The Sounds Between

Part I: Zard Kuh story

2010-11-02T22:51:00.000-07:00

The title is of course temporary. This is the first portion of a story I have been working on for the past month or so. I hope to add to it soon.

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April the 10th, 1915
This being the preface to this journal.

     My father, Declan Pierce, was a translator, and an explorer. He ranged wide over this world in his time, saw great sights, and discovered many a wonderful and terrible thing.

     He began his work in his youth, his own father insisting from an early age that he learn not only Latin but also ancient Greek, and later, Hebrew. As he progressed through school he showed a remarkable talent for language and geography. He was enroled at Oxford University in 1868, at the age of 17; by the time he was 22, he had completed his first doctorate.

     He was totally immersed in his studies. By now he was taking part in the thrilling new work available deciphering the clay tablets of such far-away sounding cultures as Assyria and Sumeria. His work obsessed him, so much so that it would be another four years before his marriage to my mother Christina, and yet another six before she bore him his first and only child, I who bear his name, Declan Pierce II.

     I knew him for but a short time, only long enough to form an impression of both the wonders and the dangers of the frantic life he led. While I knew him as a loving father, he was nonetheless very distant. I would sometimes go days without seeing him, despite the fact that he was just behind a door, in his study – where I was never to enter while he was at work. I have learned from my mother that it was not always so; before I was born, he was not so private, was more accessible to those who loved him. It was not my birth which changed this, but rather a deeply enchanting idea which had taken hold in him, an idea whose manifestations appeared as spindly roots which reached clear through the literature and religions of all the epochs of human life, from the present all the way to his own area of expertise, the very earliest human writings. He kept his work on this subject under lock and key, his notes and all his books, and it would be many years before my mother would tell me what was hidden behind the locked doors in my father's mind. Perhaps she did not herself know, when I was young.

     Yet while I could not pierce that particular mystery, my father's library was always open to me, as was his study when he was not at work. I found these places infinitely fascinating, and I fondly remember peering through his books and his curiosities. I could not read many of the books, and some were written in whole alphabets whose symbols I had never encountered, though by this point I could recognize the Roman, Greek, and Hebrew letters (though I could not read them, as yet). These mysterious books were written in a strange hand, bizarre collections of straight lines terminating in odd triangular shapes, arranged in perplexing grid-like formations – the writing I would one day know as cuneiform.

     Among the books were other relics of times long past. Greek pottery: black-figure soldiers, women at looms, contrasted beautifully and timelessly against the burnished red of Attic clay. There were Roman busts, ancient Christian mosaics, and, what fascinated me most, the sculptures of those same enigmatic peoples who had written in that bizarre style. These, my father told me, were temple statues – but they had not been idols to be worshiped, they were themselves the worshipers. They were set up around idols when human attendants were not present, that there would never be a second when the gods of this ancient race were not under adoration. These statues clasped their tiny hands across their chests and turned their wide, flat faces upwards, their noses and mouths shrunk to tiny holes, their eyes, alight with the wonder of the divine, enlarged to wholly unreal and slightly unsettling magnitude.

     My father left when I was eight years old, and I did not see him again. I asked my mother constantly; she told me simply that he was working on something very important, that he would be back eventually. Over the years I learned to stop asking the question. But it remained, ever in my mind, asking itself, over and over: “Where did he go?” It would be many years before I was given an answer.

     But the seed had taken root in me as well, and I followed happily in his footsteps. I myself enroled at Oxford in the year 1901, my eighteenth autumn, keen to delve into the mysteries of the ancient peoples. I was not the prodigy my father was, and I myself earned my doctorate after six years, still a respectable achievement. What I lacked of my father's speed in learning I made up for in other areas of my life; I met Edith, who would become my wife, in my last year at Oxford, and three years later we were married. My own son, obediently given the name Declan III, was born two years later, in 1909. He is now six years old, and to my great pride, he has mastered the basic grammar of the Latin language.

     It was not until just a fortnight past that my mother finally disclosed to me the truth of my father's obsession and the reason behind his sudden and continued disappearance. I had visited, alone, for dinner, while my wife was out of town with little Declan. We had eaten, and were sitting in the parlour, speaking little. There was a great storm outside, and it was dark in the house; I thought that my mother had actually fallen asleep over her knitting, and I was preparing to depart, when suddenly and without introduction she began to explain to me the things which I had never known about my father's journey.

     His hidden and secret work, the work which so consumed him when I knew him, had, she said, led him to leave on a great journey, halfway around the world. She had spoken to him only a little about his obsession, but she knew that the journey was a part of it. He had told her only the name of the place to which he was going; a mountain, in the Zagros range bisecting Persia, a mountain with the magical name of Zard Kuh.

     She stood and handed me something then: a small, iron key. She told me that it opened the strongbox in my father's study, where he had kept all of his notes regarding the idea that had so enchanted him. She told me that though she had opened this chest, and had looked at the books and treasures hidden there, that she still knew nothing of substance of the idea that drew my father across the map to wind-blown Persia. Yet, she had gathered the basis of it, from hints, from suggestions, from telling and significant utterances my father made in his sleep. The idea that locked my father away from his family, that had consumed my father's mind as it had consumed countless minds before him, was simple, but massive; it was an idea that has never, through all time, lost its efficacious ability to stop men in their tracks and put an unholy lust in their hearts: the idea of neverending life.

     Taking the key, I raced to the cabinet and opened the door. It swung open easily and I was greeted with the smell of old leather and paper. There were several battered notebooks and old hide-bound manuscripts, little figurines and statues. My mother looked on from the doorway, her hands folded on her chest, a sad, weary smile on her aged features. Hungrily, I grabbed at the notebook on the top of the pile, pulled it open, and realized at once why my mother had not deciphered more of the story. On this matter, my father had written all of his notes in ancient Attic Greek.

     She allowed me to take them, everything, and I loaded them into my automobile that very night. I covered them with my coat as I brought them out of the house, allowing myself to be soaked to the bone, and when she saw that, she turned away, and I believe she may have been weeping.

     I have now had two weeks to review the material my father left behind, and I have spent nearly every waking moment doing so. Some of it is more helpful than the rest. My linguistic focus is in Greek; this has enabled me to read my father's notes with ease, however I have no experience with any Sumerian, Akkadian, or Assyrian language, so most of the primary materials from the strongbox have been of little use. There are gaps in the notes, pages cut out of the books as if with a razor, pages which I assume my father brought with him on his journey. Likewise, the entire collection speaks plainly to a missing volume; the notebooks cover specific issues in some detail, but there is no single, general volume – a text my father almost certainly brought with him when he left.

     Nonetheless, the material that remains and can be read speaks quite plainly about my father's plan. One of the notebooks, covering geography of the area in question, even includes a map, with a goal and even a tentative route which he planned to take. Others, which describe the thing itself for which he was searching, are more confusing. He refers often to texts which have no reliable English translation, and where he refers to specific legendary or mythical objects and personae from the Assyrian originals, he has painstakingly transcribed these Assyrian words directly into Greek instead of using a Greek substitution. This has meant that the most useful words are basically unintelligible to me.

     I have considered contacting my father's friends in his field to acquire translations of these texts, but I know that this project would take weeks, if not months. I feel a pressing urge to follow after my father now, to trace his footsteps to the mountain of Zard Kuh, and I believe it cannot wait. I have no hopes of finding my father alive; if he has not returned after twenty-four years of absence, he can only be dead. This fact only pushes me more toward my own departure. If he has died, I must learn why. I must find him, or find where his trail ended, and learn what it was that meant so much to him. I must follow this story through to its conclusion.

     England is now at war with the Ottomans, who rule Persia. This means that traveling in the area will be very dangerous. It also means that the borders will be lax, the country will be in turmoil, and the yards and miles of red tape which would otherwise prevent my entry into the country will be loosened by the chaos of war. Should the Ottomans win the war, an Englishman will not set foot in that country for a hundred years. To delay now is a risk I cannot take. I must go, and I must go now, or I may lose the only chance I have in this lifetime to know what it was that was worth my father's life.

     And so I will make my provisions, set my plans, and I will follow my father to Persia.

April the 21st, 1915

     The past few days have been a weary endeavor both to finalize my plans and to attempt to explain to my family why it is I must do this thing, which I will do. The one has been much easier than the other.

     Through my father's contacts, I have arranged a number of important documents, the most crucial being a falsified passport and letters of reference signifying my identity as a Swedish antiquities scholar. I speak no Swedish. However, the English are hated enemies of the Ottomans, and I would be lucky to return with my head were I to travel on my authentic passport. The Americans, as well, while not in outright war with the Ottomans, are nonetheless looked upon as a treacherous Western power, and I would be unlikely to gain entry with American papers either. Sweden is a small country which plays no part and has no alliances in the war between England and the Ottoman Empire.

     I have also secured a traveling companion, a Moslem man by the name of Ibrahim al-Fawaz. He is Egyptian, not Persian, however he speaks the Arabic and Persian tongues and knows the land; he will be an invaluable assistance. He was, I am told, a student of my father's. He has warned me in the strictest terms to never speak when in the presence of authorities or soldiers. I cannot speak the language of the country to which I pretend, and the English language will only cause problems in that part of the world. He has also counseled me, in sober and serious tones, that I must acquire a rifle. I have done so.

     Transportation is another problem. England of course trades not with the Ottomans, and a Swedish scholar disembarking from an English patrol ship would look quite odd indeed. To this problem an ingenious solution has been devised. We will sail to Italy, and there charter passage on a Greek trade ship to take us as far East as possible upon the Mediterranean. We will disembark, show our papers, and, God willing, begin our voyage inland toward the Zagros mountains. We must hope that neither the Greeks nor the Turks (or Egyptians, provided we reach the Levant) will be overly suspicious. It is, however, our most viable option, the others being to travel overland through Russia and arrive from the North (a voyage of many months), or to sail direct to the more British-friendly Egypt and attempt to cross into Persia from the South, a border much more secure and patrolled than the Mediterranean coast.

     I have also learned, again through my father's contacts, of a scholar of cuneiform who works in Damascus. His name is Faisal Abdul Hadi. He knew my father and will be a most welcome assistance, provided he can be found. Contacting him via post is not an option; there is no time, nor any assurance that the letter will reach him. Leave it be; we will find him if we can.

     Discussing this journey with my family has been more difficult. My son, who is too young to know for certain where it is I am going, or to fathom its incredible distance even when shown on a map, knows only that his father is leaving for an indeterminate amount of time in order to further his studies – a feeling I know all too well. My wife Edith, on the other hand, is keenly aware of the danger of this voyage, and the possibility, more likely than I would care to admit, that my son also shall grow to his adulthood knowing only a few fleeting years of his father's presence.

     I have myself worried about this fact. However, the excitement I now feel to follow my father in his footsteps is more exhilarating than my academic work has ever been. That is why I have begun work on a smaller project, one to be completed before my departure, one which my wife has begged me not to complete, and which I myself feel no small reluctance toward given the portentous implications of the act. Yet I feel it needs to be done.

     I will not bring my father's notes to Persia. I am now working at copying all the relevant notes and diagrams into new notebooks – I have four large notebooks which should easily contain everything necessary – and my fathers notebooks shall be left in the strongbox at my mother's house, along with the scrolls of cuneiform copied from tablets (they are too bulky, and will be entirely useless unless I happen to catch upon Faisal Abdul Hadi in Damascus). This time, the key goes not to my mother, but to my own wife. She accepted it with bitterness, with tears in her eyes. I explained to her, calmly but firmly, that it was my wish that should I not return, the key should be given to my son, when he was ready. She was reluctant to agree, but I persisted. It is the only time in our married life when I have insisted upon the privilege of my status as head of household. She eventually acquiesced, in doing so her eyes flashing with a moment of hatred which stunned and bewildered me. We have not spoken of it since.

     Aside from these things, our last task remains the tedious supply of the expedition; matches, clothing, dried food (certain to run out before we even reach Egypt), currency and other tradeable goods, tents, blankets, books, pens, maps, and all number of other small items. As we are a party of two, we have held ourselves strictly to the principle that we shall leave England with only what we two can carry; when we reach the mideast we will surely attempt to barter for a pack animal, and if this is successful, we will purchase more equipment. Much of the specifics of this voyage are being left up to circumstance, a situation unavoidable in transcontinental travel. Be it as it may; the Lord will watch over us.

     We leave on a trade ship on the ninth of May. It is the day, so history recalls, that the Canaanites fought Pharaoh Thutmose III in 1457 BC, on the plains of Megiddo, where battle shall again be joined on the Last Day.

May the 10th, 1915

     The past few days have been a whirlwind of activity. Ibrahim and I have shipped on a steamer bound for Italy; there is a flat, empty expanse of water ahead of us, which will take us some month and a half to cross before landing in Syracuse. From there we shall journey overland to Taranto, the main shipping port of Southern Italy, from where we hope to gain transport on a Greek ship. Sailing the Mediterranean to our destination will take almost another month. I will not record much in this my travelogue during this period; I am not comfortable on ships and do not expect to be in a writing mood. We are already but one day out and already Ibrahim laughs at me and tells me my skin is green.

     Yesterday we departed. My son bravely held back his tears and shook my hand steadily, like a man. I told him that it was of utmost importance that he continue his studies and be a support to his mother. I was unable to tell him how long I'd be gone, as I do not know myself. The most conservative estimate is something on the order of six months; it may be closer to a year. I held my wife and told her to be strong, but before I left I made her confirm her promise regarding the key, and my father's notebooks. She nodded icily. I hope for my safety, primarily that she not have to hand over that key, as my own mother did.

     As the ship left the port, I saw my son pull at his mother's hand. She raised him onto her shoulders and he shouted to me, in superb Latin, “Celeres ventes, pater!”, 'Fast winds, father!'

     I have a long voyage before me, and I will feel much better about it when my feet are on solid ground.

May the 28th, 1915

     A few general notes regarding my progress.

     My project of copying my father's relevant notes was completed several days prior to my departure, but the translation of the peripheral material as well as the compilation of all of this information into a workable plan was to be completed during my voyage. I feel compelled to admit that I am finding this latter portion of the work to be somewhat more difficult than I was expecting. I mentioned earlier my father's bothersome insistence upon providing transliterations instead of simple substitutions for important words; without a cuneiform scholar, my translations of such words are highly speculative, derived mainly from context references in the surrounding Greek. There is no linguistic relationship between Assyrian and Greek, so even when I see something that hints at a cognate, I must consider this a simple coincidence and move on; there are no words, so far as I know, which 'migrated' from Assyrian to Greek.

     I still do not know what it was for which my father was searching, though it appears to have been some sort of physical object, and not a person, or something less tangible, such as a state of mind or a mystical revelation. The Greek adjectives which seem connected to it in the notes are simple designations of physical qualities: in one instance it is referred to as 'thorny' or 'prickly', and in another, tellingly, it is said to be 'growing'. I can only surmise thus that it was some sort of plant. There are only a handful of these adjectives, these two being by far the most helpful.

     Ibrahim has been a fine traveling companion; he is very optimistic and jolly, and he takes to the sea with a natural affinity, despite the fact that his people traditionally wander an ocean of sand, not of water. He tells me that he knew my father up until his disappearance, and indeed I have fleeting recollections of his visiting on occasion. His assurances have convinced me, however, that if anyone but my father worked on this enigmatic project, Ibrahim was not one of them. Nor do I have any reason to doubt him on this point; he is an academic, but an Egyptian archaeologist, and he does not know cuneiform any more than I. Besides which, though he is older than myself, he is much younger than my father, and was not so much a colleague to him as a favoured student. We are, the two of us, risking a great deal for a very nebulous cause, sharing in common only that we trust my father, the great figurehead and benefactor of this expedition, urging us on now from decades in the past.

     We have been at sea now for two weeks, or so I am told. This brings me to a very curious occurrence, for which I am unable to fully account. On two separate occasions during this sea-voyage, I have found myself stymied by an incorrect calculation of the date. It sounds a small thing, but only consider for a moment that I have a calendar upon which I have carefully recorded the days as they pass; that the navigator of the ship has his own calendar, and that twice in two weeks, my own calendar has not matched his. I am almost certain that it cannot be attributed to error on either of our parts. Marking the day is my first order of business upon turning out each morning, and the navigators of ships of course must take very accurate notice of time and date in order to avoid going off their course. Neither can it be a matter of simple neglect when, as has happened, the first error was in recording the subsequent day as the present day (would I not have had to mark the calendar twice in one day?) and the second error was in, somehow, inexplicably, coming up one day short.

     I have, in both cases, relied upon the judgment of the navigator, and assumed that I have been in error – after all, it is hardly possible that both of us, keeping accurate records, should record different dates – but I know, I am sure, that my record-keeping has been accurate. But then perhaps it is possible that the sea has induced in me some delirium. I have come to find it hateful and hideous, near-painful, the constant and vast expanse of empty gray-blue, terminating nowhere, extending infinitely on all sides, and ourselves occupying the single tiny feature of this endless waste. I am thrilled to see the occasional whale or dolphin, not because of some naturalist's love of wildlife, but because it enables me to say to myself, there, there is another object, Jove has not drowned the world in a second deluge and left only us in our wooden prison. The sea carries not for me, as it does for so many others, the promise of freedom and adventure. For me, it's the featureless white walls of Bedlam.

     But on we go. Our journey over sea, they say, nears its halfway point. Soon enough, we will be back on land, if only briefly, and then after another, shorter voyage, my journey begins in earnest. Winds be swift, indeed; I would happily face ten-score of the Sultan's bayonets, would that I could only dispatch with this damnable waiting.

June the 18th, 1915

     Brief personal notes regarding a few odd events.

     We are now reaching the end of our major sea-voyage; we have rounded the coast of Spain, passed the straits of Gibraltar, and are now cruising at a good pace through the Mediterranean Sea. It is lovelier than I had allowed myself to hope. I am told we will reach Southern Italy in five or six days.

     While the scenery has vastly improved, I feel I should comment on a few strange occurrences which have taken place over the past two weeks. I mentioned in my last entry that I had first gained and then lost a day on my calendar; this has not happened again, but there are nonetheless some nagging thoughts and bizarre fears that have been preoccupying my mind. I have been having strange dreams, dreams of my father and the mountain that lies at the end of this journey. Often these dreams have no narrative or form, but consist solely of single visions, often of dead, white expanses of snow. In one of these, I saw Christ crucified amidst a terrifying, blinding blizzard. The blood that fell from His cross froze in midair, and was buried before it could stain the snow. I was awoken from that ream by Ibrahim, who was shaking me – he tells me I was screaming.

