The Liquid Prisoner (from The Liquid Prisoner: Three Stories, by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)
I've told this story before. And now I am writing it down, just in case something else happens and changes everything.
1
By the time the alarm was raised the house was deserted and Darius Stenof, the carpenter, was not seen again. And from what those who had visited the house – some with better reasons than others – said afterwards about it, the rumor was circulated that the carpenter had vanished a week prior to the discovery of his absence. And other than a collection of bottles dug up in his garden, filled with lists cataloguing the contents of the house, no further evidence of either the intentions or the reasons for the carpenter’s disappearance were apparent. And if the authorities worked out a solution, based on what they discovered and established at the old house, no such solution was offered to the public.
What can it mean?, his neighbors asked. And for years the incident remained a choice ingot in their evening conversations. It was a topic which when discoursed on and developed would nag at them, and in painful spasms sobered and recollected them to their vulgar curiosity and gossiping habits until every hair on their heads responded.
2
What followed the burial of Darius Stenof's father was no indication that something had been long overdue. But whatever it was, and the story bears this out, it had been progressing steadily towards it. And the other crucial detail not to be overlooked was that the Stenofs kept to themselves. Hence the suspicions, the unneighborly premonitions and the visible relief and relish with which nearly everyone greeted the conclusion.
The Stenofs kept away from one and all indiscriminately. They had done so scrupulously since the fatal accident that cost Madame Stenof her life. Her passing accentuated certain irregularities in Darius' character. The father, Anselm Stenof, thirty-nine years old when he bid his wife of sixteen years a last farewell, could not be described as having taken much notice of his wife's absence. If he did he was unwilling to let his son catch him at it. Not a troublesome task to master for a man who had always been disdainful of squandering words for the sake of making an impression.
Talk is foolish. A tool to misguide others with. Such were the rare remarks Anselm passed on to his only progeny. Remarks that insinuated themselves into Darius' life, even when he could not have recognized their presence or know the tenor of influence his father's few observations were exerting.
Talk is foolish and noisy, Anselm told his son.
3
As a carpenter Darius might not have rated high, but he was sufficiently efficacious to cut and shape wood as he chose. All manner of strange objects, some of them beautiful, came into being through his tireless and eccentric efforts. Objects which troubled and worried his employers, the monks of Saint Boniface of Tyllsdum. These artifacts, the Father Abbot warned him, are not godly things.
4
Darius numbered and counted the windows, he counted the doors, the metal locks, he counted the cupboard shelves, he counted the rough white linen his mother had made and left him. He reckoned every item useful and otherwise which in some fashion belonged to him. He counted and numbered and catalogued them in his slow and quivering script on long sheets of paper.
He did not find writing congenial. It came slow, when it did come. He'd not ever established much familiarity with it. For one thing he'd not required its companionship. Although he eventually did admit to himself that writing could reach a degree of faithfulness once one acquired something of its oblique essence.
He was up at four in the morning, every morning, drank a cup of boiled water with a few hard coffee beans, ate a piece of bread with a slab of salt-dried pork, and set off for the abbey with a leather bag.
5
His father's last words to him were, I'll leave the last question to you. And he died.
Seven months after his father’s burial Darius at last accepted the disappearance of objects from the house. It was a repugnant discovery, and what the objects were he could not initially identify. But he sensed their absence nevertheless.
At first forks, knives and loafs of bread went missing. Later chairs, doors, even windows vanished. He was stopped, thwarted by walls which had not been placed where he'd known them to be (he'd first seen the light of day in that house) all his life. The house disoriented and tortured him. Here he languished in isolation. A powerlessness against daily deterioration.
He did not trust his memory, or the ways and tendencies of his body. I know myself a prisoner, he reminded himself.
6
The monks at Saint Boniface of Tyllsdum tended to the whims of their carpenter, despite his obvious lapses into irresponsible superstition. Outright paganism (notions he couldn't keep to himself and propagated among the celibate and kindly religious brothers), in some instances. Father Nimorous, the Abbot, liked and doted on the young man. He had christened and seen the boy through nearly all of the days of his natural life. It was he who sent a party of the abbey's brothers to investigate the carpenter's disappearance when he had failed to report for work.
7
The tedious chore of keeping lists, with the laborious business of having to add or subtract items to it daily led him to conclude that the safety and accuracy of his catalogue depended now on the where and the how it was kept. It wasn't, he felt, safe to simply leave it on his workbench, or even in the large oaken chest he kept under the bed. Circumstances edged him. He couldn't ignore the direction things were taking. It was a destiny which he'd neither foreseen nor could organize to suit and serve his own ends.
8
He sat at the workbench and brooded over the difficulties, staring obliviously in front of him. He stared long and fruitless hours. Aches to his eyes were about the sole benefit he reaped. Eventually he resolved on a circuitous way of protecting the lists. He would place them inside bottles and bury them in the back garden. In different places every night. And he'd do so only under the cover of darkness.
He adopted the plan and saw it through for weeks. Burying the lists in the yard at night and digging them up again in the morning, that he might consult and check the veracity of their contents. The discrepancies, however, persisted, and his humble and ready optimism lapsed.
9
He languished in his lonely pursuit, certain that the way of perfecting his methods and means of keeping the lists accurate and safe from the invisible thieves was next to impossible. For he recognized them and named them dark and malevolent angels, thieving angels. A matter for his confessor, the Father Abbot, to wrangle with. He had no head for such critical delicacies of the spirit.
Who were these treacherous creatures, and what divine purpose did they fill? Was his misfortune the result of some physical or spiritual error? What was Darius' role?
He resolved to maintain a cloaked silence about the going-ons in his house. He told the more intimate of his monk friends little of consequence, and nothing about the lists and the vanishing objects. Although he had voiced strange queries within hearing of Father Nimorous, and these questions gained him access to the old and patient Abbot.
