“Sometimes I think—” Colm said.
Anthea was going to prod him to a complete sentence with the tiny, imperious gestures of irritation that made her hands look so much like Hazel’s. Instead she crouched, careful and listening, above the three hieroglyphic gauges.
He only said, “You shouldn’t be too hard on yourself, you know. About Jasmine. And about the money. We’re all just doing the best we can.”
She began to laugh: “Don’t worry, Dad. Besides, there’s no way I could afford to work at the Kilgour Institute if I didn’t have extra money. Like, they should give me a tax credit or something. I’m really okay with being a remittance girl.”
He made a face. “Don’t call yourself that, Panther.” She didn’t know what to say, and she just crouched a little longer, looking at the dials. But then Colm spotted some blackberries, and together they stood over the hanging bunches for a quarter hour, eating what they could reach.
ABOUT THE HOUSE ON THE POINT
Jasmine had said that Simon liked to face the water, so she thought his rooms would be on that side of the house. From those windows, he looked down the rocks toward the east and south. He might contemplate grey mist, or the veiled shore opposite; the winking lights of fishing boats or bootleggers.
Though the war was long past, he still thought like a soldier. Even before the house was finished, he cross-hatched the beaches with intersecting lines of fire. He planned cement gun mounts above each point and pillboxes in the woods. In the meadow at the top of the drive where Hazel grew potatoes, they unearthed a roll of barbed wire rusted solid. They found two army-issue entrenching tools and the tin spoon of a mess kit. At the edge of the potato field, a shallow groove zigged once before it disappeared under one of the new roads. You had to be told by someone who knew—someone like her grandfather, or old Sweeney, or Colm—to recognize those distortions as the remains of a forward fire trench.
The precise dimensions of Simon’s earthworks were gone, the regulation two-foot step, the revetment all lost to the collapsing walls. They had been present at some time, Anthea was sure; she thought that Simon would enjoy such precision. She could imagine the breastwork in the curve that remained of the forward face. She imagined men in khaki, dusty handkerchiefs knotted on their heads. They wrestled stones from the ground, listened to the ring-and-chop of their blades cutting clay. They stopped to swig cold tea from a milk pail. Each man ate a slice of grey-white bread and seedy blackberry jam for lunch; each man took an hour at two o’clock to lie in the shade.
Touching the crusted remains of one of His Majesty’s entrenching tools, she thought she saw them: they worked slowly; they didn’t rest. They woke to nightmares triggered by the scent of freshly turned earth and the balance of an entrenching tool held in the right hand, blistering the base of the palm. Colm told stories from when he was a kid, when they uncovered food caches while digging the footings for his father’s workshop. Hard tack. Bully beef. In the years after Simon buried them, the cans swelled, so rusted they resembled clods of earth. The contents separated: salted meat at the bottom, yellow fat at the top. Colm remembered finding one hoard that had gone off, and how he and his sister Ada had spent a stinky afternoon breaking open the cans so the pressurized contents shot out in a rotten geyser.
Simon’s boxes rotted. Iron hinges oxidized and crusted over, their nails rusted deep and brittle in the wood. Three generations hardly seemed to account for the scent of deep time that drifted up from each opened cache, and each time one was unearthed, Colm thought of the grave goods of some distant Chieftain. Each barrow might contain a warrior in a seagoing canoe, arrayed in mother-of-pearl and hammered gold with a cedar death mask marking the place where his skull lay. The Enfields decayed in their oilcloth, and the bayonets—unfixed, now unfixable— turned to rust.
There were caches Colm didn’t know about.
In the course of Anthea’s long weekend, they did not finish sorting the shed, but she convinced Colm to start another burn pile at least, and she added a few things he hadn’t okayed; she hid a half-rotten valise under some rope and reduced a chest of drawers to kindling. The piles still worried Colm because the local CarbonNinjas chapter was cracking down on burning—not only the off-season kind that started forest fires, but the general kind that caused climate change. “They’re sending people around with cameras,” he told her, “to document burn piles.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if we want to cross them. They get pretty mad.”
