A.: I understand, but the thing is, I think he resigned because he didn’t know I was coming. I think he’d love to come back.
WOMAN: [After a short pause and a diplomatic puff.] Mr. Wells, I seem to recall this … Strückner you’re looking for, and I don’t think he would.
A.: He told you so?
WOMAN: Again, I’m not the one who interviewed him, but he seemed to be … [Looks for a word; desists.] Servants often witness uncomfortable situations in their houses. He was quite in a hurry to find a new position, and with his résumé, it wasn’t very difficult. I remember having recommended his name to some good customers in D.C. not three weeks ago.
A.: “D.C.”? Oh, Washington! Hey, that’s not far, is it? Could we—
WOMAN: Sir, our customers’ data are strictly confidential, as you will surely understand.
A.: But you must have a way to contact Strückner—
WOMAN: Same goes for the staff, sir. I’m sorry; I must ask you not to inquire any further. Now, if you wish a perfectly trustworthy—
A.: You do follow-up, don’t you?
WOMAN: Beg your pardon?
A.: Well, an agency of your reputation surely does some follow-up calls. To make sure servants and employers get along.
WOMAN: Well, yes, we—
A.: So, next time you call him, can you give him a message? Just a message.
[Scribbling in the background.]
WOMAN: This is most irregular, sir.
[A paper is torn off the notepad.]
A.: Just that. Please. When you call him, tell him exactly that. I won’t call again. And please tell me how much I owe you for your excellent service.
LETTER
* * *
Axton House
1 Axton Rd.
Point Bless, VA 26969
Dear Aunt Liza,
Life at our family’s ancestral manor is still tolerable despite the place’s multiple flaws, such as the house being severely understaffed—a circumstance largely contributing to my failure to completely spoil our young protégée. The lack of personnel is noticeable by the growing marks of our presence in all rooms—not only the ones where we dwell (i.e., this bedroom and the kitchen), but also in those where we just camp during the hike from ground floor to attic. No matter how long a virgin room remains impregnable, hidden at the end of a windowed gallery or in a particularly dark corner under the main stairs, after we discover it and claim it for our rightful patrimony, it will never look untrodden again. There will always be at least a piece of Niamh’s colorful clothing or some hair accessory of hers to signify our passing, if not a much less subtle hint from Help. Niamh is addressing the latter problem, though, so we expect not to need a servant to look after that. But anyway, a butler would be so cool.
[…] I’m sad to admit the return trip was significantly less fun than the runaway, mainly owing to the uncertain results of our investigations. Objectively, none of us walking up the porch stairs looked as happy as in the morning when we left. Okay, maybe Help was; he does feel the house as home. The whole of it. That’s some mind-stretch, considering his previous home was a kennel.
But then again, it’s not the house. I think it’s the homework: the burying ourselves again in books and desks. Also on that issue, Strückner would be of great help. But I fear we just shot our last flare.
Tomorrow Niamh and I are working the library together; we’ll concentrate on finding that book of Ambrose’s childhood—the one Strückner “used to read by a tree.” I hope that being side by side will keep our spirits up.
I wish I could have her by my side in my dreams too. I recently started a dream journal, if only to prove to myself that the dreams are recurring, that it’s not just déjà vu, but I haven’t shared it with her. At least she’s there, delicately sleeping when I wake. That’s nice.
Okay, so maybe I do miss you. Happy now?
Kisses,
A.
NOVEMBER 10
DREAM JOURNAL
* * *
I am sleeping on a bench, in the park, in the snow. I hear boots on the walkway. Cops prod me with their truncheons and speak in some language I’ve forgotten. I’m too tired to answer.
The über-sexy woman in lingerie, in the car, in the traffic jam, in the snow, in daylight, in Scandinavia, is wearing magenta blush. I’m not moving the Rubik’s cube; I’ve made up my mind that I won’t move it until I know exactly how to solve it.
The Renaissance men dressed like Jacobean doctors and the skeleton are playing poker.
A book slips from the reader’s brown hand, and watery music.
I hear them laughing at my stolen eyeball in the surgeon’s pincers, optic nerve dangling, interrupted messages of useless pain sparking out the severed end. They laugh at it. So I sit up and grab the surgeon’s skull who just pulled my eyeball out and shove his face into a rack of syringes, needles up; I kick the general, snatch his gun, execute his fucking skull; I run for the door, a hand covering my vacant eye, feel the breeze through my fingers inside the cavity, shoot my way along the corridor, black soldiers with Kalashnikovs splattering their useless brains on the walls; I kick the metal door, feel my remaining eye burning with the light of a white desert, white sun, white air, black guerrillas aiming at me, white gas tank behind them; I shoot at it and it blossoms into a fireball, roasting them alive; I hear their blood sizzling, smell their flesh burning, see their charred skeletons falling to their knees and crumbling, skulls frozen in a cry of pain, and I hope it fucking hurts.
LETTER
* * *
Axton House
Axton Rd.
