The Yeare's Midnight

by Ed O'Connor

  72

  The candles smoothed shadows across Crowan Frayne’s face as he read from memory. Heather Stussman’s eyes were open now and her gaze was fixed upon Dexter in fear and expectation. Dexter watched Frayne and worked at her bindings as he spoke. Frayne had been reciting ‘A Nocturnall upon St Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day’. His dry, rasping voice rose and fell like a boat on an ocean as he drifted through the last verse.

  ‘But I am None; nor will my sunne renew

  You lovers, for whose sake the lesser Sunne

  At this time to the Goat is runne

  To fetch new lust, and give it you.’

  The candle flames bent and sparked slightly as Frayne’s breath cut across them. Dexter looked around the room. There were great piles of books everywhere, some ancient and expensive, some falling apart at the bindings. She tried to piece together the jigsaw. The oil drum concerned her. It seemed incongruous, an ugliness. What was he trying to achieve?

  ‘Enjoy your summer, all

  Since shee enjoyes her long night’s festival

  Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

  This houre her Vigill and her Eve, since this

  Both the yeare’s and the daye’s deep midnight is.’

  Frayne paused for a second and then turned to face Heather Stussman, wild-eyed, gagged and seated at the table. Frayne opened his box of medical equipment and stared at the glittering rows of scalpels and scissors. His hand hovered over the box like a sparrow hawk until he selected one of the heavier-looking scalpels. He stood and walked around the table to Heather Stussman.

  ‘Dr Stussman, I am going to remove your gag now. If you scream or attempt to scream I will insert this instrument into Sergeant Dexter’s left eye. Do you understand?’

  Terrified and shaking, Heather Stussman nodded her agreement. In a swift movement, Frayne sliced the masking tape gag from her mouth and returned to his chair.

  ‘So, Dr Stussman, lecturer in English at Cambridge University, tell me about “A Nocturnall upon St Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day”.’

  Stussman frowned. Sweat streamed from her brow into her eyes. She tried to blink it away. ‘What can I tell you that you don’t already know?’

  ‘It’s what you don’t know that I am interested in,’ said Crowan Frayne as he replaced his scalpel into its holder and ran a gentle finger across his other instruments.

  Stussman breathed deeply. ‘It’s a poem about bereavement. St Lucy’s Day was regarded as the longest, darkest night of the year.’ She looked over at Dexter, ‘December the thirteenth. Today.’

  Stussman paused. What did he want her to say? She decided to keep it simple and apply her own basic critical model. ‘The poem is probably about his wife Ann. She died in childbirth. There are five stanzas, each with nine lines. The rhyme scheme is fairly standard and straightforward: ABBACCCDD. The repetition of rhymes at the end of each stanza is deliberate.’ She dared to look in Frayne’s direction. He nodded encouragement. ‘It is calculated to enforce the sense of despair: the rhymes are heavy and ponderous, like “drunk” and “shrunk”, “laugh” and “epitaph”, “absences” and “carcasses”.’

  ‘What about the conceit?’ Frayne took another blade from the box and held it to the light.

  ‘Donne says that by the woman’s death he has become a quintessential nothing. The nothing that predated Creation. An absolute nothingness. He says that even stones and rocks have some kind of spirituality.’

  Frayne smiled at Dexter. ‘Aristotle.’

  ‘Yes, it’s an Aristotelian idea.’ Stussman started speaking more rapidly as Frayne stood and began to walk around the table. ‘Then he resolves to join with the dead woman, he yearns for annihilation, to become nothingness on the darkest, longest night of the year.’

  Frayne walked around the table to Dexter and stood next to her, blade in hand. Stussman desperately groped for something else to say. ‘It’s an interesting theological point explored by Augustine and Aquinas: can a man wish to become nothing? If being nothing is better than his present state then surely it must be something. Now, in my opinion—’

  Frayne cut her off in mid-sentence. ‘Suddenly a man may wish himself nothing, because that seems to deliver him from the sense of his present misery.’ His eyes rolled in his head, like a shark biting down on its prey, as he remembered the remainder of the quotation. ‘But deliberately he cannot; because whatsoever a man wishes, must be something better than he hath yet; and whatsoever is better is not nothing.’ He reached down and cut away Dexter’s gag. ‘Donne’s Sermons, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Heather Stussman.