Tell me what's been tormenting you, Darius, the Father Abbot said in his cautious and pleasant manner. I've noticed a strangeness affecting your every word and movement.
Darius said nothing in his defense. What could be said about his silence, or his awkwardness, or his periodic trembling fits? He was alone. It would serve no purpose to elaborate for the Father Abbot's pleasure and curiosity. It wouldn't cost Father Nimorous anything at all.
Your father died a peaceful man, the old monk continued. He lived a good life, mindful of others, charitable to the less fortunate. Yes, I liked and saw goodness in your father's ways.
Darius' silence was not corrupted.
The Father Abbot glared at the carpenter for a time. You're not your father's son, Darius.
Involuntarily Darius' mouth opened. How am I not my father's son?
Your father confided in me. He brought me his confessions. I was at home in the insecurities, the frailties, the deviations of his heart, Father Nimorous explained without rancor.
The reply comforted Darius. The initial apprehensions, as to the direction the conversation was assuming, were lifted from him. He was safe from scrutiny. The old monk hadn't questioned him (even if he'd warmed to it) about the provenance of his thoughts. He'd twirled around, enough to drive him to make giddy and queer associations. He posed himself a question. Where could he turn for assistance now?
10
Sit yourself down, Darius, the Father Abbot told the carpenter. Take a chair.
Darius set his tool-bag at his feet and occupied the nearest chair.
From his desk Father Nimorous took up a notebook. Young Brother Lapidis, he said, has come to me with a problem.
Darius did not raise his head to look at Father Nimorous.
You're as close a friend of Brother Lapidis as he's got. You are the same age.
The carpenter neither turned nor answered.
Of course you must have things in common, continued the monk with a nod.
Darius leaned over the side and gave his bag a passing glance.
The Father Abbot came about and stood behind the carpenter. He was still talking. He's been describing very special thieves to me.
With the notebook still cradled in his hands Father Nimorous took a chair half-the-room away and opposite Darius.
Can you guess type of thieves?
Darius leveled his gaze and for the first time during the interview fixed it on the monk.
Angels, brought forth the carpenter.
Father Nimorous' eyes narrowed. Angels, he repeated after Darius. You've not mentioned angels in your confessions.
I can't accuse them of anything.
Impatiently the Abbot said, That's not what Brother Lapidis has given me to understand. He's asked to be transferred to another abbey.
He's afraid, retorted Darius in a dull- lifeless manner.
The monk corrected him. You have frightened him.
He plied me with questions and obliged me to furnish explanations. I told him what I know.
How have you come by this information?
Darius raised his head. Dreams, he said.
The Father Abbot abandoned his chair and set about pacing the small room, his notebook under his right arm and his hands hidden inside the folds of his robe.
Darius lowered his head and kept his gaze within the tiny circle between the tips of his boots. He proffered upon Father Nimorous the sort of distance he'd granted his father. An affinity had existed between the monk and Anselm Stenof while the latter was alive. Darius had noticed exchanges between them. He had followed the manner of their respective physical responses, the way they walked and swung arms and legs, the way in unguarded moments when they kept still and remained silent, the posture they assumed in the vicinity of trees, the way they shuffled under the rain and bolted for cover. He had watched them. Now it was just the Abbot, and, still, it resembled the old tension.
Dreams are dangerous, Darius. People who trusted themselves to dreams, the monk expounded, in the not so distant past, were burned by the authorities.
Darius kept his eyes on the bag at his feet.
Father Nimorous crossed his arms, after first pulling at the wide folds and sleeves of his robe.
Dreams lead to temptations. To sin, the Father Abbot shouted. You've sinned the sin of pride, the sin of arrogance, Darius. You've placed yourself outside God's jurisdiction. What can be more arrogant and reckless than that? Answer me, my son. Tell me about your thieving angels. Describe them to me, shouted the monk. Confess your sins to the Almighty this moment and all shall be forgiven.
But not forgotten, added Darius in a whisper.
Speak up, Darius.
Forgiven but not forgotten, repeated the carpenter.
Forgotten? How can you expect God to forget anything? He forgives everything, but forgets nothing. With a judge's finality the monk reiterated, He has seen it all and remembers it all.
What about the angels in my dreams? How do they get into my head?, ventured the carpenter.
You've summoned them. Just as surely as you are standing here, before me.
I summoned no one. They've come to my house and stolen my things. They have stolen walls, and windows, and forks and benches. They've even taken doors and most of my father's tools and drawings. Whatever was taken I have not seen again.
Father Nimorous gawked. You're accusing angels of theft? Why angels?
They have appeared in my dreams with the doors and the forks, my father's things and drawings, and the walls. I saw them. They were angels. I saw them distinctly and they showed me my things.
Did they speak with you?
Yes, acknowledged Darius with a nod. They laugh and shout and dance. They showed me bits of wall from my house.
How do you know the bits and things are yours?
Because they tell me and show me the marks.
What marks?
The marks, said Darius.
Father Nimorous turned and caught Darius peering at the tool-bag.
What's in the bag?
Darius' back stiffened.
What have you got in the bag?
The carpenter took up his bag and left his chair, retreating as the monk advanced upon him.
Let's have the bag, Darius.
It's late, Father Nimorous. I've got a long walk...
The Father Abbot interrupted him, Have supper with me and spend the night with us.
The carpenter reached the door and pulled it open. A good night to you, Father. I'll be back before Sunday.
There was nothing to be done for it. The carpenter dashed down the unlit corridor, disappearing after a few steps, before the monk could reach the door.
11
It is possible that Darius' last thoughts are for Zinza and the meadow she discovered one day, early in the month of June. A field covered by water and thousands of green and yellowish (all-spotted) and brown frogs of every size. She had bullied him there, brought him by the hand and with lashes from her sharp and ironic tongue, to see for himself. For I want you to tell me what it is and how such a place as this is what it is, you know, she told him, squeezing his hand, plucking him like a string instrument for solitary notes and chords. Her descriptions of the place had left him wondering. It was, on the whole, a perplexing experience.