Uncaring, profligate with carbon, Anthea threw greasy rags onto the heap, and at the end of the day tarped the two new burn piles so they’d still be dry when the season changed. “What are the chances they’ll be able to see this far in? Just tell Mom to avoid them.”
He looked doubtful. Earlier in the summer some disapproving neighbour had reported the old cars that Grandpa Max had left in the woods, and which Colm had not yet removed. “People around here are getting kind of fancy,” was all Colm said about that, but she knew what he meant.
She stopped at the house again on her way home Monday evening, but didn’t tell her parents. With her feet on Simon’s old highway—from his manor house through his village to his spiritual refuge at The Place of the Stones—she walked the route the buck had taken, past the overgrown green of Hazel’s once-garden, past the grader, the rust-hoards, the old cars still in the woods and the new burn piles she and Colm had built, until she reached the belt of trees and fence posts that marked the property line. She slipped through the loose wire to the Taberners’ side. The house was dark as she crept into their perennial border, and then onto the open lawn between the garden and the edge of the bank.
The Place of the Stones should have stood opposite the long perennial bed, under the trees. She was halfway across the grass when she realized that it wasn’t there. “Son of a bitch,” she said.
Where it had been there was a heap of loose boards and ivy trunks as thick as her wrist, and underneath them the yellow granite foundation piles. A sledgehammer and an axe still leaned against the wheelbarrow nearby. She looked through the plywood and two-by-fours, where little green fingers of ivy seemed to dig themselves out, and when she had cleared some light and worm-holed floorboards she saw the crawlspace. She picked up more wood, stacking it neatly near the wheelbarrow and when she had cleared a little bit of the floor, she crouched to look through to the ground below.
Among the fir needles and pebbles she saw a conspicuously flat spot. She felt around its corners, then brushed it clear: a panel of wood like a trapdoor let into the earth. She thought of Simon Reid, and how he had been this way and set the door into the earth, and she wondered if he had left it for her, and willed the prickle of vision to fill her eyes—Simon Reid, nearby, his gray suit a blur in her periphery. Then she worried her strong, pointed fingertips into the corner nearest her and pried it open.
The scene was set for a revelation: a chamber lined with brick; a buried box; the declining sun above the woods illuminating the opposite shore like a painted backdrop. In the last light she set the sheet of plywood back in place and recovered it with old needles, carefully pushing them into the cracks. Then she carried the box over the rubble toward the fence, though it was heavy and had bruised her hipbones by the time she reached the car. It was deep twilight when she left, and as she drove she kept her eyes on the road in front of her headlights, and averted from the dark under the trees. In the two hours it took her to reach the city, the box’s scents filled her car, and as she inhaled spores and grains, she imagined the things she could find inside, from a beating heart to a cache of jewels to the Emerald Tablet to an alchemical formula for the philosopher’s stone.
At home with the door locked, she cleared a space in the papers on the floor of her front room, and set the box down with a halo of clay dust and fir needles already settling around it. She knelt before it, and slipped the claw of her hammer under the metal flap on the box’s lid where it was secured with a rusted padlock. When it didn’t give, she knelt carefull
y on the lid and leaned back until the nails slid out of the wood. She opened it.
The box was full of books. When she split the first spine, fine dust leapt into the air and hung in the candlelight. The pages were tea-coloured like the parchment she and Max used to make for pretend ransom notes. The edge of each book was charcoal and spotty where it had been exposed to the narrow airspace at the top of the box. In the first book, there was the date, a wriggle of ink and entries in a spiky Victorian hand. She flipped to the centre of the book. It was blank. She flipped back. Only the first dozen pages were filled, the rest were empty. The last in a series she thought. The dates were from the late twenties, just four entries written over an entire season. A not very devoted diary keeper; she thought of Mrs. Kilgour’s extensive records and disapproved.
She opened the next book. It had a few more entries, then more blank, these from the early thirties. The next had even fewer. She worked through the entire box, hauling out journal after journal. All of them were scribbled in the opening pages, and then empty. The entries she could decipher were either boring or cryptic.
December 17, 1933
It is impossible to work under these circumstances. I will return to the city.
December 31, 1933
In the event of my death I would like to come back as a stone on the floor of the sea. I will tell Mr. Sweeney this.
