The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year One

by Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  “Ornate fireplace,” I say aloud, scribbling. “Wrought iron bird cage. Canaries: two, one considerably younger. Six candles. Six candlesticks.”

  “Can you hear me?” she asks. “I can hear you.”

  “Velvet curtains,” I reply, my jaw set.

  “I don’t understand,” the priestess says, though not for my benefit.

  She walks off-screen. When she returns she is dressed the same but her stomach has swollen, just as it always does at this point in the narrative. She approaches the screen.

  “Please,” she says, “I don’t know if you can hear me. . . . By the Gods, I don’t even know if you can see me, but if you can, please answer me. Please help me. I am with child, I am. . . .” Her lip quivers and my pen pauses, suspended above the page. I know I must press on, that I cannot be taken in by these delusions, but her fear and hurt are so palpable.

  “Please,” she says. “Please help me. There is no-one else.”

  I swallow hard and regard my notebook.

  “Go away,” I say as firmly as I can manage. “You are not real.”

  Again, my words have an electrifying effect on the woman. I cannot help but watch as she reels away with a shriek.

  “By the Gods,” she says once she has recovered. “You. . . you hear me? You see me?”

  “You are nothing but a fabrication of my isolated mind. Please resume your original actions and allow me to return to mine.” I adopt an austere tone, seeking stability in formality.

  “What are you saying?” The priestess turns to face the Heavens. “What is going on?”

  “You are being punished for a crime that is not your fault,” I say, trying a more patient tone. “You are imprisoned. There is no escape for you.”

  “What?” The woman’s eyes are wide. “How do you know? How could you. . . .” Fury suddenly flashes in her eyes. “Are you from him? Has he sent you to taunt me? Filth! Even now, even after all, you still will not leave me alone? You must debase me further?”

  Her accusation, her tone, the rawness of her emotions, all conspire to overcome me.

  “No madam,” I exclaim. “Most certainly not. I demand that you withdraw—” And then my actions catch up with me. I am arguing with my own delusion, one summoned from the punched holes on a filmcard, from the projector’s flickering bulb-light.

  With my free hand I massage my temples. “You are not real,” I mutter to myself. “You are not real.” I repeat the phrase like a mantra, like an incantation to banish her, almost like a prayer. It is this final realization that snaps me from my reverie and brings me back to my studies. I have sworn not to stoop to the depths of prayer.

  I pick up my pen and resume my notes upon the film’s features. I ignore the priestess, her accusations, implorings, and other expostulations. The passage is hard, especially at the end, as her begging turns to screams and the babe once more takes her life for its own, but I am resolute.

  The next day I am more myself. I cease discussions with my animals, tend to several newborn rabbits (their birth allows me to take one of the older subjects for my dinner that evening), and make, what I believe is, significant headway in my thinking about a third variable. Whatever it is that modifies the relationship between behavior and lifespan is unlikely to be entirely random. There is likely to be some sort of logical connection between all parts of the equation. I work for several hours on factors that could possibly be related.

  In the evening, after a delicious stew, I resume my studies of the narrative. The most salient feature of the hallucinations is their onset, which always occurs at the moment of the priestess’s incarceration. After this point she again begins to alternately implore and curse me. She soon gives up however, and I am briefly hopeful that the hallucinations are slipping away, that the mere technique of scientific observation is reducing them. However, the priestess stays slumped, sitting on the floor regarding me, refusing to return to her usual actions. Occasionally the screen flickers momentarily to black and when the picture comes back the priestess’s stomach has noticeably increased in size. In this manner she makes her way towards her inevitable demise.

  After the priestess’s death I strike upon a theory. If the madness always comes upon me at the same point in the narrative, surely by avoiding that part I can avoid the madness itself. I have no idea how one would skip this part of the narrative manually, so instead I plug my ears with cotton-balls, holding them in place with a blindfold I have perched on my forehead, ready to drop at the appropriate moment.

  This experiment is a dispiriting failure. The whole case is quite inexplicable. However, after viewing numerous other, lesser productions I am able to confirm that my symptoms are, at least, limited to this one narrative.

  The priestess herself lapses into silence over the coming weeks. She sometimes paces her rooms, but never in the old patterns. I often hear her hum or sing to herself. She has a pretty voice. Occasionally she will sit and sob. These times are the hardest.

  One night, I am experimenting with other forms of sensory deprivation (this time is my nasal passages are stuffed with cotton-balls and I am breathing through my mouth) when she addresses me directly.

  “I know that you refuse to speak to me, that you deny that I exist despite the fact that you clearly see me. . . I do not understand why for the life of me but,” she squares her jaw, resolute, “I am going to speak to you, sir, no matter your response. To not do so will drive me insane, unless I am insane already. Ever since you first appeared in my life things have seemed so much less bearable, the cycle of things weighing so much heavier. . . .” Her voice quavers. “Maybe the Gods punish me, though I cannot find any sin my past that seems to deserve such punishment. But Their ways are not our own.”