     In other dreams, I am confronted by masses and walls of text of various languages and alphabets; languages I know, alphabets such as cuneiform which I can recognize but not read, and always lines and pages and endless, eternal lengths of a bizarre script which I have never seen, its characters intricate and precise, like hieroglyphics, but entirely alien. Always in these dreams there is the sense that if the words would simply slow down, I could begin to pull them apart, to draw out their meaning, but they batter against my mind, ceaselessly, if anything seeming only to gain speed, until I find myself amidst a numbing cataclysm of text, each line and every letter diverting my attention but none working with others, until my concentration is shattered into a hundred points at once. Sometimes, at the height of my confusion, the letters turn to snowflakes, and I am left alone, helplessly, desperately alone, in the deadening white of words and winter which has no end.

     Once, having dozed off over a notebook, pen in hand, my dreams led me to this place. My mind reeling, I fell to my knees in the snow and waited to die. There was a dull pain in my arm which I took to be frostbite, but it gradually became more severe, more acute, and soon I woke with a start. I had drawn one of the foreign figures on my own arm, pressed so hard with the pen that the nib had actually cut my flesh. A mixture of blood and ink had pooled into a small puddle on the ship's deck between my feet. The mark may well be permanent. It is highly stylized, but it is clearly a pictogram, like the hieroglyphs of Egypt, though Ibrahim assures me it is not a hieroglyph. It depicts a kneeling sycophant, his arms raised in worship beside a small, thorned flower.

An Oneirological Style of Tarot "Divination"

2010-03-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

This is something a little different than usual; it's not a story, but rather an explanation of a new process of non-divinatory Tarot interpretation modeled after dreams (hence 'oneirological'). This may be of interest to those with an interest in the history and process of divination through cards, though (as I explain) it is not really itself a form of divination. I offer it, then, as an illustration of the versatility of the Tarot and its completeness as a symbolic system. As a sidenote, I have adopted E.A. Waite's stylistic choice to generally refer to the diviner in masculine terms and the querent in feminine, as he does in the Key To The Tarot.

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AN ONEIROLOGICAL STYLE OF TAROT “DIVINATION”
Dominic E. Lacasse

The process of divination via Tarot cards dates to the sixteenth century, and possibly even earlier. Since this time there have been elucidated a great number of guides to the interpretation of the cards, and with each guide we see a different set of assumptions regarding precisely what is happening on the diviner’s board. These assumptions involve questions of the actual meaning of the cards (do we interpret them according to our own perceptions of their meaning, or according to the esoteric standards developed by our predecessors in the art?) the issue of which cards fall and in what sequence (is this totally random, or is it affected? If it is affected, is it affected by the diviner, or the querent, or some third party, perhaps spiritual?) the issue of interpretive priority (does the diviner tell the querent what the cards mean, or does the querent herself assign meaning?) and the place of the diviner (is he a spiritual medium, a psychologist, a scholar?) For each guide to Tarot interpretation we receive a different set of answers to these questions, and thus the act of Tarot interpretation is not a singular tradition but rather a pluralistic one; the Tarot is not a unified process maintained inviolate since time immemorial, but a common theme among a vast array of widely differing traditions.

It is in this spirit that I introduce what I understand to be a new approach to the nature and function of Tarot interpretation. This approach, as I will explain, will seem radically alien to many scholars of the ‘classical’ Tarot divinatory style as expressed most popularly by E.A. Waite. My approach offers different answers to the questions above, and indeed reevaluates the assumption that Tarot is necessarily a form of ‘divination’ (though of course, I am not the first to offer a non-divinatory approach to the Tarot.)

In short, I hope to illustrate an approach to Tarot interpretation which I am calling, for lack of a better term, “oneirological”, that is, essentially, ‘dream-oriented’. It is my understanding that the Tarot can in fact be interpreted in much the same way as a dream is analyzed by the dreamer. The process is similar; we are given a set of data (be it understood to be random or somehow affected) which we then interpret according to inner logic and apply to our lives. I will begin by discussing the nature of the dream in this sense, followed by my interpretation of the Tarot in this scheme, and will finally relate the major differences in assumption between this style of Tarot interpretation and the classical divinatory Tarot.

In this understanding, a dream is understood to have two major components; the ‘content’ of the dream, wherein are included the images, emotions, thoughts, and experiences which comprise the actual ‘events’ of the dream, and also the ‘analysis’ of the dream, which may occur during the dream or after waking, but is distinguished as being a ‘detached’, external examination of the dream content; in short, the attempt to apply some sort of cohesive personal logic to the (often illogical) dream content. All dreams which are remembered by the dreamer have these two aspects. Let us examine them in detail.

The ‘content’ of the dream, as everyone knows, is capable of an incredible, almost limitless range of images. The imagery and events of any particular dream may be either completely alien to us or completely mundane, or any combination thereof. Similarly the emotions we experience in dream appear to encompass the complete range of all our waking emotions, from pleasant relaxation to sublime joy, from vague apprehension to speechless terror. These emotions often spontaneously arise as a result of seemingly confusing or counterintuitive dream imagery; the face of a beloved friend can produce feelings of abject hatred, or any number of common objects or experiences may produce entirely unexpected emotional responses. The content of dreams is thus chaotic (in the sense that it is changeable and unpredictable, not in the sense that every dream is a dream of chaos or a chaotic experience.)

The chaotic nature of dream content is what necessitates analysis. Dream analysis is the question therefore of ‘what dreams mean’. Even seemingly mundane dreams necessitate analysis, and perhaps simply because of the fact that they are dreams, mundane dream experiences tend to be analyzed in a deeper sense than the same experience having occurred in waking life. Even more so do we analyze the bizarre or confusing dreams, dreams in which cryptic images and events take on massive emotional significance. Detailed analysis is a natural human response to unfamiliar content- thus dream content and dream analysis cannot truly be separated in the question of what dreams are. Indeed, we often analyze even while still dreaming.

Often is the argument made that the meanings drawn from dream content through analysis are secondary and irrelevant to the dream data, which is itself random. The argument goes on to suggest that the process of analysis is essentially a secondary layer of interpretation, with no real connection to the dream itself. This argument, as I see it, is correct in one respect (that is, that dream content truly is random, or close to random) but flawed in another sense, which is that it seeks to drive apart content and analysis of dreams, to such an extent as to suggest that the one is really only tangentially related to the other, that the content is the ‘dream itself’ while the analysis, which comes later, is a kind of story ‘about’ the dream.

This would be the case in the event of one person analyzing another’s dream, however the crucial distinction where a single person is concerned is that the same thing which creates the dream (that is, the mind) also analyzes the dream. The logic applied to dream content is not scientific logic but the internal symbolic thought processes of the individual; thus when a person analyzes his own dreams, the conclusions he reaches are not those that would necessarily be reached by any other person having heard about the dream, or having even experienced the dream.

The analysis, like the content itself, is a personal matter, and is thus not really a secondary explanation of the dream in logical terms, but rather a profoundly personal psychological explication of dream content. This is why decisions about what dreams ‘mean’ often only make sense to the person who has had the dream; dreams are explained to the self, not to others. Thus dream content and dream analysis are two parts of what is really a single process, this process being the mind’s evaluation of its own contents.

What we have then is a model wherein the following occurs in the process of having a dream: First, in the state of REM sleep, the subconscious is bombarded with a series of images and emotions. These are the regular contents of the waking mind (whether conscious or subconscious), arranged in what appear to be essentially random configurations. Most of this information has absolutely no relevance (or more correctly, is of absolutely no interest) and this perhaps explains why, as science has demonstrated, the vast majority of our dreams are never remembered. If we cared enough to remember our dreams we would have five or six per night; most people have only two or three per week.

However, certain configurations of the contents of our minds are new to us or perhaps inform us (purely by chance) about some previously unknown way of looking at some thing or another. It is these dreams which we remember; they are memorable because, as we say, they ‘tell us something’ (although really the content comes first and the analysis second, even if this happens during the dream itself). The degree of ‘normality’ that a dream has seems to correspond to the degree to which we think we understand the issue in question; thus we may have a completely mundane dream about, say, driving our car, and many aspects will be almost exactly like normal waking life, but it is the incongruous aspects (gearshift is a clown’s head) which indicate an attempt to gain understanding of something previously unknown or unconsidered. When we analyze our dreams, we draw in and correlate ideas in our minds which we believe to be related to these symbols, to explain to ourselves what it is the dream ‘means’. Thus the process of dream analysis is essentially reductive; we first subconsciously filter out and forget dream content which we consider irrelevant, and then we synthesize what remains with ideas we assign through our internal symbolic logic, and then we condense the result into what we call the ‘meaning’ of a dream.

Turning now to the Tarot, it is my understanding that Tarot interpretation can proceed in exactly the same fashion. In this case the Tarot deck (the full deck) stands in for the thoughts in our conscious and subconscious minds, the cards which are laid out during the reading represent specific dream content, and the pondering of the meaning and interrelationships of the cards represents dream analysis. In this way, a Tarot reading can be seen as essentially an ‘artificial dream.’

In this way, there need not be any aspect of ‘divination’ involved at all; the cards represent certain things (different things to different people, as will be discussed below) and they can be held to fall in a completely random manner, in any orientation, in any sequence, and at any place on the board in relation to the other cards drawn. Which cards come off the deck is also random (depending on the results of shuffling the cards) and which cards remain ‘unsaid’, i.e. never make it to the board, is therefore of course also determined purely by chance. In this way we have an event reminiscent of what happens when we dream; images and thoughts arrayed in completely random and totally unpredictable (unexpected) fashion, which are then interpreted as well as possible by the symbolic internal logic of the dreamer, or in the case of the Tarot, the querent. Thus we have a style of Tarot interpretation which is profoundly personal, which has absolutely no external guiding principles (esoteric, hermetic, or otherwise) and which allows for an incredible range in interpretation. Really, it is nothing more (and nothing less) than pulling a handful of thoughts out of a mind, shaking them like dice, throwing them on a table and observing the results. This approach is, to my mind, very exciting in that it shifts the focus of the Tarot from attaining information from spiritual entities / domains (divination) to a spontaneous, creative, and imaginative reappraisal of one’s cognitive state- essentially, self-psychology.

Needless to say, this approach changes the assumptions of classical Tarot interpretation in a number of ways. These changes involve the understanding of what is actually happening during a reading, the meanings of the individual cards, the roles of the diviner and the querent, and the expected result of the reading. These changes all involve the primary distinction of this style of Tarot reading, which is that at all times and in all cases the reading is immensely and completely personal (that is, subjective).

As discussed above, this type of interpretation need not (and to my mind probably should not) be considered divination. However, it does not necessarily have to be considered wholly psychological either; this is left up to the querent. Many people believe that spiritual beings or unknown realms are sometimes responsible for the content of dreams. This assumption need not be completely done away with in light of this new way of looking at the Tarot. Just as one might say that a dream comes from ‘beyond’, so one might say that the ‘artificial dream’ represented by the arrangement of the cards is also so affected. In this case, the cards that fall, their orientations, etc. may be read with an eye to the unseen in much the same way as a classical Tarot reading. However in order to properly maintain the personal emphasis of this ‘oneirological’ Tarot, one must of course remember that even if one holds that the message (the content, i.e. the cards) are swayed by this force, the content is inseparable from analysis, which must always be personal and human. Thus even if the cards are understood to be swayed by some spiritual force, the layout of cards is not a reflection of reality, but rather a message which only comes to its completion in the individual’s analysis. Personally, I prefer to keep divination wholly aside from this style of Tarot reading, as it largely misses the point, and also because classical Waite-style Tarot reading is a much better system for divinatory purposes.

A major distinction between what I am calling ‘classical’ and ‘oneirological’ Tarot is the assumptions implicit in the meanings of the cards. The cards of the Tarot are often considered to represent Jungian archetypes, and while I agree with this in principle, we must be careful here to maintain the crucial element of this approach to the process, which is the importance of subjective analysis. While the cards are certainly archetypal, it would be entirely against the nature of this kind of interpretation to suggest that they have concrete meanings which remain unchanged from person to person. In this case the numerous Tarot ‘guides’, such as the popular one by Waite, should really only be consulted when the meaning of a card is uncertain, and should be consulted not with an aim to ‘learning what the card means’, but rather as an attempt to open the mind to various interpretations, to start a person thinking about what a card could mean. For this reason it is also important that a person select a deck with imagery which appeals to him personally, and a guide which comments more on the imagery than on the received tradition of esoteric interpretation.

It should be clear by now, but let us state it boldly and without ambiguity: This style of Tarot is precisely not hermetic or kabbalistic or ‘traditional’ in any sense; it is improvisational and, beyond all else, personal, with no reference whatsoever to the authority of tradition (excepting of course that the individual accepts traditional meanings, having honestly decided that he agrees with this identification.) Similarly, the choice of card layout for this style is largely without consequence, although given the higher emphasis placed on the relationship of cards to one another, it may be wise to choose a layout which readily displays these connections, such as the Celtic Cross.

This is not to say that the values of the cards are arbitrary, but rather that each person must come to their own conclusions about what a card means. These conclusions can change over time, and certainly should, based on absolutely no criteria other than the opinions of the querent, but they should not be assigned arbitrary values from one reading to another, or else we will lose the important random aspect of the reading, and wind up simply fabricating the results we hope to attain. With this ‘oneirological’ approach, we have greater freedom, which can be easily abused to the detriment of the spontaneity of the reading. Let the querent set her own values for the cards, but let her keep them honestly, excepting that she honestly decides to alter them.

This brings us to perhaps the greatest distinction of all between oneirological and classical Tarot, that being the roles of the diviner and querent. It should be clear by now that with this form of the Tarot, the role of the diviner is greatly subordinated to that of the querent. The diviner no longer really does anything, merely lays out the cards according to blind chance (for the sake of emphasizing the personal approach of this style, the querent should still shuffle and cut the deck) and then helps to explain the possible meanings of the cards; however the querent herself is the ultimate authority on what the cards mean to her. The diviner really just becomes a more convenient flesh-and-blood version of the guidebooks to Tarot meaning that can be found in any bookstore. Even in divinatory interpretations of this Tarot style, it is the querent and not the diviner who performs the activity of divination, in that the divined message comes in two parts, the cards laid out and the querent’s (not the diviner’s) interpretation.

What this really comes down to is that in this style, the roles of querent and diviner really collapse into one person. In classical Tarot it is discouraged that a person should perform a reading on himself; in this style, this is precisely what should happen. Because the cards are no longer seen as a message from beyond, but rather a model of the reader’s own mind, it becomes a matter of great importance that the reader have an intimate familiarity with the cards; not just the cards of the Tarot in general, but the cards of his specific deck, and should always be refining an intricate system of personal meaning for each.

That is why this kind of Tarot is really not well suited to the traditional diviner / querent duality; a querent, unfamiliar with the Tarot or dealing with unfamiliar cards, will not possess the requisite depth of meaning required to analyze them on the incredibly personal level that this style demands, while the diviner, unfamiliar with the querent, can give only general hints, which may completely miss the mark. Much like a dream cannot be adequately explained to another person, the Tarot in this sense is a closed, personal message system, relying as it does on personal associations to its imagery, and thus for one person to explain another’s Tarot reading in this way is like the futile attempt of one person to explain another’s dream. This system is thus best suited to a scenario wherein the person of the diviner has been replaced by the querent’s own intricate, extensive, and subjective knowledge of the cards.

We must also learn to limit what we expect from the Tarot reading. In divinatory Tarot, where we take as a given that there is a message, which is trying to be understood, there is no such thing as a meaningless Tarot spread. Any spread which appears meaningless is understood to simply be unreadable because of intellectual limitations on the part of the diviner. Here, with no external guiding principle infusing our readings with insight and meaning, we do not have the luxury of assuming that a Tarot spread must be a message waiting to be read. We are taking dreams as our model for what happens when a person sits down with a deck of cards, and dreams are often (in fact, as discussed above, usually) completely nonsensical.

With the Tarot we have a kind of advantage over dreaming in this aspect, because we are not subjected to the apparently harsh edicts of our subconscious judge, who seems to censor about ninety percent of the information that passes through our minds during REM sleep, leaving only a small percentage as a remembered dream. We are allowed to make our own (conscious) decisions as to whether the ‘dream’ has value, and indeed any dream (or Tarot spread) which is open to analysis becomes a valuable insight in this scheme. As such, we can anticipate a much greater success rate in reading the ‘artificial dreams’ of the Tarot, as opposed to remembering our dreams. Even so, we must be open to the possibility that a certain Tarot spread may simply mean nothing to us (though it almost certainly would mean something to someone else.) Accordingly, we must learn to distinguish our own motivations, and be able to tell the difference between a configuration of cards that really means something to us and one we are simply trying to inject meaning into, by distorting our understanding of the meanings of the cards. We must be ready, and willing, sometimes even at a simple glance, to recognize when the cards are telling us nothing, and to pick them up and start again.

I see this style as something of a liberation from the somewhat constraining assumptions of classical Tarot, which generally requires extensive hermetic knowledge and limits the possible range of meaning of these incredibly intricate cards. I expect that I will gain little support among staunch proponents of the divinatory aspects of the Tarot, but I do not propose this system as an attack on divination. Rather, as I mentioned above, the cards themselves are only the common core of a huge range of traditions, some divinatory, some not; this one in particular is not (or, at least I think should not) be considered divinatory. This is not to say that there are no valid divinatory uses of the Tarot; rather, it is to affirm the incredible subtlety and versatility of these cards as symbols, and to demonstrate the astounding range of uses to which they can be put.

Persitence - Part IV: Ellen

2010-03-22T19:52:00.000-07:00

PERSISTENCE
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part I: Halifax (Link)
Part II: Triumph (Link)
Part III: Stories (Link)

I had used up all of my time in Triumph. There was nothing for it; I was scheduled to work that afternoon, and there was nobody who I could contact readily enough to cover for me. So, though my mind was racing with the unanswered questions I would be foolishly leaving behind, I was forced to pack up my meager belongings early that morning and set out. Jebediah, who was by that time already up and about, offered to give me a ride to Lunenburg, and so it was from there I set out with leveled thumb and stormy thoughts.

I secured a ride readily enough from the driver of a pickup truck, every square inch of the truck bed packed with what looked like mackerel bound for the Halifax market. Fish goes bad quickly, so a fish truck is a good ride– the shelf-life of the product necessitates a fast trip. I tried not to eye the speedometer and simply gazed out the window, speaking only when absolutely necessary.

