My House Gathers Desires

by Adam McOmber

  At first, Elizabeth thought the boy was making a joke in bad taste, but when he did not laugh and continued to simply stand and stare at her, she asked, “Why would he want do that?”

  Conrad Deale brushed perspiration from his upper lip with the back of his hand. “Because Marty’s weak. He can’t handle these sorts of things. He couldn’t really handle the thing with the cow-faced girl either. That’s why everything got out of control, if you have to know. Marty panicked. So the girl panicked. I think it’s something in his French blood.”

  Elizabeth’s heart beat so hard beneath her dark blouse that she thought it might cause the locket that hung against her breast to tremble. “What sort of thing are you talking about, Conrad? What can’t Martin cope with?”

  “The thing I have to do to you today,” he replied, calmly.

  She was not sure if she should turn and attempt to go back to the boat or simply flee into the woods. What Conrad Deale had said frightened her terribly. She wanted to leave, but the boy was certainly faster than she was. Any attempt at escape would be futile. Her only recourse at this point would be to reason with him. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Conrad,” she said. “What do you mean that you have to do this thing?”

  The boy raised his fine eyebrows, “I’m under orders, Mrs. Jordan,” he said.

  Elizabeth’s mind raced, trying to think of a way to lead the boy away from his intentions, but before she could speak, he said, “Do you really think some old story made us do what we did in the woods that night? You think we’d believe in such nonsense?”

  “I—”

  “That sort of fantasy is for bored old women, Mrs. J.,” Conrad said. He took a step toward her, dragging the white oar behind him. “All that reading. All that stupid, useless talk. Us boys know better than to care about such things. The closest you can come to gods these days are men like Headmaster Dove. Men who can help us with our futures if we behave. We took the girl into the woods because the headmaster told us to. Dove wanted to watch. We’re like gods to him—young and strong. We can do the things he can’t. And we took you onto the river today because he told us to. Because he said that you’re the only one who ever questions him. You don’t listen. That’s what he told us, Mrs. J.”

  “Conrad, you can’t expect me to believe that a civilized man like Headmaster Dove sent me out here to be harmed by my students,” she said.

  The boy took another step toward her. At the same time, he raised the white oar. “Not harmed, Mrs. J.,” he said. “Sacrificed.”

  Elizabeth lifted her hands, one of which still clung to the pitiful silk fan from her mother. She knew that such an attempt to block Conrad Deale’s blow was useless. He could easily knock her to the ground. For a moment, she seemed to drift in the air above her own body. She saw herself cowering like an animal before him. And just as the white oar swung toward her face, a loud knock echoed against the trees, sharp enough to make it seem as though a ripple had moved through the landscape itself.

  The oar didn’t strike Elizabeth. Instead, Conrad Deale dropped it from his hands.

  Deale stood before her, blood boiling from a cut that had opened on his high white forehead. A red stream of the stuff ran down his face and neck. Elizabeth saw a large stone lying at Deale’s feet. The stone still had a piece of his skin clinging to its sharp edge. Conrad Deale’s knees buckled suddenly. He toppled forward, landing face down in the mud.

  Martin Oole stumbled out of the trees. He held a second stone of approximately the same size as the one that had struck Conrad Deale. He made a strange high-pitched squeal that turned into something like a scream. The French boy had saved her. And in doing so, something had broken loose inside him. Elizabeth went to him, intending to provide comfort, but before she could reach him, Martin Oole’s hand—the one holding the second stone—shot up, smashing the rock into his own face. He repeated this action three times before Elizabeth could reach him, bursting his nose open like a boil and breaking off both of his front teeth. She grabbed his arms and shook him, forcing the bloodied rock to drop from his fingers. “Stop it, Martin,” she yelled. “Stop it right now.”

  Oole only stared at her. His face was a red mask. He didn’t seem to know her. He didn’t seem to know anything. Finally he whispered, “You have to go now. He’s coming.”

  “Are you talking about Headmaster Dove?” Elizabeth said, looking about.

  The boy shook his head. “The other master.”

