Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  “This is a lovely campus, but it’s so small,” she said as she slipped into the jacket. “I can see it suits you, though.”

  I ignored the slight.

  “I’m at the Monaco until tomorrow,” she said. “You need to get past our personal history and focus on your career. If you work through your pique, give me a call.”

  I detected a hint of injury in her voice, but I remembered what an accomplished actress she was, how skilled at manipulation, and this gave me cause for doubt. Nevertheless, the idea that I could hurt her, though satisfying on a petty level, bred the surprising notion that I didn’t particularly enjoy it.

  She started for the door.

  “Wait,” I said.

  * * * *

  The settlement of St. Gotthard had been established in an Andean valley in Venezuela in 1863 by a splinter Moravian sect, which until that time had been based in Switzerland. The word “established” gives rise to the impression of a settlement carved from the wilderness, but the Moravians occupied buildings already in place. The valley and all within it had been bequeathed to the sect twenty years previously, along with a hefty endowment, by Odell Remarque, a wealthy German eccentric and voluptuary who had expended a significant part of his fortune in seeking out the most beautiful spot on earth (the one qualification of the bequest was that the Moravians maintain the land, the buildings thereon and all they contained exactly as Remarque left them). The criteria governing his search are unclear, though he is on record as saying that he was not interested in a glorious vista, feeling that such would tend to become oppressive over time—this appeared to legislate against an Andean site, but Remarque was satisfied and sent in landscapers, engineers, and builders to tailor the valley to his precise tastes.

  Unlike most religious émigrés, the Moravians had been neither persecuted nor oppressed in their native land; rather they came to Venezuela in order to evade the influence of the modern world and to further their charitable ambitions. They were a small sect, less than a thousand souls, yet exhibited the energy of a much larger body, traveling widely throughout the country, setting up schools and clinics in dozens of locales. As the decades passed, however, they gradually withdrew from these stations and the tradition of good works they embodied, and in 1928 they severed connections with the outside world, eliminating all but a single line of communication with the Venezuelan government, a bank account from which a yearly tax was withdrawn. The Interprovincial Board of the North American church sent emissaries to determine what had transpired. Some failed to return and those who did reported that the colony had fallen away from the Covenant for Christian Living (a document containing the fundamental precepts of the faith) and that their sole concern seemed to be the securing the valley against intruders. They had fortified the massive river gate that Remarque had constructed so as to provide a dramatic entrance into his fabulous preserve, and were engaged in rendering other routes into the valley impassable.

  Remarque did not permit the use of photographic equipment in his domain and the Moravians continued this proscription; thus only a few old pictures of the valley existed, most showing the cluster of fantastic buildings topped by minarets and Gothic spires, lifting from a great plaza at the center of a forest. Recent satellite images gave evidence that brush had overgrown the plaza, the buildings had fallen into disrepair and the surrounding land, no longer tended, had returned to the wild—this apparent abandonment provided Nubia with the ammunition she needed to petition the government for permission to enter the valley. She availed herself of her family’s political connections and wangled the use of a huge CH-47F Chinook helicopter to transport our expedition to St. Gotthard... at least that was how she explained it; but after watching her flirt with bureaucrats, I wondered mean-spiritedly if she had used a more intimate means of persuasion.

  St. Gotthard was a lifelong obsession of Nubia’s and, though she was unable to experience it as Remarque had intended, passing along the river and through the gate, she was thrilled by the prospect of breaching this forbidden place. For my part, I was less interested in the place than the project. The book, as Nubia envisioned it, was to contain no reference to our previous relationship, yet in it we would be characters who clearly had a history. Adventure and a hint of romance in an exotic setting would add a novelistic element to engage the pop sensibility and enable a general readership to put up with the drier sections. I had some reservations, but when I weighed the rectitude of scholarship and the rebukes of my colleagues against a potential audience with Oprah Winfrey, it was no contest.

  There were to be seven in our party, including two grad students from the University of the Andes and two Venezuelan soldiers sent to report on our findings. Our videographer was Taylor Mendenhall, a young instructor at Miami, blond and good-looking in a morally straight-and-true, Sears catalogue sort of way. At a mixer in Nubia’s suite at our hotel in Merida, the jumping-off place for the expedition, Taylor drew me aside and pointed to Claudia Pozzobon, one of the students, a diminutive, busty woman with a milky complexion and black hair, who was chatting with a government official.

  “Claudia’s kind of hot,” he said. “She’s got a Christina Ricci thing going on.”

  “I guess... yeah.” I tipped my head, as if to gain a better perspective on Claudia, who was laughing at something the official said. “Happier, though.”

  “Huh?”

  “Claudia seems happier. Christina Ricci usually plays downer roles.”

  “The word is Nubia’s doing her.”

  “Ricci?”

  “No, man! Claudia.”

  I snagged a glass of champagne from a passing waiter. “Nice.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you? I hear you and Nubia were hot and heavy back in the day.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Around the department. Nubia’s the stuff of legend at Miami.”

  I knocked back the champagne and made a non-committal noise.

  Taylor stared grimly at Nubia, hemmed in against the bar by several men. “Well, it bothers me.”