I gave myself a headache, trying to pierce the furthest reaches of the forest with my gaze as it flew by. Cyrus’ story haunted me. I wondered what other nameless, unspoken horrors lurked in the forests of the world. All my life I had treasured these grim tales, but never before had I been so scared of them. I was not scared of the content of the story; true, it was probably the most gruesome I’d yet heard, but it had happened long ago, and, as Cyrus said, it was over. Finished. What scared me was the prospect that this was not, could not be the only story of its kind; a story untold, a story forgotten, and forgotten intentionally. How many others had there been? How many other unspeakable things had happened not only in this forest, but in all the forests and cities and deserts of this unholy world? How many, indeed, had been entirely forgotten, finalized in their disappearance?

A sickening chill washed over me as I considered that maybe the stories we have are only the very tip of something much more terrible. That these stories we remember, no matter how gruesome, are remembered simply because there’s something in them, or rather something missing from them, that makes it possible for us to deal with them. The human mind is a fragile thing, and perhaps unable to deal with much of the products of human will. Maybe beyond the veil of our limits of sanity there exist fleeting shades of true madness, stories which by their very nature must be forgotten or else remain like tumors, wounding generation after generation, never dying because the human mind is infinite in its capacity for self-destruction. Ghosts of people may be considered and dismissed. When one decides that ghosts are not real, ghosts lose all strength. But stories are always real. Every story is true in the mind, because a story is not a scientific test of reality but a mirror, a window into ourselves, and in this life the one thing we can never escape is ourselves.

So it was that when I returned to Halifax, I allowed the story to pass away into memory. At first I made half-hearted plans to return to Triumph, but I invented reasons to postpone the trip whenever the possibility came around. Never in my life had I left a story like this alone, never had I come so far and then simply given up, left the questions unanswered. The truth was that I wanted to forget this story. It was my hope, a hope I kept hidden even from myself, that some day I would simply wake up and the story would be gone from my mind, and I would live the rest of my life and never think about it again. I put Ellen’s book of secrets behind the books in my shelf, where I would not even be able to see it, as I knew the very sight of it would bring the story crashing back into my consciousness. I put my travel bag, with all my notes and the still undeveloped film canisters, on the very top shelf of my closet, behind a large box to likewise hide that from my eyes. With the passion and fear of a man on the run I dove into my studies, and over the next few months the story began to fade away from my mind.

I spoke to my friend David, but never brought up Triumph or anything I had learned there. Curiously, he never asked me about it. It was as though we had, without speaking, simply agreed not to mention it. We spoke often about the work we’d both been doing over the summer, what we’d managed to find out about the places we’d been, but never was Triumph discussed.

David and I both attended an upper-year fieldwork-based seminar. One day, the professor quite unexpectedly asked me about a project I’d been delaying. I sheepishly explained that I had not yet begun. When he asked if I’d decided on a particular subject, if I had any leads I’d been following up, I remembered Triumph momentarily and hesitated in my speech. I told the professor I had not yet found a subject. Seeking to avoid his disappointed gaze, I turned to glance at David, sitting across from me at the table. Our eyes locked for the briefest of moments, and it was suddenly clear that both of us knew, we were both trying to ignore the same story, pounding at the door.

Still, we did not speak about it. I continued to try to force the story from my mind, but I eventually decided it was of no use. Despite my efforts to forget, my mind continually went over my time in Triumph, the unanswered questions. Eventually simply looking at the bookshelf which held Ellen’s journal caused great waves of awful memory to come crashing down on whatever I was trying to focus on. I was driven to distraction. My mind continually searched for Ellen’s place in all of this. Eventually I decided that I would be satisfied if I could only know the truth, whatever that might entail.

I had to start with Ellen. With shaking hands I reached into the back of my bookshelf and drew forth the battered black journal. I laid it on my desk and simply gazed at it for a moment. Though I had looked through it several times in Triumph, I had never managed to find anything legible in it besides the two passages I had transcribed earlier. These transcriptions were waiting for me when I finally opened the cover; they were folded neatly, and I had not touched them since my return from Triumph.

I looked them over again, with a slight chill. Ellen’s frantic scribblings about man’s tormented soul. We have walked beyond the path of animal but here there is no road for us to travel, there is no guide for us because we are first. What primal shock had so stunned and fascinated this woman?

I folded the transcriptions again and put them aside. I began again, for the first time in almost four months, poring through Ellen’s diary. I pulled apart the dry pages as I had done so many times before. Coming upon the two legible inscriptions was like phantoms of the past as seen in dreams. I moved on and tried not to read.

Again, like before, I reached the end of the diary and had found nothing but watery blue-black masses diffused through ancient paper. I was about to close the book and accept defeat, when I noticed that the very last piece of paper, which I had taken to be part of the back cover, was in fact a separate sheet, almost hopelessly fused to the leather. I knew there would likely be nothing legible on the other side of that sheet, assuming I could even get it separated, but if only for the sake of thoroughness I patiently and gently pried the page back with the help of a pen-knife.

As I expected, the back sheet was the most distorted of all, and appeared to have no original writing on it to begin with. I sighed in disappointment; I had finally got the nerve to begin to track this story down further, and I had found nothing new.

I then noticed, however, a few lines printed in an extremely small script in a lower corner. They appeared to be machine-printed, which may have accounted for their legibility after such a long period of time. Leaning close, I discerned the words Dalhousie Bookstore. Ellen, whoever she was, must have attended Dalhousie. I shuddered to think of resuming my investigation, but this story had laid quiet long enough. It was time to pick up the trail again and finally finish what I had left in Triumph.

Merely gaining access to the school’s records was a struggle in itself. I found myself pleading with an irritable librarian who peered at me over the top of her glasses and seemed almost to improvise reasons why I should not be given access to the records. In turn I improvised elaborate lies to circumvent these rules. Eventually, after I had patiently explained that I was a friend of the family trying to track Ellen down to give her the news about her poor mother’s death, the librarian sighed in resignation and grudgingly handed over a huge set of keys. “Basement, room D.” she croaked. “Don’t make a mess.”

The student records at Dalhousie seemed to share the same general organizational scheme as the church bulletins in Triumph; huge file-boxes stacked haphazardly in massive piles, like a miniature city skyline. The boxes did, however, appear to have a more or less alphabetical arrangement, and were kept in fairly decent order. I had to wind carefully through this forest of boxes, nearly to the far wall, before I found the D section. I began unpiling one of the towers, my eye on a huge box labeled ‘DA’ on the very bottom. I took the utmost care to watch my step– knock over one of these towers and it would start a chain reaction of terrible proportions. That old heron of a librarian would hear the racket and race down here, and God knows, I’d probably never get out alive.

I finally unearthed the correct box. Sitting down crosslegged on the cement floor and cautiously resting my back against what seemed a reliable tower, I began poring through the files. I flipped rapidly through them, the collegiate lives of unknown students zipping past my gaze. And then, quite unexpectedly, I found Ellen’s file, exactly where it should have been.

I removed it from the box and simply gazed at it for a moment, without reading. There was her name, carefully typed at the top; down below, her academic achievements. This was a real person. I realized that until this point I had no expectation of actually finding her file down here. I realized that a part of me had refused even to believe this story. I had dreamed this girl’s name, never even told by that terrified apparition. I had found her diary in a scorched lighthouse. And now I held in my hand real outside evidence. There was now no chance that this was all in my head.

I peered down to read the transcript. Ellen Daress was an undergraduate student in the department of Psychology. She had left the university during her third year, and had apparently never graduated. The transcript read that she had entered Dalhousie as a freshman in 1922, and somewhere in the second half of the third year had suddenly dropped everything and left.

I looked at her class transcript. She was a very bright girl, and had only three B grades against an otherwise straight-A transcript. By the second half of her second year, she was taking nothing but high-level seminars and independent studies in Psychology, mostly under the tutelage of a professor named Dr. Brisson. The names of the classes themselves I could make no sense of– “Advanced topics in Perception”, “Behavioral Statistics”, “Psycholinguistics Research”– but I at least had the name of what appeared to be the professor who knew her best.

I pulled out a notebook and began scribbling down classes and the names of professors. My pen caught on a crease in the paper and in my haste I caused the pen’s nib to scatter ink across the sheet. Frustrated, I tore the piece of paper out of my notebook. There was a small wire trash can in the corner of the room. With Ellen’s transcript under my arm I stalked over to toss the paper out.

There were several pieces of what seemed like a single ripped-up sheet in the trash can. I tossed my page away and I was halfway around when I suddenly realized the text I’d seen on one of the fragments. It was a headline, of a font and style I knew all too well from the bulletins I’d found in the church in Triumph. It was ripped vertically and fragments of a two-line headline read ‘Jameso’ and, beneath, ‘Fire’. My heart thudded in my chest and seemed to stop. For one brief moment I felt like breaking down in tears. I was not chasing this story down; it was chasing me down, the way an animal runs down prey. I had not wanted to go on. I had wanted to forget this ever happened. The real reason for my even being here was to prove to myself that this was all some kind of elaborate hallucination. But here I was, holding in my hand Ellen’s college transcript, and in the trash can of this concrete oubliette the story lay waiting for me, driving me further onward though I wanted no more.

I took a deep breath. I tried to be calm. I thought of my previous agreement with myself; if I dropped this now, if I never found out the truth, would that not be worse? I must continue, if only to give this thing a sense of completion, so that I could sleep at night knowing that I had understood it all. With a firm resolve I turned back. The paper was ripped into seven or eight pieces. With a little bit of patience I was able to rearrange them on top of a nearby box.

The headline read “Jameson House Destroyed in Fire, Killing Two”. Below and to the left there was a picture of a modest log cabin. Beneath this, a smoldering foundation. With a sickening lurch I realized that I had seen the foundation before. Visions of my dream crackled like flame before my consciousness. I shut them out, drove them away, as I’d become accustomed to doing.

The text of the article, to my outward dismay and inward delight, was almost entirely obliterated by black ink. Someone had intentionally scribbled out the text, before ripping the paper to pieces and throwing it in this trash can. There was no doubt in my mind that this was David’s work. Now I was sure– David had found what I had found in Triumph, perhaps even more, and he was running from it the same way I was. He had even been down here, in this very part of the records room, obviously just as hell-bent as I on discovering the significance of Triumph’s most mysterious daughter.

There were, however, a few line fragments which my friend’s hasty pen had left whole and intact. A part of the first line was legible, reading “Police report that a faulty lamp was to blame for Saturday’s fire, which–“ the text disappeared under black ink and emerged shortly later “–son and his elderly mother.” A faulty lamp, I thought. An adequate metaphor. A little further on down the page: “–fire did not pose a threat to the rest of the town–“ ”–solated by its distance at a full five miles up the shore from our lighthouse.” Beyond this, the paper was almost entirely obliterated, aside from a few line fragments of little importance toward the end of the article.

I felt defenseless and vulnerable in this concrete cell. I quickly scribbled down the notes I needed from Ellen’s transcript and replaced it in its box. I stuffed the bulletin fragments in my pocket and hastened to get out.

The next day I was waiting in the Psychology department at Dalhousie for an appointment I’d made with Dr. Brisson. I’d learned that he was in fact the chair of the department, a renowned psychologist who had studied with Freud himself for a long while. I had with me my old travel bag, still containing all the old collected material I’d found in Triumph. Bringing the bag down out of my closet felt taboo, like unearthing a corpse, and now it slumped on the chair next to me and made me uneasy.

The secretary let me know that Dr. Brisson was ready to speak with me and led me into his office. Far from the palatial space I’d expected on the other side of the door, the doctor sat crowded at a tiny aluminum desk, surrounded on all sides by more books than a man could read in ten lifetimes. Books lay stacked in huge piles on the floor, all over his desk, the man was drowning in a sea of books. The professor himself wore a battered jacket and a beard that was unkempt and obviously unintentional. He looked up and smiled, beckoning me inside. “Come in, come in!” he cried. He moved a stack of books off a small wooden kitchen chair and gestured madly at it. “What can I help you with, my boy?”

Sheepishly, I sat down. “Sir, I’m looking for information on a former student of yours.”

He sat down in his chair and leaned back. “A student of mine? My son, I’ve had an awful lot of students in my time.”

“You might remember this one, she took a number of classes with you,” I explained. “Her name was Ellen Daress.”

The professor looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling for a moment, as if trying to remember the name. At last he snapped his fingers. “I believe I do remember her,” he said, “she did not graduate, am I correct?”

I nodded. “That’s right, she left in her third year.”

“Ah yes, so she is the one.” the professor said, “I do remember her. She was a very smart girl. We were all devastated when she had to leave. I had such high hopes for her.”

“Why did she leave, Dr. Brisson?”

“She wouldn’t say,” he explained. He furrowed his brow. “There was a rumor that there was a baby, if I remember correctly. But of course that’s a fairly standard claim to make whenever anyone leaves something so suddenly.”

“She never told you why she was leaving?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “I believe she wanted to spare us all the worry. She came and told me that she needed to go home, and that she wouldn’t be coming back. And that was that.”

So the professor didn’t have an answer for Ellen’s abandonment of her studies. If Ellen had gotten pregnant, she would have certainly returned to Triumph; a girl her age could not have possibly supported a child and an education on her own. It was somewhat of a tragic story, if true; Ellen never became what she felt she was meant to become.

“Professor, maybe you could tell me something about what Ellen was studying. I found her file in the records, but I don’t understand any of the names of these classes.”

Dr. Brisson laughed. “Ellen was interested in human relationships.” he said, “Especially as those relationships exist between members of a family as opposed to members of society at large.

“To be slightly more technical, Ellen was interested in the psychology of the family structure as an instinctive primitive tendency. Apes and chimps, our close relatives, organize themselves in familial tribal structures. Likewise, at the dawn of civilization, man delineated himself from others by family bonds. Only comparatively late in human societal development did the concept of multiple tribes working toward a single end originate.

“Ellen was working to show that this instinctive bond between families is exceptionally more influential than we currently understand. The argument would have gone on to suggest that all of the urges explained by Freud regarding one’s family in early development, are in fact a direct result of the simple fact that they are one’s family. She was arguing that the basic tribal instinct, in essence, mythologizes the family.”

I leaned back in my chair. “And this mythologizing then causes psychological problems later in life?”

“That’s right,” said the professor, smiling. “It’s quite an impressive theory, is it not? Political issues can be considered a result of one’s mythological image of the father. Racism and the like are xenophobic reactions caused by an innate desire to resist the mingling of tribes. And, more importantly from a treatment perspective, one’s innate understanding of the working of this ideal, ‘Olympian’ family can be examined as an indicator of mental disorders.”

“And what kind of research did this involve?”

“If I remember correctly, she did a lot of work that involved what’s called folie a deux; it’s a very rare psychological condition in which a particular delusion or mental issue is shared by two or more people. These cases usually involve members of the same family or isolated group. Ellen’s hypothesis about folie a deux was that it was directly caused by these primitive familial bonds. If a person’s perception of reality is always mediated by their understanding of their tribal status, then there is a tendency to see the head of the tribe as the paradigm for rational understanding of the world. When the head of the tribe loses grasp of things, the subordinate is in danger of falling into the same delusions as a result, essentially, of his loyalty. A person may be taken over by delusions that objective reality proves to him are not true. Eventually the person forgets objective reality and simply tries to share the mind of the leader.”

I thought about Jameson and his mother. No wonder Ellen had been so frantically obsessed with them. She had given up her education, her life’s purpose, but had found in her very own hometown the perfect historical specimens for her theories.

“Professor, could this kind of problem be exacerbated by some kind of trauma in the household?” Visions flashed through my mind of the Jameson house walled with snow, the family closed off from everything, and then finally, the first unspeakable deed which was the seed of all that followed.

“Yes,” said the professor gravely. “Perhaps with this affliction more than with others. In a sudden catastrophe or prolonged hopeless situation, a person’s grasp on reality becomes less firm. The mind is searching for a place to hold on. Ellen would have said that we latch on to the mythologized forms of our tribe in panic, and if the leader we decide to follow has himself lost his grasp, we may happily accept his delusions simply to find solid footing.”

I was silent for a long time. Dr. Brisson looked at me with gleaming eyes. At last I said, “All this from a third-year student?”

The professor laughed heartily. “Yes, she was a remarkable student.” he said. “For the longest time, I was hoping she would return and finish her work, but it appears unlikely now. I hadn’t thought about her for some time until you arrived. Tell me, why are you so interested in Ellen?”

I realized that I had no answer. I didn’t owe this man a lie like the one I’d fed the librarian earlier, so I simply replied with the truth. “I found a notebook of hers. It’s barely legible but now I’m trying to find out more about her.”

The professor asked to see the notebook. I reached into the bag and found it, but before I pulled it out, I hesitated. “It... it looks like it’s not in here.” I said at last. I don’t know whether it was out of a sense of competition or one of mercy, but I felt nauseous at the possibility of letting him in on what I’d found out so far. Best to leave it alone.

The professor and I had a short chat about my own work. I mentioned nothing about Triumph but discussed some of my prior fieldwork. After a few minutes of cordial conversation, I thanked Dr. Brisson for his help and excused myself.

I had learned something of Ellen, but nothing that would help me track her down. I at last decided that, revolting as the idea might be, I needed to return to Triumph. I began making plans, serious plans this time, plans with which I intended to follow through come hell or high water, to visit the town one last time. I had still not done the thing I’d been too embarrassed to do when Ellen’s name was only in a dream– I had to ask Cyrus, keeper of lore, about Ellen Daress.

The next weekend I was on my way back to Triumph, the corpse-bag hung over my shoulder and my thumb out in the mid-autumn chill. I had left very early; with any luck, I could make Lunenberg and have some time to myself before finding a ride to Triumph and arriving in the early afternoon.

I caught a ride in an old maroon car piloted by an old lady who had been driving these roads since the days when travel was done by carriage. She said little and drove slowly, but I was in no rush. In my mind’s eye, I went over the confrontation I’d had with my friend David the night before.

We’d still not spoken about Triumph. He had dropped by my room to say hello, when he noticed I was packed for a trip. When I told him I was going back to Triumph, he turned as white as a sheet. “Why go back there?” he asked, his voice betraying his nervousness. “I told you there was nothing there. You never found anything there, right?”

I turned and looked at him. His question had an obvious insistence that betrayed his words. “I did find something, David,” I said. “Or at least I think I did. I’m going to tie up some loose ends.”

David swallowed. “You didn’t find anything, my friend. I know you think you’ve found something, but there’s nothing to find there. The place is dull. You’re just going to be wasting your time.”

I shrugged. “I’ve got nothing else to do this weekend. Care to come with?”
He looked hurt, as though I was a kid on a playground, taunting him to climb higher. There were several seconds of silence. Finally he shook his head and said “If you want to go, that’s your business, I’m staying.” He had tried to sound ambivalent, as though the trip was only an inconvenience for him, but there was tension in his voice.