  She started to tell Martin Oole that everything would be fine, that she could take him to a doctor in town. The doctor would tend his wounds. Then they would get him safely back to his parents. But just as she began to speak, a noise rose from depths of the forest—an awful trumpeting, like the call of an ancient horn. It was the kind of sound that made the trees shudder and the river hush.

  Elizabeth looked into Martin Oole’s bloodied face once more. She put her hands on his shoulders. “Who is coming?” she whispered. “Tell me the truth, Martin.”

  “Conrad talked to Headmaster Dove,” Martin replied. “But I talked to the other one. I’ve always talked to the other one, Missus.”

  Elizabeth heard something approaching now. It sounded as if it was running. Loping through the forest. She thought of June Strump locked away in the school by Headmaster Dove. She thought of how the boys had hurt June that night on Dove’s orders—because he wanted to watch. She pictured the horrors enacted in the woods that night. She wondered what sort of being such actions might have conjured.

  Elizabeth suddenly wanted to close her hands around Martin Oole’s slender throat. She wanted to put an end to all of this.

  But instead she whispered, “Go, Martin. Leave this place.”

  The boy ran off into the woods, crashing through the trees.

  Elizabeth turned then very slowly. She thought of all the lessons she’d taught the boys, all the ancient mysteries she’d piled upon them. She pictured the horned figure painted on the caves at Lascaux. She pictured the boys’ upturned, listening faces. There was a difference, she thought, between a god and monster. She should have told them while she could.

  Homunculus

  Salzburg, 1535

  Paracelsus, the great alchemist, is asleep in the alcove when the homunculus finally emerges from its gourd-shaped glass. Imagine the creature: a tiny, blood-filled form. Its mouth is no bigger than a nail’s head. Its teeth are like granules of sugar. It stands at the edge of the workbench, flushed and silent, peering warily into the chalky recesses of the master’s room. Above the fireplace hangs an accordion bellows, a dark and portentous wing. Iron troughs and copper tubes form a complex city beneath a plaster sky. Snow crusted on the windowsill throws spangled light across the wall. The near translucent homunculus lifts its sliver of a hand, and for a moment, the hand is gloved in light. The creature feels warmth. It hears its master stirring.

  Upon awakening, Paracelsus sees the homunculus on the workbench, and he rises, gathering a sheet around his aging body. He is startled by the results of his experiment—this shrunken and skinless child. He has never taken a wife. There were men in Germany and then again in the African mines, but nothing remains of those friendships. The alchemist never expected a family, and he wonders if he should dare to call the unlikely thing that stares back at him a son.

  We have only the old physician’s fragmentary notes to reconstruct this meeting. “The homunculus has many features of a child that is born from a woman,” he writes, “but it would be wrong to mistake it for that. The creature comes from me alone. And because of this, it is mine to care for. As I hold it in my arms, it has the strange air of one who sees the invisible wheels of Heaven. Forty days in the glass cucurbit were enough to give my seed time to agitate. This same number of days was required for Egyptian embalmment. It was forty as well for Christ’s awakening in the wilderness. Forty more after the Resurrection when He rose again. The birth of the homunculus is admittedly a mystical occurrence—one that I do not think my scientific mind will ever fu
lly comprehend.”

  In his journal, Paracelsus makes a record of the creature’s care. A homunculus must be nourished, he tells us. Human blood is ideal. It fattens and rouges the delicate body. The old man cuts his finger daily and allows the creature to sip the red bead that forms at the base of the incision. The homunculus must be educated as well, though not with books or dictation. The education of a homunculus is best performed in the natural world. If correctly taught, it is foretold by both Ficino and Agrippa that the creature will become a master of nature itself, one who can raise armies of bizarre forms: giants and wood-sprites, worricows and naiads. “Those beings who understand the hidden matters of the Earth,” Paracelsus writes.

  Picture the alchemist tramping through a dark forest at the base of the Swiss Alps. He holds his homunculus gingerly in the crook of his arm. The creature’s pink legs dangle like those of a child. “Chestnut tree,” the old man says, pointing. “And here—a puddle of rain water.” The water seems to swell and contract as the homunculus observes it. The chestnut tree too looks as if it might burst open and give birth to mysteries that have been long dreaming within. When the old alchemist coughs, the creature turns its small head to look at him, gazing out from beneath heavy pink lids. Paracelsus attempts a smile, revealing stained teeth. “Old man,” Paracelsus says, touching his own hollow breast. “Terrible weak old thing.”

