They had never intended to let the dove back into the ark.
She knelt beside Krista’s corpse and made herself search the folds of reeking,. sticky clothing until she found Krista’s key to the rubbish gate, the key they had used to throw out the ashes. She sat on the ground beside Krista and rubbed the key bright on her own pant-leg.
Let them try to keep her out. Let them try.
Krista was my shipmate. Now I have no shipmates.
At moonrise she shrugged her aching arms through the straps of the empty pack and walked slowly around to the side alley gate. Krista’s key clicked minutely in the lock. The door sprang outward, releasing more garbage that had been piled up inside. No one seemed to hear. They were roaring with song in the front wing and drumming on the furniture, to drown out the cries and pleadings they expected to hear from her.
Miriam stepped inside the well yard, swallowing bloody mucus. She felt the paving lurch a little under her.
A man was talking in the kitchen passageway, set into the ground floor of the back wing at an oblique angle across the well yard. She thought it was Edouard, a camera tech, pretending to speak on his cell as he sometimes did to keep himself company when he was on his own. Edouard, as part of Security, carried a gun.
Her head cleared suddenly. She found that she had shut the gate behind her, and had slid down against the inside wall, for she was sitting on the cool pavement. Perhaps she had passed out for a little. By the moon’s light she saw the well’s raised stone lip, only a short way along the wall to her left. She was thirsty, although she did not think she could force water down her swollen throat now.
The paving stones the men had pried up in their work on the plumbing had not been reset. They were still piled up out of the way, very near where she sat.
Stones; water. Her brain was so clogged with hot heaviness that she could barely hold her head up.
“Non, non!” Edouard shouted. “Ce n’est pas vrai, ils sont menteurs, tous!”
Yes, all of them; menteurs. She sympathized, briefly.
Her mind kept tilting and spilling all its thoughts into a turgid jumble, but there were constants: Stones. Water. The exiled dove, the brave cabin boy. Krista and little Kevin. She made herself move, trusting to the existence of an actual plan somewhere in her mind. She crawled over to the stacked pavers. Slowly and with difficulty she took off her backpack and stuffed it with some of the smaller stones, one by one. Blood beaded black around her fingernails. She had no strength to pull the loaded pack onto her back again, so she hung it from her shoulder by one broad strap, and began making her painful way toward the well itself.
Edouard was deep in his imaginary quarrel. As she crept along the wall she heard his voice echo angrily in the vaulted passageway.
The thick wooden well-cover had been replaced with a lightweight metal sheet, back when they had had to haul water by hand before the old laundry pump was reconnected. She lifted the light metal sheet and set it aside. Dragging herself up, she leaned over the low parapet and peered down.
She could not make out the stone steps that descended into the water on the inside wall, left over from a time when the well had been used to hide contraband. Now... something. Her thoughts swam.
Focus.
Even without her camera there was a way to bring home to Victor all the reality he had sent her out to capture for him in pictures.
She could barely shift her legs over the edge, but at last she felt the cold roughness of the top step under her feet. She descended toward the water, using the friction of her spread hands, turning her torso flat against the curved wall like a figure in an Egyptian tomb painting. The water winked up at her, glossy with reflected moonlight. The backpack, painful with hard stone edges, dragged at her aching shoulder. She paused to raise one strap and put her head through it; she must not lose her anchor now.
The water’s chill lapped at her skin, sucking away her last bit of strength. She sagged out from the wall and slipped under the surface. Her hands and feet scrabbled dreamily at the slippery wall and the steps, but down she sank anyway, pulled by the bag of stones strapped to her body.
Her chest was shot through with agony, but her mind clung with bitter pleasure to the fact that in the morning all of Victor’s tribe would wash themselves and brush their teeth and swallow their pills down with the water Victor was so proud of, water pumped by willing hands from his own wonderful well.
Head craned back, she saw that dawn pallor had begun to flush the small circle of sky receding above her. Against that light, black curls of the blood that her body wept from every seam and pore feathered out in secret silence, into the cool, delicious water.
“Lowland Sea” is one of those stories that wove itself together all on its own, using bits and scraps resurgent from months, no, years of watching the world and other people’s art.
One basic strand was a novel I’d recently read about a woman tracking down her supposedly-dead actress-mother at the Cannes film festival. I liked the protagonist’s “outsider” status looking in on an alien mini-culture. This connected with the persistence of reports on the upsurge in modern slavery, particularly sexual slavery; news stories about the abuses of children that poverty, sexism, and war bring with them; and the nightly footage of shattered villages and dusty, flyblown refugee camps.
The original stimulus, of course, was Edgar Allan Poe’s wonderful “The Masque of the Red Death.” Taking off from that little masterpiece of horror was irresistibly easy. What better version of arrogant aristocracy than our current culture of movie celebrity? What more gruesome incarnation of the merciless and class-blind horror of plague than a mutated form of Ebola? And what more satisfying resolution than disaster at the hands of a person purchased from the world of struggle, oppression, and routine exploitation that so many of the rich casually build their wealth upon?
