The White Forest

by Adam McOmber

  “The play you were putting on here,” I said. “May I ask you to explain it?”

  He ran his too-dark tongue over his teeth. I did my best to pull my gaze from his mouth and look into his eyes. “I know it appears irregular,” he said, “but honestly it made for an enlightening evening, an evening that would have been entirely positive had not poor Nathan gone missing.”

  “What was the play meant to be?” I asked, knowing the answer well enough but wanting to hear his explanation. I studied the trees, the animals, and the moon as he spoke. They seemed to quake in my presence.

  “The Royal Hunt,” he said. “My boys worked on the trees for weeks, and they tell me it’s difficult to get the color of the bark just right. Do these look right to you?”

  I didn’t answer, as the color of his trees was the last thing on my mind.

  “All of England was once covered by such trees,” he said. “Clearings were sacred because they were rare. And the hunt, well, there has always been a hunt—a gathering of men who track a beast—be it mythical like the unicorn or somewhat more common, like a fox, or, in our case, a stag.”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw the stag from my vision racing through the forest, pursued by the Red Goddess. She appeared to float through the trees, darting this way and that, finally catching the animal by its throat.

  “The hunt was a hallowed act, the stag a sort of divinity,” Day said. “To kill the stag was to enact a scene from the greatest of all human myths—the death of a god. And as we know, the god must die to bring about a new era on earth.”

  Paul Rafferty said Nathan had played the stag, and I tried to imagine my old friend in a pair of stag’s horns and a pelt. I wondered what enlightenment Nathan thought he might derive from such an act. “And who killed the stag that night?” I asked.

  Day chuckled. “Killed the stag? Why, no one killed the stag, my dear Jane. The hunt was theater. We only play at death.” He paused. “Perhaps we should talk about the reason I’ve brought you here.”

  “The note you sent with Alexander Hartford indicates you think I’ve done something.” I paused here, anxious but still composed enough to bait him. “It seems more likely that it’s you who’ve done something. I’ve read of your previous misadventures.”

  He leaned forward, causing his chair to creak. He was no longer a feudal lord; he was an animal, leering at me. This attentive, clever creature was the Ariston Day I feared. “You are aware of the qualities that make you of interest, dear Jane. And you are aware of what you’ve done. Don’t play at naïveté. You showed your colors to Corydon Ulster. Why not show them to me as well? Mr. Ulster approached you at my behest, after all. Fetches rarely act of their own accord.”

  “You sent him to harm me?” I asked.

  “To test you. I wanted to verify the claims made by Nathan Ashe.”

  “I assure you that Corydon Ulster wanted to do more than test me, Mr. Day,” I said, grimly.

  Day leaned back in his chair and relaxed, as if we were taking part in an utterly cordial conversation. “Be honest with me, Jane. You know where Nathan Ashe has gone. In fact, it was you who put him there.”

  I felt a sudden pressure in the air, as if the entire Temple of the Lamb above us might come crashing down. How much information could Day possibly have? “I don’t know what you mean,” I said finally. I was not going to fall into his trap.

  “You put Nathan Ashe in the Empyrean, Jane Silverlake.”

  Hearing the name of that secret place on his lips made my heart skip. “I did no such thing,” I said, yet even as I spoke, I pictured myself pressing my mouth against the fissure in the field of shale and pleading for help.

  “You banished Nathan because your emotions got the best of you,” Day said.

  I was quiet, having never imagined Ariston Day would bring me into his awful cave to talk about my heart.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nathan’s disappearance was only the beginning. Soon we’ll all be reunited.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Occult philosophers have long conjectured that the entire natural world is but an expression of the spiritual,” Day said. “But you, Miss Silverlake, you alone sense souls in the unnatural objects produced in our terrible factories. You alone see souls in industry. And you believe there is something perverse in this. Don’t you? That’s why you wear flowers—to prove you are still a woman. To prove you are not an unnatural.” He gestured to the feverfew tied at my wrist. “But with your relationship to objects, Miss Silverlake, you can help us transcend this pitiful existence. Help us reach what Nathan called the Empyrean—and what I know is the final Paradise. It has been sealed off since creation’s dawn. We need to break that seal, expose civilization to its cure.”