  No doubt he was bursting to tell me about his involvement with her. As a charter member of the Victims of Nubia, I had a responsibility to listen; but I wasn’t in the mood. I excused myself, grabbed another glass of champagne, and went over to a window offering a view of the city and the mountains beyond. Merida was built on a plateau formation—it appeared that the land had been chewed off by something big and toothy, leaving deep canyons on three sides. The poorest barrios were closest to these dropoffs, some of the tiny white houses clinging to the edge. A yellow cable car inched along above the canyons, suspended against the backdrop of the Cordillera Occidental, a northern arm of the Andes, its rumpled slopes gone a dull Pomona in early summer, rising to snow peaks sixteen thousand feet high.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Claudia, coming up beside me; her head reached to just above my elbow.

  “I think it looks forbidding,” I said.

  She glanced up at me, perplexed. ‘

  “Scary,” I said. “Ominous.”

  “Yes, I understood. But I don’t understand why you think it’s forbidding.”

  “The Andes are mysterious. Mountain fastnesses, deserted cities.” I pretended to shudder. “Incan ghosts.”

  Macyory Abuin, the other student, eased up behind Claudia and whispered to her. Claudia responded in Spanish that she wasn’t ready to leave.

  If I hadn’t been drunk, I wouldn’t have spoken to Macyory. She was a timid soul and rarely spoke herself. At twenty-one, she was several years younger than Claudia, and deferred to her in most circumstances. She was thin, albeit a bit broad in the beam, and pale (not so pale as Claudia), yet her features had the vaguely Asiatic cast of the indigenous Indians: almond-shaped eyes and a broad nose, a full mouth and thick black hair. Her compacted silences reminded me of Nubia, but then I saw something of Nubia in every woman. When I asked Macyory if she was at all daunted by the prospect of entering St. Gotthard, rather than, as I e
xpected, lowering her eyes and giving an uncommunicative answer, she said, “In situations such as this, it’s best to keep fear in one’s mind.”

  “What’s there to be afraid of?”

  “For me it’s the isolation, being connected to civilization by so thin a thread.”

  “We have the army to protect us,” I said.

  “The army!” Claudia sniffed. “Now you’re making a joke.”

  Nubia called to Claudia and she hurried to join the group at the bar. To my surprise, Macyory lingered at the window.

  “The army is not concerned with us,” she said. “They have their own interests.”

  “And what would those be?”

  “If Saint Gotthard has been truly abandoned, they will seize everything of value.”

  “That should make them happy.”

  “Oh, yes. Certainly,” she said. “But if they discover something of great value, they may not want any witnesses.”

  * * * *

  We set out for St. Gotthard three days later, flying in the shadow of Andean peaks, past montane forests, over glacial lakes and spectacular canyons, following the course of a tributary of the Chama River until we reached the head of the valley and the massive bronzed river gate, its surface etched with images of strange half-human figures, more appropriate to a sybarite’s retreat (which it once had been) than to a religious colony. Despite the tangled vegetation that overgrew the work of Remarque’s landscapes, I could imagine how the valley had appeared to a guest entering along the river—it poured between the banks of a narrow gorge, a stretch that widened into a crystalline pool; then it narrowed again, bearing the new arrival beneath arches formed by the epiphyte-laden boughs of trees with dense, dark crowns and thick gray trunks; then the trees thinned out, admitting to a view of rolling hills. The watercourse went through a series of such drastic alternations, moving from claustrophobic gloom to inspiring vistas, the surrounding terrain obscured by granite cliffs carved with glyphs, by giant ferns that formed a plumed aisle, and by lumpish hills whose crests had been sculpted into quaint troll-like shapes. These last flattened out, giving way to an undulant terrain of green bamboo and creeks that sprang from the naked rock to splash down among tumbled boulders the size of cottages. At length the river spilled into a basin at whose nearer reach stood a dock fashioned of ebony planks upon which the guest could stand and contemplate the glory of St. Gotthard: a circular band of forest that enclosed four improbable buildings, their roof ornaments and spires lifting high above the trees. They expressed a bizarre mingling of architectures: Tibetan and Byzantine and Gothic, and something best described as a nineteenth century futurism. From a remove they blended into an aesthetically pleasing whole, yet once we drew near they seemed at odds with one another, a tawdry grouping of the sort one finds crammed into a corner of a theme park, pretending to be skyscrapers and ancient pyramids and the like. The forest occupied the lower, gentler slopes of a mighty hill and beyond the hill lay the central massif of the Cordillera Occidental, a towering range whose sharp peaks were wisped by fumes of cloud, offering the impression that they were venting steam, furious at our intrusion.

  We circled the plaza while our pilot, Captain Abreu, announced our arrival over a loudspeaker to whoever might not have heard the sound of our approach; but no one came forth to greet us. As I’ve said, the plaza was overgrown with bushes and young trees, the paving stones barely visible beneath weeds, and offered no place for the Chinook to land. The captain hovered at a height of ten feet and, after dumping tents and other camping equipment out the door, we climbed down by means of a metal ladder. Once the Chinook had passed out of hearing, seeking a landing site beyond the forest, silence descended over the area, broken by the flow of wind. Sgt. Perdomo, a squat, taciturn Indian with a jowly face and acne-scarring on his cheeks, oversaw the others as they made camp in front of the largest building, a structure whose facade had the massive doors and decorative conceits of a Gothic cathedral, but was more like a castle in its overall design. The doors were cracked open—Nubia and I pushed through the brush that fronted them and slipped inside.