Point Bless, VA 26969
Dear Aunt Liza,
Some words to accompany Niamh’s Polaroids of the library.
It feels like an amphisbaenic church. It certainly echoes like a church and has the size of one, but when you come in through the massive double doors from the hall stairs, you don’t see an apse at the other end, but another set of double doors that open out to the front gallery. We leave both doors open to create a corridor across the floor, which otherwise shows a peripheral path.
The two long rows of bookcases separate the central nave from the narrower aisles. Four spiral stairs, one in each corner, climb up to the balcony. There are no windows, no walls—just shelves spanning all around the court.
The cases, the shelves, and the books are all unlabeled.
On one side of the central nave sits a card catalog, each entry painstakingly handwritten. On the other side there’s a small desk—the workplace of someone who was abruptly interrupted from their labor, and whose butler came cleaning after them, doing his best to arrange the mess into an illusion of order by aligning and piling solidly the misplaced books and papers that no one knows where to put anymore. This is where Niamh found the folder containing the CD and the magazine clippings. It is also where today we found a curious document. The original was handwritten by Ambrose on a torn sheet from an accounting ledger; I copied it for you.
A LEDGER PAGE FOUND IN THE LIBRARY DESK
* * *
LETTER
* * *
[Cont’d.]
Regarding the library contents: I reckon that works of fiction make up less than half of it. The majority of the collection is a gold mine of knowledge from every time and place, in multiple languages, with ancient philosophers fraternizing with twentieth-century geopolitics. These books are roughly sorted by area. There’s also an astounding map collection. It even includes a chart of Mars.
The fiction section takes up the shelves in the balconies, and it’s sorted alphabetically by author. There is no children’s literature area. It’s a perfect place to hide a book forever.
AUDIO RECORDING
* * *
[Five minutes of pages slowly flipping.]
A.: Niamh? Niamh, why’s the recorder on?
[…]
Turn it off. If a ghost were to haunt this library, she’d be bored to death. Again.
LETTER
<
br /> * * *
[Cont’d.]
By three p.m. Niamh collapsed. The research part of the job doesn’t fit her. After a whole day in the book woods tracking and hunting down possible candidates for “that wonderful book of our childhood” as I checked them in the catalog, something just snapped in her little fantasy-dressed head. She probably screamed (thank God I didn’t hear that), gave up solving the riddle, and attempted to crack it. She started to pull out books and shake them, hoping for Ambrose’s letters to flutter out like autumn leaves.
She went through a whole shelf while I timed her from the desk. Then I did the math while she panted her frustration away. It took her three minutes and twenty-six seconds to check the forty-something books on one shelf. That bookcase is eight shelves high. The balcony runs for a straight row of ten cases, plus two in each corner. Multiply by two for the opposite side. Multiply by two for the lower level. Add fourteen cases along the central nave. I reckon thirty hours would be necessary to shake out any document, marker, or train ticket from all the books.
Unless, of course, Ambrose actually fixed those letters inside the book with tape. Which, now that I come to think of it, I would have done.
So, in short: We do need a butler.
Kisses,
A.
P.S. From the vast continent of uninhabited wilderness that is Axton House, I feel we could begin to consider the annexation of this music room into our conquered territory. I admit it’s a big step forward (I dare compare it to the acquisition of Tennessee), but it is, after all, the place we go home to after a day’s work in the library. Here Niamh plays the piano or listens to her EVP (I scolded her today for just recording stuff and never listening to it) and I write and watch TV (did you know The X-Files is on its third season here?)
A.’S DIARY
* * *
It’s midnight.
The uncharted regions of Axton House sleep in utter shadow. Between this music room and our bedroom lies a swamp of silence. We don’t dare to cross it. We’d rather stay here, where there are many lights, and a TV, and things that won’t desert us. We sit on the sofa and comfort each other. Suddenly, we shiver with cold and frailty.
I watched The X-Files tonight (it’s even creepier here in Axton House). There’s a poster in Fox Mulder’s office in the basement that reads, “I want to believe.” I think that’s the way I’ve felt all my life.
I’m not a religious man. I’m not sure why. I guess I never needed a religion. Niamh is a Catholic, and I went to a Baptist church with her last Sunday and stood through the service like Livingstone might attend a ceremonial rite in Africa: amused by the exotica, and somehow honored to be accepted, but spiritually untouched. I’m actually so atheist that I’m reluctant to use the word spiritual.
Same goes for anything fitting in the X-files cabinet. I don’t believe in, nor let myself be affected by, anything that requires empirical reason to stand aside. So there go gods. There go souls. There go ghosts. There goes the paranormal. I don’t need it.
And yet, like Mulder, I’d like to believe.
It’s not that I envy people who believe. I don’t see them getting any advantages. Niamh would have endured her shitty childhood without God just as well. Those who believe in the soul fear theirs might burn in hell. Those who believe in ghosts fear they will be haunted. Those who believe we’re not alone end up glancing over their shoulders at all times and despising their unreliable senses.