I never mentioned anything about the bulletin I’d found in the records room. He was running, just like I had tried to do. He was still running, and at the time I thought it would have been cruel to make him face the facts. He had left shortly thereafter, without saying goodbye.

So it was this meeting that was on my mind as the old lady steamed into Lunenberg and deposited me in front of the local library. I thought I would go to a restaurant for a cup of coffee, but before I did so I remembered the rolls of film that had been floating in limbo in my bag all these months. With little else to do, I wandered up the street to the drug store and turned in the film to be developed. I found a restaurant nearby. After my photos were prepared, I would have plenty of time to find a ride to Triumph.

I ordered a coffee and spread my old notes out in front of me. I spent half an hour or so flipping through them absently, trying to find some piece of the riddle that I’d not noticed before. What was Ellen’s diary doing in the lighthouse? From the notes I’d copied from her, she seemed a bright and intelligent young woman. Why, then, would she have been hanging around in a burned-out lighthouse?

I reached in the bag for my own notebook, in which I’d taken a few notes about Dr. Brisson’s explanation of Ellen’s studies. I felt that somehow this could tie together something I’d not noticed before. Rummaging around in the bag first for the notebook and then for a pen, my hand wrapped around a solid, heavy object at the bottom of the bag. I pulled it out. It was the bottom half of the rusty padlock that had hung from the lighthouse door, the half that had snapped off in my hand when I had visited the lighthouse.

Absently, I examined the object. It was rusty in places and seemed ready to fall apart in my hand. The spots without rust were stained with smoke and soot. Not the world’s finest padlock, to be in such rotten shape. I assumed it had been put on the door in 1911, after the first fire, and perhaps merely its age was the reason it was in such a state.

For no reason other than absent-minded curiosity, I retrieved my small magnifying glass from the bag and observed the padlock more closely. At first I could find only smoke damage and rust, but then I noticed, on the bottom, some fine lettering that I could not make out. I took a napkin from the table and rubbed at the lettering, clearing away enough of the soot to make the words more legible. Again I put my eye to the magnifying glass and peered intently at the words written there:

J.D. Behringer Security - 1928

I frowned in confusion. If the lock had been manufactured in 1928, then it
certainly couldn’t have been put on the door after the fire of 1911. Truth be told, it would make sense that it was put in place after the second fire, in 1928– but if that was the case, why was there smoke and soot all over it? The only logical explanation was that it was put in place shortly before the second fire. But then why had they waited seventeen years to lock the door after the first fire?

I looked at my watch. The photographs would be ready by now. Putting the padlock back in the bag along with all my notes, I pondered the situation as I walked across town to the drug store to pick up my prints. Upon looking through them I found that several were in bad shape, including one whole roll that was entirely useless due to overexposure. However, I did have fifteen or twenty decent photos of the church and the lighthouse. I returned to the coffee shop and spread them out in front of me. One picture had been taken quite close to the door of the lighthouse, before I had broken the padlock off, so I spent a few minutes analyzing that one closely. I thought that there might be some clue to be found by observing the lock in its entirety, rather than just the piece I had with me.

What I noticed, however, was nothing to do with the padlock. It was a small keyhole underneath the latch on which the padlock hung. A deadbolt, I thought. I remembered seeing a piece of it break off when I kicked the door open.

Two locks on the same door. But why? Increased security? The lighthouse was certainly not a very safe place in which to be playing around. My thoughts flickered back to the stairs and their tenuous grip on the walls above me. It made perfect sense that the town’s parents wouldn’t want their children hanging around in that mess. But again I thought of the smoke on the padlock; it had been there when the second fire started. Before then, the lighthouse was no danger to anyone, and the deadbolt would have certainly kept out anyone who wanted to get in. Why hang a second lock?

I became even more perplexed when I picked up a picture that showed the entire lighthouse. The windows on the side were broken, gaping wide open to the elements. I had planned on climbing through a window if I could not get in through the door. The overgrown woods would have made this manner of entry as easy as you like, certainly easy enough for a mischievous child. If security was the reason for the deadbolt, why were the windows not boarded up?

The answer hit me with so much force that I dropped the photograph and the padlock, making a loud clatter that turned the heads of everyone in the coffee shop. The padlock had not been hung to keep anyone out. It had been hung to keep someone in.

Looking through my pictures only reassured me of this. The metal grates on the windows were broken and bent from their frames, jutting out from the lighthouse rather than in. Suddenly everything made sense. That was why there was no mention of the second fire in the bulletins. Visions crackled through my head, visions of a dark night lit up by flame, the townspeople gathered around the lighthouse, screams tearing through the night as the fire reached up, turning everything inside to ashes. Everything except Ellen’s black diary, the enigmatic book which had been driving me forward, and had driven me back here. We take care of our own around here.

I shoved everything on the table hurriedly into my bag and stood up. There was one last thing I needed to check, in order to be absolutely sure. Cyrus had told me that the fire department had come down from Lunenberg to help contain the 1928 fire. I had noticed the fire department on my ride in to town and knew it was only a few blocks away. I raced to the fire department.

There was an old lady behind the desk serving as a receptionist and dispatcher. She seemed startled by the frantic way I spoke to her, the look in my eyes, my shortness of breath.

“Calm down, young man!” she cried, “What’s the problem here?”

I tried to calm myself and failed. “I need you to check your records.” I said. “The lighthouse, in Triumph. 1928. Was there a fire?”

The lady stopped to think. “I’ve been working here for fifty-three years,” she mused. “I’d remember something like that. The lighthouse in Triumph burned...” she paused and frowned as if trying to remember. “It burned, but not in ‘28. It was before that. I think it happened in 1910 or ‘11.”

My heart felt like a heavy stone. “I need to be positive, ma’am, do you have any records you could check?”

She gave me a scowl. “You don’t trust me, eh?” she asked. She sighed theatrically. “Alright, young man. I’ll go have a look. But if this phone rings, you yell, good and loud, get me?” I nodded, and with another dour look she tottered off into a back room.

She returned about five minutes later. “We’ve got no record of a fire at the lighthouse in 1928. Just 1911.”

My mind was reeling. I thanked her and ignored her when she asked what this was all about.

In a daze, I walked to the highway and flagged down a few cars before I found one willing to bring me to Triumph. This was a young girl who had all kinds of questions about who I was and where I was from, why I was going to Triumph, what I did, and so on. I responded curtly and only when necessary. I did not mean to be rude, but my head was spinning. I was having a hard time understanding all of this, but I felt I had finally uncovered the sinister secret of this town, and I was preparing my questions carefully.

When we arrived in Triumph, a great thunderstorm was raging overhead. The sky was nearly as black as night and the rain was coming down in sheets. I asked to be dropped off by Cyrus Peterson’s place, and I hurried into the hotel.

Cyrus came out of the office, a large cigar in his mouth. “Jason!” he cried. “Back again so soon!”

I walked to the desk and put my bag down. I said nothing but simply stood in front of the desk, looking downward, trying to figure out what to ask first.

“My God, boy, you look like death warmed over.” Cyrus’ voice was full of concern. I felt terrible bringing all of this darkness and disquiet here. I was an outsider come to disturb the tribe, and I felt vulnerable and intrusive.

“Mr. Peterson,” I said. I was breathing heavily, trying to avoid eye contact. “I need you to tell me about Ellen Daress, and what happened to her.”

Peterson leveled his gaze at me. When he spoke, it was quiet, but not menacing. “You just don’t know when to quit, do you, boy?”

“I’m tired of this going through my head.” I said at last. “I’m tired of all of this. Mr. Peterson, something awful happened here, and I’m not talking about the Jamesons. All I want is the truth. I just want to settle this thing in my mind and have done with it. I wish to hell I’d never come here.” I felt worn-out and desperate.

Cyrus looked me in the eye for a very long time. At last, he took a deep breath and opened the door to his office. “Come on in, son.” he said, his voice resigned, old and weary. “We’d better have a drink.”

I sat down once again in my old chair, apprentice and master, scrutinizing one another over the whiskey bottle that stood between us. Cyrus poured us each a glass. “What do you know, then?” he asked.

I reached into my bag and pulled out the padlock. I began outlining my evidence, not as an accusator but as a colleague sharing fieldwork with another. “I know that this padlock was put on the door of the lighthouse before it burned the second time. I know that neither the Lunenberg fire department, nor the church bulletins have any record of the fire. I know that Ellen Daress was in the lighthouse– I found her notebook there. I believe it’s true that the people in this town intentionally locked her inside and burned the lighthouse down. And I know from that notebook that all of this is tied to the Jameson family somehow. I just want the whole story.”

Cyrus took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You’re good, my friend.” he said at last, in a low voice. “I’d hoped I’d never have to speak of this again. You’re right that this goes back to the Jamesons. I didn’t tell you because you shouldn’t know– no one should know. But now it looks like you know, and God knows there’s nothing I can do to help that. You want the whole story? To settle yourself?”

I nodded. I felt exhausted.

“It won’t settle you. But neither can it harm you now, not any more than it would otherwise. What’s done is done. You deserve to know the truth.

“Ellen Daress was a smart girl. She had gone to Dalhousie to study psychology, a very new discipline, and one the townsfolk weren’t crazy about– them that could understand it, anyway. Nor them that couldn’t, I suppose. She went anyway. In her third year, she got pregnant. A mistake, they said, and the father wanted nothing to do with it. She came home to Triumph in 1925 to have her child.

“She found out about the story of the Jamesons somehow, even though them that know the story keep it quiet. We heard that she had even gone to the woods to find their foundation. Slowly she began to lose her grip on reality. She would spend days and days trying to find out what had been going on in the heads of Jameson and his mother. Eventually it was all she talked about. We knew what was happening, but it was too late for her.

“We tried to get her away from her books, but nobody can take away the thoughts in a person’s head. She became violent and would stay confined in her room for days, with the door locked and the child with her. Eventually, we decided that the baby was no longer safe. We tried one night in ‘28 to get it away from her, but she fought us and escaped with the child.

“We didn’t know what had happened to her for another week or so. And then some kids were out at the lighthouse, fooling around, and they tried the door and found it unlocked. They didn’t know, none of us knew, that Ellen had somehow found her way into the lighthouse and was living there, scribbling madly in the diary that you found. The children looked around the lighthouse and quickly uncovered Ellen’s child. She had killed it, and the flesh was torn away, like it had been bitten and chewed.

“The children ran from the lighthouse. One looked back before they reached the woods and they saw Ellen there, naked and covered in blood. She did not chase them but returned to the lighthouse to wait.

“We heard the story the children told us and we went out there and saw the child where they had said it would be. Ellen could be seen at the very top of the lighthouse, just sitting and staring out to sea. We did then what needed to be done, the same way it needed to be done back in 1850.

“I’m not proud of it. It weighs on me every day, the knowledge of what was done to poor Ellen. But Jason, you have to understand, this has to stop. All of this has to stop. It’s chewed the soul out of me and it’s doing the same to you, just like it did to Ellen. When nobody’s left to tell the story, it will be over, so we need to just leave it alone. You and I will never forget about it, nor will anyone who knows, but we have to keep it inside of us, it needs to be stopped so that it will stop hurting people.”

I had been listening to all of this with an increasing sense of detachment. At last I could take no more. I jumped to my feet and grabbed Cyrus by the shoulders. He gazed at me, confused, while I shook him. “You did what needed to be done?! Did you stop to consider helping her? Do you ever think about that around here?” I released him and paced the length of the office, my face in my hands. The further this story drove me the more unholy it became. I felt like I was being forced to some great and terrible end and I had no chance of escape. The story was not through with me yet. “This town!” I cried. “Good God, you people!”

Cyrus watched wide-eyed as I stormed out of the office. I slammed the door shut behind me and it echoed through the hotel like the last second of some monstrous, gargantuan clock.

I stood outside and let the rain pour down upon me while thunder rolled overhead. I felt like I was at the end of my sanity and the story still gripped me and would not let go. I was in despair. I came here to find finality, to put an end to this story, however gruesome it might be, but I had found no reason for this. Hunting this story was like chasing down some unknown vicious horror and finding only the bloody remnants of its voracious feasts. After each victim it became harder to track the beast, but I was driven on further by simple desire to know what the beast would look like.

I had nowhere left to go. I’d come back to Triumph and asked the question that I had assumed would end all of this, but I was left with only more horrible visions in my mind, now confirmed by a first person witness. Cyrus had told me nothing but the fact that the most horrific end I could have imagined for Ellen was in fact the way her story had ended– though of course it had not ended. I had been everywhere, I had seen everything. This story had seemed to drag me along, to chase me into its labyrinth, and now I had seen all and was this how it ended? Was this all there was? A terrible and bloody history with no motivating purpose, no justice?

Five miles up the shore from our lighthouse. That’s what the bulletin David had nearly disposed of had read. Five miles. A short hike for closure. With a grim, foolish insistence I decided that I would go to the only place left that could tell me anything, bring any kind of conclusion to this grisly tale.

The mud was thicker than the last time I had come out to the lighthouse. This time I was glad that I did not intend to go inside. When I came upon it, it was like a horrible monument to sin, primitive man’s self-glorification to the heavens. I walked quickly past it and down to the shore. It was fairly accessible and easy to walk on, although occasionally I had to wind my way up into the woods and clamber through dry sticks and patches of rotten, mossy earth. I measured my distance approximately, by my steps. I knew this was foolish, that there was little chance of finding the foundation, and that even if I did, I would not want to go near. I soon found an overgrown trail, however, that seemed to be leading in the same direction I was going. I followed it first simply to make walking easier, but I soon came to suspect that this path was made for the exact reason I was taking it, hewn, probably, by Jameson himself.

The rain began to subside, though I was soaked through.

My suspicions were confirmed when I walked to the top of a small ridge, at or around what I had estimated to be about five miles from the lighthouse, and saw the tip of an ancient chimney not far away. Without even trying, really, without having to root around in this forest like I had thought I would, Jameson’s path had found me, and had brought me here. This, I felt sure, was finally the end of the road for me. Whatever closure there was to this tale could exist here, and nowhere else.

At last I stumbled through a tangle of trees and briefly saw the ancient, broken chimney past the swaying branches. It rose obscenely from the ground like the gnarled finger of some long-dead antediluvian behemoth. I carefully stepped forward, eyes to the ground to watch for snaring roots that might trip me, when I saw the edge of a rusty object. Bending down and extricating it from a pile of moist, rotting leaves, I found its gruesome truth, a short length of antiquated barbed wire. With a shudder, I dropped it and continued.

Soon I was in the clearing. Before me lay the ruins of a long-finished house, the broken teeth of its foundation locked in their silent scream to the cloudy sky. For a moment I was compelled by something primal, something animal within me, to turn and run. Cyrus had told me the story of this place and the barbed wire had confirmed it. Before me lay the very house in which Jameson and his insanely hopeless mother had done their grisly deeds. These very trees which surrounded me had muffled their victim’s screams. The only part of this house which remained was the most terrible part of all. Justice and time had not wiped this place clean but had separated and exposed its singular sinful brutality. Though my very body seemed to resist each step, my intellect forced me onward.

Slowly I made my way to the edge of the foundation. My mind replayed flashes of my dream against my will. The desperation, the fear. I knew this place. There was the corner where I hid from the nameless it which had hunted me. There had lain the horse, returning to the earth under a blanket of decay. There, that very spot, the Thing’s human hand had gripped the foundation, pulled itself near. I felt dizzy and out of breath. Fear and sudden sorrow laid heavy on my breast. There was a rock nearby and I sat on it, gazing into the black, charred remains of whatever this place had once been. I put my face in my hands and closed my eyes. Fire and hopeless ruin, decay, rotting, my dream, my dream.

Somewhere deep in the forest I heard the faintest echo of birdsong, as light as memory. And I felt the Truth.

I slowly removed my hands from my eyes. I looked around at the forest in startled surprise as a child born new into this world. A bird sings in this forest. I was on the precipice of something massive, I had come upon an idea that was so vast and terrifying that at first I could only know that it was there, I could not understand it. A bird sings in this forest. I turned my gaze to the ruined foundation sprawling open before my feet. I sat in rapt amazement and peered into and beyond the charred blackness of time. With a surge my mind dove fearlessly into the timeless grandmother-idea it had found. And I knew the Truth.

The Truth was that this was only a foundation. Nothing more, nothing less. This forest did not remember the screams that its fronds and leaves had blocked from the ears of yesteryear’s townspeople. This foundation did not remember those who had died here. Jameson and his mother and all they had done was now only a shapeless mound of wet ash. The Truth was that these terrible things did not taint this place with a foul presence. The activities of humanity do not sink in the very earth and stones to fester and boil. What had happened here was finished, it was finished when the match was struck.

But then what? What was responsible? With no hesitation, with a mad desire simply to know at all cost, I felt my mind dive deep into the Truth, to the very center of the idea, and with a blinding burst of realization the name of Ellen Daress thundered in my consciousness. I went limp, I toppled off the stone, I lay sprawled on my chest as my mind recoiled and threatened to shatter. I truly understood then the essential terrible fact that lay behind everything I had seen and heard in Triumph: all comes from within.

Ellen Daress had come here and she had known the Truth. And the Truth is that the terrible, unspeakable actions of humanity, not only the depravities undertaken in this house but everything comes from within. There is no grand judge in this world, nothing terrible lurking in the remains of this hollow stone mouth. Insanity lies in us all like a foot of dark oil under an inch of pure water. It takes but the faintest jostle to stir the two together, to bring from below the hideous animal amorality which seethed in us before the Fruit. Nothing drives us mad. All comes from within. Reeling in this realization, my mind was turbulent, the oil mixed with water, and without thinking I reached out and felt the gritty surface of the mouth’s broken tooth and the animal awoken within me dragged me to the foundation. With wide hopeless eyes I gazed into the blackness and prayed for something to rise up within it, but all was still. And all was finished.

Some time later, I do not know for sure how long, I rose to my feet. I felt no reason to stay anymore. I had been laid low by myself and I would have to get up now and go live with what I now knew. Stumbling and tripping, the sun going down beside me, I turned my back on the Jamesons and set off down the trail. I remember nothing about what was going through my mind at this point. I was functioning only enough to keep my feet moving, to keep going, to get back to Triumph and find shelter. I needed to see Cyrus. I did not need to talk to him, but I needed to see him, to understand in him what was happening in me, and to find out how to deal with it. Cyrus could deal with it, somehow, through some great force of will he was able to keep this thing within himself, to look it in the eye and stand firm before it. I could do no such thing. This thing I had found now decided everything for me, it was the largest part of my mind, it made decisions for me. It was allowing me to walk back to Triumph.

