ear, his funeral oration sounded as if his mind had been rendered captive of that which the German philosophizers term the Zeitgeist, or – if they had the decency to speak proper English – the Spirit of the Age. As surely as the great machines of Steam had encumbered the nation, so the landscape inside his skull had been transformed thereby. If any Saviour remained to him, it would be one with no bloody wounds upon His crucified hands and feet, but rather one who would open His chest as the Paganinicon had done so many years ago, to reveal whirling gears and wheels rather than a thorn-bound heart.

  I glanced over at Rollingwood standing
beside me. The hired mourners displayed no untoward reaction to Jamford’s pealing words, but the customary smile had disappeared from the face of the Gravitas Maximus Funerary Society’s representative. As had much of the colour that his eager young blood had brought before to his cheek – the man looked grievously appalled, as though this turn of events had not only been unanticipated by him, but was scarcely endurable.

  With the point of my elbow, I managed a surreptitious nudge to his ribs. “Tell me–” I whispered from the corner of my mouth; my words were masked from others’ detection by the bishop’s continued roaring, “do these events usually go quite like this?”

  “No–” An expression settled on Rollingwood’s face, the like of which I had not previously seen there. “An interval of some weeks has passed since the reverend has conducted one of these – indeed, it might have been months; I would have to consult my business diary. But it seems as if some alteration has come over him in the meantime–”

  “Oy! ‘Ave a care, mate.” One of the mourners, perhaps the most villainous in appearance of the lot, issued a barely sotto voce rebuke in our direction. “S’posed to be respeck’ful and all, and two of yez blath’rin’ away like a pair o’ magpies, y’are.”

  “Too right, Cecil.” The next over, equally unshaven and disreputable, leaned forward in order to peer disdainfully at us. “And thet’un there be the fookin’ widower! Plantin’ ‘is ball and chain in the sod, we are, and the bastid can’t even stay shet up for couple minutes. Dis-grace-ful’s whut it is.”

  Rollingwood ignored them. His continuing distress revealed a sterner element, which his previous cheerfulness had kept masked.

  “Jamford was always a bit on the eccentric side–”

  This concession seemed hardly necessary to me.

  “Actually,” continued Rollingwood, “more than a bit. But there were still at least a few bounds of propriety within which he managed to stay. But now he seems to have gone completely off the rails – I had not heard him speak in quite this manner before.” He observed and listened to the bishop for a few seconds more, then turned back to me. “Once more, my sincerest apologies; I imagine this must be rather distressing to you.”

  “Whatever feelings I have in that regard are of little consequence.” My statement was the truth; after so many occurrences of a similar nature, my sensibilities were numbed to a considerable degree. Men do not resolve to become stone-hearted; our lives calcify our tenderest elements, whether we will it or not. “And given that my wife is dead, I scarcely imagine that she is taking much offence, either.” My exchange with Rollingwood went on unabated, despite the glares from the hired mourners. “But my endurance is an issue, however; how much longer do you think this will last?”

  “It could be some time.” Rollingwood shifted about uncomfortably. “He is of a long-winded tendency, which always before represented good value for money; few previous clients ever complained about him delivering a perfunctory account. For many people, the worth of such services is measured by their length.”

  In this, as with so many other things, I was not of the same opinion. That old maxim, Brevity is the soul of wit, could profitably be amended to include funerals as well. The enjoyment which others derive from their own public weeping was nothing in which I cared to indulge; the sooner we all could escape Highgate’s damp, predator-infested environs, the more satisfied I would be.

  This was, in point of fact, more than mere inclination on my part; as Jamford rolled onward with his increasingly demented speech – more blathering about machinery and God, and some apparent similarity between them – my anxiety increased. Already I had been concerned about the wild animals which had taken up residence in the cemetery, of which creatures I had already obtained a glimpse; I very much doubted that the mourners who had been engaged for the memorial service would do much more than save their own hides, if the occasion arose. New worries, however, advanced upon my thoughts and seized a position there. As we stood by the gravesite, the daylight had rapidly diminished, casting the scene into a twilight aspect even more sepulchral than before. Though our sector of the world had entered into its afternoon hours, there was yet considerable time before sunset – but while I could still distinguish Rollingwood next to me, and the forms of the others gathered about, the shadows of the surrounding foliage had been completely engulfed by the enveloping gloom.

  I tilted my head back, seeking some reason for this phenomenon; I pay little attention to calendars of astronomical events – indeed, who does? – so I would have been unlikely to have been aware of an impending solar eclipse. Such did not seem to be the case; while the sky directly overhead was completely shrouded by the mists rising and condensing from the heated earth below, some blurry yellow light from the paled sun was still visible about the surrounding horizon. The occlusion across the cemetery grounds was more in the nature of a partial shadow, cast by some enormous object far above, of such scale as to darken the landscape for miles in any direction.