Oh oh, there I go opening myself up to charges that I’ve written not a tasty “escapist” horror story but a propaganda screed!
I don’t think so; after all, late in the process there appeared some of those magical-feeling serendipities that happen when you’ve been dealing with a real story that wanted telling—little grace notes that turn up along about draft number twelve (or later), each one a small, bright reward for the work and also its validation, in a funny way.
It’s like this: I knew I was all right with this story when my Christmas present from one of the grandkids turned out to be The Moviegoer’s Companion, a small book of invaluable details to help sharpen the verisimilitude of my filmic revelers; and then again there was that moment when it dawned on me that Noah’s dove and the doomed cabin boy just touch each other; wing-tip to wing-tip in passing, in a way that strikes a soft, melancholy chord much richer and more satisfying than anything I could have consciously planned.
Those are the times that I really love my job.
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* * * *
John Langanis the author ofMr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters(Prime 2008). His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and son.
* * * *
Technicolor
By John Langdon
Come on, Say it out loud with me: “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” Look at that sentence. Who says Edgar Allan Poe was a lousy stylist? Thirteen words—good number for a horror story, right? Although it’s not so much a story as a masque. Yes, it’s about a masque, but it is a masque, too. Of course, you all know what a masque is. If you didn’t, you looked it up in your dictionaries, because that’s what you do in a senior seminar. Anyone?
No, not a play, not exactly. Yes? Good, okay, “masquerade” is one sense of the word, a ball whose guests attend in costume. Anyone else?
Yes, very nice, nicely put. The masque does begin in the sixteenth century. It’s the entertainment of the elite, and originally, it’s a combination of pantomime and dance. Pantomime? Right—thin
k “mime.” The idea is to perform without words, gesturally, to let the movements of your body tell the story. You do that, and you dance, and there’s your show. Later on, there’s dialogue and other additions, but I think it’s this older sense of the word the story intends. Remember that tall, silent figure at the end.
I’m sorry? Yes, good point. The two kinds of masque converge.
Back to that sentence, though. Twenty-two syllables that break almost perfectly in half, ten and twelve, “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death” and “held illimitable dominion over all.” A group of short words, one and two syllables each, takes you through the first part of the sentence, then they give way to these long, almost luxurious words, “illimitable dominion.” The rhythm—you see how complex it is? You ride along on these short words, bouncing up and down, alliterating from one “d” to the next, and suddenly you’re mired in those Latinate polysyllables. All the momentum goes out of your reading; there’s just enough time for the final pair of words, which are short, which is good, and you’re done.
Wait, just let me—no, all right, what was it you wanted to say?
Exactly, yes, you took the words out of my mouth. The sentence does what the story does, carries you along through the revelry until you run smack-dab into that tall figure in the funeral clothes. Great job.
One more observation about the sentence, then I promise it’s on to the story itself. I know you want to talk about Prospero’s castle, all those colored rooms. Before we do, however, the four “d”s. We’ve mentioned already, there are a lot of “d” sounds in these thirteen words. They thread through the line, help tie it together. They also draw our attention to four words in particular. The first three are easy to recognize: they’re capitalized, as well. Darkness, Decay, Death. The fourth? Right, dominion. Anyone want to take a stab at why they’re capitalized?
Yes? Well... okay, sure it makes them into proper nouns. Can you take that a step farther? What kind of proper nouns does it make them? What’s happened to the Red Death in the story? It’s gone from an infection you can’t see to a tall figure wandering around the party. Personification, good. Darkness, Decay, (the Red) Death: the sentence personifies them; they’re its trinity, its unholy trinity, so to speak. And this godhead holds dominion, what the dictionary defines as “sovereign authority” over all. Not only the prince’s castle, not only the world of the story, but all, you and me.
In fact, in a weird sort of way, this is the story of the incarnation of one of the persons of this awful trinity.
All right, moving on, now. How about those rooms? Actually, how about the building those rooms are in, first? I’ve been calling it a castle, but it isn’t, is it? It’s “castellated,” which is to say, castle-like, but it’s an abbey, a monastery. I suppose it makes sense to want to wait out the Red Death in a place like an abbey. After all, it’s both removed from the rest of society and well-fortified. And we shouldn’t be too hard on the prince and his followers for retreating there. It’s not the first time this has happened, in literature or life. Anyone read The Decameron? Boccaccio? It’s a collection of one hundred stories told by ten people, five women and five men, who have sequestered themselves in, I’m pretty sure it’s a convent, to wait out the plague ravaging Florence. The Black Death, that one.