Slowly, with the townspeople giving me untrusting looks, perhaps thinking me drunk, I staggered down the streets of Triumph. Cyrus’ hotel loomed like an ancient Catholic hospital. I shuffled indoors and made immediately for the office. I burst through the door and saw Cyrus, leaning over his desk.

“Mr. Peterson?” I called. My voice sounded sluggish and chaotic, the voice of a lunatic. There was no response. He was slumped over the desk as though he were drunk or asleep.

I slowly walked over to him and prodded him with a finger. I called his name again but he didn’t so much as move. My head was swimming as I noticed an empty pill bottle clutched in his left hand. In his right, he held a letter in a white envelope. I reached for his wrist, and felt no pulse.

My mind could make sense of none of this. I had to call Jebediah and he had to see this thing that had happened. Then I noticed the writing on the envelope. In a large and thick hand was written “For Jason”. I felt sick to my stomach. This man had committed suicide, and had left a note, for me. With all I that had learned that day and now this, I felt like burning the paper, grabbing it and ripping it to shreds, throwing it out into the rain to turn to a soaking, pulpy mess in the street.

But Cyrus had proven to be a friend, and a sufferer of the same disease that I knew had now changed me forever. If he had one final word for me, I felt that I should read it, even though the prospect felt like blackness in my mind. Almost against my will, I sat in my old chair, across from Cyrus, and opened the envelope. There was a letter for me written in Cyrus’s distinctly bold hand:

Dear Jason,

I am sorry that it had to be like this. I cannot go on any further. I have carried this burden on my soul for years and at last I know I can go no further with it.

I know I have lost my mind. I see things that aren’t there. I hear things when there’s nobody in the room. I feel ghosts, Jason, but there are no such things as ghosts. There’s only what we do, and what’s been done, and how we try to explain these things. You know all of this now, of course. You know how we’re trapped in ourselves, and how we can never get out, and that there are things in us, things that are so old and powerful that they come from before we called some things good, and others bad. What you’ve learned is that these things are as much a part of us as they are any other animal, and that they are within you, and because they are part of you there is no escaping them.

I’ve been a fool to help you. You should have never known any of this. I’ve done terrible things. I was there when Ellen died. I’ve kept this story alive in you. I hope you are a stronger man than I am, because for my part, I was unable to take this any more, and I’ve done the only thing that could have kept me from losing my humanity.

Tell Jebediah I’m sorry. I’ve left him a note as well. I told him that I could not go on alone, that I’ve been depressed and miserable since his mother died, and that that’s why I’ve done this thing. Please don’t tell him otherwise, Jason. He doesn’t know about this and I pray he never will. Tell him to sell the hotel and get out of Triumph.

I should have done better by you, Jason. I should have told you it was all a bunch of foolishness, told you that nothing had ever happened here, that everything is and has always been fine. Someday people will say that about Triumph because there will be no one left who knows these stories. I hope to God that day comes sooner rather than later.

Good-bye, Jason. I’m sorry.

With all I can give,
–Cyrus Peterson

For several minutes I read and reread the letter, gazing at it in abject horror. For all my love of stories, my desire to accompany my predecessor in his forays into the darkest realms of the human mind, I had now become a character in my own right. I knew then I would never be the same. The story was settled, the final conclusion for which I’d hoped had come, but I knew the rest I was seeking would never be mine. This horrible Truth about mankind’s savage remnant, this insanity, would remain like a lens through which I would now see every moment for the rest of my life. As if in response, deep thunder boomed overhead and the room was suddenly overtaken by the sudden black void of a power failure. I sat and listened to my heart thumping, holding in one hand a letter from the dead man sitting at the desk across from me. I vomited when I felt a soft, female hand grasp my own.

I rode again to Lunenberg with Jebediah that night, the cab filled this time with a granite silence that neither of us cared to disturb. Jebediah was fetching the coroner. I was merely trying to escape. I had Jebediah drop me off at the pharmacy and told him I would simply wait until morning to catch a ride back to Halifax. He gave me a stony nod and drove away without a word. In the metal trash can nearby I placed all of my notes about Triumph, along with Ellen’s diary and Cyrus’ letter, and set them alight. I gazed with no expression at the burning papers and saw in my mind’s eye the lighthouse blazing, Ellen pounding frantically at the red door whose new padlock resolutely denied her escape.

We think that ghosts haunt certain buildings, certain places, certain times. Can a ghost haunt a person? If there’s any truth to my experience, they can. I see them in waking light and again, more horrifically, every night in dreams of the utmost horror, dreams whose sense of reality and abject hopelessness I had never experienced in my sleeping subconscious prior to my arrival in Triumph, Nova Scotia. The ghosts of Ellen Daress, of Jameson and his mother, of the children they slaughtered, of Cyrus Peterson, these ghosts follow me everywhere I go. But they are not really ghosts. They are the insanity, the animal within me. The insanity that Ellen so rightly noted seethes in every one of our tortured souls, this insanity now haunts my dreams and shatters my consciousness. We say that the insane are different from us, but the truth is that everything we see in them is reflected in ourselves, and that is the true horror– that insanity is a matter of degree, and that the madness that swims just below the surface of a town called Triumph is nothing more than the tortured reality of our own glorious and hopeless victory over the simple minds of the animals we once were.

Jesse P. Hiltz - Not by Needs nor Nature

2009-10-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

Today there are two new posts. I'm posting part III of Persistence, the hot new story recently rejected by Gaspereau Press. If you've been reading along and wondering about where all this supposed 'horror' is at, this section of the story will hopefully satisfy; it's where things really start picking up speed. You'll find Part III: Stories directly below this post.

But before I get to that, I also want to recommend something else for you to read. This is the work of my good friend Jesse P. Hiltz, which you can find at his writing blog, Not by Needs nor Nature.

Jesse is a man well-versed in the philosophical critical approach, and this knowledge finds its way into everything he writes (it is also the reason why my review of his work won't be nearly as far-reaching as his review of mine, which is an interesting little essay in its own right on the essence of horror). Never satisfied with a simple approach, Jesse evaluates all things from all sides, drawing out and often tearing down our inherent assumptions- assumptions about what it means to read, assumptions about what the real purpose of story-telling is, and (perhaps the greatest fiction of all) the assumption that there is an absolute and inviolable barrier between reader and thing-read.

His latest and (I think) most impressive fictional(?) work is now being posted in sections on his blog. This story, The Split, is a fascinating study of the idea of motivation and guilt, framed within the hazy bounds of a horror story that often seems more like a dream. As we read, we begin to realize that the story is not merely an isolated report of events but the actual product of those events and maybe even the motivator for future events not recorded in the story itself. This is the reason for the question mark above. In the story's process of drawing itself into itself, it also causes itself to go beyond its fictional barriers; as the real story is drawn into the fictional event, the fictional event becomes bound up against the real story and acquires a realness of its own. In the end we are left with the question of what exactly we mean when we say that a thing "has happened."

The Split was written at about the same time as my story, Persistence, and both are the result of hours and hours of frantic discussion between Jesse and I regarding the nature and purpose of horror. This includes the how-and-why of being 'horrified' by things, and the oft-overlooked distinction between 'horror' and 'fright'; ignorance of which leads certain writers (to name no names) to think that merely injecting a stock monster into an otherwise mundane situation is cause enough to label the resulting product a work of horror. In the end, I think that these two stories, the result of that discussion, are complimentary manifestations of a shared outlook; as the one argues that the reality of horror is essentially fear of one's own self, the other takes this one step further, adds the social element, and explains how this fear of self can be spread to or shared by others; although- crucially- the result is not fear of the other, but rather a sense of shared guilt, and an acknowledgment of the fact that all human motivations are essentially entwined.

Take a look at his stuff and I'm sure you'll be impressed. If you've been reading Persistence, I'd suggest you get caught up on The Split, and read the two side-by-side as we post them; they were written side-by-side and they are brothers.

Persistence - Part III: Stories

2009-10-16T09:13:00.001-07:00

PERSISTENCE
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part I: Halifax (Link)
Part II: Triumph (Link)
Part IV: Ellen (Link)

Part III: Stories

   Cyrus helped me get settled into my new room. I noticed that he had his eye on the whiskey bottle, so when my meager luggage was moved, I suggested that we sit down and have a few drinks– a prospect he seemed to appreciate. He left the room and reappeared shortly with two glasses. I gestured for him to pull a chair up to the desk on which I had carefully positioned my notes about Triumph.

   “You said this morning you’d tell me some stories?” I asked. He grinned, poured himself a glass, drank it in one gulp, and poured another.

   “Well, if it’s stories you want, I’ve got them,” he said. “I probably know more about the comings and goings of this town than anybody else.”

   We talked for a long time about the town’s history, though I didn’t learn anything that I hadn’t known before. However, our historical discussion served its purpose, which was to get enough whiskey into Cyrus that I could begin to ask him about the darker side of Triumph’s past. At first I asked him about fires in general, the worst ones he’d seen or heard about, the fate of the first church (apparently it burned when a Sunday-school teacher forgot to open a flue, a tragedy for such a small mistake, but Cyrus assured me that no one was hurt.) Then, feeling that the time was right, I mentioned the lighthouse.

   “The lighthouse? That was a sad thing, alright. The whole town was broken up about it. My father would never even go back to see the place afterwards. Real tragedy.”

   “Your father?” I asked. “So then this was quite some time ago.”

   “It was in 1910, I think, ‘10 or ‘11.” came the reply. I watched Cyrus carefully, but he didn’t seem at all perturbed by my questions. He sipped his whiskey and leaned back in his chair with the same wistful look he’d had in his eye throughout our conversation.

   “I stopped by the church to look it up, it was in a bulletin from 1911.”

   Cyrus shrugged. “Well, there you go. I suppose you know the story. For a man to lose his wife and child like that, and he’s just down the road, but you can’t see anything through that forest, so nobody knew. He killed himself, I heard, a few years later. It wasn’t his fault, but you don’t get past that kind of guilt.”

   I nodded. “You know, it’s funny,” I said. “Your son told me it happened in ‘28.”

   Cyrus glanced at me. “Lad’s got his facts mixed up. The place burned twice.” I was surprised. I had imagined myself as some kind of detective. When I was preparing my questions for the event I had seen myself slowly wheedling out the facts from a tight-lipped Cyrus. But here he had beaten me to the chase. I felt obligated to show off at least a certain amount of journalistic expertise.

   “That’s what I thought,” I answered. “The picture in the bulletin from 1911 showed the lighthouse essentially unharmed.”

   “Yeah,” he replied. “The first time the fire didn’t get to the lighthouse. The rain put it out before it got through. Nobody ever used it again, though. When something like that happens in a town like this, people would rather forget it than try to rebuild, and the new lighthouses made it so there wasn’t really a point to reopening it.”

   “So what about the second fire? That was in ‘28?”

   “Yeah, I think so. It doesn’t surprise me that Jeb got the story wrong, he was just a boy when it happened. Some kids got in there, just fooling around, you know. They were smoking, and somehow they managed to set the place on fire from the inside out. They managed to get out okay, they ran and told the constable about it, but by then there was no point in trying to put it out, really. The fire department from Lunenberg came down and we pretty much just watched it burn, kept it from spreading into the woods. Nobody hurt. I think most of us were glad to see it go.”

   I was crushed. Once again, it appeared that I had gotten to the end of my search. Perhaps Triumph was, as my friend had suggested, simply not home to many good stories. I had learned a lot about the town’s woeful history, the decline of the fisheries, and the tragic burning of a lighthouse (as well as a not-so-tragic second burning) but beyond the face values of these stories there seemed to lurk no mysterious legend, no grand myth.

   I had been scheduled for Monday at my job in Halifax. Here it was Saturday night and I was no closer to my goal than I was when I had left. I had one more day. It would have made sense to return to Halifax and forget the entire event, but somehow I would not allow myself to consider it. It may have been a hunch, or perhaps simply a sense of competition, but I was resolved to stay here and find something where my friend had not. Cyrus and I stayed up for several more hours swapping tales, but when he left and I crawled into my new bed, thoroughly drunk, I was at a dead-end.

   Fear. I am running through the woods at dusk. My foot slips off a rock and I fall, hard, on my right shoulder. There is no impact but a sickening cushioning, a sweet-smelling rotten softness as my shoulder goes through a decaying tree-trunk. Potato bugs swarm out of the gash in their putrid home.

   I leap to my feet and keep running. Cobwebs and tangled branches swipe at me. It is getting darker. My feet slip and dig in foul-smelling mud and slick black moss. The further I run, the more rotten the world becomes. There is no life in these woods. I do not know what I am running from.

   I stop at the edge of a carefully-constructed foundation. The ruins of some long-dead house. Ancient, finished. A piece of humanity left to crumble and rot as the world reclaims all things. It is dark now. I dive into the foundation and shove myself into a corner. Dry things and wet things. Things crawl down the neck of my shirt where my back is pressed against crumbling stone. I become as small as possible, hoping to be overlooked by whatever nameless, mute terror is chasing me. Fear rises inside me like a second self. I am no longer myself, I am made of fear, it conquers my being.

   I am standing. I have no control over myself. I know it is foolish to do so, but I walk into the center of the foundation. Whatever hunts me will find me. The fear is turning my mind to ash but I begin to move dead logs and brush from a heap in the center of the foundation. I uncover the blackened head of a rotting horse. An eyelid is open but the eye is gone. A smell of death washes over me.

   I hear nothing and see nothing but suddenly I am intent, mystified, staring at the edge of the foundation. A black thing is there. A human’s hand grasps the side of the foundation and the black thing heaves itself closer. The world is full of fire.

   I awoke in a cold sweat. It was still night, the lingering effects of the whiskey pounding dully in my head. I had never been so terrified. The dream played itself out over and over in my mind’s eye as I stared into the blackness. That rotting foundation in the dark woods, that feeling of decay all around me, like a terrible black hole in the world’s heart. That unspeakable black horror, dragging itself toward me, more terrifying for the unhallowed mask of humanity it wore. There was no humanity in it. It was a being of rot and plague. But the form it wore was undeniably its own, and the notion that what was once human was now that thing was nauseating.

   It was the most vivid dream that I had ever had, but it was a dream and nothing more. Deeply wishing it were morning, I closed my eyes and tried desperately to clear the vision from my mind. Behind it all was the lighthouse, a tortured building calling for me. I would go again tomorrow. I would go on my own and find that which was being hidden from me.

   It was raining again the next morning. Cyrus was kind enough to offer me breakfast, but he was obviously in no mood for conversation. He held a large meaty hand to his forehead and kept his gaze directed straight down at the table, eating small bites of scrambled egg and drinking cup after cup of steaming black coffee. Having been in his position before, I knew that his archival gift would be of no use to me until noon at the very earliest.

   I, on the other hand, was feeling surprisingly unaffected by the previous nights’ libations. My plan was to hike out to the lighthouse on foot with only a notebook, flashlight, and camera and find some way inside. Given how close the overgrown woods were to the lighthouse, I guessed that if the door would not avail me, I could try climbing a tree and getting in through a window. I couldn’t have explained why I felt that there was something that wasn’t being told about the lighthouse, but I had an odd sense of certainty about it. I felt sure that after only a few minutes of searching I would uncover some piece of this riddle that would either answer all my questions or send more and more swarming my way– either way, the story would grow from this search.

   It was raining again, a bleak kind of mist coming down from a bleak kind of sky. The lighthouse was about twenty minutes away on foot, the last five or ten of which wound through the ruts and puddles of the overgrown path leading up to the clearing by the sea. Before I had arrived at the lighthouse my clothes were soaked and my shoes covered in mud and grime. I was having second thoughts about the whole operation. Why was I suspicious of Cyrus’ explanation? Kids make stupid mistakes like that all the time, and it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time things got out of control and something like this had happened. What made this situation seem so out of the ordinary? There was the mixup with the bulletins, but Cyrus had corrected me on that.

   Just as I escaped the forest’s clutches and was again confronted by the mammoth structure towering over me, it hit. I was suspicious simply because I had still not found a record of the second burning. Peterson had told me his story and everything seemed to fit– his son’s confusion over the date, the first article’s picture with the lighthouse intact, everything seemed to make sense with the information that Cyrus had given me, but the box that should have logically contained a mention of even the relatively small news of the burning of an abandoned lighthouse by some careless kids had not mentioned the lighthouse at all. I had not gotten the full story, at least not in print.

   My inquisitiveness now renewed, I gazed upward at the enigmatic tower. Two small starlings zipped into the clearing and spiraled up through the broken glass at the lighthouse’s spire, making their home out of what man had forgotten. In a strange moment of poetic lunacy I suddenly saw the lighthouse as a grand prison tower, not a guardian to the wayfaring sailor so much as an asylum for those who embrace their own insanity. It towered over me, silent and inscrutable, daring me to challenge its blackened heart.

   I sloshed up to the door. It had taken some damage from the fire, the paint that appeared to have once been a lustrous red now a sickened brownish-black. The edges were charred and scorched. There was a heavy padlock hanging from the door, itself smoke-blackened although apparently not broken. I grabbed it and gave it a good shake and found, to my surprise, that it had rusted through. The entire latch snapped off, leaving me with the rusty lock itself, which I absently shoved into my bag beside the flashlight and the camera. I picked the latch off of the hinge which held the door closed and kicked the door in with one go. Strangely, it opened easily, and the excess force caused it to swing around and bang off the inside of the tower, a noisy clang that rang hauntingly through the darkened depths of the lighthouse. I saw a rusty chunk of an old deadbolt, previously mounted inside the door, fly off into the darkness.

   My heart fell as I shined the flashlight into the lighthouse, because the damage was even more substantial than I had thought. Broken rafters and pieces of the stairs lay all over the ground; it appeared that the fire had started near the bottom, for the stairs high above my head were still securely fastened to the wall, though they looked just as charred and demolished as those that now lay crumpled before me. I had a vision of those blackened things coming loose somehow, crashing to the ground, pinning me under them. I shuddered involuntarily but stepped inside.

   My feet sank into wet ashes. The rain must have come in through the broken windows and stagnated because a rancid smell immediately rose to sting my nostrils. I trod forward resolutely and even had the courage to lift and flip over a large piece of charred wood. A mass of tiny white insects of some kind or another fled this destruction of their decades-silent abode. I recoiled from their escape. There was nothing to be seen under the object I had moved, only more charred, soggy ashes.

