The Book of Feasts & Seasons

by John C. Wright

  As you might expect, the first voices I heard, considering the day and hour, were the voices of children. The drug made it impossible to ignore some voices and to concentrate on others–that was the exact brain function the injection had paralyzed–but I could use artificial means to block out unwanted signals: the brass knob of the neuroelectric interference resonator was beneath my fingers. I turned to the middle of the spectrum, well within the normal human range.

  “What masks shall you wear tonight, children?”

  “Oh, mother, I want to be a ghoul for tonight!” and “I am a ghost! I’ll scare Mister Brown!”

  This and other lively chatter I heard.

  Next, I heard the voice of some pundit being interviewed on the radio, a professor of at the local university slightly known to me by reputation. Oddly enough, I could hear both his voice from several points around the town, and where he spoke in the microphone at the radio station at Grover’s Mill. I could also hear the wheezing in his lungs where cigarette ash had wrought ruin. He was speaking of the pagan roots of the Halloween holiday, and he spoke much of Samhain and Celtic lore, and belittled those who adopted such customs into a Christian holiday. The whole matter was unscientific rubbish, or so his tone of voice, the drawling sneers, implied.

  “Things are what they seem to be,” he said positively. “Teaching children that masks and deception are fun, well, it may lead to problematical developmental difficulties later in life. Children are programmed by their experiences, you know, like robots. Empiricism is about realism.”

  Of course, he could not hear, as I heard, the cheers and carrying-on of children of all ages, or the whispers of a toddler dressed as a bunny, but petrified by stage fright, being urged by mother to say the magic phrase of “trick or treat”.

  At the same time, on another station, I heard a preacher with a thick Southern drawl urging parents not to let their little ones participate in the mischief of the night. “Why teach the young ‘uns to look like evil critters, I ask ye that, brethren? Why give evil honor?” There was no corresponding living voice. This had been tape recorded, perhaps decades ago.

  I increased the gain on my equipment, and began slowly inching my way down the dial. Soon my senses were filled with the sounds and smells of opium dens, flophouses, jails, gutters, and I heard such crimes planned, such screams, such gasps of whispered hate as will not soon leave me; or the murmur of suicides composing their farewell notes; and curses, and harsh, thudding, dark music.

  Down I went again, and soon only the snarls of beasts was in my ears, but not of friendly or domesticated animals. This part of the spectrum was only occupied by those moments of terror and rage and desperation which come when an animals fights for its life, and rips with its jaws and takes the life of another.

  Further down the dial was the zone of silence Tillinghast describes. My equipment was finer than his. He was working in his day with such crude vacuum tubes it is a wonder he received any signals at all.

  At the very bottom, I heard a voice speaking in a language never spoken on Earth. With my neural matrix paralyzed, the methods we use to block the understanding of the meanings of foreign tongues were not available to me. The pain of those words was more than I can say: I bit down on the capsule I had been carrying under my tongue just for such an eventuality, and a spreading numbness shielded me from the worst of it.

  “What masks shall you wear tonight, O ye thrones, virtues, powers and potentates of this, my realm?”

  “I shall appear as a learned man, O Dark Prince, and lead those ensnared in intellectual pride astray.”

  “I shall appear as a man of the cloth, solemn and wise, and lead those who trust in him down your dark paths by easy and unnoticed turnings, and make the love of money or the concern for the conditions of the world appear more holy than holiness itself.”

  “And I shall appear as an angel of light, so that even the Elect, if it may be, might be deceived.”

  Up the dial I went. Soon I was hearing only the voices, or catching odd visionary glimpses, of men of unparalleled genius, or soldiers or firemen in the midst of some act of superhuman bravery, or hearing nuns at prayer. Gentler music I heard, the whisper of silvery strings.

  Above this were elfin sounds, and I heard crystalline voices amid the waves, or the sound of dance on grassy lawns beneath the moon, the carouse of kings and queens not of mortal kindred.

  Hours passed, and I listened with delight, amazed at what hidden things exist right before our eyes, unseen, unseeable. I offer no explanation: but the thought burning in me then was one of giddy joy. I was thinking of Doyle’s theory of an offshoot race of man that had discovered the art of perceptual interference at about the same time we Homo sapiens had mastered the art of making fire. We produced tools and smelted gold and put the animal world beneath our feet. They opened doorways we cannot see, and gathered kingdoms to themselves, and ruled the worlds of dreaming as we rule the day.

  I was at the edge of the range of my equipment, and, perhaps due to some quirk in the upper ionosphere I heard quite clearly the music sung by orbital resonances, and the electromagnetic choirs of the stars as they perturb the galactic magnetosphere in their huge and ancient orbits.

  Another voice spoke. “My Son, in whom I am well pleased, what mask shall you wear this night?”

  A voice so stern and yet so lovely I would give anything to hear it again answered him: “I will walk among my brothers, as fully human as are they, in the shape of the hungry, the ill-used, the orphaned, the worthless, the weak, the prisoner in the jail.”

  A third voice, neither male nor female, but singing as if a metal string made of gold was plucked to give it voice, or a thread of white hot fire answered: “I will make note of who opened their hand to you, and who turns their face away.”

