by KW Jeter
“No, no – that’s quite all right.” Digging the butt of my palms into the sand, I pushed myself as far away from him as I was able. “For the sake of argument – or rather, for the sake of concluding this one – I admit the validity of your position.”
And in truth, this was no mere cowardly evasion on my part. To myself, and unspoken, I had to acknowledge that this eerie, man-like figure was utterly correct as to the solidity of the circumstances in which I had discovered myself. All that I wished had never happened – it had indeed. To think of it as fantasy, concocted by those ceaseless mental engines that take the upper hand while one’s rational part is buried in slumber – that was the dreaming, fondly embraced, and sadly abandoned now that I felt myself fully awake. To dream of dreaming, chasing one imaginary rabbit after another down its unending burrow – what silly creatures we are, as a species. I could hardly fault others for so often attempting to deceive me, when I was so obviously willing to do as much to myself. In that sense, the Brown Leather Man’s blow had achieved a salutary effect, that of knocking over the painted screen that I had erected before my perceptions, obscuring the true state of affairs about me.
“Very well,” I spoke aloud. “On this epistemological battlefield, you are the victor. You are as real as I am, as surely as this island of Groughay is real beneath us. Now what?”
“I despair of you.” He shook his glistening, featureless head. “That I am real and no dream – that all that has ever happened to you, those things took place in the world in which all creatures live, and not inside your head – this much is undeniable. But you advance a baseless assumption, when you conclude that everything about you is true. Observe, Dower.”
Involuntarily, I gave a flinch as I saw him squeeze his gloved hand into a fist once more. But it came nowhere near me – instead, as though indulging in one of those fits of temper in which a person damages himself more than any other object, he struck an outcropping of rock close beside me.
To my surprise, he did not curse himself for a fool, and rub his bruised knuckles with his other hand, attempting to alleviate the pain of the futile blow. Startled, I turned to look, and saw it was the rock instead that had suffered. A cracking, splintering sound had come to my ear; to my perplexity, I could discern that the Brown Leather Man’s fist had penetrated the damp, lichened surface, nearly to the extent of his wrist. The white edges of the hole that had been produced by the impact contrasted sharply with his forearm.
“Why… it is nothing but plaster!” I bent forward, peering more closely at the damage. “And papier-mâché–” When my companion withdrew his fist, I could see within the hole, and note the glued sticks and angled board pieces that formed the hollow structure, and upon which the imitation rock surface had been artfully laid. “Why would anybody have deposited such an artifice here?”
“Hardly the only one.” The Brown Leather Man strode to the vertical cliff-wall bounding the cove; with a quick thrust of his upraised boot, he punched a similar hole in it. A resultant crack ran jaggedly up higher than his chest, causing a small avalanche of pebbles and papery dust. “If I had a mind to, I could crush everything you see here–” He gestured toward the visible extent of the island beyond. “The whole place is as phony as a three-dollar bill.”
The last of the words he had spoken startled me. There was some other pretence going on here, other than the shabby falsehood of the terrain that had just been revealed to me – and I was now certain what it was, as though the delayed effect of the blow from the other’s fist had arranged my thoughts into a new and more accurate order. I had noted before that while the Brown Leather Man appeared just as I remembered him from long ago, he did not speak now as he had then. When I had had conversation with him before – always oblique and abbreviated, but filled with dreadful portent – his manner of speaking had been stilted and odd, with inverted phrases and accents, as of a foreigner to the British realm. Now his enunciation and phraseology was much like my own, as though he had spent the intervening years in close proximity to native English speakers, absorbing their speech and making it his own – yet the last time I had encountered him, he had with irrevocable bitterness renounced the prospect of any further contact with the human species, determining to return to his own doomed kind in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, and die with them there. Of what might have induced him to break that vow, I had no idea, but this change in him remained apparent. Even more significant, though, were his lapses into mystifyingly obscure cant, such as three-dollar bill – an Americanism, it seemed, such as I might have expected from the entrepreneurial Blightley, now departed from my life, or so I hoped. In what circles would have the Brown Leather Man been a communicant, that a usage of such type came easily to his tongue? It might have been a puzzle indeed, had not the answer already formed within my thoughts, that the source of this wordage was not one displaced from here by location, but by Time.