No, I think I want to believe because I need that limbo between the real and the unreal to exist. I don’t want this wall imposed by my precursors, a border to which my reason must abide: “This side is real; that one is not; bacteria and hallucinations exist; ghosts and UFOs are bullshit.” I don’t want my reality set, my world defined.
I guess believing wouldn’t be enough, though. I’d like to know. Not even empirically: just as I know Australia is somewhere out there, though I’ve never actually seen it. Because if there were a minimal chance for those things to exist, it would improve my universe in the same way that coming to America improved it: Everything would be more like in the movies.
But I can’t believe. The older I get, the more solid the wall becomes, like everything that was to be explored has already been. True things grow truer, and unproved things fade away. Because we don’t need them. Like I don’t need a god.
And I’d like X-files to exist. I’d like to have plausible testimonies of unexplained phenomena as I have news of countries I’ve never been to. I long for the slightest evidence of it that doesn’t require me to relinquish reason, because a natural mystery and reason to face it make the happiest combination of all.
But there is no hint. No plausible clue for anything we now call superstition, religion, or bullshit to be real. And the ones who should provide it, the ones who believe, are also nearing extinction.
And I blame them. Yes, I blame believers for my skepticism. Because they’re not up to it; they’re no challenge; they’re so easily proved fools, I hate them. All those psychic wannabes, those women holding séances and faking so unconvincingly, expecting me to lower my standards to their puerile level; those self-proclaimed parapsychologists pretending to be scientists, who can’t even tell when they started to con themselves; all those pathetic lonely people fooling one another into their clumsy games of afterlife and cosmic relevance just to avoid noticing the nauseating sadness of their real lives. How could such a fascinating realm end up in the hands of idiots who stripped it of any glamour? How could it sink that low?
That’s how I used to feel, bound by reason to boredom.
And then along came Axton House.
We’ve spent most of the night here in the music room, not daring to go upstairs, because Niamh was listening to her EVP and I asked her to play the recordings from the bathroom two nights ago, on the eighth. At first, it seemed the recorder had captured nothing but a thick layer of noise and my voice swimming in it. But Niamh heard something else.
She browsed the wire drawer for a connector and jacked the recorder into the hi-fi speakers. We heard the same static through the stereo. She dialed up the volume until the floorboards trembled with the drone and Help escaped the room. Then she played with the equalizer to raise a certain frequency over the rest. I thanked God (that is, Niamh’s God) for having our closest neighbors more than a mile away.
But finally she succeeded: a single string of sound emerging from the static, one dyed fiber in the pattern, droning at a different beat. With a rhythm. Making notes. Singing exactly the same melody. And then my own voice on top of it all, repeating the melody in a whisper that had the chandelier rocking in the sound blast. That was me in the bathroom two nights ago, repeating what I thought I had heard: the same indelible four notes from the orgiastic tune we danced to that afternoon. Hours after we danced that day, the tune was still echoing in the bathroom—or being echoed. Niamh has heard it too.
Music had touched every living thing in this house. Living or whatever.
But that isn’t proof enough. This is.
Niamh replayed bits of every recording at the same frequency. Most gave nothing. One did. The one from the bathroom on the sixth.
It features, after hours of pure white noise: the light switched on. Me pouring water over my face. The faucet squeaking off.
And then a voice—the same exact bar on the equalizer screen, the same dyed fiber, saying something.
Then plain noise, for a few seconds.
And then the Dead Kennedys, in a brutal shock wave of punk music coming from this very stereo, played by Niamh to warn me that Curtis Knox or somebody else had broken in.
Niamh spun the volume down and we locked eyes. That voice before the music exploded was a girl’s. And what she’d said—actually, she’d said to me—“We’re not alone.”
NOVEMBER 11
DREAM JOURNAL
* * *
It’s a fountain—the watery music is. There was a Moorish window before I quietly closed my eyes. The book
falls out of my hand. And I savor the last words I read, but I can’t understand them.
I am the skeleton. And I’m holding a pair of fives. And the ace of hearts. And a three, and a four. (Should I go for a flush?)
I’m playing Scrabble, but the words look all fuzzy.
I reach for the window and trip and fall. And the monster thrusts the pitchfork through me and nails me to the floor.
(Late night.)
—You babbling in your sleep.
—Sorry.
(He clutching his chest.)
[Later.]
I’m flying over a shirtless man under tropical rain clouds. He peeks over his shoulder, startled, but he can’t see me. He sees through me. His skin feels me.
It’s a corpse he trips on. And as soon as he touches the floor I thrust the pitchfork through his back.
NIAMH’S NOTEPAD
* * *
(Cellar—facing the wine racks.)
—I think the older the better.
—Yeah, but I also think there’s an age when it just turns into vinegar.
—You should’ve insisted on having them come over here.
—Next time I’ll pass you the phone and see you handle it. Look, just take anything that looks pompous and old.
(I hug him.)
—I just walked into that, didn’t I?
(I choose a bottle.)
The Supernatural Enhancements Page 6