   I looked around for another ten minutes or so, dodging all manner of entombed vermin who had decided to take up residence in the abandoned lighthouse, and found nothing. I had begun to accept that what little in this place had survived the maelstrom that engulfed it had surrendered to the elements long ago, working its way back into the earth in the bellies of worms, getting ready for another go-around.

   Suddenly a loud sound which I could not identify echoed through the inside of the lighthouse and a small black object crashed to the ground in front of me. I dove for the door, knowing for sure that the stairs hanging over my head had finally taken this moment to come crashing down. I was outside, frantically peering around with my flashlight, when I saw that the noise had been made by several large seagulls suddenly deciding to take off from the top of the lighthouse and out to sea. I spent several seconds analyzing the stairs, trying to read their minds. Eventually I decided that they would probably remain there long enough for me to quickly dart inside and see what had fallen when the seagulls had abandoned their shelter. If it was only another charred piece of wood then I would close the door behind me and head back to the hotel. This lighthouse was not the treasure-trove of clues I had hoped it would be.

   I stepped inside and trudged through the soggy ashes to the origin of my haphazard evacuation, passing my flashlight over the ground. At first I had a hard time recognizing it as anything other than a block of wood, but then I saw that the object on the ground in front of me was actually a small black book, what looked like a journal of some kind. I snatched it quickly, shoved it in my bag and stalked off back to the hotel. The rain was falling with a vengeance now, making the walk out even more miserable than the walk in, my shoes buried in mud, my lungs full of the sickeningly-sweet odor of a forest in a hot summer rain.

   When I had gotten back to the hotel, dried off, and changed my clothes, I sat down at the desk and pulled out the notebook. It seemed to have fared only slightly better than the rest of the lighthouse. It was damp and moldy, most of its pages blurred to unintelligibility. The cover was of a soft leather; I imagined it would have been a very nice journal when it was new, but now the cover and binding were bent and cracked, warped with moisture, giving off a noxious odor.

   The first twenty pages or so were completely useless to me. There was a page beyond that, however, that was somewhat more legible. Taking up a pencil and my own black notebook, I carefully transcribed what I found on these pages:

   Nobody wants to talk about them. They call it dangerous. I think that’s foolish– as though simply learning about something causes you to become a part of it. There’s no harm in simply learning. Jameson and his mother were monsters, but that’s not to say there’s nothing that we can learn from their misdeeds. The work begun by Freud in this area could benefit greatly from such a dramatic case. For instance, the nature of their k-

   The text faded away here, although indentations in the page hinted at the sinister word that would have followed. The bottom half of this page was covered in scribbles, as though the author’s pen had malfunctioned and he or she was trying to coax it back into life. I eagerly turned the page, but the next several pages were blank, and when the writing resumed again it was in a section that had suffered much water damage and was essentially illegible.

I flipped further into the book. Past more obliterated text there was another dry spot. The handwriting here had changed considerably. Where before it had been a graceful, petite script, it changed to a somewhat cracked, spidery hand, as though written in haste or with pen in shaking fingers. It read:

   We say the insane are freaks of nature, we see them as half-animal. We do not understand them to be like us. They are mindless, we are rational. They are chaotic, we are predictable. They see a fragmented and nonsensical reality, we base our lives on fact.
What terrifies me is the idea that we characterize the insane this way because we are afraid of the obvious truth. The truth that confronts everyone and is silenced by such belief is that we are, really, all insane.
   This world is not meant for us. There are those among us who have passed beyond the curtain between what we call sanity and what we call madness, but in the eyes of the world, we are all madmen. We think and write, we build massive monuments to our own selves, we love beyond our lives, we destroy ourselves by the thousands with weapons of unearthly power.
   We have walked beyond the path of animal but here there is no road for us to travel, there is no guide for us because we are first, and so we simply act our desires, conforming our madness to the bonds set by our societies, driving down the one fact that we all know to be true, the fact of our own senselessness and chaotic lack of purpose.
   All madness is my madness. There is no escaping this truth.

   I put down my pencil and stared blankly at what I had written. I could not say what scared me more; the passage I had just transcribed, or the extent to which I could feel myself agreeing with it.

   That night, after dinner, I fetched my bottle of whiskey and sat with Peterson in the hotel’s office. We drank and he told me more about the town’s furthest reaches of history, its settlement by Basque sailors, their battles with the colonial French and English before their final defeat. Again, when his tongue was suitably loosened by the bitter whiskey, I began to steer our conversation toward the matters with which I was presently concerned. I had decided earlier not to mention my trespass in the lighthouse, nor the notebook I had found in there. I wanted to know about these Jamesons, and the apparently nefarious deeds they had committed, these crimes about which it was dangerous to speak.

   Again, as before, I led him into the discussion by asking about similar events. I asked if there had ever been a murder in the town, to which he replied that once, as a child, he had heard of a man in town who had killed his wife when he found she was being unfaithful to him. Here I decided to speak to the point:

   “Was that a Mr. Jameson?”

   Cyrus was silent for several seconds. Finally, slowly and deliberately, he put his glass down on the table and leveled his gaze at me across the small table. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, calm. “Where did you hear that name?”

   I had devised a somewhat suitable excuse before our conversation began. “I heard some of the kids talking about a Mr. Jameson, something about a murder.”

   “That’s a lie,” Cyrus said flatly. I remained silent. After a few seconds, he spoke again. “We don’t talk about them here. The kids have never even heard the name. So where did you?”

   I had no answer. If I told him the truth, then he would know I had broken into the lighthouse, and that was the last thing I needed. This town seemed like the kind of place where even someone like Cyrus would be enraged by the thought of an outsider snooping around, breaking into buildings.

   “You’re clever, you.” he said eventually. The rain pounded down outside the window. “You keep your mouth shut. You think before you talk. That’s good. Well, it’s none of my business where you heard about those lunatics, I suppose.”

   It seemed I may have gotten what I wanted. Cyrus took a long gulp of whiskey, which I had learned to identify as a signal of an oncoming story. But when he put his glass down, he kept a calculating stare on me, seldom breaking eye contact. His voice was quiet, barely audible over the torrent outside.

   “I don’t want you mentioning this again in town, do you understand?” the tone of his voice made clear how serious he was, and I nodded nervously. “It’s bad for us to be talking about them,” he said, “It’s a story people shouldn’t hear. But you’re the expert, not me, so I’ll tell you. But once we’re done here, we’re not going to be bringing it up again.” Again, I nodded. He grunted his approval and began.

   “A long time ago, I think it was sometime around 1850, there was a family here, named Jameson. A man and his wife, and two sons. They lived with his mother. She was feeble-minded and it was said she was demented somehow. She lived in their attic. None of this was out of the ordinary, you know, not for that time. It wasn’t like today, when people send their parents away when they get old and screws start coming loose. The idea of medicine for problems of the head barely even existed. So if granny cracked, you’d put her up somewhere in your house, and that’d be that.

   “Anyway, things went fine for them for a long time. Jameson was a butcher and he made a good living. His family seemed to be happy. But then his wife, she got sick, pneumonia or something. She held on for a long time, but eventually she passed, and it hit Jameson hard. He stopped showing up for work. He wouldn’t answer the door when people came to visit. His boys stopped going to school. Everybody in town was worried sick about the poor guy.

   “And then one day he locks the door on his shop, and he and his boys go off into the woods with saws and hammers. They come back a week or two later, and they’re packing up their stuff into a cart. None of them says anything to anybody. They take one cart-load of junk, bundle the old lady in, and off they go.

   “For a long time, nobody saw them except for when Jameson or one of his boys would come in to town for essentials. They hunted and cured their own meat out there in the woods, living off deer and bear, whatever they could get. After a while everybody just sort of forgot about them.

   “Then they got a real bad winter. Even the people in town were snowed in for a good part of it, not to mention the Jamesons, out in the middle of nowhere with nobody to help them out. Difference was people in town could stock up on food when the snow melted, get ready for the next snow-in. The way I heard it, the Jamesons didn’t have enough meat put away and couldn’t get out of their house until the spring.” Cyrus’ gaze was distant. He was looking down at his hands but there was no focus. He was quiet for a long time. He cleared his throat. I had the sudden, unbidden image of a rising tide. “Not to put too fine a point on it, his boys weren’t seen again after that winter.”

   I shuddered at the implication. I considered asking for clarification, just so I could be completely sure of what I was being told, but the look I was getting from Cyrus told me all I needed to know. A chill passed over me. Cyrus took another sip of whiskey and stared out the window for a long time. I thought the story was over, but then he suddenly began again.

   “Nobody asked questions,” he said. “Everybody knew, but nobody asked. The place became sort of a haunted house story around here. People avoided it like the plague. Kids dared each other to go out and sneak a look at it. On the rare occasion Jameson came to town, he looked dead inside, and people stayed out of his way. A thing like that happens to you, whether it’s guilt or something I don’t understand, it puts you off-kilter. And Jameson didn’t need any more of that, what with what he went through when his wife passed away, and being cooped up all the time with an old bat who had gone around the bend years before. Word spread that he was out of his head, but good. Them that lived closest to him said when the wind was right they could hear him screaming, just screaming and screaming.

   “And then the worst of it. Kids in town started to go missing. At first it was just one, and everybody figured she’d gone off into the woods and gotten lost, or else drowned in the ocean, something like that. Things like that happen sometimes, and you’ve got to get past it. But then there was another a couple months later, and then another. Eventually it got so parents kept their kids locked inside, too scared even to let them out for school.

   “Everybody got together to talk about it, try to figure out what the hell was going on, as you’d expect. Nobody could figure out where these kids were going to, one after another like that. And then somebody says when Jameson’s been in town, that’s when the kids go missing. It wasn’t so hard for them to notice that, because everybody was so scared of Jameson, they knew when he was in town and when he wasn’t, they stayed away. But of course they hadn’t told their kids about what he’d done and what they thought he’d become out there in the woods, and every time Jameson comes into town, one of the kids goes missing.

   “So a bunch of the men got together and headed out there. And I hear when they got to about fifty yards from the house, one of them trips, and they find this barbed wire, strung up about six inches off the ground. They follow it all the way around and it’s strung in a circle all around Jameson’s house.

   “So they go in and it’s like something out of a bad dream. Jameson’s mother, that crazy old demon, she’s in the living room, she’s laughing, and she’s got this kid, and she’s just breaking her fingers, one by one. Kid’s not even screaming, just sitting there crying, not resisting at all. So the men come in and knock the old bitch down, and this poor girl, she doesn’t even understand what’s happening. She just stares at these guys, doesn’t say a word. And they’re hugging her and telling her it’s alright, they’re here now, she’s not gonna get hurt anymore, and she’s just standing there, blank-faced, like she’s not even a person inside anymore. So somebody grabs her up and heads back to town with her. I heard she never said a word for the rest of her life.

   “They tie up the old lady where she fell down, and she’s hollering bloody murder and ranting and raving all kinds of nonsense. Next thing you know Jameson’s in the room and he’s screaming all kinds of madness and swinging at these guys with this butcher knife, catches one of them right in the arm. Somebody cracks him with the butt of a rifle and he goes down cold.

   “The rest of the house seems fine, they can’t find any of the other kids. So they go down into the basement, and it’s a fuckin’ nightmare. The blacksmith’s boy is strung up and skinned, just like a deer. What’s worse, there’s a pile of bloody bones and clothes in one corner, no flesh to be seen. The crazy bastard was kidnaping these kids, and when his demented old crow of a mother was done playing with them, he was... dressing them out just as neat as you please, for dinner.”

   Cyrus stopped talking, a haunted look on his face. I felt sick. I had come here for a story, and I had gotten it, and I wished that I had never even heard of Triumph. Cyrus poured us each a short-lived glass of bourbon. When we had taken a few seconds of silence, I asked in a shaky voice, “And Jameson? And his mother? What happened to them?”

   Peterson leveled his eyes at me. “We take care of our own around here.” he said at length.

   “You take care of your own?”

   “That house was burned to the ground before those boys even started back to town. They stayed and watched it go to make sure nobody got out. It was the right thing to do and nobody ever had a problem with it.

   “I said you were clever because you think before you speak. You keep your mouth shut when you think it’s the right move, which is the only reason I told you that story. If you’ve got any brains at all, you’d keep your mouth shut about this. That was the worst thing that ever happened in this town, but it’s finished. We don’t talk about it, and you shouldn’t either. Some stories are best left untold, for any number of reasons.”

   That night I had a hard time getting to sleep. It wasn’t only the gruesome story I’d heard that kept me awake, although that in itself has caused me many sleepless nights in the years that have followed. It was that I had two halves of what I was convinced was one story. The lighthouse, the house in the woods, the house whose foundation I was sure I’d seen in my terrible dream. Jameson and the author of my anonymous notebook. 1850. 1911. 1928. And now, 1958. A drama that played itself out over a century of mysterious events.

   Suddenly, I was struck by a memory of the notebook. It was a hunch, but at the same time, as I turned on my bedside light and leapt to the desk, I knew exactly what I would find. I frantically scanned the inside of the black diary’s cover with a magnifying glass. And then I found it: in a tiny script, a poem which I curiously remembered from an ancient McGuffey’s Reader I had somehow inherited, and the name that had been on my mind since my first night in Triumph:

   Don’t touch this book if you value your life,
   For the owner carries a leather knife.
   This diary is the property of
   Ellen Daress

Persistence - Part II: Triumph

2009-08-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

PERSISTENCE
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part I: Halifax (Link)
Part III: Stories (Link)
Part IV: Ellen (Link)

Part II: Triumph

“Here he is!” I heard a boisterous call as I made my way down the stairs. Cyrus Peterson was leaning over the counter, a short blue pencil in his hand, preposterously small reading glasses perched delicately on his massive nose. Before him were business ledgers and other such papers. He appeared to be doing some accounting. Yawning, I asked him where to find breakfast in town.

“Won’t find much in the way of restaurants,” he explained. “Least not the kind of restaurant you want to be eating at. There’s a cafeteria, but its only customers are fish-plant workers, and after six hours dealing with old fish anything looks delicious. But I was just cooking some breakfast, and seeing’s how you’re the only one here, I’d be glad to offer you some.” I was more than happy to accept.

Over a breakfast of eggs and fried potatoes, I decided it would be a good time to ask Cyrus for some of his legendary wisdom regarding the town of Triumph. At first he lauded me with stories of the good old days, when Triumph was home to one of the province’s biggest fisheries. But the fish in the nearby seas had dwindled, folks were having to go further out, fishing was more expensive and less fish were coming in. Eventually the industry caved in. “People here today just don’t want to move,” he explained. “But Triumph is pretty much done in now. There’s some fishing to be done but we’re never going to be like that again. Those days are over for us.” He looked down at the table for a long moment, as if considering the idea for himself.
“You some kind of reporter?” he asked suddenly. There was a note of suspicion in his voice, and I did not know how to respond.

“Well,” I finally began, “Not for a newspaper, no. I’m a student, I study folklore, urban legends, ghost stories, things like that.”

“Just like your friend, then, I expect?”

“About the same, yes.” I confessed. Cyrus shook his head in resignation.

“What do you think you’ll find here?” he asked. “We’re not anything special. You kids read too many books, you think all the small towns are full of wackos.”

“I’m not here to make you out to be wackos, Mr. Peterson,” I tried to explain. “But every town has its stories, doesn’t it?” Cyrus pondered the question for a moment, and nodded after a few seconds.

“I suppose so,” he said at last. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Triumph’s got its ghosts, or so some would say. But I doubt our stories are any more interesting than anyone else’s.”

The moment was right. “Could you tell me a few of those stories?” I asked. I reached for the notebook in my back pocket, but Cyrus was pushing his chair away from the table. “Not right now,” he said. “I’ve got to get these papers done. Come see me tonight and I’ll tell some stories. That’ll give me some time to remember them.”
“Your son, Mr. Peterson- David said he knew this town like the back of his hand, would he be able to show me around?”

Cyrus grinned. “Want the grand tour, eh? Well, Jeb’s got to be down at the plant in two or three hours, but a tour shouldn’t take you more than ten or fifteen minutes. I’ll call him down for you.”

Jebediah, a man I placed somewhere in his early thirties, graciously agreed to show me around town, to see what little there was to see. The fog of the previous night had all burned away and a nicer day could not have been asked for. The sun was shining brightly and there were only a few high wisps of cloud in the sky.

The town itself was not the most beautiful I’d seen, but it was not the run-down, half-rotten sprawl that Lovecraft had once convinced me was the paradigm of all small towns. His description of the town in ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, with its half-collapsed houses and clock-towers missing their faces, had given me a vision of a town diseased. Triumph was not like this. Most of the houses were in bad shape, it can be said, but they remained distinctly human places, and were obviously being maintained as well as meager budgets could allow. These houses were places of life, despite- or perhaps because of- the economic troubles of their occupants.

I could understand now what my friend meant when he said that the people seemed like ghosts. To me they seemed like their houses. They did not seem happy, exactly, but neither were they miserable. These were people who simply made do, people who lived a life of monotony, and it would only stand to reason that they would be jaded, bored. The dull look in their eyes, the unenthusiastic way in which they greeted each other, all of this could, I thought, easily be attributed to their lot in life as fishermen and their wives in a small town on the coast. The modern exuberance, the lust for life that we are encouraged to foster, is entirely a creation of our own, a product of our age. Life was not so exciting and romantic for our ancestors, the ancestors who, in large part, lived lives similar to the lives of these townspeople.

Aside from the houses, the only memorable structures in the town were its large fishery (along with its cafeteria, whose appearance suggested that Cyrus was right to caution me), a small government office, and a great red ogre of a church. I asked Jebediah to wait a moment or two while I snapped some photographs of the church, for it was majesty in ruins; a large red-bricked cathedral with a tarp over part of the roof, missing bricks, and a cracked and broken set of stairs leading into its darkened interior. Jebediah explained that the church served many roles– it was a place of worship, an emergency shelter, town hall, and, through its weekly bulletins, the town newspaper. When I asked, Jebediah told me that the church had always kept an archive of its bulletins in order to hang on to the town’s history. This seemed to me the logical place to begin my search.

As our last stop before we returned to the hotel, Jebediah took me down a short dirt road to see the ruins of the old lighthouse. Trees hemmed in alongside and above us on the overgrown road, which had clearly not seen regular traffic for a very long time. At the end of the road was a clearing, and as the trees parted and gave way upon our entering this clearing, the lighthouse suddenly and shockingly dominated the sky. The clearing appeared to be little larger than the lighthouse itself and before I’d even noticed it we were suddenly mere feet from the stone behemoth. It loomed over us like some great mindless predator.