“What is the purpose of these sham constructions?” Rather than voicing anything more accusatory, I feigned the pondering of another question, yet unanswered. “The island of Groughay already possesses genuine rocks – I stumbled across many of them when I was here once before. What purpose is fulfilled by crafting and depositing fakes, when the real ones abound alongside?”
“There is no Groughay,” said the Brown Leather Man, an unseen sneer turning his voice even more guttural. “Or at least not here. You have been deceived, Dower – yet again. It is not a matter of this rock–” He pointed to the smaller one near me, through which he had punched his fist. “Or this–” His gesture swept across the vertical face beside himself. “You are not on Groughay; everything you see is a replica, designed to make you believe that you had been transported from those chambers beneath London, with its sham Venetian canals, to a remote island in the Hebrides. If you were to shovel just a few feet through the sand beneath, you’d come to sheets of bolted iron; the waters you see there – no more an ocean than what you’d find in a bathtub, only on a somewhat grander scale. And the sky?”
The Brown Leather Man – for so I continued to term him, leaving his true name unspoken even in my thoughts – bent down and picked up a substantial stone, enough to fill his hand; he weighed it for a moment in his palm, then flung it upward. Though presumably as artificial as the one in which he had previously crushed a hole, it had enough weight and mass to strike what I could now perceive as the painted ceiling above us; a rectangular tile was dislodged by the impact and fell with the stone to a spot close beside me.
“There–” With the toe of his boot, he kicked the flat object. “Do you need further proof?”
I looked from the tile – one of its four corners had been chipped away – and then up to the expanse above. The only wonder now was that I had ever been deceived by it at all, and had believed myself to be out in the open air. That I had, and so easily, occasioned another of those brief, self-flagellating meditations of which I am such a soi-disant expert, dispensing them like penny candy to all who are so unfortunate as to be reading these pages: Thus it ever is with Humanity, that we are not deceived by what others wish us to believe, but by that which we wish to believe. I had desired to consider myself cast upon some remote and chilly Hebridean isle – such has been my life, that this is what passes for ambition with me – and the desire had placed itself between my perceptions and reality, blinding me to its obvious ramshackle artificiality. Even what I had taken to be the low murmur of the ceaselessly rolling ocean upon this concocted shore, I perceived now to be the thrum of Steam once more, those relentless boilers and pistons that powered these self-inflicted deceptions.
“This is, I take it, some further contrivance authored by those godforsaken Americans Blightley and Haze?” My thoughts, having penetrated the mock island’s thin veneer of verisimilitude, pressed on to note more inadequate details – what I had believed to be the thin grey sunlight of the Northern latitudes was actually the flickering illumination of gas jets tucked into various niches above; the clam
my mists that I recalled from my long-ago sojourn on the actual Groughay were in fact somewhat more tepid than those, indicating that they were but leaks from the various pipes and valves that no doubt underlaid the scene. “Judging from my previous acquaintance with what they had so proudly proclaimed to be their handiwork, what I see here has every indication of being more of the same.”
“Got it in one, Dower.” Another oddly breezy expression was uttered by the Brown Leather Man. “That pasteboard Venice from which you were extracted, with its mildewy atmosphere and boggy canals, is hardly the limit of their ambitions. They and their backers – of which Blightley has an indisputable genius for finding, and milking funds from the same – have a grand scheme for creating an empire of amusement parks–”
“What would those be? I have never heard such a term.”