  The rheostat blew out of my main amplifier then, and I jumped from the couch to my feet, tearing the headset from my head, blinking in confusion, trying to bring my senses back to the room.

  For I had heard the voice of my servant Froward at the front door, angrily turning a hungry man away, telling him the treats being given out were only for the children, not dirty beggars.

  I ran down stairs, stumbling, hoping I would be in time.

  Nativity

  Advent, The Vigil of the Nativity

  “Mr. Went, if you could visit anyone in the world, any time, any place, who would you go see? Oh, not for a long time. Long visits are never permitted. But just for a moment, just for an embrace or a long look, no longer?”

  His words were not in English, and I did not speak any modern Romance tongues, but he must have been a priest or a scholar, because he and I could make ourselves understood to each other in Latin and in Greek. We were two living men with two dead languages in common.

  I was not sure where I was. The streets in these ancient cities are narrow and crooked, and they don’t put the names on street signs.

  The stranger in the top hat and long coat did not linger to hear an answer. Now he paused to listen to some children singing carols—I remember they sang O Come Emmanuel, but the words were not in English—while waiting for me to climb the alley. I had stopped walking.

  It was not that I was tired, it was just that I was used to the broad and flat streets of the American Midwest, so, to me, the sight of a cobblestone street turning into broad stairs for part of its climb was a novelty. It was, no doubt, a street older than my whole nation.

  I wanted to make a comment to my wife, but she, of course, was not there. In my pocket was a small Christmas gift for her, wrapped in gold paper. I had put it in the pocket of the dark and formal coat I donned for the funeral. I had intended to leave it at the grave, but the idea of bright, cheery, frivolous colors of wrapping paper beneath the granite headstone, on the darkness of the newly-turned earth, seemed unbearably hateful to me.

  And I still wanted to say something to her, to share my thoughts, to share my life. And I could not. So I had paused, wrestling with the aching emptine
ss inside me.

  I turned my eyes outward. Between the narrow and dark houses looming to either side, the gap of the alley fell like a stone waterfall, as if the stair were the broken rapids, and in that gap I could see the famous city spread out below me, adorned to celebrate Christmas. I could see the festive lights in the distance.

  The stranger came up beside me, offering me a handful of the roast chestnuts he had just bought from a street vendor. The children singing he had shooed away by passing out the brightly colored paper which looked to me like Monopoly money.

  I gestured to the view below. We were halfway up one of the seven hills. “There are more Christmas trees than there were years ago.”

  He said, “You have been to the Eternal City before?”

  “My wife is from here. Was. She–excuse me.”

  He passed me a handkerchief, and turned as if to look at the city. “The Christmas tree is a Germanic custom. Such things travel south to the more civilized nations somewhat slowly. It is in the nativity scene where the Italian genius is manifested. You should see the one displayed at the Church of Saints Cosma and Damiano! It was commissioned by Charles III of Naples. Six master woodcarvers labored on the scene for forty years, adding new figures each year! And in the Santa Maria Maggiore, where the first Christmas Mass was said, is a presepe, the permanent display of the crib. The reliquary below the altar is said to contain pieces of the original manger. History is fascinating, is it not? Are you ready to go?”

  I nodded. The stranger walked a short way up the alley, took out an enormous key and bent over the lock of intricately wrought black iron gates. The iron gates were decorated with images of roses and winged skulls. With a groaning clang they opened. Beyond was a courtyard shaped like an L, closed in on each side by windowless brick walls, and in the midst of the court was a dry well, filled with leaves and dust, rusting under a tiny roof.

  Around the corner of the courtyard, up the shorter arm of the L, were more stairs guarded by worn winged lions, their gaping mouths filled with grit and dust, and the grime of their faces made them seem to weep.

  To my surprise, the front door to the old house was not locked. He opened the door and stood in the doorway, fumbling with something on a small table set immediately by the door. There was the click of an electric striker, a flicker of flame, and the stranger lit a candle, which he carefully placed in a black iron candlestick. Inside he went, lighting his way with the candle, beckoning me to follow.

  “The power is out?” I said. I could hear the singing of the children in the street below clearly enough, but the door was so heavy and so well fitted to the frame that all noise from the outside was cut off the moment I shut it.

  “There is power here,” said the stranger, smiling crookedly. “More than enough to shatter the cosmos. But the site has never been electrified. It would identify the era too closely, and disturb the anachronic echo effect. Come. The machine is in the attic.”

  I followed him. A narrow wooden stairway led upward and upward. The walls to either side were painted with figures of satyrs chasing nymphs through patterns of grape leaves, but in the dim light, the figures seemed distorted, and the lolling tongues and goat-horned heads of the satyrs gave them sadistic, blank-eyed expressions.

  The attic was brighter than the house, because large and narrow skylights admitted the colored hues of the festively-lit city as well as the slanting rays of the moon. In the middle of the blank, wooden floor was a shape covered with a tarp. The stranger handed me the candle, stepped over, and drew aside the tarp with a theatrical flourish, like a stage magician revealing his pretty assistant, alive and unchained. But a cloud of dust flew up at the breeze, and it blew out the candle, so the dramatic effect was ruined.