Now this was a sight that would have made my predecessor smile, for it seemed almost transposed directly from one of his stories. I was expecting a simple foundation, perhaps with some large stones and debris from the lighthouse’s storied past lying about, waiting to be overcome by the earth. But the lighthouse had apparently been abandoned comparatively recently, such that it was still standing in all its grotesque magnificence. There appeared to have been a fire, quite severe by the look of things. The door was scorched and burnt, held closed by a large and heavy padlock. All of the windows had broken out, their frames warped and twisted like the legs of dead spiders from the heat. Above these windows the exterior walls of the lighthouse were stained with massive black spikes of soot and burned paint. At the very top were the magnifying windows, shattered and broken, the railings around them snapped at insane angles. The roof was sagging noticeably in one place and looked ready to cave in.

To the side was the corpse of a small house, presumably for the lighthouse-keeper and his family. This was entirely destroyed, and were it not for the foundation, a half-standing chimney on the far side and a greater concentration of charred debris I could have overlooked it completely. I walked to the edge of the foundation and peered inside. My eyes fixed on a charred and warped spoon on the edge of an equally obliterated metal card table, still waiting for a meal to come. I felt a chill, though I did not know why.

“What happened here?” I asked.

“Well, a fire, of course.” Jebediah replied. “Back in twenty-eight. Nobody really knows how it started. We think it may have been lightning.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

Jebediah gave me a long look. He walked a few feet away and peered momentarily at the top of the lighthouse, where a large black crow had landed to survey our little expedition. “Two. Two dead,” he explained. “A mother and daughter.” he glanced quickly at me. “The keeper’s wife and his daughter, you know. He was in town, and nobody heard or saw anything, I guess, and when he went home, this is what he found.”
Something about the way he was talking seemed strange to me. It seemed he was somehow telling me more than the truth. “And nobody’s thought to rebuild the lighthouse?” I asked quietly. Jebediah smiled and headed back towards his truck.
“No point,” he said as we drove away. “They’ve been building lighthouses all up and down the shore, new ones with brighter lights. That thing was just a big oil lamp, it’s amazing it didn’t burn down sooner.”

“Still, you think somebody would do something with it, restore it, if just for the history.”

“Folks around here know history, we don’t need museums.” he laughed, but I thought I noticed a kind of nervousness in his laughter. The birds had stopped chirping in the forest around us. “That lighthouse, it was a bad business, but it’s over now.”

Jebediah drove us back to the hotel and, now that I had my bearings, I decided it was time to do some investigating on my own. Cyrus Peterson was busy out in front of his hotel, his torso buried under the hood of his son’s pickup truck. “Can’t be bothered to learn to do this himself,” he muttered to himself. “Little bastard leaves me to do everything.” I decided now was not the best time to press him for more stories. Given that the lighthouse was the only real story I had so far, I decided to go to the church and look through the archived bulletins for further clues.

I made my way up the hill to the massive church. I found myself even more enthralled than before with its beautiful desolation. Going up the steps and through the big doors I was suddenly met with ten or twenty people, just milling about and catching up with each other. The conversation dropped to a murmur as soon as I entered, and I received a great number of suspicious looks. For a moment I felt that I had made a huge mistake in coming here, that this church was a place for insiders only, that I had violated some unwritten code. I searched frantically for a friendly face. In one corner was the youth who had driven me in from Lunenberg. He was talking with a few friends his age. I approached him, with a mind to ask where the archives could be found, but as soon as he saw me heading his way, he and his friends quickly left the church. I felt a sudden sense of profound alienation.

“Who are you?” I heard a voice behind me inquire. I nearly jumped through the ceiling. Taking a moment to compose myself, I turned to face an elderly woman.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said who are you? Haven’t seen you before.” she was squinting at me suspiciously, her gnarled hand clasping and unclasping the top of a wooden cane.

“My name is Jason, I’m a student in Halifax. I’m here on a visit,” I replied, trying to avoid words like ‘reporter’ and ‘folklore’. My brief conversation with Cyrus that morning had shown me that it would probably behoove me to speak as little as possible about my true intentions here.

“A visit? Here? What’s to see here?”

“I’m just interested in your history, that’s all. I’m told there was once a big fishery here.” To my relief, the woman’s face softened.

“Oh, yes!” she said. “You should have seen this town when I was a girl. Not like today,” she shook her head. “I suppose you’re here to see the bulletins, then?”

Hardly believing my luck, I agreed. I appeared to have won her over, as she gladly led me down a set of dark stairs into a room filled nearly to the ceiling with old cardboard boxes, most of them stamped with the logo I’d seen outside the fish plant. She stayed and regaled me with more stories about the good old days until I finally mustered the courage to explain that I’d rather be alone while I went through this material. “Oh, shy, are we?” she cackled. “Well, alright then. But put everything back where you find it! I’m too old to go reorganizing this whole mess.” With my heartfelt promise that I’d be careful, she left me to my work.

The archives were truly a mess. While they were generally arranged more or less chronologically, many were torn or otherwise ruined, and some boxes were out of place, meaning that I had a hard time tracking down the right pile to begin my search. With no other events to investigate aside from the unsettling lighthouse fire, I rifled through the pile until I found the box labeled BULLETIN ARCHIVE - 1920-1930.

Locating ‘28 quickly enough, I began to search through the bulletins for any mention of the fire. The news in Triumph was of fish-hauls, houses being built, old houses being torn down, marriages, new babies, and obituaries. These were punctuated by the occasional disaster- a flood, a particularly bad snowstorm, a fire. Yet I could find no mention of the lighthouse. I shuffled back and forth through 1928 two or three times, and I was sure that the lighthouse was not mentioned.

Digging through the rest of the box, I scanned over every bulletin for the entire decade, and the lighthouse was not mentioned once. I assumed that maybe the bulletin for the week the lighthouse burned had simply gotten lost or destroyed, but the 1920-1930 box, being near the bottom of a pile, had appeared to have suffered much less than those that were more exposed. Furthermore, what struck me as strangest of all was that it wasn’t only the fire that wasn’t mentioned, there was simply no mention of the lighthouse at all, nor its keeper or his family. For one of the largest structures in town to go unmentioned in the town’s only newsletter for an entire decade seemed highly unlikely to me. It was almost as though the lighthouse had not existed during these ten years.

That lighthouse, it was a bad business, but it’s over now.
I had played a bum hunch. With no other leads to track down, I began rifling through the other boxes. They appeared to date from at least 1870, and I amused myself by reading some of the older ones. I could begin to understand the nostalgia with which the elderly people in town spoke of the old days; the black and white photos I saw in these old bulletins spoke of a much happier time. The church in which I stood was featured in one of the bulletins from 1890 as having been recently built. Far from the disrepair the place was in now, it seemed almost to sparkle in the sun. The townsfolk were gathered around outside it. Everyone seemed young and happy.

Then I followed along as the fishing trade began to decline in the early 1900's. The headlines were less encouraging:

Fish shortage may last, according to captains.
Eastern fisheries closes.
Mayor encourages young people to stay in Triumph.

I imagined the surprise, the disappointment of the town as they saw their way of life shrinking into next to nothing. This life that they had made for themselves was supposed to last. They expected their sons and daughters to lead the same life. It was a good life, and things seemed like they could go on, and nobody would ever be wanting as long as there was good hard work to be done. But where do we go from here? What do we do when our best-laid plans turn into nothing? I knew what they did- most left, and some stayed. And that was Triumph.

I was so engrossed in the local drama that I almost skipped right past the story I was looking for. On the bottom of the first page of the bulletin from the second week in April, 1911, there was a simple headline and a short story:

Lighthouse Fire

Constable Michael Burns reports that sometime in the early evening of April 9th, a fire started in the home of lighthouse-keeper Daniel Morgan. The fire spread quickly and gutted the small house.

Tragically, Morgan’s wife Aliza and daughter Hannah were both killed in the fire. Both bodies were found in the remains of little Hannah’s bedroom. Constable Burns reports that it is believed Aliza had gone to retrieve her daughter to make their escape, but had soon fainted from the smoke. Lighthouse-keeper Morgan was in town at the market at the time of the fire.

The cause of the fire is as yet unknown, although the afternoon’s thunderstorm suggests lightning as a possible cause. The lighthouse-keeper’s house appears to have been destroyed completely, but the lighthouse itself

The story ended abruptly. I turned the page and saw a large black and white photo of the scene I had witnessed earlier in the afternoon; the fire-demolished house with its standing chimney, its hollowed-out foundation. But there was something different about the scene, something I could not quite put my finger on. And then I realized what it was. The windows of the lighthouse were intact. The roof was in passable shape. The trails of soot and ash bursting from the windows were entirely absent. The door was solid, not charred. I felt a chill as I read on.

appears to have suffered no structural damage whatsoever. Nevertheless, Morgan explains that he has no intention of returning to his work. Deeply disturbed by this event and left without a home, he has resolved to move. We offer Morgan our deepest condolences and wish him the very best of luck.

The town will advertise the job, but town manager Davis explains that the cost of rebuilding the burned home likely means that the lighthouse will shine no longer. For years, the new lighthouses in Lunenberg and down the coast have made Triumph’s lighthouse little more than a curiosity and, Davis explains, the cost of running it no longer justifies its worth.

I was baffled. I was sure I had seen that lighthouse completely gutted, almost beyond repair, yet the fire reported in the bulletin had not touched it. Nor had any of the bulletins mentioned a second fire, at least before 1930. Why had Jebediah given me the wrong year in his recounting of the story? When, then, had the lighthouse burned, if it was still in decent shape when Morgan’s family met their end?

I resolved to ask Cyrus that evening. I felt that I was really on the trail of something now. If my friend had even gotten to the archives in the church basement, I could see how he could have easily missed the story about the lighthouse, seeing how we had the same guide to the area, a guide who was either misinformed about the correct date or was hiding the date on purpose. However, now that I knew that something strange was going on, I felt sure that I would uncover something worth reading.

That night I enjoyed a dinner with my host, a simple meal of baked fish and more potatoes. I didn’t pry him for any information at dinner, as I had a certain secret weapon in the form of a large bottle of whiskey I’d picked up in Lunenberg. I thought that after dinner I would sit down with Cyrus and the two of us would talk things over, aided by the strong spirits.

I returned to my room later that evening in order to sit down with my notes for a while and come up with some questions for Cyrus. Obviously, I intended to ask him about the second fire at the lighthouse. I also wanted to ask him about any other strange happenings around the town that could have been related to it, as well as some general history of this declining village. My room had a little desk and I poured myself a small glass of the whiskey, sitting down to do my writing. I quickly became engrossed in the story. Visions flitted through my mind of the lighthouse burning. It must have been quite a fire to leave such obvious stains on the outside of the building. I wondered if it would be possible to get inside.

Without warning I was suddenly shocked out of my writing. There was no sound or vision to startle me. Again, like in my dream, I was tense, on edge. My head snapped immediately toward the corner where I had dreamed of the figure, hiding herself behind her hands. There was nobody there. Still, I could not shake this sense of presence, could not deny that there was something in the room with me.

My heart lurched suddenly as I heard a tremendous shattering of glass behind me. Before I could even turn I saw shards of glass rocketing across the room. I spun around and saw that the large mirror across from my bed had completely shattered. Not a piece of it was left on the wall. It had exploded outward, covering the bed and floor with fragmented glass as though something had crashed into it suddenly from behind. Yet it was a wall-mounted mirror, and that would have been impossible.
I was standing and examining the glass, heart pumping, when the door slammed open. I nearly attacked Cyrus Peterson when he burst through the door.
“What the hell’s going on in here?” he bellowed.

“Mr. Peterson, I’m sorry, but this has nothing to do with me,” I explained, doubting seriously that he would believe me. He was scared himself, eyes darting around the room like a nervous cat. “I was at the desk over here, you see?” I gestured madly at my papers scattered everywhere.

Cyrus took a long look around the room and finally sighed. “This house, it’s old, it swells and shrinks. I guess the mirror just got pressed a way it didn’t like. Never seen something like this happen before.” We stood for a moment, both winded with surprise. Finally he glanced at the bed. “Aww, for fuck’s sake.” It was the first time I’d heard him swear. “There’s glass all over your bed, you can’t sleep in that. Pack up your things and I’ll move you to a different room.” I had no arguments.

Unfinished Horror Project

2009-08-17T23:09:00.000-07:00

Writer's Note: An unfinished project, most written some time ago, though I've been getting back to it now and I expect to have more soon.

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Mr. Aaron Davis
Bethel, North Dakota
December 19, 1884

My dearest son, Samuel,

A terrible thing has happened these last months. I suspect that I will not see you again, nor will I be alive when the ice and snow thaws in the spring. I have had time to come to terms with this; time is all I have now. I am, I know, the only one left, and as you know, problems of my own leave me confined to this damnable wheel-chair, unable to provide for myself as man was meant. So I know I will not survive this winter– His will be done.

As I noted above, however, I am the last living citizen of the town of Bethel. As such it falls upon me to provide a record of the events, should providence one day sweep this place clean of the wickedness which has so recently brought it to ruin. Your family, my loving wife and your three beautiful sisters, are in the arms of our blessed Lord now, Samuel, and so I address my memoir to you. I will try to explain as much as I can in the time I have left, though I cannot give reason for this thing nor comprehend its work. I fear some great evil in us has called down His fury. Whatever has happened here, know that I have always been proud of you, and that I will be watching over you until we meet in the promised land.

It breaks my heart to recall it, especially to you, my son. My sweet wife was the first to fall victim to whatever happened here. There is some perverse irony at work here– my wife the first, and I the last. Would that our roles could be reversed! Your mother was strong, but not strong enough to resist this. I witnessed her death and it gives me pain every moment of every day. I want nothing more than to be together with her again, but here I remain– the only man alive, left to wile away the hours and days as the last of them all, surrounded by the dead, listening to the howling wind, waiting to die. An awful death like that of your mother, the drawn-out wasting away of your father– that these were the only possibilities speaks to the terror of these times; that all received the former, and only I the latter, speaks to the inscrutability of God’s will.

I was there when the Cerberus germ (as it came to be called) got its start. I was walking with my wife in mid-autumn, she pushing my chair down one of the paths where the river forms the border of my farm. These were paths that I had cut in my younger days, before my affliction, and you helped me, Samuel, before you left Bethel. I was thinking of this when your mother suddenly gave a loud cry– an animal had bitten her ankle. It was like nothing I’d seen before. It was very small, about the size of a mouse, with similar fur, but with no legs or appendages of any kind. It had a large head, but it seemed to be all mouth. I could detect only tiny black pinpricks for eyes. Your mother was kicking desperately, trying to rid herself of the creature, but it had locked onto her tightly. I saw it seem to swell slightly and then tighten its body as it clung to her ankle. It gave a single ecstatic shake and stopped moving, curled up on itself. When she saw this she stopped kicking and I was able to reach for the creature. When I pulled on it, it dislodged easily in my hand and lay motionless in my palm. It was quite dead.

Your mother said she could go on and we went back to the house. I kept the animal with me, balled up inside my hat so as to keep it out of sight. Your mother said she had some soreness in her ankle, but I thought that this was to be expected. As to the nature of the creature itself, I tried not to speculate until I could get a better look at it, although my first assumption was that it was some kind of rodent, deformed somehow, likely mad and near death when we crossed its path.

As soon as we returned to the house I sent your sister Deborah to fetch Dr. Stuart. He examined the wound and declared that it was only a small bite, and that as long as it remained clean, it would heal on its own. He made a bandage for your mother’s ankle and then the doctor and I examined the animal in more detail.

As I mentioned before, it seemed to have no arms or legs, though its matted, grey hair could have been hiding vestigial stumps of the kind sometimes found in other animals when the young are born with such defects. If it was a mouse, then its face was also unnaturally flattened and its mouth extraordinarily large in size. It had no tail. The doctor and I both agreed that we’d not seen the likes of such an animal before, but what of it? Strange monsters are born all the time in the wild. We thus passed the incident off as a curiosity which could not be fully explained but which was not, in the grand scheme of things, so absurd. I burned the creature’s body in the stove and thought no more of the situation until your mother’s condition worsened.

Two or three days later, the wound did not show signs of healing. Your mother’s ankle was swollen and ached constantly. I feared what I thought then was the worst; that the creature that had bitten her had been rabid or otherwise diseased, and that she was having a reaction. Again I sent for Dr. Stuart, who examined the wound and did not seem pleased with what he saw. He gave your mother a pill of some sort or another and replaced the bandage after cleaning the wound. Leaving her with the girls, he gestured for me to follow him outside where he told me, in hushed tones, that if the swelling did not go down in a few days, he would have to consider an amputation. The wound could be serious, could develop into gangrene. My heart sank in my chest at the thought of her having to go through with such a terrible thing. I felt helpless and for a time could not speak. The doctor reassured me that in all likelihood the swelling would go down, before reminding me to fetch him again if it did not. There was nothing else I could do.

We kept her off her feet as much as possible over the next few days. The girls were always helpful and did all the chores. They were smart girls, and I do not expect that they did not, on their own, reach the same conclusion that had been grimly proposed to me by the good doctor regarding your mother’s convalescence. They remained bright and cheerful, though they must have worried for themselves as well, forever bound to serve their invalid father and amputated mother. They said nothing about it and seemed delighted to help. At night we all prayed, together, that everything would turn out well. They were good girls.

The ankle did not get well. The next day it was swollen larger and was giving constant pain. It was black and blue. We changed the bandage and cared for her but she was feverish. The girls and I exchanged furtive, ominous glances over her. Nothing was said. I decided to give it one more day, in blind hope that perhaps this was the peak of a troubling condition, that it would from here on begin to heal. But the next morning, it was worse than before. Your mother was sweating unnaturally and was deeply feverish. I sent one of the girls for cold water and another to fetch the doctor; if this thing had to be done, to save her life, then it would have to be done.

As we waited for the doctor, I got out of my chair and cradled your mother’s head, wiping it with a cloth and the cold water fetched from the well. I tried to calm her, but she was delirious and speaking gibberish. I held her and waited.
When the doctor arrived, he took one look at your mother and his face sank. His eyes met mine and I knew what was going to happen, there was no doubt in the doctor’s eyes. I nodded, feeling ready to collapse. The doctor quietly herded the girls out into the kitchen and told them they needed to leave the house, to go visit a friend. They obediently did as they were told, though there is no doubt in my mind that they knew what would happen. When they were out of the house I began to cry, holding your mother’s head in my lap.

