with someone like you a pal good and true i’d like to leave it all behind and go and find a place that’s known to god alone just a spot to call our own we’d find perfect peace where joys never cease out there beneath the kindly sky we’d build a sweet little nest somewhere in the west and let the rest of the world go by
There was talk of renovation. There were speeches and applause for each benefactor. An elderly board member from the Kilgour Institute accepted a bottle of wine on their behalf, but Anthea had never met her. When they were finished, the crowd was released into the cold, dark theatre, drinking their wine and dry cider while pineapple, chèvre from the islands, rye bread and salmon skin rolls circulated on trays and waited on the white tables in the lobby. Anthea refilled her glass and ate a B.C. roll, but she tasted nothing. She continued to avoid the posters, which were covered in photographs she had not selected, filled with texts she had not written.
On the other side of the lobby, the singers stood before a shifting half-circle of admirers. Anthea approached in a quiet moment, while around her the crowd spoke loudly about vaudeville revivals and regionalism and the local residents’ association. An urban matron in expensive ceramic jewellery tried to do a buck-and-wing. Anthea averted her eyes, and joined the prima donna and her tenor. She made polite noises, first, about the theatre and the evening’s speakers, then said, “So, have you heard of someone named Leticia Kilgour?”
The prima donna looked excited. “Of course! Are you with the Institute? I’ve been listening to her work.”
“My God!” Anthea wasn’t prepared for her sudden possessiveness. “How?”
“It’s part of the project, isn’t it? I was talking to a woman named Brynn at the Institute. She talked about our ‘artistic foremothers’ and there was this CD. I had no idea the province supported that sort of talent in the Twenties.”
“Okay.” Anthea then had to ask again, “Like, really?”
“Her phrasing is incredibly sophisticated. She’s always been a bit of a joke—you know, one of those eccentrics people tell stories about. After listening to those arias, though, I’m kind of smitten.”
There was one of those pauses that meant the conversation was going to change directions, or people would leave or arrive, and Anthea’s opportunity would be lost. Before that could happen, she pressed on and asked, “Did you ever hear of a tenor named Liam Manley?”
The prima donna shook her head.
For another moment Anthea stood before them, then felt the change again and knew it was time to withdraw. She thanked them for singing, and then returned to the lobby and the poster display. She looked at the pictures of Mrs. Kilgour and Liam, the silk-tasselled program from their gala performance in this very theatre, the pink roses that wreathed the photographs from that night. There was a poster from Duncan’s Crossing, and sheet music annotated in Mrs. Kilgour’s hand. No mention of Clive, strikebreakers, grave-robbing, or Phosgene gas. That was probably a good choice.
On the last panel of the display, Brynn had written about their plans for the Kilgour Archive, not only the Biography—The Kilgours of the West: Volume III was due next year!—but a short monograph on the province’s early music culture to accompany Mrs. Kilgour’s discography. It would be a digital release, with liner notes by some musical historian from campus, pending funds. Brynn’s slick little addendum smelled like a grant application. Well, it was a good idea, Anthea thought, and she deserved the good luck if she got it. She worked hard. She applied for things.
Anthea returned to the auditorium and found other cracks in the ugly grey wall, through which she saw more of the original plasters, and where they had been hidden by dirt, they were still bright. She was looking through a crack at a plaster figured with papyrus and a bird-headed man when she realized that someone was standing beside her.
“Anthea. So good to see you here. Really good. I was worried you wouldn’t. Blake thought you were going to stay away.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m impressed that you’re dealing with this so well. I was worried.” Having got through her manners, Brynn went on to say what she really wanted. “Did you ever come across anything to do with a man named Simon Reid? When you were working in Rm 023?”
Anthea looked at the bird-headed man on the wall. “No,” she lied.
“It’s just there’s a lot of stuff in there related to him, and I thought you might have an idea considering how much time you spend in there. It’s interesting, whatever it is.” Then Brynn gave her lots of advice, and they walked in opposite directions.
Anthea was the last guest to leave, after the staff and volunteers had begun collecting garbage and stripping the white-linened tables. As she left, she looked up once more toward the walls that rose above them, before she passed into the darkness outside.
THE END
On the last day of Anthea’s haunting, she was standing on the Express as it stopped just outside a busy intersection. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and it was raining. The bus was too crowded to sit or think, and ten minutes into her ride, all the noise around her collapsed into a shallow field from which she could distinguish no meaningful sounds. She was content to surrender to the noise of her commute when she heard, suddenly, a string of notes. First she ignored it, then she listened, and just as she had decided the phrase was some accidental convergence of talk and engines, she heard it again.
The melody was sweet and familiar, something operatic she might have found within Mrs. Kilgour’s collection, though she could not name it. As she listened, the singer seemed to draw closer to her, and then she realized it wasn’t a recording, but a real man singing an aria somewhere in the crowd on the sidewalk. She knew he was walking because she could hear his changing breath, and the song changed, too, bounced off the plate glass coffee shop by the bus stop, and the plaster rosettes that decorated the building, through the bodies of the people passing by and the glass doors where she stood.