  Dexter gulped air into her dry mouth. ‘Listen to me,’ she said to Crowan Frayne. ‘This is madness. Let us go. There are people who can help you. I can arrange that.’

  Frayne frowned at her, curious. ‘You think I need help, sergeant? Do you think I am a monster? Or a madman like the tramps who drink lighter fuel by the bus station and think they can fly?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ She struggled to find neutral language, ‘I don’t think that you’re mad but I do think that you need help. I am prepared to help you.’ The tape was loosening slightly on her wrists. If she could stay alive for a couple more minutes …

  ‘You make an interesting point, Alison.’ Frayne moved away from her. ‘You have the ability to make strange connections about people. What is the essence of that, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t understand the question,’ Dexter replied. Keep him talking …

  ‘Let me rephrase, it then. What do you think that Dr Stussman here missed in her analysis of the poem?’

  ‘I am not an expert,’ said Dexter. ‘I don’t understand poetry.’

  ‘I think you understand people, though.’ Frayne picked up a roll of black masking tape from the floor. He tore off a long strip and wrapped it around Stussman’s mouth. ‘Let me help you. The poem is a man’s response to bereavement, to the loss of his wife and daughter. Dr Stussman talked very lucidly about the structure of the poem, of the devices employed by the poet to attain his ends. She even entertained us with a snapshot of the theological tensions that underpin man’s desire for annihilation.’

  He moved his left hand across Stussman’s face, feeling the smooth ridges of her cheekbones, the elastic perfection of her eyeballs. ‘What’s missing?’

  Dexter saw where he was driving her. ‘She didn’t talk about the pain. The man’s emotions.’

  ‘Correct!’ Frayne seemed pleased as he drew the hair back from Stussman’s face. ‘The word is “pity”. It is a concept that I am sure Dr Stussman understands but she is afraid to apply. You see, sergeant, “pity” is a literary term. Tragedy is meaningless unless you pity the protagonist.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Unless his condition arouses pity in the audience, feelings of compassion that arise from empathizing with his desperate condition, his redemption has no more meaning than his suffering. Dr Stussman is a literary electrician. She understands circuitry and technique in language. In many respects she is original. However, unless one has the honesty and the courage to embrace one’s own agonies, how can we understand the pain of others? Dr Stussman’s ivory tower is in her head. Poetry is not mathematics, you see, Alison: it grows from the agonies of the soul. It bleeds. If Dr Stussman had the capacity to feel pity, her logical structures would be beautiful.’

  ‘Did you pity Lucy Harrington and Elizabeth Drury, then?’ said Dexter angrily, despite her fear. ‘Or those two kids that you beat to death and pushed into a stream?’

  ‘No,’ said Crowan Frayne. ‘But I pity you, Alison. Your cleverness has made you lonely like me.’ He pulled back Stussman’s chair so he could get around in front of her. ‘And I pity you, Dr Stussman. So I am going to help you both. I am going to show you that beauty can come from ugliness – and once we have each attained beauty we will become angels together.’

  With his left hand Crowan Frayne held Heather Stussman by the neck. With hi
s right hand he sliced the four letters that spelled ‘PITY’ into her forehead with his scalpel. Stussman screamed noiselessly into her gag as blood streamed down her face. Crowan Frayne stepped back to admire his handiwork.

  ‘Now, Heather, you are beautiful,’ he said happily. ‘You are complete. Pity should arouse pain.’ He wiped the scalpel against his trousers and replaced it in his equipment box.

  ‘You bastard!’ Dexter shouted at him. ‘What kind of sick fucker are you?’

  Crowan Frayne held a finger to his mouth and shushed her. He walked over to a bookcase and picked up a small wooden box. He placed it on the table between Dexter and the sobbing Stussman.

  ‘Guess who?’ he asked as he opened the box.

  Dexter saw the two bloodied eyes staring back at her and thought she might be sick. Lucy Harrington and Elizabeth Drury glared angrily at her.

  ‘What do you suppose, Alison Dexter?’ asked Crowan Frayne. ‘Is she not beautiful?’