  A fear of large, hovering things is not unreasonable, by my reckoning; surely I am not alone in estimating that little good can come from them – worse yet, if their visible aspect is shrouded from one’s view. If my general apprehension had been unloosed by the sight of wild animals in the vicinity – and the indication of larger and hungrier ones, which I had not yet seen – it now bounded forward with no restraint.

  “Look – you see that, don’t you?” I made no attempt to keep my voice to a decorous whisper as I grasped hold of Rollingwood’s arm with one hand and pointed upward with the other. “There! Above us!”

  “See what?” He had glanced to the deeply overcast sky, but displayed no reaction to what he might have seen; indeed, he returned a puzzled expression at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Are you blind?” Both amazed and appalled, I stared back at him. “You are unable to perceive… that? Bloody huge! Blocks out the sun! There, you imbecile!”

  “Well, tears it, that does–” The hired mourner who had previously admonished me now began to roll up his jacket sleeve, the muscles of his forearm drawing tight his upraised fist. “If a sinse o’ propri’ty won’t shutter yer gob, then I’ll demned well ‘ave to.”

  “Do ‘im over, Cecil–” His companion nudged the man in the small of the back. “Bluidy rude, ‘e is.”

  “Oh!” At the same moment, comprehension dawned upon Rollingwood. “Yes, of course – impressive, isn’t it?”

  “This is insane–” To me, it now seemed as if the self-styled bishop’s lunacy had become contagious, infecting everyone in the vicinity. I dropped my hand from his arm and stepped backward. “We should flee, at once–”

  “By no means.” His smile appeared once more, a luminous instance in the deepening gloom. “I see where I have erred, Mr Dower – I should have informed you at greater detail about the particular nature of this service, and all that it entails.”

  All this while, Jamford’s funeral oration had continued unabated – if anything, his thunderous voice had increased in volume, in an attempt to drown out the hubbub which had broken out before him. I discerned further reference to machines and gears and God, but had no superabundance of attention with which to join all together and make sense of them. Whatever was taking place in the heavens, or at least that part immediate to us, it had no inhibiting effect on either his vigour or dementia.

  “Oy, Cecil – this bluidy great galloon’s all aj’tated o’er nowt.” The threat of violence was forestalled by the one mourner deciding to restrain his more pugilistically-minded comrade. “Ign’rant bastid, ‘e is, but more t’be pitied, seems.”

  “Informed me of what?” Thus goaded, I demanded explanation. “I came here at your invitation, expecting no more than a proper funeral – which is what you assured me would happen.” To my concern about the security of my person was added a mounting anger, over once more having been cozened into others’ bizarre schemes. “And now–” I gestured toward the increasingly ominous sky, “what monstrous even
t do you mean to inflict on me?”

  “Pray calm yourself, Mr Dower – your fears are understandable, but ungrounded. What a fool I’ve been!” Rollingwood’s smile persisted as he heaped obloquy upon himself. “I did not sufficiently take into account the length of your exile from this our modern world. That which you have seen of it, at such a telescopic distance, is but a fraction of the advances that have been reached by Mankind in your absence.”

  “True enow,” agreed the loquacious mourner. “Be whut ‘appens, when yokels like this’n brought to the city. Most disor’enting, must be!”

  “I swear…” Now it was my hands that were clenched into straining fists. “If no explanation is forthcoming, I will not be responsible for what happens next.”

  “Then how fortunate it is, that you will be able to witness for yourself – at this moment! – that our intentions constitute no harm to you.” Raising his arm, Rollingwood directed my attention toward the figure at the head of the grave. “I do believe that our chosen cleric is approaching the climax of his speech. All will be revealed in short order, once he concludes.”

  A sense of disgust overwhelmed me, evoked more by my own failings than the moral deficits of those in whose company I found myself. Surely I had experience enough, that would have enabled me to foresee the entangling snares that others set before my feet. What was the point of embracing a hermit’s life, as much as I had been able to, and then forsake it at the first enticement? I should have been of sterner resolve, and confronted whatever dangers lurked there, rather than fleeing to London and finding myself in circumstances of greater hazard.

  I turned on my heel and stalked away, to put as much distance between myself and the person who had inveigled me here, as well as to lessen the impact upon my eardrums of Jamford’s increasingly apocalyptic rantings. Several yards from the gravesite, I stationed myself on a slight rise, overgrown with vines and damp fronds; scowling, I folded my arms across my chest, as much as daring any lion or other predator to approach me in my present sullen mood.