She wanted to name the song. She wanted to find the man and tell him that she liked to hear him sing. In the end she could do neither, and when the bus pulled away from the singing man, she listened hard for his voice until it was gone.
AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE
Simon Reid, the prophet, resolved to end the material world ten days after the birth of his child who, being a girl and not the prince foreseen, had disappointed him so bitterly. This was midway through the September before an unusually early autumn, when the late golds of August had already begun to darken, and in the mornings fine rain spattered the gardens and the branches of Douglas firs that shadowed the village. Simon Reid spoke to Michael Sweeney, who was his aid in all things related to the material function of the Foundation, and told him to ready the engine for their final progress to the Uttermost West. The necessary fires must be lit that night, and no later, before the season turned, and the true, autumnal descent began. We belong to the light, he had told Michael many times, and winter darkness—even close as they were to the West— held subtle threats to their safety and organization.
They had been assembling the Engine since the vernal equinox, when Simon had revealed the true nature of his plans to the Foundation’s council, and described the endgame he had foreseen at the founding in 1918: the Engine, the transformation of the material world, the coming of the West.
Though he had not known their purposes, Michael Sweeney had begun collecting the Engine’s fittings years before, since many required long, alchemical processes. Others were simpler: he buried hollow cow horns full of ground quartz under the apple trees, and hung silver talismans in the waters off the point for 243 days. For years, they collected lumber for the Engine’s frame, and firewood for its boiler: oak, crab apple, fir, cedar, maple, arbutus in the right quantities and from the right quadrants. Boxes had been arriving at the Foundation for more than a year: springs in tight silver whorl, finely milled gears with long teeth, each stamped with a figure in Greek or a hieroglyph. Slender bars of brass, wheels of cop
per wire as fine as baby hair. Other spools almost pink, soft and thick, easily dented with needle-nose pliers. Counter weights, pendulums in copper, governors with long insectoid legs. The Damascene steel, the Levantine hardwoods. Wooden crates of glass gauges, the small, heavy boxes from England and Germany that Michael Sweeney unpacked himself, and kept hidden. There was a disk under a glass dome, its needle fine and black measuring some quantity numbered in Greek, the central circle surrounded with figures of the zodiac and a ring of periodic elements. A brass toggle marked Alpha and Omega. A collapsible instrument of levers and arrows and weights, that seemed to measure the ascension of stars and planets, but fixed facing down, an astrolabe marking subtle oppositions in the earth below. There was a spyglass with lenses of impenetrable purple obsidian. There were calipers and slide rules marked not with Arabic numbers, but with Mayan glyphs. There were bars and insulators and resistors in gold, lead, steel, copper, bronze, and porcelain. There were glass vials and tubes and wide beakers of polished crystal. There were disks of quartz rimmed in gold. There were diamonds.
At five o’clock in the afternoon, Simon lit the fires, and the engine began its work. It was the first time Michael or anyone else had seen all these pieces in one together, and he was disappointed, thinking not of the coming transformation, but his own early history, before Simon. He thought, It’s like the shop floor, with a furnace and all that heat— in August, on those days that had the tar oozing on the pavement; if you were on the floor on a day like that, you’d feel the whole world was burning. So Michael wondered if the new world—the return of the Hyperboreans in the western Beringia—was really so far from the old one he had known when he was just a kid, working nights in the foundry.
It was just one of those engines, he thought dully in the terrible heat, as he felt his eyebrows and eyelashes burn away. It wasn’t a new sort of an engine at all, but just the old tired kind, come back in a different, more expensive form. It was true he could not trace the movement of force through all its gears and arms and governors, but by then he didn’t need to, because he was too busy trying to get away.
Michael returned to the estate in June, just before the lawyers and RCMP and assessors could go through and determine what must be sold to make up the losses to the noisiest—and wealthiest—investors. Michael was not among them, of course: his two hundred and fifty-seven dollars were long gone. The time he had given Simon was unrecoverable.
He did own part of the land, however. His name was on the deed for the heart of Simon’s little kingdom: the fifty-acre parcel that held the manor house, his own cottage, the gardens and the orchard. That was the land from which the Foundation’s thousand acres grew, a confluence of angles and leys that Simon had recognized when they first set foot on the place.
He hitched to the familiar corner, and then walked the remaining two miles off the main road until he reached the stone plinths on either side of the gate. Someone had retracted the metal bridge that crossed the trenches. He slithered down eight feet to the bottom of the forward trench, and followed the duckboard around a zigzag to the exit.
As he did, he found himself making lists: the bridge was rusted, the windows broken in the gatehouse, the trenches had not been mended after the winter rain and had already begun to fall in. You still knew them for trenches, though, and he guessed people would come on them in the woods for a good long time, and animals would shelter in them, or boys from Duncan’s Crossing would use them as blinds when they shot cougars in late summer, for the bounty. He walked down the drive, which was gutted with runoff. It would need grading before the next winter, if anyone was ever going to use it. He walked past the weedgrown orchard and the empty barns, glancing over the vegetable garden and then quickly away from the tangle of dandelions, beets that had been left in the ground the September before, scarlet runners in the strawberry beds. He looked for strawberries under the leaves, but there were only husks, the fruit taken by crows and raccoons and wasps. He wondered about the quart jars of jam they had put up in the kitchens, and the green beans and the pickled beets he had liked with his stews in the winter.