The flooded field was where she'd claimed it would be. The tongue and the voice and the music it accompanied had not missed the mark. Not by a single decimal. And she had divined as much with an extra wink from the left eye to him. So, the flooded field, the borders of hedges and the waist-high walls of broken stones individually matched and fitted. There were old and weathered wooden stiles, as well as great trees shaking their old heads in the wind. The field, additionally, could reduce the boy to a smallness he’d not counted on. The site and its character brought him to the swelling of tears and sighs, and a crushing embrace from Zinza. And there was a kiss. And this was perhaps what Zinza had foreseen by bringing the boy to witness the slinking transformations of the hidden field. A hidden field wrinkled by the whims and affectations of time. That's what the place was called, the Hidden Field. It had no owner. Even if papers filed in the municipal library matched the spot to a corresponding name in the parish. This personage (known to a handful of municipal officials) was grand by virtue of both his unobtrusiveness and his unmatched invisibility.
Niels, Zinza's eighteen year old brother, proposed a bizarre use for the frogs. He was a lugubrious and lumbering creature who talked to people when the fancy struck him, or conversely and with as much ease and naturalness, abandoned himself to a diet of solitary ramblings across fields and valleys and to the toiling up the sides of mountains. And all, according to Niels, for the sake of a good view and generous helpings of silence. I have no use for companions and even less for conversation. That evening Darius learned that however unschooled and extravagant a prattler Zinza's brother was principled and inspired. He aired views and conjectures about everything, most earnestly expressed (even when they were odd-sounding and crudely reasoned). He could work most of his answers to a fine political excellence. Notwithstanding his many talents he was perpetually in conflict with all who knew him. Neighbors and relatives included.
The sole exception was Zinza. And this is why he also took Darius into his confidence and made of him something resembling a friend. A gesture Darius was proud of and reciprocated. It also forced him to withhold judgment on Zinza's brother, whatever else he heard or was whispered about Niels.
I'm a nonconformist in a dull place, Niels told his sister and her friend Darius. It's like being, or rather to be more precise, having been a long time living resident at the cemetery. Who does one talk to in such a place? But why bother with explanations. I'm me, and everybody else is everybody else. Nothing will change the paradigm. It shall require several lifetimes of constant trench digging to solve this little darling of a squeezer.
A squeezer?, echoed young Darius with a tilt of his wavy-and-fair-haired head.
Zinza, looking rather vexed and turning to her brother with an apologetic grin, said, A squeezer is a squeezer. Understand?
Darius nodded in the affirmative and questioned Niels expressions not ever again. Not in his presence, at any rate. Although Zinza was not entirely forthcoming when it came to elucidating Niels' unconventional manner of expression. If she had grasped what Niels had shared with both her and Darius, then she, for reasons of her own, grudged Darius the advantage. And no more could be done about it.
The frogs will help us pass the time, Niels muttered one afternoon.
How?, asked Zinza.
Collect about twenty hefty-ones and bring them to me. And with that he slithered across the meadow, beating the waist-high grass with a stick, whistling fierce calls.
Darius watched him get up on the flint-wall and leap across, to the side opposite, a wild shout in his throat.
Where's he going?, Darius asked.
To the road, Zinza said, scooping frogs into her bulging coat-pockets.
How many frogs do we need?
As many as we can carry.
She had filled her coat and was already on the way, taking the path Niels had cleared.
Wait, shouted Darius after her. Wait. I can't move.
Step over them, Zinza encouraged him. They'll die anyway.
I can't. Please, come back.
See you, laughed Zinza.
The tall grass swayed above her head and Darius lost sight of her. He saw the green path ahead, parting, widening, and, periodically, something of Zinza's head.
Darius peered about him helplessly, calling out, Zinza, wait. Zinza … Zinza …
12
Niels waited by the road, in a ditch. Between his teeth he had a long green straw and lay on his back. When he saw them he spat out the straw, straightened stiffly, and drew his long and hairy muscular legs against his chest.
Come here, he ordered them, with a hand up in the air.
Bring the frogs here.
The dirt about Zinza's mouth contrasted not unfavorably with the red splotches on her fleshy cheeks. Her white dress, purple-fringed and elaborately frilled, was covered with grass smudges and spots.
She emptied her pockets between Niels' legs. Darius kneeled next to her and imitated the scooping action, dropping his frogs in the circle Niels’ legs provided.
Niels regarded his two young comrades before shifting his curiosity exclusively to the amphibians.
Out of the corner of his left eye Darius darted a glance at Zinza. But Zinza's attention was solely on he brother, on his hands and his mouth, and the long green straw wedged between his teeth.
Then Darius noticed what Zinza awaited in silence so beatifically for. Niels was thrusting the straw, without wincing, into the frogs, one by one, and inflating them until they were almost spherical.
Here was something Darius couldn't emulate. Not even if Zinza pleaded with him. It sickened him to look on and so turned away. He cowered against the wall of the ditch. He had scraped himself earlier and now discerned a trickle of blood in the dirt caked about his knees.
Come closer, Darius, said Zinza reproachfully. You'll miss it.
Niels raised his head and stared at the boy briefly. What's wrong with him?, he asked Zinza.
The girl shrugged her shoulders and said, He's scared.
I'm not, Darius shot back. But if it was not true that he was frightened, it was quite true that he was revolted by the sight of the abnormally swollen creatures. It made his hands, his forehead and his feet quite cold.
I'm not scared, he repeated.
Zinza ignored him. She wouldn't be deterred from watching Niels.
The chore of inflating the frogs over Niels and Zinza counted them. There were thirty-six of them struggling to leap and flee by means of their long and slippery limbs. But Niels had rendered them grotesquely inadequate by his brutal intervention.
