The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  “What kind of a prophet?”

  “Like, an end-of-the-world prophet?”

  “But which world? And which end?”

  Jasmine shrugged, but Anthea thought hard and said, “Like. How many are there?”

  “Oh, the world ends in lots of different ways. I bet he was a spiritualist.”

  “Okay?”

  “There was a lot of that around. There was also this one Theosophist woman from Russia who liked the Rockies. She said there was a secret lamasery there, and Those Who Are were all in hiding and guarding the secret knowledge of the ancients. It sort of trickles down to the coast. But that’s Blavatsky. You’re saying he came to Duncan’s Crossing?”

  “Yeah, right, so he built this community and told a bunch of people the world was going to end, then he got them to come and build houses? And he took their money and no one knows what happened to him?”

  “That’s not unusual,” was all Jasmine said for a moment. Anthea assumed that she had lost any occult credibility the story might have gained her, had she told it correctly. Even at the time, however, she was beginning to suspect that she did not wish to be occult; it involved too many arbitrary rules, like not lending your nice Tarot cards to people, so they had to use the ones with all the tea stains and cigarette burns, that smelled kind of skunky like they’d spent a long time in someone’s stash.

  After her long, dramatic pause, Jas started again. “I think we should look for him. Where’s the house?”

  “The little house is next door to Grandma’s. But the big house—the manor I think she called it?—was on the point.”

  “He had a manor. Classy. We should definitely go there and try to look him up.”

  “But it was a while ago—like, the twenties—”

  “We should go to the house site. We should call him up.” She said this with a ten-year-old’s Ya scared? look.

  Anthea chewed her bottom lip and imagined going to Hazel’s house and saying she wanted to raise the dead. Hazel’s atheistic derision at self-deluding spirituality would elegantly balance Jasmine’s contempt for Anthea’s—wilful, she implied—clumsiness with all things esoteric.

  “No. But. Like, my Grandma?”

  “Oh don’t worry,” Jasmine shook her head, “we wouldn’t tell. You shouldn’t let the uninitiated know too much. Tell her we’re visiting.”

  “Okay. But.”

  “We’re visiting ’cause you miss her. They like that sort of thing. Say I’m interested in local history. Which is totally not a lie.”

  Anthea imagined the phone conversation, realizing that Hazel would like it. It would be awful, but Jasmine was still staring at her. “Okay?” was all she said.

  Just before they left in the late afternoon, Jasmine sat on the floor of Anthea’s dorm room showing her all the things she’d packed. “The idea is,” she said as she brought out myrrh in a small alabaster box, “the idea is that all things have associations. Correspondences. And if you assemble all the things—like actual objects, I mean, but also colours and smells and flavours—that correspond to a force or idea you can attract that force. And each force or idea is attached to a deity who acts as a kind of handle, so you call on that deity and if you do it right and raise the right powers you can direct the force too. So gods’ names—or saints, even—are just the handles that allow us to invoke natural forces.”

  “But. Like. This guy isn’t an idea. He’s a guy.”

  “Yes, but he’s dead and he has associations—the occult and leadership and priesthood and that sort of thing. So I’ve decided that we invoke Hermes Trismegistus, called Hermes-Thoth, thrice great. He’s associated with occult secrets, magic, mysteries. And our guy is dead, so we put down myrrh. We light white candles, we go to a place that mattered to him. It’s like if you bring together enough pieces of him and invoke the forces that he was bound to in his life, he can’t help it, he’s got to show up. You’re just opening the right door.” Jasmine paused, and then said in the low, important voice, “Remember, doors want to open. They’re not walls.”

  By now Anthea’s bed was covered with bits of magic. She picked up a book about correspondences and flipped through it. So many elements: plants, stones, times of day and year, days of the week, numbers, letters, metals, colours, scents, flavours. She wondered what a complete list would look like, like a dictionary of objects, or a concordance for the entire world. As she wondered, Jasmine wound white ribbon around the tapers and put them back in her knapsack with a large piece of silk to hide the more peculiar objects: the bundle of twigs, the vial that held something red and viscous.