  ‘Who? All I can see is a bloody mess that you created.’

  ‘You’re closer to the truth than you realize, Alison. As I said, you have the ability to make strange connections. Sometimes you do it in ignorance of yourself. Donne would regard you as a wit. Remember that beauty is born of ugliness. Worthiness is born of failure.’

  ‘We learn from our mistakes?’ Dexter snarled at him. ‘Is that the best you can do? That doesn’t strike me as especially witty. More like a big bloody cliché.’ She stopped herself from saying anything else: there was still one empty space in the eye box.

  ‘I was born of an ugliness, Sergeant Dexter. Unwanted and unloved, an accident that killed my mother as surely as if she’d walked under a bus. I was born in death. Infused with its ugliness at a subatomic level. But my grandmother created beautiful structures in my soul. She was an alchemist where Dr Stussman is an electrician. She refracted darkness and made it light, catalysed music from white noise, drew poetry from the billion dead voices shouting in my head.’

  ‘What has that got to do with us?’ Dexter shouted at him. She had a sense that events were beginning to accelerate. A reckoning was approaching.

  ‘Everything. You see, she hid her ugliness, the darkness of her times and her life. She kept her pain in a wooden box in her bedroom. I found it. The tiny universe of pain and experience she had compressed into this box, into three glass eyes. How fragile and corruptible beauty is. I exposed her horror to the world. It overwhelmed her. I took her placid beauty and made her abhorrent to herself. She saw herself in my eyes and finally knew her own ugliness.’

  Stussman moaned in pain, her face a curtain of blood. Dexter had almost worked her hands free. Now she just needed an opportunity. Frayne moved to the foot of the stairs and rolled the oil drum to the centre of the room.

  ‘So I resolved to become the alchemist, Sergeant Dexter. I decided to take the ugliness I had created, the base matter if you like, and restore it to beauty.’

  ‘You’re replacing her eyes?’ Dexter asked, playing for time.

  ‘I am creating poetry, Alison. I am reaching beyond physics and religion, plugging the gaps in the glistening spider’s web that is man’s self-knowledge. Let’s get Dr Stussman here to help us now she’s had a rest.’ Frayne peeled the tape from Stussman’s mouth. She groaned in agony.

  ‘Doctor, what are the basic characteristics of a metaphysical poem? If you fail to answer I will have to molest Sergeant Dexter’s eyes.’

  Stussman tried to look beyond the pain, to concentrate the agony away. ‘Intellectual rigour, sexual or religious imagery, conceit … performance.’ It was all she could manage. Stussman’s head fell forward and dark spots of blood dropped onto the wooden table.

  ‘You might say, Sergeant Dexter, that the last week has been my own valediction. You must admit it has approached poetry. The rigorous transubstantiation of ugliness into beauty: the bold and bloody imagery, oceans of tears drawn from sightless eyes. Wasn’t my conceit confusing to you at first? Have you not gained knowledge and understanding as it unfolded through Harrington and Drury? Has my performance not entertained and engaged the chosen audience? Has it not dazzled you all with wit and invention? The generation of beauty out of baseness. Violet Frayne’s beauty reborn from the same blood and destruction that once took it from her. It’s alchemy, Alison. It’s the very essence of man’s struggle out of ignorance.’

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ Dexter asked. ‘How does your poem end? I suppose you’ll cut my eye out and bash my head in. That doesn’t strike me as poetry, though. That strikes me as exactly the kind of pig ignorance you say man has been struggling to crawl away from.’

  ‘Why do you think I contacted Dr Stussman? Why did you think I chose women with such specific names? I meant you all to understand, Alison. I took it upon myself to educate. To educate myself and my coterie. To make you worthy. Do you read the Bible, Alison?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Book of Daniel interested Donne. The writing on the wall at the murder sites? Does that not seem reminiscent of the writing on the wall at the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar prophesying the fall of Israel?’

  ‘No. To me it is reminiscent of a maniac with a big fucking ego.’

  Frayne smiled and turned to Stussman. ‘I’m sure the piteous Dr Stussman is familiar with the Book of Daniel. Tell me, doctor –’ Frayne shook Stussman violently until her eyes rolled open and her stare fixed on him ‘– are we not as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego?’