What'll happen to them?, inquired Darius.
Zinza turned to Niels for the answer.
We'll line them up along the ruts.
Darius panicked. What ruts?
The road, said Niels. We'll wait here. No one shall see us. Sooner or later a cart will come along.
Zinza laughed. Boooom!
Niels raised his hands and parted them in a flower-like motion.
13
Darius did not care for electric lighting. It was costly and could turn unfriendly. It furnished a dull and miserable mushroom of light in his kitchen. Such views arrested the further installation of electricity in the house. Anselm Stenof had shared his son's sentiments.
Now it mattered but in the most trivial ways. He was alone and could keep it off if he wished to. Keep it off months at a time. Or never switch it back on again.
I'm alone, a voice said inside him. What good does light do me? I don't work at home. It's wasteful and I am poor. This isn't the abbey. And it was not the abbey. Sitting at his workbench he labored the arguments. He folded and unfolded the arguments many times and for as many vexing reasons.
His gaze hooked itself up on the bare light bulb. It dangled from it like a piece of fruit from a treeless ceiling. An unlikely fertile spot for any manner of fruit.
I'm alone. The one other obstacle resembled Do I belong here? It's my home and I belong here.
He did reach his destination. For it was the it. The uncertainty he lived with. The provocation. It was becoming palpable enough for him to bestow a name on it. While Father Nimorous carried on about God and the beautiful. And other things besides.
14
It'd be different if I could watch you eat, he told Gabriella.
His words elicited an animal grin from her, as she undressed.
It was Darius, again, who declared, It'd be like coming home to a wife. Wouldn't it?
How would you know what coming home to a wife is like?, she squealed.
I came home to my mother, and later to my father, for years.
That's grand, howled the prostitute, as she tidily and self-consciously placed her under-things and her dress on the chair next to the night table. But it's hardly the same thing, you boor!
His legs wide apart, Darius sat on the edge of the bed, unbuttoning his trousers and unhitching the ends of his shirt. His head was stuffed like a sack of apples, abandoned in a corner of the attic. His predicament was similar that is, as he undressed, aiming looks of distress and weariness at Gabriella. It couldn't be said that he was listening or looking at anything, or even thinking about anything.
You'll be asking for my hand in matrimony next, said Gabriella getting in bed.
He called this place Gabriella's room, which it was not. It was rented for business. In any case he was not curious about the prostitute. He saw plainly enough that she was about his own age. Or could she be ten years older and not look it? What did not require confirmation was that she hadn't ever been a resident of Würde, or that she had any relatives in town.
What would watching Gabriella eating in her own home reveal? How, he pondered, can she turn out to be other than she's already become? But as he bared his teeth on her right shoulder and pulled hard into her he reconsidered his flippant assessment. She was not unlike him. They were both here, in this room and on this bed, fucking, out of loneliness and not desire.
What's the matter?, Gabriella asked.
He had slipped out of her.
The carpenter locked his left arm about her waist and turned his head away, replying, It'd make me look at you and think of you differently if I had watched you cook and if we'd shared a meal in your own kitchen.
My man was a soldier, years ago, Gabriella said. I took up whoring then, when he was away. I did it because he sent no money home. He sent nothing.
Darius turned to look and stare.
She went on. I was a child, pretty and strong, and my breasts were firm and my arse hard and high. Nineteen I was.
She flung the covers aside and got hold of one of her breasts.
Look at this. Look at it now. I was nineteen when I started.
Darius peered at the breast Gabriella held in the cup of her hand.
Look at what's left of me now, she sighed. The voice originated somewhere inside the woman next to him. But it required imagination and effort to match it to the humorless, unhappy lump of muscle and teeth and eyeballs and bags under the eyes. Look at me, Gabriella commanded. And he stared back.
I come from a place not unlike this town. It's also by the sea.
How do you get here?, Darius asked.
By train and bus. And, the last ten kilometers, walking.
Why walking?, he said.
I don't care to be seen and pointed at or anything else. I walk the last few kilometers and it aids my transformation. I forget myself and pretend I'm another woman.
Darius said little after that and eventually slept. When he opened his eyes Gabriella had gone. The week was over. He had been the very last customer of the month. In two months' time, by the first or second week of April, she'd be back in Würde.
The window was wide open. There was still plenty of snow on the ground, frozen.
15
During a weeklong blizzard Darius went missing. Concerned for his safety the Abbot of Saint Boniface of Tyllsdum organized the monks and sent them off. Within two days the carpenter was found buried head-high in the snow and tied up to a tree. He was brought back to the abbey unconscious.
Darius was delirious for twenty-nine hours, during which time he dreamed about a horse in a stable and old woman setting fire to the hay in the stable. He heard the wild and desperate neighing of the four-legged creature, as well as the kicking at the walls and partitions, and heard the woman's moth-like laughter rising with the pall of smoke and the tongues of fire flicking and issuing from every corner.
Slowly, the patient recovered. And although small of frame his robust constitution saved him. The coughing subsided, the fevers quit his body, and his senses resumed the obligatory conduct of their duties. He was complete again.
A view the Abbot expound upon liberally. You're whole again, Darius. Make good use of your newly restored powers.
Thank you, Father Nimorous. I'd like to go home tomorrow.
It's too early. You'll not be leaving your bed for at least a week. Your cure requires constant and careful supervision.
Darius sat up. I'm better, Father Abbot. I shall fall behind my work if I don't get home right away.
Your work can wait.
His vision blurred and with difficulty Darius wriggled himself under the covers.
Father Nimorous signaled the two monks by the door to leave the room.
I'll come back later, said the Father Abbot from the door, his hand on the knob. Sleep now, Darius.
16
When Darius sketched his tongue curled out of the corners of his mouth. Sometimes, very seldom, he noticed it.