  Paracelsus writes that when not being educated, the homunculus is stored in a cupboard or concealed in some other even darker place. He tells us that he has begun to realize the uneducated homunculus is like an unpolished mirror, the surface of which is distorting but somehow all the more revealing because of its imperfection. “How many of us have caught glimpses of ourselves in a poor surface of reflection and been taken aback by our own terrible nature? A badly made mirror may not reveal the precise lines of the face, but it can instead show the very essence of a soul. To look at the homunculus, therefore, is to see oneself aslant. The homunculus provides a truer vision.”

  The alchemist’s journal is rife with descriptions of evenings spent by the fire, listening to the creature move about in its locked cabinet. “The homunculus sounds neither frightened nor displeased,” Paracelsus writes. “It merely paces, as I sometimes pace when I am deep in thought. Perhaps, there in the dark, it considers its lessons. Or more likely still, it concerns itself with subjects beyond my own reckoning.”

  At times, the alchemist seems to grow weary of considering the homunculus’s secret knowledge. He digresses, writing of his mother in Einsiedeln. She died when he was very young. He placed small red flowers on her grave—Dianthus, gathered from her own garden. The memory of those blossoms reminds him of the homunculus’s own delicate face. “When I hold the creature, it is as though one of mother’s red funeral flowers is staring up at me,” he writes. “I can almost see the gentle curve of the petals and smell the sweetness of those long ago days.”

  Paracelsus recalls the priests who taught him the sciences at the stone abbey in Carinthia. He makes a list of their names. Father Brandt was particularly kind, teaching him the specifics of botany and metallurgy. The alchemist wonders what the priest would make of the homunculus locked away in the cabinet. Would he perceive it as a product of science or some ethereal body, unwisely gathered from the upper air? Paracelsus goes on to tell us of his journeys in Africa where he worked in the mines, searching for precious metals that could be used in his experiments. He treasured being alone with the men in the darkness, listening to their stories. He remembers coming up out of the throat of the Earth, hands and face caked in soot. He had to close his eyes against the bright light of the African day.

  Finally, Paracelsus writes: “How should we imagine the light will look on the morning when the homunculus stirs in its cupboard, ready for release, but I myself do not awake? Certainly, that day is coming. I can feel the weight of it in my chest. Will it be the salt-colored light of my own dreams that fills the workroom? Or will it be the dim, gray light of abandonment? How long will the tiny body knock against the cabinet door? Will the homunculus eventually find a voice to call for me? I imagine the pitiful sound spreading into the workroom and then to the city beyond, growing thinner, leaving only a few strangers in the street unsure if they’ve heard anything at all.”

  The Coil

  Arthur awakes in the golden wood. He has dreamed of a silver cup or a stone that fell from the sky. He cannot remember which and wonders if such things can be said to matter any longer. The campfire has gone out. His bedroll is covered in morning dew. He watches mistletoe flutter on the branch of a tall birch and listens to the bright song of a jay. The journey, he realizes, is ending. Two weeks out, and nearly done. The forest seems as if it might close around him like a giant eye. Soon there will only be the remembrance of these travels. Half-invented tales told to other men in a shadowed hall. Arthur stands and makes his way toward the stream near the encampment, careful not to wake Sir Guyon. The knight looks handsome there in his bedroll—tangle of yellow hair, bristle of a young man’s beard. Arthur remembers how the two of them used to play together in the barley fields west of the castle—Fox and Goose and Hoodman’s Blind.

  Arthur kneels before the stream. Shadows glide across the surface of the water. He knows what must happen next if the quest is to continue (and it must continue. Arthur won’t go back . . . not yet). He’s learned his occult imagination from the most convincing of prophets. He relaxes his gaze. Blurs his vision. And there, twisting in the ripples of the water, he sees it: a kind of answer. “What have you found, my lord?” Sir Guyon asks, approaching from behind, eyes still bleary with sleep. He wears only his breeches and a coarse linen shirt. Arthur pauses for a moment and then holds his hand out over the water. Guyon looks down and sees nothing. Of course he doesn’t. There’s nothing to be seen. “Darkness,” Arthur says, gravely. “And a presage.”

