The Soul Continuum

by Simon West-Bulford

  SIX

  I am back under the oak tree again. It was only the day before yesterday that I last sat here, and I am astounded at how different I feel now. My aspirations and expectations have fluttered away like ash. I have no tangible reason to sense this doom upon me, but I am unable to escape it. Ever since I came into possession of Withering’s infernal stone, I have been ill and haunted, some dark specter always beyond sight yet close enough to breathe on the back of my neck following my every step. If I were an irrational man I might suppose that this malevolence had in fact already revealed itself in the form of the man I saw in the window box at the gentlemen’s club.

  As before, the sullen body of the university and the surrounding vista mirror my mood. This time it is a foreboding image. The building cowers beneath the shadow of storm clouds, and the driving rain has created a hazy curtain in front of it so that I can no longer see it clearly. I am getting wet and the light is fading, yet I find I have no desire to return either to my room at the gentlemen’s club or to the university. I will choose one soon enough. For now I will sit, waiting for the moment when I come back to my senses and shrug off this ridiculous superstition. But it is not just the mystery of the stone that disturbs me. My behavior toward Edith has been less than admirable. I believed myself to be a man of creditable values, but the evidence seems not to support that. I am not even able to taste the bitterness of my mistakes, let alone swallow the pride that allows it to remain unchallenged. I should apologize. Properly.

  In the dim light of dusk it is hard to make out any movement other than the flapping of flags in the wind, especially through the rain, yet I am sure I can see a buffeted figure trudging through the field below me, heading this way, hunched. As the minutes pass and the figure draws closer, I am convinced it is an old man wearing a dark raincoat, shielding himself against the increasingly hostile weather with a tattered black umbrella. He is small in stature, but he seems quite determined to press on, undaunted by the elements. Is he coming to see me? Is it . . . him?

  The penetrating rain finally finds a way through the leaves of the oak, splashing against me with engorged droplets. One hits my neck, sneaks below my collar, and runs down my back, causing me to stand as a chill runs through me. The man stops. He is obviously observing me, but I cannot make him out in the waning light. He is only a few paces from the shelter of the tree now.

  “Brighty? That’s you, I hope.”

  I hadn’t realized I had been holding my breath, but at the sound of Underwood’s voice I feel the tension drain out of my shoulders, replaced quickly by the irritation of misplaced fear. “Yes. What the hell are you doing out here, man?”

  “Came to see you, obviously. What’s your excuse?”

  “Came to be alone.”

  He huffs, coming under the shelter of the tree and shaking his umbrella before closing it. “Well, now you’re not.”

  “Plainly. Whatever it is you came to see me for must be urgent. I can’t imagine why you’d press through this infernal weather otherwise. What is it?”

  “It’s more a case of privacy than urgency. Can we sit?”

  I sit on the bench and nod to the empty space next to me. He sits, not caring that it is now wet with rain. He says nothing.

  “Are you going to get to the point, Underwood?”

  He observes me like a doctor examining a patient. “How are you feeling?”

  “Cold, wet, and if you must know, still in need of some solitude.”

  “But do you still feel unwell, like you did yesterday? Do the symptoms persist?”

  “Look, what’s this about? Why this sudden concern for my welfare?”

  “It’s everyone’s welfare I’m concerned about. I fear we are all in very grave danger.”

  “Oh?” Though reluctant to give in to his melodrama, I turn to face him.

  “It’s the stone Withering gave you for analysis,” he says.

  “The stone.” My response is flat and a little mocking, but I already know this is just my attempt to cover the anxiety I feel at its mention.

  “Yes. The stone. Has he told you anything about it?”

  “Nothing illuminating, no. Why?”

  Underwood reaches inside his coat and produces the notebook he has been absorbed in recently. “This is why. It came from the same person who gave Withering that stone. He asked me to read it with a view to critique.”

  “Yes, we gathered that. What’s so special about it?”