  “You’re talking nonsense,” I said.

  “Am I? I think rather this is why you’ve come here, Jane. Because I can help you understand. You’ve heard of the new science—called archaeology?”

  “I’ve read of it.”

  “Then you may know one of its primary tenets—the concept of ‘stratification.’ A geologic time scale has been posited by our own English archaeologists working in Egypt and Greece as a way of comprehending the progression of the ages. The earth is made up of layers, and to dig into those layers is to move backward through time. Stratum lay one on top of the next, and the deeper we dig the further back we go.”

  “Did you bring me here for a lesson in the applied sciences?” I asked.

  “Humor me a bit longer, Jane. Imagine a form of spiritual archaeology. If instead of digging into earth’s layers, we could dig into the invisible layers of pneuma, digging all the way to the bedrock.”

  The bedrock was where Nathan wanted to live. To live upon the rock, away from the shifting soil.

  Day looked at me with a kind of threatening adoration. “Until Nathan described your abilities, I believed spiritual archaeology would be impossible to achieve. I merely fiddled about with the manipulation of dreams through ancient versions of theater.”

  “Mr. Day, I don’t know what Nathan told you, but I’m not what you think. I am especially not a tool for so-called ‘spiritual archaeology.’ ”

  “I didn’t believe him either and then Nathan showed me something that was very dear to him. Something that he’d brought back from Malta.”

  At first, I thought Day might be talking about the ape’s finger, but then he lifted the leather portfolio from his lap. When he opened it and took out an unbound sheaf of yellowed pages written in Italian, I knew almost immediately what I was looking at.

  “You have the writings of Theodore de Baras?” I asked.

  “So you know of these papers already?” Day said.

  “I’ve read Nathan’s journal,” I replied, realizing the appearance of the papers had caused me to drop my defenses. I was telling Day too much, and this was precisely the reaction he wanted.

  “I intercepted these pages, Jane,” he said, carefully. “I’m sorry I didn’t let Nathan show them to you, but I had to be sure all the pieces fit before I decided how to proceed.”

  “And what do they say?” I asked.

  Day leaned close once again, speaking in a direct and matter-of-fact tone. “They explain your very existence, my dear. The so-called Lady of Flowers was only one incarnation of the unnamed goddess who controls the gates of the Empyrean. There is a line of such incarnations running down through the ages, right up to the modern day. All of these women have the power to fling open the doors if they so choose. All of them can bring about the new Paradise.”

  I found I could not breathe, thinking of the red vision I’d seen time and again.

  “What the papers reveal,” Day continued, “what excited your beloved Nathan Ashe, is that you, Jane, are the incarnation of the goddess in our current era. You can return all of us to a primitive dream, curing every ill of modern society. Rome is a disease. London is a disease. You are the cure. You can unmake what should never have been made to begin with.”
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br />   His words caused an unexpected reaction in me. Beneath my anxiety, I felt a certain power begin to rise. It coursed through my limbs, and I felt as though I’d been waiting all my life to hear this. In just a few words, Day’s story explained my near lifetime of suffering and isolation.

  I pulled myself back, knowing I couldn’t allow myself to fall under his spell. His business was to proselytize, and I did not want to become part of his religion. By himself Day was dangerous. With me at his side, he might be lethal.

  “I don’t think I should be here, Mr. Day. I need to collect my thoughts.”

  “I wouldn’t leave, Jane. Not just yet.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because I can help you reunite with Nathan,” he said. “If you will, in turn, help me.”

  I felt my anger boil at this. “I’m not here to barter,” I said. “If you think you know how to bring back Nathan, then tell me, or—” I raised my hand as if I meant to touch him.

  Day extended his own hand in response. “I’d love to be hurt by you, dear Jane. To experience your power as Corydon Ulster did—even to go mad from it. It would be to know supreme bliss, to connect to something I once thought unknowable.”

  I lowered my hand, looking toward the pool. “If you understand what I’ve done to Nathan,” I said quietly, “tell me how to mend it.”