  Dexter started. She remembered her first encounter with Frayne: ‘bedtogoto bedtogo’. Abednego. She hadn’t dreamed it.

  ‘What?’ said Stussman, blinking through the blood that was starting to dry in crusts around her eyes.

  ‘Are we not worthy now? Have I not made us worthy? I have achieved alchemy, you have found pity and Alison has her mind full of strange connections. Together we are the essence of metaphysics.’ Frayne unscrewed the top of the oil drum, ‘Kind pitty chokes my spleene; brave scorn forbids/Those teares to issue which swell my eyelids.’

  Stussman heard the words rise above her pain. The opening couplet of ‘Satyre of Religion’. What did they mean? What was he thinking? She tried to think of his loss, his madness, to put herself in the centre of the inferno that raged inside Crowan Frayne’s mind. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Stussman croaked at Dexter across the table.

  ‘I’m working on it.’ Dexter had one hand free now.

  ‘We’re all going to die.’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Donne called them the children in the oven in his “Satyre of Religion”. He used them as imagery.’

  ‘What oven? What are you talking about?’ Dexter was getting annoyed.

  ‘In the Book of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are cast into a burning furnace to test their faith in God. God saved their lives because of their faith and worthiness.’ Stussman’s wounds were starting to dry and they cracked painfully as she spoke. ‘He sees us as the most worthy.’

  Dexter watched in horror as Crowan Frayne tipped the oil drum over and spilled petrol over the floor. He lifted the container and poured the remainder over the book piles, over the table and finally over himself. He then returned to his seat and pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket. He placed it on the table and took two vicious-looking skin clamps from his box of medical equipment. With her left hand, Dexter frantically picked at the tape that bound her right wrist to the wooden chair. She needed more time. Must talk to him.

  ‘So now what?’ she asked. ‘Burning the house down isn’t poetry.’ The smell of petrol was everywhere. The room was as dangerous as a powder keg. It smelled of death.

  ‘The conceit has almost unfolded, Sergeant Dexter. This process has been educative for us all. You have become a worthy audience and I have become a worthy poet. Are we not poised to become angels?’ With that, Crowan Frayne placed the two eye clamps on the skin above his left eyebrow. Then
he ignited his lighter and threw it into the nearest book stack, which promptly burst into flames. The wall of heat hit Dexter in a second. She only had moments to get out before the whole room exploded into flames. Crowan Frayne let out a high-pitched scream as he drove his scalpel into the ciliary muscles at the side of his left eye.

  Dexter was panicking. The glue on the tape was melting onto her hands, burning at her skin. A final wrench and both her hands were free. The staircase was on fire now and Dexter was gasping for air. She tore at the tape around her ankles. Flames were spreading quickly up the wall. They rolled across the floor in a blue and yellow tide, eating at the legs of the table. Crowan Frayne dropped his scalpel onto the table and pulled a pair of metal forceps from his equipment tray. Dexter tried not to watch as he forced the claws of the instrument into his eye socket and begin to pull on it.

  Finally she was free. She ran around the table to Stussman and desperately tore at the lecturer’s bindings. Fire burned at her feet and her ankles, melting her tights against her skin. Crowan Frayne screamed again as fire washed over his chest and back. With a final terrible effort, he pulled his left eye from its socket and dropped it on the table in a dark pool of blood.

  ‘Is this not the triumph of the will, Sergeant Dexter?’ he screamed.

  The fire was roaring now. She had to get to the staircase fast. Dexter quickly reached across the table, grabbed a scalpel from Frayne’s box and slashed violently at the tape around Stussman’s ankles. It finally came away and Dexter dragged Stussman to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Look, Alison!’ Crowan Frayne shouted through the flames. ‘Love has wrought new alchemy. I have forged beauty from ugliness. She is beautiful again.’ As flames engulfed him, Crowan Frayne held up the highly polished purple-lined box that now contained three eyes.

  Dexter hauled Stussman up the burning staircase with her last vestiges of strength. At the top she turned the door handle and pushed hard against the wooden door. It was locked. For the first time that night, Alison Dexter screamed for help.