January 22, 1934
Annie was a better housekeeper than the one we have now. She ruined my best grey suit.
At the bottom of the box there was a sealed envelope. Anthea put on her gloves and opened it carefully on the kitchen table, her eyes scratchy and her nose running. Only a few of the sheets inside were whole, the others were odds and ends, grubby bits of envelopes and lunch receipts with diner grease on them. These were pencilled with words, a few numbers and the signs of the zodiac. Calculations, admonitions underlined and exclamation-pointed. There were names parsed by number and element and hieroglyph. MICHAEL SWEENEY. ANNIE SWEENEY. ALICE SOMERS.
She sorted the papers into acid-free plastic and carried the box downstairs and outside to shake its dust onto the grass in front of her building. Her hands were dirty and dry. Inside again, the room smelled of mildew. When she turned the lights on, everything around her seemed hot and brightly coloured, and she couldn’t tell if the dead smell rose from Simon Reid’s books or her own skin. She sneezed. Mold. Mycosis. Librarian’s lung. Standing under the shower, she looked up to see that mildew had begun to spread over the white ceiling of her bathroom in interlocking circles: negative halos, little grey fingerprints.
In the end, there were only three useful things in the whole box. The first was all the lovely blank paper in the leather journals and ledgers, which witnessed Simon Reid’s fine taste in office gear. The paper took ink beautifully, and she found herself writing in long, slanting cursive because it was such a pleasure. Another was a clipping from the magazine called The Messenger, a publication of the Canadian Order of the Yellow King, in assc. with the American Theosophical Society, dated 1932. The final object of value was a plan made in black ink on stiff white cardstock about one metre square. It was a detail from some larger plan, a drawing full of gears, a governor, a series of levers and dials.
At first The Messenger and the blank paper preoccupied her. Later she found the plan again in its acid-free plastic and unfolded it, laying it out on the floor beside her portable record player while she listened to Patsy Cline on LP. She never grasped its significance, or what the engine was supposed to do, but she liked it, and many years later framed it and hung it on the wall, and when people asked about it, she liked to tell them the story, as far as she knew it.
FROM THE ARCHIVE OF SIMON REID, PROPHET
The Messenger, A Publication of the Canadian Order of the Yellow King. 14.4: 1932.
I would like to take this opportunity to respond to Mr. Burgess’s last letter in the Autumnal Number of this Publication, as he seems to have misunderstood my attempts to correct his rather anthro-centric approach to magic. I will attempt also to counter his charges of anti-humanism by presenting my points as simply as this complex matter allows.
Of greatest importance in any casting—and this is the point where Mr. Burgess and I reach our disagreement—is the hidden space left in which the G-d may act. Beyond all things—if we value our lives—we must avert our eyes when the G-d deigns to glance our way. We are not their equals; we are their supplicants. They do not respond to commands; they cannot be bound—we appeal to them at our peril and to our glory. For these reasons, each ceremony must be designed around a hidden space, an element of the random or the wild, in which the G-d might choose to dwell and act in secrecy. It may be achieved any number of ways. The participants may be blindfolded, or stripped naked; their consciousnesses may be altered by special preparations. They may, at the last moment, change their incantations and speak spontaneously. The conduit may break the circle when he is drawn to do so. He may change the sacrifice at his whim. All this is a deferral to the inaccessible order of the eternal, which may appear to us disorder, for our tiny ceremonies cannot hope to contain it, and must be smashed by any real manifestation of the G-d.
I thank you for the opportunity to clarify my position in this delicate and critical issue. This publication is, for many, an introduction to our world. We have a responsibility to such chelas as seek our path to reveal both the benefits and the consequences of the magus’s life.
WORDCOUNTS
Nine days into her haunting. Two days to her deadline. 5,671 words written, 4,889 erased. That left a title, her name and the date, and a few dusty sentences about the Temple Theatre. No help from the photographs propped up on the mantel of the boarded-up fireplace in her tiny front room, or the shrivelled rosebud she kept in a saucer on her coffee table. Anthea asked Blake for a copy of the biography to date, or at least what was available in .docx format. “To get a feel for the voice,” she put in the email, though she hoped to avoid that voice. Blake sent her the first draft of the opening chapters of The Kilgours of the West, Volume III: Arrival, 1914-1918. It didn’t help much.