  “You sound guilt-ridden,” Day said. “A goddess feels no guilt. She merely acts, and her actions are a pronouncement.”

  “I won’t get caught up in your fantasy,” I said. “Just give me the information I’ve come here for.”

  “What I know is the same as what you know, Jane. You put Nathan in the Empyrean, but how you did it is not easily summarized. To understand that, we must first understand your very existence. Theodore de Baras says those of your kind are the intercessors. You are the gate and the bridge, as delicate a fabrication as has ever walked upon earth.”

  His mouth was so vile, but his words were necessary.

  “In de Baras’s papers,” Day continued, “he writes of meeting a girl very much like you in Rome. She was a child of the streets—simple and without guile—yet she had a gift. As he describes it, she could make the ancient statues sing, and she caused bright lights to rise up from the cobblestones, like sunlight dancing on the ocean’s waves. When de Baras found her, the girl was attempting to use her talents as part of a street performance in the plaza before the Pantheon, but her abilities only frightened the crowd. They wanted the simple amusements of jugglers and snake charmers. Only de Baras recognized her for what she was, having already come into contact with the cult of the Lady on his island home. He took her back with him to Malta and kept her at the ruin of Crendi, imprisoned there in a temple, unbeknownst to the Brotherhood of Saint John. The monk fed her and clothed her in exchange for access to her talents. He made experiments with her, much as Nathan once made experiments with you, only de Baras took his experiments further. When the girl began to refuse him, he took her clothes, kept her chained to the stone altar in the temple. He found that cutting her flesh was a way of opening the fabled doorway.”

  “Stop,” I said. “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “But you must, Jane. You must hear it so you understand something more of yourself and the dangers you may face. There were other ways to open the door as well. All of the methods involved fear. De Baras hints that, eventually, he was actually able to walk into the Paradise and come back again. But after that, he became increasingly paranoid, believing that some creature had followed him out of the white forests of the Empyrean and returned to the temple with him. De Baras believed the monster meant him harm because of what he’d done to the girl.”

  I thought of the white ape Nathan had seen in the ruin. Was it possible that this was the same guardian that de Baras had drawn out of the Empyrean? Before I could think further about this, I heard something moving above us. I looked up to see a flash of red between the illusion of thunderheads. There were Fetches crawling in the clouds on some sort of wooden latticework. “What’s going on?” I asked Day.

  “They only want to look at you,” he said. “And who can blame them? You are to be our savior, after all. You are the great scourge. Queen of all queens. The goddess reborn.”

  I stood, smoothing my skirts. “I’ll take my leave.”

  But he would not be silenced. “The world has not been good to you, Jane,” he said. “It offers you nothing. Your true home is waiting—Nathan Ashe is waiting. You pulled him away. You moved his body because you wanted to wrestle him from Madeline Lee. And on the evening of The Royal Hunt, in a moment of terrible agitation, Nathan Ashe let himself go. He surrendered to you, allowed you to pull him from this world and into the next.”

  I’d been so full of grief while lying prostrate in the field of black shale on the Heath that I’d been capable of anything. I’d awoken hours later when the sky was black and starless, thinking madly: What have I done? What have I done? Not remembering any of it clearly. “Even if that were true—” I said.

  “I want to restage The Royal Hunt, Jane, but this time, you will be the sacred beast. I want to provoke you. I believe I’ve discovered a means of opening the doorway and keeping it open permanently. I’ll help you fulfill your destiny and reunite with Nathan. I believe that the Empyrean will transform earth, make it finally pure.”

  I stared down at Day in his cane chair. Flame light moved in his oil-dark eyes. “I’m sorry, Mr. Day,” I said. “I don’t think we can help each other.”

  On legs of glass, I made my way through the dark of the trees toward the faint glow of the staircase, listening, all the while, to the Fetches crawl through the clouds above me.

  “This is bigger than you,” Day called after me. “Look at what a filth-ridden hole our city has become. Think how overgrown it will be in one hundred years or even two hundred. So much pain and suffering. You owe this to humanity, Jane. You owe it to us all.”