  “It’s Miss Collins’s notes on an archaeological dig she was invited to almost a year ago in the State of Iraq. It’s very detailed. Extremely comprehensive. She discovered something there. Now”—Underwood places a palm over the cover of the notebook—“I realize that you’re not in the most receptive of moods at the moment, Brighty, and Lord knows I shouldn’t have bitten your head off yesterday, but—”

  “For God’s sake, Underwood, just spit it out.”

  Underwood presses his lips together hard and breathes heavily through his nose, staring intently at me all the while. He seems to be plucking up the courage to say something preposterous, and I’m sure he will.

  “Collins says she found the tree of life.”

  Preposterous, indeed. Slowly, I place my palm over my eyes and shake my head.

  “Or it could be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” Underwood goes on. “Yggdrasil, Jubokko, the burning tree, whatever you want to call it. The point is, whatever it was she discovered, it is no ordinary tree. The locals have kept it hidden for centuries, maybe even thousands of years in a sacred temple garden, and Collins found it.”

  I raise a hand to stop him, but he lifts the book as if it’s a weapon, holding it in front of my face. “This is not a joke, Clifford, and if you would stop being an ass for just one moment and remember that it’s not some crackpot talking to you, but a serious scholar with years of academic credits behind him, perhaps you might be able to save us all an awful lot of bother!”

  It takes a lot for me not to respond to his rant in kind, but it is his desperation that stops me more than his words.

  “And,” he says with a little more restraint, “I know you know something. I see it in your eyes, and you wouldn’t be out here in the pouring rain after the sun has set unless something was bothering you. If you don’t believe—”

  “All right, all right,” I concede, “I’m listening.”

  “Good.” He rests the book in his lap and opens it. “But I don’t want you to listen now. I want you to read.” He hands it to me. “There. Right there.”

  I study him for a moment, unnerved by the fear in his eyes.

  The page is jaundiced by excessive sunlight and tattered at the edges. At the center is a sketch of a tree, impossibly gnarled with tortured faces staring out of it, as if an army of men had been absorbed into its trunk and melted into the bark. Underwood is pointing at the text below it, and I tap it out of the way so that I can read it.

  14th August: There are only two of us left now, and I have realized the truth too late. I chose not to listen to the others and now I am as much the fool as I claimed Parsons to be. I am the only one of us not made sick by the stone when I approach it. There is no logic in it. No reasonable science that explains such morbid quality in a mere mineral object. It knows when we are going to die and shares its insight through sensations of nausea. The more violent the sickness, the closer to death that person is. And as for that strange man watching us, I am sure he is involved.

  I stare at the page, incredulous, trying to ignore the last sentence, trying to lock away the rising sense of panic so that I can stay rational.

  “Do you understand now?” Underwood says quietly.

  “I understand what she thought was going on,” I say, “but doesn’t her testimony simply demonstrate that the stone itself was radiating something that caused sickness and then death? Obviously she has kept the sickness at bay for longer, although the state of her mind is quite obviously questionable. But to jump to the conclusion that�
�”

  “No,” Underwood insists calmly. “You need only to read the previous entries to confirm that’s not the case. I’ll save you the trouble, shall I? Causes of death throughout the camp were quite varied. None of the victims died because of the stone. All the deaths were different. One woman had a stroke, a boy lost his mind and fell off a roof, one of the local workers shot his comrade and then himself. A hotel worker died of kidney disease that was diagnosed a month before he even approached the dig site. It’s all in here. And now I think we are seeing the beginnings of that here at the university.”

  I laugh nervously. “What are you saying? That the stone is cursed?”

  “No, no,” Underwood waves that aside. “I don’t believe in that kind of thing, though I think Withering does. My best guess is that we radiate something. Pheromones, enzymes, something that interferes with a field around the stone. It’s not unprecedented. Cats in care homes are sometimes known to gravitate toward patients who are close to death.”

  “Yes, but falling off a roof? I’m sorry, but this is just fantasy.”