  “Of what?” Guyon asks.

  Arthur peers at the water, as if it’s become a scryer’s stone. “Cruelly scaled and long-bodied,” he says. “A devil, of sorts.”

  Sir Guyon takes a step back from the water, and Arthur is pleased. It’s always fear first with the knights, then bravery. He wonders for a moment if Guyon has ever been in love. The knight has pretended at such emotion, of course. All of them do. They write letters to maidens in a thick and unschooled hand. But has he ever felt what Arthur feels now—the cruel sting of it?

  The two of them ready themselves. The serpent, Arthur says, is hidden in a cave on the mountain pass above. Guyon bows his head in prayer, lips moving. He speaks to God as only a young man can. Arthur prays too, but not about a dragon. They gather the bedrolls then and begin their travels, Guyon in the lead. Arthur carefully watches the knight’s strong neck, the movement of his lean shoulders. He wonders if a quest like this could be made to last forever. Time might swallow them. Their names would appear side by side in ages of poetry. Their souls would mix forever in the higher air.

  When they reach the cave—for there actually is a cave on the mountain pass, much to Arthur’s surprise—Guyon draws his broadsword. “Does it sleep, my lord?” Guyon asks.

  Dragons are made of sleep, Arthur thinks. For they themselves are dreams. “Sir Guyon,” he says, and the knight turns to look at him, clear-eyed and fine. There are too many words behind Arthur’s teeth. None of them will come out.

  Guyon raises his brow. “What is it, my lord?” he asks.

  Arthur shakes his head. “Tread carefully, noble friend.”

  And together they move into the darkness of the cave. Guyon lights a torch, but the flame is dim and only serves to make more shadows. They progress down a narrow passage, and Arthur is reminded of the musty tombs beneath the castle. This place too smells of death.

  “I can hear the monster breathing,” Guyon whispers.

  Arthur does not want to believe this. He invented the creature after all. In fact, he’s invented all the fabulous things that populate their quests. None of them are real. There is no vast Gree
n Knight. No ghost-white stag. Such things are extensions of his passion. Emotion manifest. Another reason to drag Sir Guyon into the woods.

  And yet he too can hear something now, a ragged sound that echoes against the cave walls. The smell of death mixes with the scent of smoke. Guyon slips on loose stone, and Arthur watches as his friend tumbles into a large, shallow chamber.

  “Here,” Guyon hisses, righting himself. “Look, my lord.”

  But Arthur doesn’t need to look. He can feel it. Something has gone wrong. Sir Guyon is advancing on a scaled coil at the center of the stone chamber, excited because, after all this time, he has finally found something to slay. “Wait,” Arthur says, but the coil is already unknotting itself there in the dark. Arthur sees a serpent’s head. The creature’s eyes are nothing like love. They are white. They are blank stones. Like years of waiting. Like terrible yearning. And Arthur wonders what he might do to make this right. Is there a way to kill the thing in his heart before it does what it intends to do?

  Sleep and Death

  Nîmes, France 18—

  1.

  Pascal shifted inside the ornate vestibule of the Musée de Vieux. Stone angels with mouths agape stared down at him from a high, encrusted ceiling. A smell of dust and moldering canvases pervaded. He peered through the thick, wavy glass of a leaded windowpane at the museum’s courtyard beyond. Rain trembled the white chrysanthemums in the small garden. Carriages creaked through rutted mud. His aunt, ancient and wary as she was, had warned him against venturing out that morning. “There’s a storm on its way,” she said. “A fearsome one. I saw a large blackbird. I heard a distant chime.” Pascal was not afraid of the rain, and he did not believe in portents. He was nineteen and had his strength about him. Today, however, he wore a new gray suit. His cousin Elise had sent it from Montparnasse. He did not want to sully the suit’s beautiful silk. So instead of walking in the rain, he decided he would linger at the museum for a time. An old woman, a docent, pressed a printed map into his hand. Pascal took the map and nodded. He didn’t intend to look at art. There would be more interesting exhibits at the Musée de Vieux that day.