In 1920 Mrs. Leticia Kilgour embarked on a new adventure when she (12)
Mrs. Leticia Kilgour’s artistic ambitions did not limit themselves to patronage. Rather, she was a Renaissance woman of unusual capacity and sensitivity who (23) Mrs. Leticia Kilgour’s ambitions extended to performance as well as patronage, and in [1912ish?] she began searching out and succouring promising young aritsts (23)
With her unusual capacity and sensitivity it was inevitable that Mrs. Leticia Kilgour should become the city’s first patroness (19)
Determined as she was to (5)
Liam Manley granted Mrs. Kilgour the opportunity to expand her (10)
Liam Manley was born [somewhere in Ireland?] in [1897ish] he was a formidable man [and kind of hot—can I put that?] who recognized in Mrs. Kilgour the (27)
Liam Manley was (3)
Mrs. Kilgour was a woman of old-testament repressions, one whose regime extended from her devotions to her husband’s stomach to her maidservants’ fingernails. She was a woman so tightly corseted that her spine collapsed on that fateful day in 1933 when she attempted to remove her stays, a transgression of womanly boundaries she had long avoided, but made necessary by the suppurating blisters that had formed where one rib of her corset had torn loose.
She inspired in her attendants only a deep, slow dread, disrupted occasionally by weeks of adrenalized activity. After the crash of ’29 she often walked the long corridors of Craiglockhart alone, and smelled the faint, haunting stink of despair at some confluence of hallways. One such miasma marked the place her niece-secretary Nora had stood, pre-dawn, and wondered where in the rising November Sunday she would find the daisies Mrs. Kilgour had demanded for Euphemia—her youngest daugh-ter’s— hair. Knowing her task to be Sisyphean, Nora had felt the cold, black terror of Castle Craiglockhart creep into her heart, and in a long sigh left the air forever perfumed by her desolation. In l
ater years it was hard to know whether Mrs. Kilgour reflected the Castle—massive, crenellated, many-corridored—or the Castle was the Kilgour soul rendered in stone.
In light of her incipient madness, how did she maintain her influence over western Canadian society? Mrs. Kilgour’s fascinations are documented in journals and private memoirs of the colonial city she ruled. Such journals might accurately have described her as “undiscerning, wealthy and irresistibly insecure” those qualities most admired by her legion of sycophants. Known throughout the city for her low, black Rolls-Royce—a concession to modernity that, in 1905, replaced the barouche of her adolescent dreams—Mrs. Kilgour was both guardian and avenging angel. At Christmas she bestowed gilded Fortnum & Mason gingerbread on dirty-faced white children. In summer she held garden parties at the Castle for the city’s unfortunate—also white, preferably from the British Isles, though not Irish—serving syllabub, strawberries and oatcakes at long trestle tables beside the vegetable gardens. She sponsored gifted musicians and artists to study abroad. All year round she condemned socialists, actresses, suffragettes, unwed mothers and union organizers at the public lectures she also sponsored. Her husband’s employees—her serfs purchased, some thought, to complement her castle with their coal-blacked faces—did not pity so much as hate, nor hate so much as fear.
Liam Manley arrived in Mrs. Kilgour’s life already deliciously wounded, with the face of a dying subaltern poet. In the autumn of 1920 he stood at her front door, with hidden scars and tremulous hands, his eyes darkened with fever as though with kohl. (438)
TIME PASSES FOR LIAM
Liam’s haunting, the one that dominated the final decade of his life, began very much as Anthea’s did, in the early hours on the day of his return to the city a little more than a decade after he ended his creative partnership with Mrs. Kilgour. It was November. He had taken a cheap room with Mrs. Qualey, a matron who did for theatre people in a boarding house on the eastside. Like Anthea, he was asleep for this first manifestation, and also like Anthea he found, on waking, no way to answer the call that disturbed his rest. When he awoke, the initial urgency melted into the more general dread that had brought him back to the city and, perhaps, to Mrs. Kilgour.
The Paradise Engine Page 15