  “I don’t have all the answers yet, just a lot of questions, but I have to know if you’ve discovered anything from your analysis this morning.”

  I take in a long breath before answering. “I . . . that is, Edith and I, did discover something, yes.”

  Underwood listens to me intently as I explain to him what we observed in the experiment, but it was my visit with Withering after we finished for the day that he was most interested in. Withering had listened silently when I told him what happened. There was no surprise in his expression, no excitement, no concern, just flat acknowledgement, which I interpreted as a sort of dejected resignation; the tinted glasses and beard hid his face to prevent better assessment. He seemed to consider the experiment for quite some time as he took his favorite position staring through the window, and it was only when he came to take a seat at his desk again that I realized he was not at all well. He wavered before me like a man wrestling to stay awake, and when he took his glasses off to stare directly at me, the pupils of his eyes were so dilated I found it hard to believe he was able to speak with any lucidity at all, but he brushed my concern aside by telling me that he would see a physician later and that he had allowed me to see his condition only to communicate the urgency of determining the composition of the stone. It was at that moment I told him about the mysterious man in the gentlemen’s club. I don’t know why I wanted to do that. Perhaps it was Withering’s leaning toward the supernatural that gave me license, but he made no comment. Instead, he seemed to grow even paler and more defeated, if that was possible, and waved me out of his office.

  I left his office feeling none too well myself. I had been fighting off nausea, but seeing Withering in that condition, and knowing there was additional pressure for results, I felt much worse. It was one of the reasons I sought solitude under the oak tree. And now, as I discuss the experiment with Underwood, facing the possibility that his fantastic claims about the stone’s properties might actually be real, I know that I must resume my analysis of the stone with far greater urgency. Not tomorrow morning but now. This very night.

  SEVEN

  The walk back in steady rain is curiously calming. It is something normal, something human to cling to before the coming insanity. To claim that we could very well lose our minds may seem like an exaggeration of our circumstance, but this ugly premonition has taken root deep inside me, embedded like a cancerous growth, and whether a cure is attainable depends on what we find out tonight.

  It is dark by the time Underwood and I step back inside the university. I am tired, drenched, and agitated by nervous hunger, and the very last thing I want to do is return to my laboratory and continue the analysis, but it must be done. I will at least clean up and eat before returning to the task, however. Underwood is agreeable to the same, and I make sure to call on Edith before we meet him in the laboratory to continue our work. Together, we will not stop until we have a precise understanding of what we are dealing with.

  I glance at the clock as Edith and I step inside my laboratory. It is just after 9:00 p.m. Edith switches the lamp on before we check the equipment and prepare the next plates for further emission tests. Underwood steps in behind us, closing the door. I am not sure what he will add to our endeavors, but he remains stoic as we go about our business with little acknowledgement of his presence. It is only when I pull the stone out of its tin and examine it in the tongs that I become more aware of him. He approaches slowly, like a man fascinated by the fangs of a tiger but fearful that it might leap at him and tear him asunder at any moment. I glance sideways at him as his face draws uncomfortably close to mine. Both of us are a mere inch away from the stone, and it almost feels like we are daring each other’s bravery.

  I wish he would leave. Of paramount importance is the analysis of the stone, but I also still need an opportunity to clear the air with Edith if we are to work efficiently together. Her mood seemed to brighten considerably when I called unannounced at her lodgings, as if it delighted her that I remembered her, and even after I told her it was urgent, she insisted that I wait outside while she better prepared herself for the evening. She came out five minutes later wearing finer attire than usual and mildly scented with something of flowery origin. Why the fairer sex finds it necessary to pursue such trivialities, I am unaware.

  “It’s just a stone,” Edith says matter-of-factly as she busies herself at the desk behind us.

  Underwood meets my gaze with a sideward glance of his own, then draws back from the sample. “Of course,” he says, a little too brashly. “Just a stone.”

  I nod and casually place it in the cradle above the Bunsen. “Absolutely. We are analyzing a mineral. Nothing more.”