  I anticipated that we would find a chamber of considerable size opening off the foyer, with a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow; but the room we entered, though large, had more the atmosphere of a private club (or a hotel lobby minus the reception desk). It had been left vulnerable to the elements for many years. Shafts of light penetrated the dimness, falling from high, narrow windows, revealing a carpet so mired in filth that I could scarcely make out its color scheme (an Arabic design of dull red, cream, and inky blue); patches of mildew all but obscured the wall hangings. Overstuffed leather chairs and mahogany drink tables were set about in an orderly fashion, but their surfaces were dappled with fungal growths and animal droppings. In the middle of the room, a ruined fountain leaked a dribble of rusty water, contributing to the smell of dampness and decay. The basin and the statue that had formed its centerpiece were shattered. Chunks of marble lay everywhere, some twenty and thirty feet from the fountain, as if they had been hurled. Nubia was holding one such chunk when I came up, and was looking down at hundreds of yellow blossoms scattered about the basin: blooms of the golden rain tree (I had observed several specimens in the plaza), relatively fresh, no more than a day old.

  “Looks like someone’s around,” I said.

  Nubia made a derisive noise. “You think?”

  She handed me the marble fragment. It had been broken from the statue’s face: a hollowed eye and a portion of the forehead.

  “Given Remarque’s sensibilities, I expect he furnished the place with statuary that offended the Moravians,” I said. “I don’t think we can infer anything other than the fact that they must have objected to it.”

  “Then why not simply remove the statue? The flowers are clearly an offering. I think we can infer that something has gone very wrong here.”

  “You so want this to be a mystery,” I said.

  “The entire population vanished. That’s not a mystery?”

  “I doubt it’s the lurid one you’re hoping for. They may not have liked living here and erected homes in the forest. They’re probably watching us, deciding what to do.”

  “Doesn’t that suggest something’s wrong?”

  “It suggests that they’re unaccustomed to visitors.”

  Nubia took back the marble shard. “I’d forgotten how reasonable you can be.”

  “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To play yang to your yin... or is it the other way around?”

  She moved away, stooping to examine another chunk of marble.

  “Opposition’s always been a huge part of our relationship,” I said. “Contrariness. Which makes it even odder, the way you dumped me. I would have thought you’d relish one last argument.”

  Nubia went to a knee, examining another shard. “I wonder if we could reassemble the face? I’d like to see it.”

  “You’re still not talking to me? I’m still too emotional? I’m going to keep being emotional until we air this out. I was so fucked up when you dumped me, I nearly lost my grant.”

  “It might make an interesting cover for the book.”

  “Damn it, Nubia!”

  “Maybe a title as well: The Shattered Face. What do you think?”

  I watched her picking among the scraps of marble and felt anger rising in me like mercury in a hot glass stick.

  “All right,” I said. “But we’re not leaving until I get an explanation. One that goes deeper than you were worried about your damn career.”

  Without looking up, Nubia asked, “Would you mind fetching Claudia? She’s clever at puzzles.”

  * * * *

  Once camp was established, the group split up to investigate the buildings. They had been erected in a formation shaped like a V with one stroke left unfinished, and from a distance they had appeared clumped together, though in actuality they were set thirty-five or forty yards apart. The Castle was at the point of the V and the building I chose to investigate w
as on its right: an oversized Tibetan temple with whitewashed walls and ornately carved lintels. From its roof sprouted a stubby tower with a brass finial at the top. The interior was disappointingly plain: a hundred or more rooms furnished in a utilitarian manner: desks, chairs, antique office equipment. Dust and mold were thick on every surface. In the desks and cabinets I discovered papers. Bills, letters addressed to various Moravian functionaries from companies in Merida and, inside a metal box, legal documents, some of extreme age—these I took with me. I would have explored the tower, but a locked door blocked my path.

  It wasn’t until dinner that anyone expressed concern over Captain Abreu, who had not returned. Some thought was given to searching for him, but Sgt. Perdomo pointed out that it would be foolhardy to look for him at night. If he didn’t return by morning, he, the sergeant, would go after him. The conversation turned to the four buildings. Each was in a ruinous state comparable to the Castle, except for the Hotel, a pyramidal structure with slit windows, whose walls (holed as from a bombardment) offered glimpses into several bedchambers furnished with outmoded bondage devices. Of the four, the building we called Pleasure Dome was the least damaged. It occupied a position behind and to the right of the Temple, and was modeled after a mosque, with minaret-like towers at each corner and a dome of glass panels. Taylor told us it contained three main rooms: an assembly hall, a basement whose door he had been unable to force, and, enclosed by the dome, a garden that had overgrown its borders, now more thicket than garden. He had noticed white objects in among the leaves—statuary, he believed—and said it would be necessary to cut back the vegetation in order to be sure.