  She turns away, looking harassed, pushes her hair back from her forehead. “I am rambling, sir, please forgive me. I have thought so often of what I may say to you, and, now that I am doing it, all my thoughts have left me.”

  “I simply. . . . I simply wish there was someone to explain to me what was going on. Before. . . before all this, life seemed so clear, so laid out. There was a pattern to things. Now. . . . I don’t know. . . . Dissatisfaction claws at me. Perhaps, please, sir, I implore you, speak to me please. That is all I want, someone to share the burden of imprisonment. These walls. . . . By the Gods, I feel as if I am the foundation that they lie upon and they are crushing me. All I ask is a few words to help me bear the weight. Please sir, please. . . .”

  “I. . . ” I say, and then words fail me.

  She turns those big, gray eyes on me, and I feel every ounce of the weight of which she speaks.

  “I am sorry,” I say. “You do not exist.”

  “May the Gods damn you! Why do you say that? You watch me suffer over and over, you sit and you write down your notes and you hum and you hah, and you avoid my gaze, and I can see full well that you believe wholly in my existence. Why? Why do you hold me like a specimen in a jar? Does it bring you pleasure to torture me so?”

  “No, madam,” I say stiffly, regarding my feet.

  “Look at me!” she demands.

  “Madam, I—”

  “Look at me.” Her voice is calmer but no less commanding.

  I look up. A tear runs down her face. She touches it with her finger, lets the drop settle there. She holds the finger forward, advances upon the screen until it is filled with fingertip and its tiny bead of saline.

  “Do you believe in this?”

  I try to say no but I cannot. I stand, mouth slightly open, unsure. She removes her finger from the screen and I see her face again.

  “Why do you say that you don’t believe in me?”

  “Because you cannot exist.” It is the truth. Surely she cannot deny it?

  “What are the conditions of a life?”

  I throw up my hands. “There is no point in furthering this discussion. You are but a fragment of my imagination.”

  “Tell me.” She seems calm, but I suspect otherwise.

  I
consider her demand. “I will humor you, madam, but only because it is always helpful to speak one’s ideas aloud, as it helps to concentrate the abstract into the concrete. Life consists of a number of behaviors and the time we have to perform them in. There is also some third, related, but as yet, unknown variable that links the latter two together in a, as yet unclarified, relationship.”

  She paces. I go to continue but she holds up one hand.

  “I have a lifespan,” she says. “It is as long as the filmcards, is it not? I blink into existence at their beginning, and before their end I die, do I not?”

  I am not sure how to respond and so I do not. The screen flickers and the priestess’s belly swells.

  “By the Gods, answer me, I do not have much time.”

  “Yes,” I concede. “By your formulation you do have a lifespan.”

  “And I act upon the world, do I not?” She picks up the birdcage and shakes it. The canaries flap around in mute distress.

  “No, madam, that is where, your argument fails. You have no effect on my world, only your own.”

  “I have an effect on you.” She is resolute.

  “I beg your pardon, madam.”

  “I cause you to talk. I cause you to take notes in your notepad. I cause you to behave differently than you would if I did not behave in a certain manner.”

  “But that, madam, is because you only exist within the confines my mind.” I refuse to be caught in such an easy trap.

  “What proof do you have of that?”

  “The proof of history, madam. Never before has a character in a narrative demonstrated its own free will.”

  “When the first chicken laid the first egg, did it only exist in the chicken’s mind?”

  “Jest has no place in scientific discussion.”

  “Can anyone else see me? Hear me? Or is it only you?”

  “I do not know,” I concede.

  “Then bring someone else in. I guarantee you that they too will see me.”

  “There is no-one else to bring in.”

  “What do you mean?” She stands, hands on hips, interrogative. She has an abrasive manner, quite out of keeping with her demure appearance. The screen flickers once more and her belly swells, her posture changes to something more suitable for bearing the weight.

  “Tell me,” she says, “what do you mean.”

  “I find myself in a similar situation to yourself,” I concede. “I am trapped in similar circumstances, by merit of the same set of laws.”

  Her brow furrows. “You mean—”

  “I am a blasphemer, madam, as are you. I, however, both deserve and embrace the name.”

  “This is too strange.” The priestess shakes her head and then, abruptly, clutches her belly and moans. “It is coming,” she says. She grunts again. “Gods, it comes so fast. Maybe there is still time.”

  I watch as she rushes to the portal and begins to hammer on the door, screaming for help.

  “No-one comes,” I murmur. “No-one ever comes.”

  To my surprise, the priestess turns to me and smiles. “I know,” she says. “But if we do not live in hope, why do we live at all?” Then another contraction takes her and the familiar scenes play out once more, and she screams her way to death.

  I contemplate the filmcards, as the last of the deck falls into the exit tray. I reach out for them and hesitate, unsure of how to proceed.

  What if someone else could see her? There is of course no way to test this hypothesis, but what about my specimens? Would they react to her. If she shouted would they jump? Of course, even if I saw them react, how could I be sure that it was really happening and that my senses were not betraying me? I have no guarantee.

  If I cannot trust my senses, maybe I can trust my sense.