  We all know it is far more than that. I briefed Edith on my discussion with Underwood before entering the lab, but our denial is a necessity. If we do not hold to a fiercely rational state of mind and cling to scientific rigor, I fear the simmering panic under the surface of our thoughts might run amok and we may not be able to sustain the necessary focus. It is enough that I am still suffering nausea. It wrenches at the pit of my stomach like badly digested meat, and I notice my two companions fighting a similar battle. Edith has one hand over her stomach as she brings the matches to light the flame, and Underwood keeps swallowing.

  “What’s the plan?” Underwood asks, touching a finger to his lips.

  “Well,” I say as I rub the back of my neck. “For all our determination, I’m not entirely sure. We may have to be patient. I think the objective is to monitor any aberrations we detect and take note of any repeated patterns.”

  “And if there isn’t an aberration?”

  “I don’t know yet. We would have to consider other lines of investigation.”

  “Like what?”

  Edith twists the base of the Bunsen and lights a match. “Please let us get on with the analysis, Justin. If the situation is as dire as you describe, I would like to be able to concentrate.”

  Underwood nods vigorously. “Of course, of course.” He backs off as the Bunsen flame heats the cradle, and he opens his notebook to thumb through its pages, as if something there might help us, but I am certain it is more to settle his nerves and keep his mind occupied.

  “The same yellow flare,” Edith says, then looks at the plate. “Same spectra.”

  “As you’d expect,” I say. “Justin, can you go to the top drawer over there and bring me the . . .”

  Edith dangles a stopwatch by its chain in front of me and offers a smile. “Great minds think ahead.”

  I take it, offering a broad smile of my own. “Thank you.”

  With my thumb ready on the button we stare at the spectra, waiting. A minute passes. Then five more, and twenty more after that, and I begin to wonder if the stone will begin to lose value as a sample. All the while we share idle pleasantries, theories, and fears, and I am about to write the original phenomenon off as an isolated incident when the change happe
ns. I almost miss it. The spectra alters for three seconds before blinking back to its original state, and Edith begins taking notes. Each time the change happens the event is longer in duration, and after almost another hour of the experiment, during which time we furnish Underwood with rudimentary explanations of the science behind refraction, Edith gasps. She rests her pencil next to the notepad, takes the tongs, and carefully removes the stone from the cradle to place it on the asbestos slab. She looks at the pad, shaking her head at the figures.

  “Have you seen something?” I ask.

  She looks pale as she hands me the pad, saying nothing, but there is a tentative smile twitching on her lips. On the paper, she has underlined the bottom row of numbers, which appear to be an extrapolation of the timings noted above them: 3, 3, 6, 9, 15, 24, 39, 3, 102, 165, 267, 432.

  Underwood looks over my shoulder at the numbers. “There’s a pattern?”

  Edith slumps into a nearby chair and stares into space. “I know that number series. Take three as a base unit, and you might recognize it, too.”

  I return my attention to the pad again and study the sequence. It takes me several seconds of thinking that they look very familiar before I am struck hard by their significance. “It’s the Fibonacci sequence.”

  “No,” says Underwood. “It’s close, I’ll grant you that, but sixty-three would come after thirty-nine, not three.”

  “Well, don’t you see?” Edith says. “It’s a message. And they—”

  “And they’ve given us an opportunity to reply,” Underwood says, his eyes widening. “My God! They want to find out if we understand them. Who do you suppose they are?”

  All three of us look at the stone, and a cold shiver runs through me. It is such an astounding discovery that it ought to fill me with dizzy excitement, yet I fear we are glimpsing the shape of a demonic genie through the opaque glass of its bottle, and that in our ignorance, we are teasing the cork free. By the tone of Underwood’s voice, I know he feels the same way. There is a strong impulse within me to snatch the stone away, drive a hundred miles, and fling it far into the sea, yet I cannot resist its pull, and as I look at Edith, I can see that she does not share our trepidation. Her smile has broken out into a broad grin.