The Father Abbot gave instructions to keep the carpenter supplied with what tools and materials he requested. And so for five uninterrupted days Darius dedicated himself exclusively to his drawings.
Father Nimorous did not disturb him. He received, however, hourly reports on the activities and behavior of his guest. So he was hardly in the dark as to Darius' progress. The carpenter's plans were another matter.
The snow was still frozen on the ground. The wind blew and the leafless trees shook and waved and boomed and whistled. The hills kept their vigil, frozen, dismally trapped in the winter darkness. The mottled coat of the fossilized vegetation was pressed into the ground by a nameless gray and anvil-shaped sky. The weight of the sky itself was black.
The snow was piled high on the ground and frozen. Darius could see as much from the abbey's kitchen windows.
He came to the kitchen to sit down on the hard benches he and his father had crafted. He ate cold soup and hard bread. One afternoon Brother Toldini offered him dried figs from Artænas Island.
A cell was assigned to him and he worked there in complete isolation. He kept all finished drawings in his workbag. He grew obsessive and secretive about them, covering them when a noise reached him from behind the door.
It was a novelty. He'd not ever enjoyed anything resembling the conditions at the abbey. Although it was no less true that he knew and cultivated true solitude in his own home. And the light at home was superb and superior to anything here. Anselm Stenof had seen to the ministrations of light by uncovering one entire side of the house. A luxurious (a monstrous frivolity, in Darius's mother's own words) addition to the house, the skylight Anselm Stenof had installed.
Yes, the light in his own studio was perfection itself. But here at the abbey, the proximity of the sea, around the orange and purple lines of the horizon, hopelessly imprisoned him. And it was futile thinking otherwise.
17
Darius Stenof was fourteen when he first ventured beyond Grouffe. The railway tracks had inspired him. He listened to their humming and followed them. He walked all morning and chanced on a promontory, where he sat as much to catch his breath as to take notice of the view. There was much to admire, much that was alien. There was something he could not name, and lingered over the landscape. Hunger made him sleepy and he succumbed to the pull.
A passing train startled him. It delivered him to the world about him. And he started back for Grouffe that instant.
Waiting by the door, when Darius finally reached home, was his father, gripping a leather belt with the right hand.
I never reached the tunnel, Darius screamed as his father thrashed him.
In bed he listened for the train whistle. He knew exactly where it penetrated the mountainside, and that it blew a warning blast before vanishing in the dark orifice.
A burning, fire-snapping noise followed the final blast of the whistle. It was not a fire, or a voice, or a knife scraping flakes of paint from an old wall. It beat and flopped and beat again in a concentric manner. Large feather wings above his head he thought he recognized, over his bed.
Darius pulled the covers and buried his head and arranged the long and bulging feather-stuffed pillow, blocking access to the inside, to the interior, to the underworld, to the layers of cold darkness under the sheets. It was rather, he reckoned, like the inside of a fish. His legs were knotted about the knees and the feet tucked in.
He covered his ears, so that he heard the sea frothing niggardly. He heard his own breathing, and waited. When he uncovered his ears the faint buzz of flopping wings was over.
He pushed a hand out. It felt cold. He wriggled after it and surfaced above the bedcovers. All that was left for him to do now was to peer through the haze of sleep and darkness and worry.
The dawn was still an hour away, and he shut his eyes.
18
The tree-lined road Darius favored going home from the Saint Boniface of Tyllsdum Abbey was already one hundred and thirty-eight years old when he first took notice of it. The family who had been responsible for its design and erection had long ago deserted the parish. The murderous spasms of revolution and civil war had seen to that.
A doctor of medicine had purchased it and taken up residence, on the other side of the hedges, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years back. It was now a chateau of less than awe-inspiring magnificence. An old place (one can't be kinder without provoking laughter and bad manners).
At least a century had passed since the last party of laborers had been hired to repair anything within its high-ceilinged chambers and the many staircases which coiled and uncoiled from them. The manor had become, through the turgid persistence of unkind times, an embarrassing coffin.
Its present owner moved about it with the relentless buzzing and pomposity of a vision-impaired beetle. Although the sixty-nine year old doctor was far from blind himself. He had, all of Würde well knew, a lusty eye for the ladies. And, though not exactly an endearing trait, there was this predilection of his for married women. And, worst still, he had yet to be caught. And precisely because of the unresolved status no moral can be amended to Dr. Rideau's story. By offending all he offended no one in particular. In Würde, he had unpolitically pointed out once to the stationmaster, The remarkable is less so than it first seems or sounds.
Despite the local lore about the Rideau property, Anselm Stenof was reputed to have conducted an inspection of the place. But lack of funds, at least two people acquainted with the proportions of the tale had declared, kept Stenof out of the chateau permanently.
Anselm Stenof was never to utter a word to Darius about any of his fruitless dealings with Dr. Rideau. And Darius had not inquired. The son put it to his mother instead. But she told him absolutely nothing. Iphigeneia Stenof seldom talked about anything. She stared and winced.
19
The particulars of Dr. Rideau's life were, in any case, a matter of public knowledge. He had practiced for a short stint, during the war. I killed no one, was his choice of accounting for his undistinguished intervention. What happened next was well known. An aunt died and left him a bakery. With his younger brother's assistance (a writer without a scrap of talent) Dr. Rideau took over the bakery and baked for five years and nineteen weeks.
We tried shapes and styles, my brother and I, he had told different people on different occasions (the story was rather well circulated). Many shapes and styles. Every shape and style known and recorded. For I acquired a library and logged my experiments. My brother was less concerned with the results, I'm afraid. He preferred beer and a few slices of aged ham.