“Don’t perplex yourself over it,” he replied. “The words will soon enough be in vogue. The world – the real one – does not provide enough entertainment for those who desire nothing but; so there shall be special places to cater to that taste. Blightley and his partner are but the forerunners of an entire breed of like-minded entrepreneurs. Having come to ruin in America – mostly because their various contraptions are pretty much junk; I’m sure Blightley told you something else, though – they have an ever greater ambition here in England, to build giant underground locales such as this, in which various famous adventures would be portrayed, so that throngs of visitors would pay to experience all those thrilling events for themselves. Thus Blightley and Haze, and their financial associates, would reap vast fortunes based upon diverting the public’s fancies.”
“I’m certain they shall; few men have lost money by indulging others’ folly.” Frowning, I gestured toward the shoddy landscape surrounding us. “But if such is their design, why did they go to the bother of recreating the island of Groughay? The real island is a miserable, insignificant place, markedly more so than is the norm even for Scotland. That I was gladdened for a moment, to have thought myself there, only illustrates how dire the general run of my circumstances have become. But as to the history of the place, no famous adventures have ever occurred on Groughay.”
“You err, Dower; there is one such.”
“And that would be…?”
“None other but your own.” The Brown Leather Man’s dark gaze remained fixed upon me. “You believe your life to be one of little note, that the world regards with no more interest than you might invest in the fluttering of a mayfly, deceased after a single day. Well, you’re wrong about that – no surprise. While you’ve been crouching in your hidey-hole down in Cornwall, the engines of publicity have been churning night and day, with your life and times being the grist for that particular mill. I imagine you thought that Blightley fellow was handing you some kind of line, about how important it would be to have your name associated with his various half-cocked schemes. Actually, he wasn’t – I can assure you that there is some considerable value to the name of Dower, but not for the purposes of assuring the theatre-going public as to the quality of the mechanical performers they’ll be viewing.”
“You’ve heard him talk about that?”
“I hear of a great many things,” the other ominously hinted. “But Blightley’s schemes are hardly a private matter – he yaps about them to anyone who’ll listen, and who might have coin in his pocket to contribute to their advancement. But what he tells the backers who fall for his pitch, and what he told you – those are two different things. The actual reason he sought to enlist you in his cockamamie enterprise is because of the public interest in your adventures, and the money they’d pay to vicariously enjoy them in just such artificial locales as the one you see here.”
“My adventures?” His words stunned me more than the blow of his fist had. “Hardly how I would describe those unfortunate experiences.”
“Everything’s a misfortunate for you, Dower – but yes, other people regard them differently. And to his credit – or blame; however you wish – Blightley is largely responsible for that. While you slept in your remote bed, dreaming of anonymity, he has been busily thwarting your every desire. A vast army of hacks, those ink-stained wretches who’ll scribble anything for money, has been employed to promote the wonderfulness of the life you’ve lived – you might not believe it to have been so, and very likely it was just as much a smoking pit of disaster as you perceive it, but once those hunched-over, paid-by-the-word plodders had laid down their worn-out pens, your biography had been transformed into as much the stuff of heroes and derring-do as anything old Homer and Virgil ever spoke of.”
“Good God.” To say that I was appalled would have been the grossest of understatements. With these few sentences, the Brown Leather Man – if he indeed had been the creature he was but pretending to be, rather than another – had turned my previous nightmares into airy, skipping fantasies, full of sunlight and innocent children’s songs, but now all swept away by this evil prospect. “Tell me,” I implored, “that this is but a malicious fabrication on your part, designed to torment me beyond endurance. The malice I forgive – easily – if only you confess that the unwanted notoriety of which you speak – this monstrous possibility – is a lie.”
“I speak nothing but the truth, however little you wish to hear it–”
“It cannot be.” My own hands squeezed themselves into white-knuckling fists. “I do not believe you.”