The chicken house came after the strawberries. He did not want to think what had happened to them, with Simon alone there. He looked once at the three little doors with their ramps, and saw that someone had nailed boards over them. The human-sized side-door was barred and nailed as well. He did not want to think. He had liked the chickens.
The day was beautiful. When he came to the bend above the village, he saw the water and felt surprise, somehow that it was still so bright and fine, with a fishing boat chugging by just off the point. It was different from the surprise he had felt on that first day, seeing the land fall away at his feet. This was the shock of homecoming, that he still found the familiar skyline on the opposite shore, that the enclosing points around the beach should still stretch out like arms, and not even the boulders changed. It ought to have changed, he thought, somehow. Hadn’t change always been Simon’s promise?
The village, as quiet as the hen house, the orchard and garden, had begun to show its abandonment. Already, just a season unchecked, the mint in the back gardens had withered; the stinging nettles spilled out from under the trees, and the blackberries crept out of their beds and over the verges. Miner’s lettuce grew in close along the paths, and sorrel with tiny red blooms spread outward from the green strip in the middle of the drive. It would not be long, just a few years, and the whole thing would be swallowed up, only a few walls here and there, and unusual plants surviving under the trees, scented violets and daffodils springing weakly from the clearings.
More slowly now, Michael walked to the wall that separated the village from the garden. He followed it along to the little gate that came out in the field Simon had chosen for the hedge maze that was staked, but unplanted, with a few dead boxwoods still in burlap at the edge. Michael left it, avoiding the inevitable accounting he made whenever he looked at the village: those saplings had been very expensive. He walked through the garden, between the empty carp ponds to the house itself—herons, he guessed, had liked the carp, which had also been expensive—looping around to the side where the bonfire had been.
It was bad. The fire had not done much damage to the main house, but he thought there had been some later fire to account for the destruction in the garden and the east wing. New grass and nettles had come up to cover the blackened ornamental trees, and some of the hardier perennials had survived—periwinkle and English ivy and St. John’s wort and Scotch broom. The plaster walls that faced the courtyard were smoke-stained, and the library wing windows were gone, the walls charred inside and out.
Michael walked around to the side door that had always been his particular entrance and pushed it open. It was whole but scarred with shallow gashes, the kind made by an awkwardly swung entrenching tool or a hatchet in a weak arm. He walked down the hallway to the library and saw all the windows broken that faced the water, and the wind and rain had blown in all winter, so the carpet smelled strongly of rot, and the books were stained and swollen where they hadn’t been yanked from their shelves and scattered, now on their way to birds’ nests or bedding for mice. Birds had sheltered here from the weather, and shit white and purple all down the fireplace, chair backs, shelves. He watched a pair of swallows sweep into a nest at the top of the bookshelf nearest the broken window.
Only the books on the glassed shelves were safe, though some of the doors were broken. It had taken Michael fifteen years to collect them, contacting obscure booksellers, creating false identities with which to purchase the more dangerous volumes, travelling to foreign cities to collect them. All the books Simon had demanded were still there: The Necronomicon, A First Encyclopedia of Tlön, The Book of Eibon.
Michael left the library again and walked around to the front entrance with the big double doors. They stood scarred and ajar. In the sunlight outside the portico, he heard the buzz of the garden. For a moment he turned his face to the warmth and smelled the thyme, blooming and
bee-covered. Then a blue glitter in the air over the grass caught his eye; it joined another iridescent speck and another, and then there were half a dozen—no, more, he couldn’t count how many, all near the broken windows that lit the entrance hall. They made half-circles and loops, retreats and advances and disappeared into the house by ones and twos. He opened the double doors.
The scent struck him in the gut. Iridescent bottle flies circled the hall. His eyes adjusted quickly, fixing on the light from the broken windows where they had fallen on the floor that had been black and white tile, now covered in dust and soot. He could see through the arch to the main drawing room, the receiving room, they had called it, and saw the marks of recent habitation. There was a pile of cushions and rugs wadded up in one corner away from the broken windows, in the shelter of a chesterfield. There were bits of paper on the floor, the corners full of screwed up pages from books that had been used, he guessed at a glance, for napkins, for writing paper, for other things. Newspapers were scattered over the carpets, with greasy bones and apple cores.
The heat and the buzzing made him drowsy, but he followed the scent. When he stepped into the hall, through the arch to the receiving room, it grew stronger, and the buzz grew insistent. The panelling was scarred with what looked like axe marks and knife marks and dark stains. It had been a beautiful room. Michael had often felt a little pulse of pride when he thought that it was his, partly. He could not see past the archway to the shrouded dining room because of the dark, and the brightness where he stood. The flies passed him, into the gloom of the velvet drapes. There was the dining table, still covered in a long white cloth and scattered with dishes, as though they had been taken up and set down again and abandoned months before.
The Paradise Engine Page 30