  In the car she asked, “Are those all the correspondences? I mean, every single one you need?”

  “Oh no. There are lots more. I guess there are as many as there are things in the world. Everything corresponds.”

  “So does that mean that everything you do, like every time you get dressed or make supper or pack a bag you’re casting a spell?”

  Jasmine stared out the windshield. “I guess by your kind of thinking,” she said vaguely. “But that doesn’t sound right. Spells are big. They don’t just happen by themselves.”

  But it meant, Anthea thought to herself, there was—what would it be? A web, she thought, of some subtle element that linked everything to everything else. And to deploy the web one would need a language Anthea did not know, organized in a dictionary as large and varied as the universe that contained it, and containing among its entries the universe itself. It meant that any moment of contact was not only about the intersection of skin and dashboard, but all the forces associated with Anthea colliding with all the associations of a 1986 Colt, its olive-green vinyl dashboard mended with grubby duct tape. So each action was a spell, invoking unknown powers and redirecting them, all the ripples from those moments travelling outward, and their interference patterns were called fate. It meant that the impressions of a moment—say, the shade of red generated by the flicker of sunlight over eyelids, the smell of cold coffee at the bottom of her cup, the fact of its being a Saturday, the fact of its being the full moon, the flutter the wind made when it blew up the sleeve of her dark red Indian-cotton blouse where it rested in the open car window, the taste of the lemon drop melting on her tongue—these impressions were actions in themselves, invoking acetic acid and ethical coffee beans and sunlight and cotton and Saturdays and road trips. Invoking the gods and goddesses associated with these things and sending Anthea wheeling down a path toward further actions and associations she could not control, but had brought into the world by observing the taste of lemons and the sunlight on her lids.

  It was two hours of highway to get to Duncan’s Crossing. She knew she was in the valley when she smelled, through the window, the first crop of hay lying in the fields.

  Just north of town there was a place called the Glass Castle Resort, an RV park where the main office was built of old beer and pop bottles, a homemade attraction some local entrepreneur built in the early sixties. It was a permanent source of irritation to Hazel, though she had stopped writing letters to the editors of local papers and was resigned to saying “Tacky, tacky!” every time she passed it. They turned right at the Castle, down the narrow lanes away from the cars and the suburban developments. The houses there were older and larger, properties that had served as country places before the wars, with tennis courts and gates at the head of the drive. Pioneers and early gentry had been driven out by new money, people who demolished the post-war A-frames and earlier, faux-Tudor manors and brought in steel and plate glass and swimming pools.

  Hazel did not have a stone gate, nor a tennis court. Anthea’s grandfather had been a mechanic and in his retirement he had filled the property with machinery, much of it overgrown now: the bush reclaimed anything left unattended for more than a season. The most remarkable of all the things he had left behind was the grader that stood in a thicket of alders where Grandpa Max had parked it the day he finished grading the driveway, and though Hazel had called it an eyesore, he had ref
used to move it. Caterpillar yellow still showed through the lichen and the moss, and the trunks of the alders had grown up through the blades and locked it in place: it would never move again. Anthea thought it was beautiful.

  When she pointed it out, Jas shook her head. “It’s so masculine,” she said. “You can’t leave the woods alone. You’ve got to put a grader in there and mark your territory.”

  Down at the house Hazel came out to meet them. She hugged Anthea, quick and hot, then kissed her, then held Jasmine’s hand and smiled up at her. “You must be Jasmine!” she said, and pulled them into the house and out onto the deck above the beach. She watched for Jasmine’s reaction, and Jas complied: exclaiming over the water that stretched south toward the islands, and beyond them, out of sight, to America. Hazel made tea. They chatted until Anthea felt brave enough to bring it up.

  “Oh! Of course, darling,” Hazel was saying. “Of course I remember that story. Mr. Sweeney was one of them. I tried to talk to him about it when I was doing research, you know, for My Book—darling, would you like cream or milk?—I tried to talk to him about it. He was always such a nice man, but that time he got so angry he told me to go to hell before I’d finished my tea.”