Our experiments led us nowhere. The results, although not exactly catastrophic, frightened the neighbors and customers. The business floundered. And one Tuesday morning it collapsed. On that day, Dr. Rideau grinned when retelling this part of the tale, we lost our last customer. Quite literally. He disappeared and the authorities closed us down. A board of inquiry was assembled and we were interviewed. The disappearance was cleared up six or seven months later when the wife of the vanished customer led a police inspector to a tree in her yard. From a pear tree dangled the dried up cadaver. She had left him in the sun, untouched and unobserved by anyone else but herself. And she wouldn’t say anything else about it to the police inspector.
It was just as well. We had depleted what money we had set aside to run the bakery. And so we quit. We packed our belongings and left.
We were crazy and we were cursed, is how the doctor explained the confusion over their inspired baking. They asked for bread and we offered them art. It couldn't have worked. It didn't. It was fairly straight forward after that. No mysticism. I shared what money my aunt had left me with my brother, and he went his way. I came here and put what remained of my savings in this place.
20
Sometimes Darius saw a black dog on the stretch of the road by Dr. Rideau's place. The dog would follow the carpenter at a distance and then vanish through a gap in the hedge. The location of the hole in the hedge Darius didn’t manage to discover. And he'd retraced his steps and investigated the area with great care, but his efforts came to nothing.
Questioning the doctor's neighbors brought him no useful information. No one had seen the dog Darius described. Parish dogs were chained, fed regularly, and kept in the yards of the properties they protected.
But the black dog continued to find and follow the carpenter on his way home. And as usual, after a while the creature would scamper out of sight.
Then one day the dog failed to show up at all, and Darius lingered by the footpath running alongside the hedge and which bounded the Rideau orchard, anxious about the dog's fate.
As a last recourse he approached Dr. Rideau himself about his former and elusive and intermittent companion. The doctor could only gape in puzzlement, and pat the carpenter on the shoulder.
21
From pungently verdant and ocher the vegetation goes black at the center, with cracks of orange and blue and yellow and purple and pearl white. It is just under the waist-level and the area is buried in a resin-like silence. It is the world of amber and the hollowness of caves. All surface, without the kneading lips of the wind. The rest is for the invisible sun to corner. A manner of life goes on unnoticed here. It trickles, it burns and it dies. It sends off odors and buries leaves and stems, as well as the carcasses of birds and shells of insects alike. It buries anything it fondles once.
Darius wandered into this place and went cold with anxiety. He was four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. It gripped his heart and tightened its clasp about his throat and stuffed his ears. Darius's presence gave the place a language of its own. It was a preserved and fossilized region for the hands of the blind. It was the world of the ear. Eyes could neither contend with nor explain what went on. The music danced to here was rain and wind and the percussive penetration of a needle pointed sun.
This green cunt traps and hides forever anything it fondles, Darius muttered to himself.
His head ached behind the left ear. He'd heard a monk call out the name of the large string instrument but he couldn't recollect it now. It was played with a bow.
He gave a pull at the covers. He would stay home tomorrow. Before he finally fell asleep he shaped two questions. How long can I postpone it? Will I feel and remember anything afterwards?
A thriving green captured by moribund eyes. Something to wait for, something to expect with the waning of the day. Something which would explain itself, or so he felt as he stared across the way, over the profuse verdure. He tilted his head back to take the height of the trees blocking the sunlight. How could he have known that it was here he was hearing a voice that would taunt and guide him? A voice he'd be forced to acquaint himself with and learn to wait for. And this for the rest of his unaccelerated life.
Someone was calling from the other side. Who is it?, he asked, turning slowly around.
22
Darius's mother owned a small rug, which she tucked fastidiously over the bed and displayed but a corner of it.
One mustn't give in to ostentation, she would whisper to her big-eyed son. It's wrong. It's an obstruction.
The reference to obstructions caused Darius much grief. In earnest desperation he had inquired of his father what his mother might have been talking about. But his father had marched off abruptly, leaving him to the ancillary aches of his heart in the emptiest end of the house.
23
He had been taught to copy Greek prayers from a fat book missing more than a quarter of its thick yellow pages. The letters were big and useless. An old monk with transparent hands read the characters in a loud and rough sackcloth voice. What the words meant, or for whom they had been intended, the monk kept to himself. Still Darius delighted in the letters and the sounds the monk shouted indifferently at him. He caught the color of a spendthrift sun, the surf of a tawdry blue sea and layers and layers of white sand. The flat beaches of a forlorn place. And he heard the plaintive call of old and young women cloaked in black sheets, waving their arms. And there was the clatter of iron weapons and shields and armor. And say unfamiliar ship with billowing sails, hovering like white birds above the flat sea.
So Darius toiled at his letter shaping alone and without the music and strain of affection. He curled with the end of one letter to find the next waiting and lapping with a salty wind in its wake. And he gaped and gaped. And there was but an ache as the sole recompense for his effort. But with the writing, with the persistence of the writing, the ache dissolved into a placid dream of further vistas of ships and beaches and wailing women and walls rising sheer and ribbed headlands advancing on the sea. And on one of those headlands, on a mound, rose a round tower made of stones. His writings had conveyed him to the foot of this strange place, this long ago abandoned stone tower.
24
Brother Terta showed Darius a painting in the abbey's library. It showed a man on a table and a window behind the table. It was predominantly dark in the foreground, burning at the center with residual pockets of air and light. Pockets of life. Traces of life before the man on the table had died, the carpenter felt. Whatever had brought the man to that room had taken his life. That was the picture's secret.
The answer, Darius whispered to Brother Terta, is with the dead man.
The monk opened his mouth, and shut it an instant later. Then he opened it again. Why do you say that?
Everything in the room is dead, except the cadaver, the carpenter explained. I don't know that I can say anything about the artist's intentions. What's clear to me from looking at the picture is that the dead man is the only reality. The rest is uncertainty, death, nothingness. Light burns at the center, where the man's face is. And then there are his feet. Look at them.
What about his feet?, was the question Brother Terta put forth with some caution.