  I had no clear view of the machine. In the moonlight, and the flicker of changing Christmas lights from some nearby building taller than the house, I could see there was a small saddle or seat facing two levers connected to a rotating cylinder. The cylinder was connected by a mess of wires to a crystal bar that glinted strangely in the moonlight. This crystal formed the axis of the machine. My eyes could not focus properly on it. No matter how I moved my head, the inside reflections of the crystal bar seemed to be farther away than the body of the machine around it, as if it were not a crystal bar, but a crystal slot, or a well opening into unexpected depth. Behind the saddle was a large and upright copper disk, connected to a gearbox.

  The whole arrangement looked something like a crystal-poled metal parasol lying on its side taking a ride on a sled, and the saddle straddled the pole, and the cylinder and levers formed an off-center handle.

  There were scrollwork and flourishes on the brass, a windrose on the copper disk, and little cherubic faces on the cylinder, which betrayed that this was made in the days when the machines were works of art, and machinists were magicians.

  The stranger said, “Unfortunately, the dials are decimal. It is an oddity of the inventor. This dial indicates how many tens of days you have passed through; this one hundreds of days; thousands; tens of thousands. You will have to be clever in your calculations to know the month and the year of your arrival.”

  “Or I could my just use my phone,” I said, giving him an odd look. I was sure someone, somewhere on the Internet had set up an application to calculate such things.

  The stranger scowled and shrugged. “I am not familiar with such a gizmo.” (There was no Latin word for “gizmo” of course, he just said the English word. If that is an English word.)

  I said. “The book by H.G. Wells never gives the Time Traveler a name. You say he is real. Who is the inventor? Why is he not ruling the world?”

  He threw out his chest and spoke in solemn tones. “The Time Traveler is Nikola Tesla. Anyone reading the book by Wells in that day and age would have recognized the man at once–part showman, part madman, all genius.

  “The machine itself was built in Menlo Park some time during the 1870′s, with the help, and, to be blunt, despite the interference, of Thomas Alva Edison, who saw no practical use for it.

  “In 1895, a man named George Scherff, Tesla’s legal and fiscal adviser, gave an account of Tesla’s voyage into the future into the hands of Mr. Wells to put it into publishable form, since the account would not have been believed if given as fact.

  “The machine was thought lost in the great fire that destroyed Mr. Edison’s great factory in 1914. Mr. Tesla is not ruling the world because a Nazi agent killed him in 1943.”

  I frowned at the stranger. “How could a man as bright as Edison see no practical use for time travel? Anyone would see the advantage of being able to read tomorrow’s stock market results or racing form.”

  “The machine did not perform well until it was taken to Scotland. America is a young nation.”

  “What does that matter?”

  The stranger said, “The machine works by a resonance effect. Think of time as a stream, but certain events are rocks in that stream, rocks that make eddies, ripples, echoes. This is why there is no need for you to physically move the machine to the cottage where your wedding night took place. Merely touching your wedding ring to the forward cylinder will attune the crystal. Your wedding ring is an object that carries time with it. Anything used as a memento is.”

  I instinctively clasped my hand over my ring, as if to protect it. “It is just a bit of gold. There must be something else involved. Something more.”

  He nodded. “Time will never be understood by any era which divides matter from psyche and disbelieves in everything but matter. Is eternity not a psychic reality? Mind and body are one, even as time and space are one. Man alone of all the beasts fears the future and regrets the past. Tesla understood this. The machine cannot be operated by any man who is too perfectly satisfied with his own time. The time traveler must yearn–”

  I had been standing with my back him, inspecting, as well as I could, the half-seen shapes and shadows of the machine. Now I turned, and the motion startled him, for he jumped back, putting his
hand in his coat pocket as if there were a gun there.

  I said, “So that is why you were hovering like a vulture over the graveyard?”

  He said, “Think of it as a privilege, Mr. Went. Not everyone can operate the machine. Very few are allowed to even try.”

  “Allowed?”

  He licked his lips. “There is a certain danger to the operation, of which, ah, perhaps it slipped my mind, and I failed to warn you.”

  I uttered a sad, little laugh. “I just buried the only reason I had to live. What should I fear?”

  “Well, in that case, there is no need to dwell on–”

  “Perhaps I should also tell you that I am not afraid to hurt you if you don’t tell me what is going on.”

  “You have nothing to lose. I understand.”

  “Then talk!”

  “Very well. The time machine’s principles are not difficult to understand, and a working model is not difficult to build. It was, or will be, discovered again in 1968 by Dr. Ann McGregor and then again by Dr. Sam Beckett in 1999; then, after the Great Collapse, by the Revisionists of the Second Era, and, when they have destroyed themselves, the horrible living machines of the Third Era, who attempted to undo the diverse paradoxes and time-snarls their predecessors left behind them. The Nexxial Agents, who travel as amnesiacs, form the Fourth Era of Time Travel, and so on, age after age and civilization after civilization, until the Danellians of the Final Era.”