If you consider that the place in which we find the seven rooms is a monastery, a place where men are supposed to withdraw from this world to meditate on the next, its rooms appear even stranger. What’s the set-up? Seven rooms, yes, thank you, I believe I just said that. Running east to west, good. In a straight line? No. There’s a sharp turn every twenty or thirty yards, so that you can see only one room at a time. So long as they follow that east to west course, you can lay the rooms out in any form you like. I favor steps, like the ones that lead the condemned man to the chopping block, but that’s just me.
Hang on, hang on, we’ll get to the colors in a second. We need to stay with the design of the rooms for a little longer. Not everybody gets this the first time through. There are a pair of windows, Gothic windows, which means what? That they’re long and pointed at the top. The windows are opposite one another, and they look out on, anybody? Not exactly: a chandelier hangs down from the ceiling. It is a kind of light, though. No, a candelabrum holds candles. Anyone else? A brazier, yes, there’s a brazier sitting on a tripod outside either window. They’re, how would you describe a brazier? Like a big metal cup, a bowl, that you fill with some kind of fuel and ignite. Wood, charcoal, oil. To be honest, I’m not as interested in the braziers as I am in where they’re located. Outside the windows, right, but where outside the windows? Maybe I should say, What is outside the windows? Corridors, yes, there are corridors to either side of the rooms, and it’s along these that the braziers are stationed. Just like our classroom. Not the tripods, of course, and I guess what’s outside our windows is more a gallery than a corridor, since it’s open to the parking lot on the other side. All right, all right, so I’m stretching a bit, here, but have you noticed, the room has seven windows? One for each color in Prospero’s Abbey. Go ahead, count them.
So here we are in this strange abbey, one that has a crazy zig-zag suite of rooms with corridors running beside them. You could chalk the location’s details up to anti-Catholic sentiment; there are critics who have argued that anti-Catholic prejudice is the secret engine driving Gothic literature. No, I don’t buy it, not in this case. Sure, there are stained-glass windows, but they’re basically tinted glass. There’s none of the iconography you’d expect if this were anti-Catholic propaganda, no statues or paintings. All we have is that enormous clock in the last room, the mother of all grandfather clocks. Wait a minute...
What about those colors, then? Each of the seven rooms is decorated in a single color that matches the stained glass of its windows. From east to west, we go from blue to purple to green to orange to white to violet to—to the last room, where there’s a slight change. The windows are red, but the room itself is done in black. There seems to be some significance to the color sequence, but what that is—well, this is why we have literature professors, right? (No snickering.) Not to mention, literature students. I’ve read through your responses to the homework assignment, and there were a few interesting ideas as to what those colors might mean. Of course, most of you connected them to times of the day, blue as dawn, black as night, the colors in between morning, noon, early afternoon, that kind of thing. Given the east-west layout, it makes a certain amount of sense. A few more of you picked up on that connection to time in a slightly different way, and related the colors to times of the year, or the stages in a person’s life. In the process, some clever arguments were made. Clever, but not, I’m afraid, too convincing.
What! What’s wrong! What is it! Are you all—oh, them. Oh for God’s sake. When you screamed like that, I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I thought I’d need a new pair of trousers. Those are a couple of graduate students I’ve enlisted to help me with a little presentation I’ll be putting up shortly. Yes, I can understand how the masks could startle you. They’re just generic white masks; I think they found them downtown somewhere. It was their idea: once I told them what story we would be discussing, they immediately hit on wearing the masks. To tell the truth, I half-expected they’d show up sporting the heads of enormous fanged monsters. Those are relatively benign.
Yes, I suppose they do resemble the face the Red Death assumes for its costume. No blood splattered on them, though.
If I could have your attention up here, again. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Where was I? Your homework, yes, thank you. Right, right. Let’s see... oh—I know. A couple of you read the colors in more original ways. I made a note of them somewhere—here they are. One person interpreted the colors as different states of mind, beginning with blue as tranquil and ending with black as despair, with stops for jealousy—green, naturally—and passion—white, as in white-hot—along the way. Someone else made the case for the colors as, let me mak
e sure I have the phrasing right, “phases of being.”
Actually, that last one’s not bad. Although the writer could be less obtuse; clarity, people, academic writing needs to be clear. Anyway, the gist of the writer’s argument is that each color is supposed to take you through a different state of existence, blue at one end of the spectrum representing innocence, black at the other representing death. Death as a state of being, that’s... provocative. Which is not to say it’s correct, but it’s headed in the right direction.
I know, I know: Which is? The answer requires some explanation. Scratch that. It requires a boatload of explanation. That’s why I have Tweedledee and Tweedledum setting up outside. (Don’t look! They’re almost done.) It’s also why I lowered the screen behind me for the first time this semester. There are some images I want to show you, and they’re best seen in as much detail as possible. If I can remember what the Media Center people told me... click this... then this...
Voila!
Poe - [Anthology] Page 43