  Jasmine looked at Anthea. It was obviously important to hear about Mr. Sweeney, but Anthea wasn’t sure how to ask questions without arousing Hazel’s hot and uncomfortable interest.

  It was Jas who asked, outright, “Why didn’t he want to talk about it?”

  “It’s quite mysterious, I know from my Research. The things that went on there—” Hazel set down her cup and turned to Anthea. “You remember Mr. Sweeney, darling, he lived on the other side of the Taberners and kept his boat on the old dock. He wanted to take you out once but you were too scared to go with him.”

  Jasmine looked at Anthea and laughed. “You were scared!” she said. Hazel laughed too.

  Anthea wanted to say, You weren’t the one in the boat. She remembered Mr. Sweeney: walking up and down his garden with a wheelbarrow; hauling seaweed up from the beach when it was thick. He didn’t pay much attention to property lines and used the Brookes’s beach path, but no one ever told him off. He smelled strongly of unwashed skin, or maybe it was from under his skin, an antique inside-of-the-body smell Panther couldn’t properly name. He always wore a shirt and tie, and brown polyester slacks, and a flat cap that was spotty with black grease around the brim and darkened by hair oil inside; she saw when he took it off to come in the house. He used to smoke with Grandpa Max and they sometimes built things together. Sheds. Fences. If Anthea hung around she’d listen to them hammer nails and roll cigarettes and drink coffee from a tartan thermos. They didn’t say much.

  No, but there was one time, when he wanted to take her out fishing and she was too scared and said no no right after they’d put the horrible orange canvas life preserver on her, tied too tight under her ribs and smelling like garages. She had said she was too scared of the waves, and he had laughed and called her cowardy custard and tried to put her in the boat and said the waves wouldn’t bite. She had clung to Grandma, and he’d gone out alone, and brought a fish in to show them. She remembered it flopping on the bottom of the boat. Flop. Flop. Stillness. Flopflop. He’d picked up a two-by-four and clubbed it over the head with a heavy, offhand flick and it had stopped flopping. Then he’d asked if she wanted to help him clean it. She had reached out a hand and touched the cold body that glinted like wet pebbles did when the waves unrolled from them. It was dense under her finger, and she thought it was too heavy and solid to swim like it must have done ten minutes before. She withdrew the hand and looked at her shoes not knowing what was expected of her, and Mr. Sweeney had cut in under the gills and severed the head, then there was the thick smell of blood and salt. Hazel had taken her back to the house and made cocoa in the blender, that was extra foamy.

  “Mr. Sweeney? He was such a regular old guy.”

  “It was a long time ago, dear. Anyway—I’m so glad you girls are taking an interest in Local History, it’s such an Important Subject. We have to know where we’re coming from to know where we’re going. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it!”

  There was a moment of quiet Anthea spotted for one of Hazel’s fraught pauses, which meant she was about to ask Meaningful Questions. Hoping that they were for Jasmine, not her, Anthea sat as still as a rabbit in the undergrowth, hardly relaxing even when Hazel turned to Jasmine, smiling, squinting slightly as though in fascination.

  “Now, dear, tell me. Are you the historian?”

  After Jasmine had spoken, at length, about her interest in Local History, she and Anthea went down to the house site alone. By then Anthea almost believed that they really were doing a case-study for Jasmine’s paper about coastal architecture. Hazel had been flattered by all the questions about the bungalow and how she and Max had milled the lumber from drift logs on the beach, and how she had built its stone walls herself, and showed Jasmine where there were still barnacles clinging to the rock.

  Jas forgot it all. “Why did she call you Panther?”

  “When I was little? It was my nickname.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause Anthea rhymes with it, if you say it with an English accent. I guess. That’s what they said.”

  “Does anyone in your family have an English accent?”

  “Well, no, but I guess they did. At some point. Maybe a long time ago?”

  They were in the old garden by then, where the ornamental cherry trees had grown up in watershoot thickets. There were carp ponds full of dead leaves; there were rambler roses and English ivy. Anthea led Jasmine through the woods to the rocky clearing that had been the manor, right on the point, where the earth gave way to granite that rimmed the whole inlet, showed at the tideline on the opposite shore and on the mountains above them.