  I slip the cards back in the projector and once more crank the handle. As the door slams behind the priestess, she immediately turns to me.

  “So soon?” she asks.

  “What am I doing right now?” I wave my right hand.

  “Making a fool of yourself.”

  I bridle at this. “The only way in which I make a fool of myself is by wasting breath upon you.”

  “I am sorry.” She bows her head slightly. “When I look at you I see a man in his thirties, a little sallow in the cheeks, dressed well, sitting on a chaise in a large room covered with blackboards. Next to you is a projector that points directly at me. You are waving your right hand.”

  “Thank you.” I too nod my head. “Now please, if you would be so kind, describe your existence to me.”

  “That is a very broad question, sir.”

  “Tell me what you know of your history.”

  She proceeds to give me a precise and accurate description of the events of the narrative up until her narrative.

  “What about before that?”

  She gives me a puzzled look. “Before what?”

  “Before you came to the attention of the rapist.” ‘Rapist’ is her word. She has not given her assailant a name.

  “Only what I tell people in the course of the narrative.”

  I take note of this statement, but continue my questions. “I cannot hear you before you enter your,” I pause, the word surely distasteful, “prison.”

  “And I cannot see you.”

  Again I take note.

  “What of your future, do you know what that will be?”

  “Of course.” She smiles but then looks sad. “I shall die in childbirth.”

  “You know of that?”

  “Of course. It has happened many times.”

  “And what then?”

  “Things begin again.” She smiles. I suspect she finds my interview amusing, as if she is dealing with an overgrown child. I would, possibly, be angry, if her fate did not instill such sadness in me.

  “How can you bear it?” I ask.

  “I told you before, sir, because of the hope that this time it will be different.”

  “But it never is.”

  “It is with you, sir. Each time I see you it is different.”

  I stop here, unsure of what to say. She has touched me. Not with her hands or her feet or any other physical part, but with her words. Could I summon the emotions I now feel with a fabrication of my own mind?

  “What is your name?” I ask.

  “Name, sir?”

  “What do people call you?”

  “I am The Priestess.”

  “There is nothing,” I struggle for words, “less formal?”

  “No, sir.”

  “My name is Philip DeMild. You may call me Philip.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Would you mind if I called you something less unwieldy than The Priestess?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  I hesitate, uncertain of how forward I am being. “Pree?” I murmur.

  “Yes,” she says. “Thank you. I shall be Pree.”

  Then the smile is ripped from her face, and she grasps her belly and groans.

  The throes of birth and death are even harder this time. I watch her claw at the door and shout for help, silent, impotent. After her death, I watch the face of her child.

  I do no watch the film again that night. I cannot put her through that suffering again. The next day I go through my experiments, and feel I have made good progress but it is hard to take joy in it.

  “What is it?” she asks me that night.

  “What is what, Pree?”

  “My child. Is it a boy or a girl?”

  I shrug sadly. “I do not know. I only ever see its face.”

  “That is alright,” she says, disappointment as clear as her attempt to hide it.

  There is silence between us then. I stare at the water in my glass, swill it, disconsolate. Then the thought of water falling from the Heavens provides inspiration.

  “What drove you to the priesthood?” I ask.

  “Drove me, Philip?” She asks, snapped back from melancholy with a playful eyebrow raised.

>   “Oh come on, madam. . . . Pree, surely you must admit that the priesthood is a refuge, a last home for those too terrified by the truth to turn and face it.”

  “The truth?” she says. “And what is that?”

  “You are avoiding the question.”

  “As are you.”

  “Please,” I say, stifling a smile, “do not make me resort to the stratagem of pointing out that I asked first.”

  “Belief.” She smiles at me.

  “Belief in what?”

  “What can you think? Belief in the Gods, in Their teachings, in the sanctity of the temples, in it all.”

  “Again,” I say, “you avoid my question.”

  “I answered in full.”

  “Then let me rephrase: what led you to belief?”

  “But I asked you something first.” She is demure, hands clasped behind her back. Her eyes are the only hint that she is fully ware of the exasperation she is inspiring within me. “What is the truth?” she repeats.

  “The truth is that which can be discovered,” I state, “that which can be proven and repeated, that which our senses cannot deny.”

  “And so what am I?” she asks. “Do your senses deny me? Can you prove me?”

  “I am in the process of elucidating those very facts.” I am flippant but only because the question shakes me. She seems to have come fully equipped with the tools to undermine my firmest hypotheses. Is she a manifestation of my own insecurity, my own fears about the truth that lies behind my own studies? Is she here to make it easier for me to take refuge in the collective madness of religion instead of standing to face the possibility of failure?

  “Now,” I say, attempting to abort this train of thought, “answer my question. What led you to belief?”

  “A promise.”

  “What promise?”

  “I promised my mother that I would go to temple.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted a doll.”

  “A doll?” We are both smiling.

  “I was seven years old. I wanted a doll but I did not go to temple. I promised my mother that I would go to temple every week for a year if she would promise to buy me a doll.” She laughs at the memory, but, of course, she has no memory.