He isn't wearing any socks. He removed them before he hung himself. Taking care to stuff them inside his boots and set the boots on a chair at the opposite end of the room. In the dark.
The monk turned to stare at Darius.
What's not clear, the carpenter continued, is why he was placed on the table.
Who placed him on the table?, the monk wanted to learn.
I think I know who did, the carpenter did not hesitate to tell the monk, without removing his groping eyes from the picture.
The monk touched his own lips. Records exist, he said, of other pictures by the same artist. We have a catalogue of them here, in the abbey. Although scant written evidence survive about the artist's own background.
Where are the other pictures?, Darius said.
Some were destroyed, answered the monk.
Darius eyes darted from the picture to the monk and back again to the canvas. In a fire, muttered the carpenter.
Yes, said the monk abruptly. A relative of the artist had left paintings to a neighbor, but frightened, an amateur painter himself, by the depictions the new owner turned them over to a local priest. The priest in turn sold the collection to a rich and influential landowner. And it was while in the possession of the landowner that the paintings were destroyed.
His house went up in flames, added Darius.
Yes, continued the monk. And the landowner and his wife perished in the fire. Their three daughters survived.
When was this?, Darius asked.
Over a hundred and eighty or ninety years ago, said the monk with a nod. The youngest of the daughters later, much later, confessed to setting the fire. Her motives weren't cleared up. Not by her, at any rate.
She might've been protecting the murderer, said the carpenter.
Why do you think that?
It's just a guess.
I'll tell you what is queer, Darius, said the monk. It is rather curious..., he repeated.
Darius grinned and said, The man on the table hanged himself.
Brother Terta stared.
I've had a similar dream, Darius said.
What happened in the dream?, asked the monk.
Just that. A man, whom at first I thought I recognized as my own father, and who later reveals himself not to be my own father, ambles into a dark room with a window, a table and two chairs, and sets about hitching a rope from a beam.
25
Darius watched the sky without apprehension. It let him be. He watched from a window, watched the progress of the clouds from the abbey's garden. He watched them from the wood near his house at night. He watched after the sun had toppled and crashed beyond the treeless grass-packed ridges. Land which had belonged until recently to a ninety-year-old woman and her two daughters. The elderly woman who'd given him seven silver coins; he was five years old then. Darius’ father had made for her cabinets and a side table, an two sets of chairs. She’d demanded in a manner that didn’t have to be understood and couldn’t be challenged, that he bring the boy around because she had something for him.
Darius was still watching when the moon twirled and hopped across the November night-sky, darting between trees, falling over the low walls. In the confessional he has told Father Nimorous, The moon resembles rain most. It's got no other relative.
His days are long and busy; all work or preparations for work.
Light was a pervasive influence, a source of agitation. The sky, the sun, the moon, more than preoccupied him, is how Father Nimorous phrased it. What the carpenter didn't understand did not alarm him. He labored with his hands, as his father had done before him. And he could see the advantages his hands provided. He could study the results afterwards. Of course the brain facilitated his work, even if the brain by itself was useless. A lifeless thing. It couldn't dance or see or move about in the dark, or jaunt across a meadow speckled with puddles of moonlight. It couldn't talk, it couldn't satiate itself. The brain wouldn't be able to empty itself in a woman. The rest belonged outside, in the periphery of whatever else the world was made up.
He could see some things. And he also noticed others eluded him. So it was, he reckoned, wide gaps exist between meanings, making meanings accessible and other less so. Which in turn oblige one to peruse them. Brother Lapidis had mentioned just such a place in the heart. He had called it whimsy.
26
Darius's curiosity is restricted to the activities of his hands and what his fingers negotiate with delicacy and intricacy. Finished artifacts sadden him. He has learned to look at Nature for inspiration, seeing no instances of finished works anywhere. It is to this peculiarity he attributes their beauty and power. And the urge isn’t present, inside him, the urge to reason and add up and accept as useful and good, or its opposite, the urge to dismiss as distracting and useless, what his eyes may confirm when it discovers it in Nature and what the heart has suspected for a long time. What is he to deny, and how and when is he to deny it? I am curious, he told himself, until it frightens me. The fright is inescapable, just as all else one sees and does and thinks and resolves to do is just as unavoidable and already fixed somewhere in the future. And it doesn’t have to be called fate. One can accept it, this fate, this unnamable longing to see the invisible and believe the impossible, as one accepts without explanations a sky replete with clouds and an invisible sun buried behind them.
He peeped over his shoulder and he couldn’t tell. It was too faint. He lowered his head and listened again. It was back, great wings beating.
He scrambled over the bench. There was no one else in the kitchen. The flame of the candle flickered and shapes went slithering across the walls.
He had not taken more than four steps towards the passageway when he quit, and started back, but stopped to listen. If he had heard wings in the bedroom he might hear them out in the passageway as well. He'd heard them before, on his way to work, and later, the same day, in the abbey's own kitchen. And now, they were here with him once more. He would not close his eyes. He swallowed and took notice of the cumbersome and even indelicate movements of his tongue.
There it is again. Behind me, he said to himself. He waited for it. The sound drew nearer. He listened. He didn’t turn.
27
He was awake, and cramped, and movement was difficult. He couldn’t see anything in the dark. He groped the walls, the top and bottom edges, as well as the corners. The walls were smooth and cold, and the fragrance of the hickory wasn’t entirely gone. He couldn’t hear any type of sound, only his breathing. His fingers sought and followed the lid's borders again and again. He conjured up images of what he was touching. He’d made the box, so he had perfect recollection of every inch of it. The box was well secured, from every side, and the ventilation apparatus and the tubes had been tested and they were doing perfectly well now, as expected. And for a time he felt safe and knew himself well hidden. He could admit to himself that he was and not feel contrite about it afterwards, since it wasn’t bragging. It wasn’t boasting to know that something was well done and that a task had been accomplished, even if it was fear that had driven him to it.