  “It must’ve been huge.”

  “He had a lot of money, I guess,” Anthea said. “Where do we go? The Place of the Stones is on the other side. But that’s the Taberners’.”

  Jasmine closed her eyes and Anthea tried not to watch her, though she admired the sharp cut of her cheekbones, the yellow hair blowing across her throat, her long arms and legs in repose. Jasmine never failed to costume herself thoughtfully for whichever role she had chosen. Under her lids her eyes darted back and forth as though she were dreaming. “Only we have to wait for a declining sun,” was all she said for a minute. “He liked sunset. There.” And she pointed at the corner that faced the water. “He wanted to look to the east.”

  Anthea looked past the pointed finger to the airport, still in sunlight on the other side of the inlet, and did not tell Jas that it was more northeast than east. She took off the backpack and sat on a corner of the foundation. “We have to wait for sunset?”

  “It’ll be in the right quadrant in a bit,” Jasmine said. “And we have to prepare.”

  They sat together on the manor’s foundation and arranged their things. First the four white candles on the outside, marking the directions, then the central ring of nine white tapers between the two of them, then the largest candle in the middle. Anthea had gotten them all at the dollar store the day before. The wicks were all clean and white and Anthea picked ivy to put around them, to complete the circle, and added Rose of Sharon and periwinkle, then hemlock because it smelled nice. She liked that part. Jasmine sat with her eyes closed and the central candle held between her palms, until they were in shadow, and the sun only tipped the other side of the inlet, and the islands beyond.

  “Now,” she said, and put the last white candle in the centre of the circle.

  Anthea sat down opposite Jasmine. They had decided that she would call North and East, while Jasmine called West and South. Once they’d lit all the candles, except for the centre, Jasmine began to hum. Anthea almost recognized the melody, something bittersweet and familiar like “Auld Lang Syne” or “Cheek to Cheek.” As Jasmine’s eyes fluttered in her sockets, she reached out and lit the middle candle.


  “We call the Prophet, Simon Reid. We call you back to the place you knew and bid you speak with us. By your Master Hermes Trismegistus, thrice great, we call you! By the Simonian Heresiarchs! By the Emerald Tablet! By the King in Yellow! And by his Yellow Sign!” Jas’s eyes still rolled under her lids. Anthea tried rolling her eyes in the same way, but it hurt her temples so she stopped.

  But then she began to shiver.

  It wasn’t that she was cold, but something made her skin shudder like a sleeping cat’s. Looking east Anthea saw the wrinkle of wavelets, the sea gone dark grey as the last fringe of sunset dropped away, the sky above not opaque but a luminous black with its new stars, and in the moonlight the islands, the trees around them, the jumbled foundations of the old house were sentient and articulate, though she did not know what they said. Now her skin gathered into goosebumps down her back, and the muscles in her chest constricted around her heart, and it stumbled, then caught, then stumbled as Jas finished her call.

  “Simon, are you present? Do you hear us? We have called you to this place, we hold your key and command your answer!” She intoned like a priestess, then looked at Anthea, as though she expected something.

  Anthea’s lips were cracked from mouth breathing. “Simon!” she said. When she didn’t continue, Jasmine made little “spit it out!” gestures with her upheld hands. Anthea raised her arms, too. “By these objects we call you!” She reached behind her and grabbed a bit of brick from one of the chimneys and flung it into the centre of the circle. “We bid you come to us!” Jasmine added a flower she had taken from one of the rambler roses that still grew under the trees. Then they both lowered their arms.

  The wind freshened.

  Jasmine’s eyes focused on some point in the woods, above Anthea’s head.

  The candles fluttered. South went out, then North. Jasmine said “Shit!” and went to relight them, but she stopped herself. Instead she murmured, “As above so below.”

  The leaves around them unsettled as though by fingers, and the same hands ruffled the waters below them and snuffed their candles. Up far above them the arbutus trunks groaned that familiar, atonal moan in the new breeze.