“You’ll bloody well believe, when I have proven it to you – which I can. Wait but a moment.” He turned and strode a few paces away from where I sat, toward another of the plaster-and-pasteboard outcroppings of rock which formed this artificial cove’s underpinnings. Reaching behind it, he pulled forth a satchel made of the same dark, glistening substance as his own aquatic garb; carrying this pouch by its broad strap, he returned to me. A moment was required for him to unseal the flap by which the penetration of any moisture was prevented, but when he had accomplished this, he extracted an object of flat rectangular dimensions. “Here–” He thrust the item toward me. “Take it, and see for yourself.”
With the greatest reluctance, I allowed him to place it in my hands. A book, of obviously cheap manufacture, shoddily bound and with the visible edges of its pages already yellowing. Its garish exterior depicted a hodge-podge of various imagined machines, drawn skilfully enough by some nameless artist so as to present their most threatening aspect. Gilt letters, already peeling, luridly shouted the volume’s title –
INFERNAL DEVICES
“What a ghastly thing.” Shaking my head at what I saw, I opened the book – I took no notice of the author’s name, if there were indeed any person shameless enough to claim it as his own. When I had read only the opening lines of the first chapter, I was unable to conceal my revulsion. “The bloody cheek – this is written in the first person! As if I had written it!”
“That is the conceit of Blightley’s commission.” The Brown Leather Man radiated an air of smug triumph, even through the blank mask which concealed his face. “If your life is to be presented to the public as a series of heroic adventures, all the better to entice people to a reconstruction of those events, then he who lived through them must also be seen as a hero. That would be you, Dower – and what you hold there is your dashing, but tastefully modest as well, account of famous deeds.”
The impulse that rose within me, to fling the volume – wretched in appearance, even more wretched in content – into the concocted sea nearby was almost overwhelming. Such a violent lash of my arm was stayed, however, by the horrid fascination that seized hold of me; I continued turning the crudely printed pages, as though I suffered the same compulsion that forces one to stare unblinking into a writhing pit of snakes.
It was with some gratitude that I felt the urge ebb away, after a cursory perusal of the outlandish narrative. Any resemblance to my own life – the one I had actually lived – was slight; certain facts and details remained, but all buried beneath the writer’s meretricious prose, which I took to be his imit
ation of my own more measured way of speaking. And all the while, on every page, the bastard sought to portray every stumbling accident that had befallen me in reality, every prankish scheme that had been cast as traps before my feet, as some sort of thrilling exploit. If the account had been represented as mere fiction, it would have been bad enough – but for it to be employed to gull its readers into believing me a person worthy of renown? Within my breast, both shame and fury burnt.
“I wish I could give you my thanks–” Closing the book without glancing at whatever might be its tedious and inevitable denouement, I held it up toward the one who had so hatefully bestowed it upon me. “As a general rule, I am grateful to anyone who is so kind as to tell me the truth, however little I might wish to know it. But in this instance, that response is beyond my capacity.”
“Keep it.” He dismissively waved off the volume. “Or throw it away. There’s plenty more where it came from.”
“More?” I had not thought it possible, but I was newly aghast. “How much more?”
“You’d be surprised, Dower – or perhaps not. At any rate, a vast body of literature has been created – if you’d care to call it that – recounting not just your supposed adventures, but a great deal of others as well. There appears to be a voracious audience for tales of steam-driven devices and other machines of dubious purpose, and the halfwits who become entangled with them. Very likely, the day approaches when there will be nothing but such books as the one in your hand, and nobody will bother reading Shakespeare and Milton and all the rest of that creaky lot. Some might consider that a blow to civilization, but–” His dark shoulders rose in a shrug. “For me, that’s just how it goes.”
Once more, a sense of unease was evoked by the manner in which he spoke, so different from that which I recalled from my first experiences in his company – and increasingly so, as if some concealing veil had inadvertently slipped from his featureless visage, beyond the one through which I had already glimpsed his true identity. But at this moment, I did not have the leisure to mull over the matter, searching for whatever significance it might possess.