  CHAPTER 25

  On my hurried return to the carriage, which hovered in the greasy sunlight of Southwark like some black and untenable island, I barely took notice of the dim figures in the streets. I’d spent my life not believing in the savior Christ or the Christian God. As Stoke Morrow was empty of my mother’s presence, the world to me felt empty of an all-knowing, all-seeing deity. The idea that I was an incarnation of some primitive goddess whose very name was lost to time went against rational thought.

  In the muddied street, my arm was brushed by something soft, and I imagined it was Ariston Day or the ghost of Theodore de Baras softly caressing me, trying to steal my power. But it was neither Day nor de Baras. Rather it was something like a child, standing at my feet. I say “like” because the urchin was of an indiscernible age and sex, shrunken as my mother had been when her blood slowed. The small creature moved with the some deliberateness, lifting a bouquet of wilted daisies toward me.

  “I have no money,” I said, passing by the urchin, though the silence of the daisies appealed to me in all that moaning ghetto.

  “Not for sale,” the urchin said, peering up at me with soot-dark eyes. “I am told to give them to you, mum.”

  “And who gave you such instruction?”

  “Mother,” said the child. “Mother says you are beautiful and deserve them.”

  “Well, I am nothing more than plain,” I said.

  “Mother says you must come to our church in Spitalfields, called the Hall of the Red Star.”

  I paused at this. Miss Herron-Cross had also mentioned a church in Spitalfields, one that my own mother had shown interest in. “The Red Star?” I asked. “And what do they worship there?”

  Tears welled in the child’s eyes, glistening in the grime on its cheeks. “Please take the flowers, mum.” The child got to its knees, holding out the bouquet.

  I took them, looking at the nearly rotted heads of the daisies.

  “And please be kind to my family,” the child said. “Deliver us from the terrors that are to come.”

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sp; “Terrors? What terrors?” When I realized the child wasn’t going to respond and was instead mumbling more prayers to me, I moved away as quickly as I could.

  • • •

  I opened the door to the Lee carriage, saying we should make haste before we were all left penniless and bruised. But when I looked into the dim cab, I saw only Pascal on the velvet seat. He seemed unsure, more of an innocent boy than usual.

  “Where’s Maddy?” I asked.

  His voice was thick with emotion. “She wouldn’t listen to reason, Jane. I had to remain with the cab, so the driver didn’t abandon us in this place. She went looking for you. The process was taking too long.”

  “Too long?” I said. “I wasn’t gone half the hour, Pascal.”

  “As I told her. But she was concerned. She said you’re naive in ways she is not.”

  “Follow me, Pascal,” I said, tossing the daisies onto the empty bench seat across from him. “We have to find her.”

  “But what of the carriage, mademoiselle?”

  “It will remain. I have no worry of that.” I said this loudly enough so the driver would hear. “What worries me more is going back into the Temple with no one at my side.”

  We hurried along, and I kept my eye open for the urchin with the flowers who wanted to worship me.

  “I’ve never been in the tavern above the theater,” Pascal said, walking double-step to remain at my side. “Ariston Day says the Fetches mustn’t go there because it’s full of heathens who don’t understand the ways of truth.”

  “Today is your inauguration into falsehood and lies then,” I said. “I doubt that Maddy would have been able to find her way to the theater without an escort.” I said this hoping she had not. I didn’t want to picture her lost in the inner forest with Fetches crawling above her through the hideous sky.

  • • •

  The Temple of the Lamb above the Theater of Provocation contained a kind of alehouse cum pleasure garden that had been oddly decorated with the remains of the beastly amusements for which Southwark was once famous. Various wax figures slouched in the dim high-ceilinged room. Nothing as marvelous as those in Madame Tussauds, these were in varying states of decay. The wax had deteriorated, so that the figure of Queen Elizabeth looked like a ghoul with a stiffened ruff about its neck, and Saint Augustine had lost so many inches off his original height that his robe pooled at his feet. Rather than causing the tavern to look like a carnival, these figures made it seem the death of joy—a graveyard for oddities. They hovered inside this sphere of death, bent and malformed, unable to straighten their bodies and stand.