The box was no more than five feet in the ground. But conversely, the depth could have been anything, a thousand feet, for all the difference it made in the dark. Was he falling? Was he floating? The sensation of isolation and disorientation were identical to falling and floating. And floating Darius remembered a long ladder up one of the cherry trees behind the house, by the well. His mother was up on the fork of the tree with a basket, picking and eating cherries. And he remembered his father, working at his bench, an unlit pipe in his mouth.
Darius slept. His inert body had its own memories (some of them never to be reclaimed).
28
Once, it couldn't have been more than a week since his father's funeral, Darius was airing tables, benches, chairs, all manner of articles of furniture, which, because of their size, allowed themselves to be brought outdoors, unlike the heavier and more cumbersome ones. It was Anselm Stenof's way of doing things. And because it was his father's way it developed and progressed into the sort of inherited reflex he could not challenge without first finding a replacement for it.
Having stacked and upturned most of the furniture against the back wall of the house, Darius positioned the only armchair he owned (designed and constructed for his mother by Anselm Stenof as a wedding present) about a yard away from the back door. Thus turned he could take with a single sweep of the head the encircling trough of the valley, with its pines and rocks and the dipping sky.
Darius reasoned, If it fills the eye it fills the head.
He’d been at it a while, and was keen to sit down and smoke a pipe. But his father had taught him the virtues and profit of discipline, so he’d forget his pipe until everything had been brought out to the yard. And it was while dragging a bench along the passageway that a thud from one of the rooms made him turn. His reaction was so abrupt that he upset a conical wooden bucket and spilled what water it contained. And having dropped the bench he clutched at his throat, and gasped and gagged. And somewhere inside his head an unnamed fear dashed itself about. It brought him to his knees, beside what remained of the puddle of water from the wooden bucket, and hardly a squeak of breath got through to his lungs.
There had been a previous choking incident. Feathers were involved. And on that occasion the peculiarity was that the feathers hadn’t been real feathers that one could see and touch. But Darius had identified them as feathers nevertheless. Moreover, on both occasions a black shape had swung back and forth, rather like a pendulum, and right above his head, back and forth, back and forth. And also on both occasions, he’d wiped blood from the lobes of his ears and he’d wept uncontrollably for hours. He couldn’t understand any of it. But afterwards a stillness prevailed for days, and Darius took advantage of the lull and went about his many chores as if nothing untoward had transpired. Which was just as well, since by his reckoning the summer wasn’t entirely gone, and a new moon would rise before the nights got shorter and colder and darker.
29
Darius’ professional life as a carpenter is disrupted, finished but for small jobs he continues to perform at the abbey. His dread increases daily. It grows until he’s unable to contain himself and contrives to elude its power.
But how is he to do it? Is he to hide himself? What type of vanishing act will save him from the unnamable threat?
He tries burying himself first in his own garden, and for a time the results are to his satisfaction. But before long he doubts he will go unnoticed, and in searching for an alternative spot to hide he looks over the abbey’s grounds and chances on what he needs. And in complete secrecy he makes what arrangements and calculations he requires, and brings tools and in a matter of days he’s dug trenches and installed all the essential underground piping. And one moonless night he moves his box there.
Darius doesn’t survive the very last of his nightly interments. He drowns.
30
Seventy years have passed and both the carpenter's life and his departure from it have acquired much of the dank narrowness of the riddle. To the skeptic it falls to protest that it is no less and no more musty than Plato's myth of Atlantis, or that other tale about a cave and the shadows spread over its walls.
The box Darius designed and carved for months, before attempting the burial methods in his own back garden, has not been recovered. The late Father Nimorous, Abbot of Saint Boniface of Tyllsdum, has left a description of its queer ornaments and the strange device Darius Stenof was noticed toiling with at the time of his abrupt disappearance.
As for the local authorities, they attributed the carpenter's vanishing act to more mundane circumstances. One senior officer wrote in a report to the regional governor, that the unhappy Darius Stenof had gone off with a circus dancer. A gypsy woman twice his age. For one such circus had passed through the area, the same week Darius buried himself one last time in the abbey's graveyard.
31
Darius seldom wandered far from home, and when he did go off to visit neighboring villages he didn’t stay away longer than a fortnight. He was predictable in this sense alone. And he willingly confess to others that he couldn’t recall experiencing the urge to drift like vagabonds and gypsies did. Anselm Stenof had taught him the worth and significance of being tethered to the past. And he’d phrased it thus to Father Nimorous. He had said to the Abbot, I'm what becomes of the past. A sentiment that captured the stoicism and resonance and something of the despondency of Darius's life since his father's death.
The thought that the past is the same as the future, that everything may stay as it is for all eternity, should concern no one, he had confided to the Abbot. I was nothing before I was born to my parents. Why should I heed the whip of so-called obligations to make something of myself now? How should I profit from what I leave behind?
The Abbot offered Darius silence in reply. The old monk dreaded having to admit to anyone (his confessor was ignorant of the matter) that he’d been plagued by heretical doubts and outright doctrinal deviations every day and every night of his contemplative life. The life everlasting promised by the holy books and all the splendors of heaven hadn’t alleviated the insomnia the Abbot had suffered from for years.
32
There were to be twenty-nine days of unabated rain. Every door in Grouffe was kept bolted against it. It forced people, when they felt the lack of constraint, to converse in whispers. The river rose and flooded the abbey's graveyard. In some corners only the tops of the headstones and the ironwork of crucifixes were visible from the road. This, the Father Abbot confided in young Brother Terta, is the second time in living memory that the river has risen so high. And that the rains have reduced Grouffe to such gloom, devastation, and sadness.
With a sigh and a twist of the lips the Abbot added, I won’t live to see another flood like this one.
© J. Noya 2006
posted by Jay Noya at 7:45 PM