The doctor slowly walked back into the room. He said nothing. I covered your mother’s eyes as he opened a black leather case and retrieved the saw. I sat mortified, holding your mother’s arms, and the doctor did the deed. Two hundred have died since this happened, all of my friends and family except you; I live as the last man in Gomorrah now as the snows begin to fall outside my house, but never in my life have I experienced such horror.

Over the next few weeks we all tried to make do as best we could. Your mother was withdrawn, as one would expect, but her fever had gone down and she seemed to be regaining her strength. We spoke rarely, merely did what we could to get by. She used my chair when she wanted to move around; we had intended for her to get a crutch when she was fully recovered, but the doctor warned us that it would be a long process. We were all simply satisfied that she still lived. There had been a terrible thing that had happened, and it had hurt us all, but we felt as if we could overcome and move on. That is what we thought.

However, the Lord was not done testing us, was only beginning with Bethel. Your mother’s condition, though it looked hopeful at first, soon began to decline. Her breath became labored and ragged. She could barely keep her eyes open most of the time. She stopped talking altogether after a time and would not even answer questions. Each time a new development in her sickness appeared, Deborah would run for the doctor, who would come and examine the situation and look at the wound where the amputation had taken place. He said that such behavior could be the result of an infection, but that the amputation did not appear to be infected. He was perplexed. Every time he came he would come up with some new hypothesis, only to find that it was not borne out by any of his tests. I fear the man almost lost his mind worrying about the poor woman.

She began to waste away before our eyes, and there was nothing to be done for it. Your sisters and I cared for her as best we could, but still she rarely opened her eyes and never spoke. She was still capable of moving her limbs, but did so in no directed manner, her arms and legs simply flopping occasionally like cold fish.
Eventually the doctor decided that it would be best if we took her in to Bismarck. I eagerly agreed, feeling that at last there was something to be done about the poor woman. The voyage would have to be done immediately; it was drawing on winter and the doctor feared she might not make the voyage in the cold air. The girls made a stretcher for her and we set out for the wagon, the doctor and two of the girls carrying your poor mother, the other girl attending to my wheel-chair. I felt like a hopeless child.

Before we got to the wagon, we passed a certain tree in the yard. I’m sure you know the one of which I speak, directly in the center of the field between the house and the barn. As we passed under this tree your mother suddenly gave a moaning cry, like nothing I’d ever heard before. We had not heard her voice for days and this sound shook us all to the core. We stopped in sudden surprise, staring at her. Her eyes slowly slid open. They were cloudy and dim. They seemed to seek out the branches of the tree under which we passed, but they did not focus. There was a brief moment of silence, the most ominous heavy silence I have ever encountered. And again she gave a ragged, unearthly moan. Her limbs began to twitch and her back arched violently. She began to shake and the doctor and the girls were unable to keep her on the stretcher. She collapsed to the ground, shuddering and kicking. She rose for one moment on her knees and stretched her face up to the heavens, and then, dear God, the sight I have had burned into my memory ever since, her mouth dropped open and with a guttural, violent groan a massive cloud of black particles erupted from her mouth and issued like a plume of smoke into the sky.

She collapsed on the ground. She gave a last spastic shudder and we heard her final breath escape her lungs. A trickle of blood, thick with the black spores, dripped from her lips. There was sudden uproar among us– the girls wailing loudly, crowding around their mother, holding her head, her hands– the doctor, his face a mask of shock and terror, huddling over her body and bellowing at the girls to step back so that he could test for signs of life– I, stunned, left helpless and alone, staring in dismal mute despair, tears pouring silently down my face as I watched this grim spectacle and tried to believe it was a nightmare and nothing more.

The doctor and the girls were peppered with the black seeds. I could see it clinging to their arms and faces. They seemed not to notice. I saw with abject sorrowful apathy that my clothes and skin also bore the seeds. They even clung to the branches of the tree under which your mother had died. On that day under the tree next to our house, the Cerberus germ started its life. The thing, the godforsaken disease that killed this town, it used her body to carry itself. I comfort myself by thinking that she was truly dead before this happened. Remember, my son, that the primal breath given by God to man is that of language and thus human wisdom. When that accursed blackness took her speech, she was dead in mind, waiting in paradise while the germ played with her mortal shell like a puppet. She was innocent and pure, and was not tainted by the foulness that claimed her life. Always remember that.

It was much later when we learned of the full effects of the Cerberus germ. We attended to all the proper procedures for your mother. We buried her in the town cemetery, of course, and grieved over her. It was as though I had lost the sun. I turned to drink, and was myself an ogre to my children and to my friends. I feel deeply sorry for it but it is the truth.

The doctor consulted all of his books and found absolutely no record of a sickness like the one that had afflicted your mother. At one point several days later, he had saddled his horse and resolved to ride to Bismarck to consult some professional acquaintances, and I encouraged him in this task, but the Lord in His mercy sent a sudden violent blizzard such that the doctor had to turn back after only a few miles. It is often I have given thanks that the doctor was not allowed to reach Bismarck, for if the germ should spread beyond Bethel, there is no saying what could happen.

It was shortly after this that the children and the doctor began to experience symptoms. We had not, until this point, known that the thing was contagious. Much like your mother had recovered for a time after the amputation, the girls and the doctor showed no symptoms for almost a week after the terrible event under the tree. The spores had washed off easily. I am no man of science but it seems to me that they were only a means of delivery, much like the dandelion’s seed, and that whatever germ the form took was dependent on the black plumes only to get them to a host.

As I say, the girls and the doctor all came down almost at the same time with symptoms with which I was already familiar. There was a fever, their breath grew slow and labored. They spoke less and less, seemed exhausted all the time. I attended to them as best I could. My soul had turned to ice. My wife was gone and now my children were ill with what seemed the same condition. I went to visit the doctor as often as possible but had less and less time. I spent my days shut inside my house with my daughters, telling them stories from their brief childhood even when they seemed not to be listening, and waited for what I feared was inevitable.
Soon enough, they stopped talking altogether. I continued to wait, with chilling certainty, trying to feed them, all the while feeling like a man trapped in the most morbid and dismal dream, as if I were the new and permanent guest of despair incarnate.

In time, the same gruesome expectoration that took place in your mother claimed each of your sisters, one by one. I sat with their bodies for a day, the black spores milling about like dust before breaking apart and vanishing. I wanted to die. I wanted whatever had happened to my family to happen to me, for I knew it was only a matter of time, and I had nothing left to live for. On one terrible day I carried the bodies of your poor sisters outside one at a time, nestled in my lap like when they were babies, slowly wheeling my chair and sobbing. I laid them next to one another with hands together and burned their bodies, for I am an invalid, and cannot on my own dig graves. I knew it was only a matter of time for the rest of the town but felt no need to hasten the downfall of any particular citizen by asking for his help giving my daughters their final rest. I never went back to see the doctor. I heard he died the next day.

I have been dreaming much since the death of the townspeople. I do not know if it is idleness which prompts this, the lack of human contact which draws the mind toward its own illusory creations, or whether the tragedy which struck the town and my family is causing me to refuse rest in the face of the enormity of this diseased reality. Whatever the cause, where I once slept soundly, I now rest but fitfully, waking often to the impossible silence and darkness of the town, feeling stripped not only of my ambulatory functions but of all sense and feeling aside from that of my clammy skin on the bedclothes. Often in my dreams there is a figure I do not recognize, always just out of sight. I feel as though it is watching me, but when I focus my attention on it, the image blurs, or my gaze is drawn elsewhere, and when I look back, the figure has departed again, slipped behind an empty house, or lost in the darkness of the forest.

Tonight I dreamed of a story my mother told me when I was young. She read to me from the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm, from a volume I remember well; the binding was broken and mended several times over, the once-rich green covers lightened to near-grey from age. I knew every story in that book practically by rote, but the one which truly held me was not a fantasy, but had its basis in truth. The story I dreamed of last night was that of the Pied Piper of Hameln. How I chilled as a child to the thought of that man who many say was the devil himself, all prancing in his multihued finery and lilting on his pagan pipe. A sickly-sweet nightmare, the memory of joy, rotten inside. Last night I witnessed the day when he returned for his due, dancing up and down the streets on that feast day of Saints John and Paul, the children wrenching themselves from the arms of their pleading parents and dancing glassy-eyed after the man into a cave across the valley. To kidnap, to steal people away in the night or to capture them as prisoner, is enough to shock the spirit; to lead them willingly away, by some wicked means to sway their own volition, is an entirely more obscene thing. It is an evil that spreads, like the curse which has lately stricken this town, and taken for its own not only the body, but the very words and breath of life, and had the sacrilege and the blasphemous daring to make participants of its victims.

Of the children of Hameln: Their subsequent history is a question not resolved, left open still to the story's varied tellers. Most say that they were led away through a passage in the mountain, brought out to the other side a new nation, perhaps in corrupt pagan imitation of the Jews and their holy guide Moses. There are tales of peoples in Moravia and Transylvania whose customary attire is of bright and varied colors and whose language is a joining of the local tongue and an elder German. Others say the children were led to slaughter in the Crusades, or that they were simply murdered and left for their parents to find in the fields and forests. It is said that only two children were spared from whatever fate the Piper laid on Hameln that day; one blind, unable to see the children to follow them out of town, the other lame, without the ability to dance along to doom or rebirth with the others. Am I that lame child? It is said that both spent the rest of their days bemoaning that their weaknesses kept them from following the others, so powerful was the sorcery of the Piper. This I do not doubt. I too spend my days now agonizing over the fact that only I remain, wishing to be with my loved ones, pleading with God to remove me to them, though I know it cannot be long now. Beyond it all is the question that never leaves me, the question which causes me to stir at night and invent apparitions in multicolored silken finery- why was I chosen to be the only witness to this event? And what does God want of me that he leaves me amid all this death, to see it all as my food grows short, to listen in utter isolation as the poisoned wolves open graves by night?

Untitled Cartography Story - Part I

2008-09-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

Writer's Note: This is an unfinished work, which means you may see more of it in coming months but certainly nothing for a while. The scope of this story will be quite large and this is definitely only the very beginning. If you're interested, I can say that this story will focus in large part on the so-called Lead Masks Case.

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UNTITLED CARTOGRAPHY STORY
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part I

It is impossible to render a sphere on a two-dimensional surface. This is the inescapable reality which lies at the heart of all modern cartography; geometrically and mathematically, there can be no perfect map.

   Area, shape, direction, bearing, distance, scale. There are a great many properties which must be accounted for in every map projection. However, because there can be no perfect map, sacrifices must be made between these properties. A map may maintain two or three perfectly, but must distort the rest. A map that adequately represents the equatorial regions may scale into infinity at the poles. A map showing perfect angles for nautical work may strangely distort the shape of a land mass. This arithmetic of sacrifice is the language of cartography; specific applications demand the accuracy of specific properties, and this necessarily makes impossible the accuracy of others. In cartography the language of mathematics, that system of representation which we have long held to be the very speech of objectivity, is unable to account for the pure complexity of nature.

   In the 1800s, James Gall stirred up a famous controversy with his equal-area map projection which, by maintaining accurate area instead of angle and shape, impiously shrank North America and the Continent into mere shades of mighty South America and Africa. Arno Peters revised the map in 1967 and the fallout was just as immense, the familiar Mercator projection revealed again as an unsuspected agent of Western aristocracy. It can be difficult when our perceptions are cast from the comfort of assumed objectivity.

   In 1972, I was working at Grayson and Co., a geological survey firm in Boston. I had been working there for some time, having several years earlier completed my degree and begun my career in earnest. The complex mathematical language of map-making was becoming a second dialect to me, and I felt comfortable, even affectionate toward the stubbornness, the evasiveness of the craft.

   The work we were doing at the time was mainly the charting of forests and other undeveloped areas; even in these places, the surface of our world continually changes, and the government of Massachusetts had decided that a new set of topographical maps was in order. After struggling all winter to earn the contract, we now had before us the task of charting all of Massacusetts' forests, translating the wild chaos of nature into the calm, rational standard of human representation.

   I was the only one in the office when he first came to us. It was a Saturday, and while the more senior members of my firm were resting comfortably at home, I had decided to come in and work. The street outside the door was almost empty and the office itself was silent except for my pencil scratches and a small transistor radio whining away in a far corner. I was perched on a stool, a messy rough draft spread out on a large easel in front of me. To an outside observer, I suppose it would have hardly looked like a map at all; it showed an area with no real points of interest, merely contour lines drawn and redrawn among scrawled mathematical calculations and points of elevation. A cold half-cup of coffee sat nearby, and the floor was littered with pencils, scraps of paper, and measuring tools.

   Into this chaos walked a man with the unmistakable air of the casually wealthy. He was wearing a tailored suit and his hands were impeccably clean. His broad face bore a large, bushy moustache, and the very slightest note of disdain, which he wore almost apologetically, as if to say it was directed not at myself in particular, but rather the world at large. I stepped down from my stool and strode over to greet him.

   He shook my hand quickly and introduced himself as Mr. Elliot Tiberius Lowell. If his mannerisms had not given him away, his name and his accent would have; American aristocracy the way only Massachusetts is old enough to remember, the Lowell family of the famed 'Boston Brahmin.' These were the legendary families that had settled Boston and New England-- Adams, Cabot, Emerson, Phillips, and the rest-- and now in many cases the families had become little more than independent corporations managing their own money. Mr. Lowell's family was stronger in the North, where they had been sent as the emissaries and defenders of British civilization in the days of French colonialism. Even so, I was sure that his name turned heads in Boston, as did that unmistakable Brahmin accent, which rang of Kennedy and the liberal East.

   I offered him some coffee and he accepted. I refilled my own cup and poured one for him, wondering as I did if he had ever drank coffee from a paper cup in his entire life. He raised an eyebrow at the cup suspiciously, as if expecting it to tip of its own accord. He took a sip and seemed nonplussed. Finally he spoke.

   "I may have need of your firm, Mr...?"

   "Bailey," I introduced myself. "Martin Bailey."

   "Mr. Bailey. Well, I am considering purchasing a certain plot of land, and I need a map before I make my decision. I'll be building a large summer home there and my architects will need an up-to-date chart of the area."

   "I'm afraid we don't sell our maps here, Mr. Lowell," I said, "but if you check with the Department of Agricultural Resources, I’m sure they'll have copies of all-"

   "I'm not interested in that, Mr. Bailey. The land I am looking to purchase is not in Massachusetts. It is in Brazil."

   I gave him a long look. "Mr. Lowell, our firm operates almost exclusively within Massachusetts. We have worked occasionally in New Hampshire and in Maine, but you can't seriously expect us to have mapped any area in Brazil. You'll need to get in touch with cartographers from the area."

   The man sighed. He gave me a look that called me a fool without his ever opening his mouth. "No, Mr. Bailey," he said, "I am looking to commission your firm." His eyes settled on a large world map which hung from one wall of the office. "Come," he said brusquely, and moved toward the map. I followed behind.

   "We're quite busy, Mr. Lowell..." I protested as he bent to scrutinize the map. "We have a very important contract that we're working on and-"

   "Shh!" Lowell traced the East coast of South America with a manicured finger. "Here, you see?" He pointed to a tiny island just south-southwest of Rio de Janeiro. "Isla Grande. Finest climate in the world. Warm but not arid, two hundred sunny days in a year. Paradise on Earth."

   I looked at the island with some skepticism. I wasn't a fan of the heat-- even Boston was a little too warm for me in the summer-- and that aside, South America seemed to me a damn long haul for paradise. I'd travelled enough to find that paradise exists almost anywhere; building a summer home in Rio de Janeiro seemed to me more an act of vanity than anything else. "It sounds wonderful, Mr. Lowell," I said with a note of exasperation. "But again, we don't work in Brazil. I'm sure there are some fine cartographers down there that can help you out."

   Mr. Lowell snorted. "Yes, I'm sure they're just fine," he said, "but I am not employing any foreigners in the construction of this house; I would not feel comfortable doing so. My architects will be American, my engineers and laborers will be American, and they must have a proper American map. A proper Boston map. I will not take no for an answer."

   We stood in silence for a moment, him admiring the tiny blob of ink that represented his paradise, me watching him, wondering what kind of wealth a man must have to be driven to such frivolous and pointless spending. He turned abruptly.

   "You think I'm a fool, don't you?" he asked, his voice curious, not angry. I stared at him, trying to devise a suitable response. He spoke again before I succeeded. "You think I'm some rich fool who has run out of ways to spend his money, am I correct?" I suddenly noticed that beneath his bushy eyebrows, his small blue eyes were piercing and focused.

   "Mr. Lowell, I don't think you're a fool, it's only-"

   "It's only that you don't see the point in sending an American map-maker to Brazil to map a Brazilian island, yes?"

   I nodded.

   "Well, you and I have different goals, Mr. Bailey. Your goal is to get this fool out of your office and resume your normal work. Charting the forests, is it? A noble endeavor. My goal, however, is the speedy construction of this house. Isla Grande has never been mapped by an American firm. My crew will be American, working in American measurements and in the English language. My plans do not include hiring an interpreter simply to explain the map of the area. My plans certainly do not include any grievous errors that could arise from miscalculations of measurement. I see from your face that you consider these scenarios unlikely; I will remind you, however, that this project is being undertaken on the other side of the world, and I am not a man who takes a great many chances."

   He paused and scrutinized me for a moment before turning back to the map and aimlessly scanning the Canadian Rockies. "In any case," he continued, "this is all beside the point. The point, Mr. Bailey, is that you and I have different goals. Since I must have the island mapped, and my research indicates that yours is the best firm for the business, I must find some way of making my goals, your goals." He turned and gave me a wry smile. "Luckily, that is the express purpose of money."

   "I'm not sure you understand exactly how expensive and time-consuming this would be, Mr. Lowell. Measurements, drafting, travel expenses..."

   Lowell waved his hand at the mention of money as though trying to bat away a fly. "Money is no issue," he said, "You shall be flown to Rio de Janeiro. There is a Brazilian survey firm across the bay in Niteroi; you will be given funds with which to hire one of their cartographers for the purposes of translating the current map and assisting with your measurements. Upon your return, I will compensate your firm to the tune of two thousand dollars."

   I held up a hand. "Wait one moment, Mr. Lowell," I said, "I'm still not sure if the firm will sign on to this project, and even assuming they do, I don't expect they'll send me to do the measurements."

   "Your superiors are busy with their new contract," Mr. Lowell said, "and we older gentlemen don't relocate easily. I will insist that it is you who makes the trip; like I said, I leave little to chance, and I have done my homework on you as well."

   Before I could ask what he could have meant by that, he was on his way out the door. He turned in the doorway, reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a silver case. He opened the case and extracted a business card, placing it carefully on a nearby table. "I will be in touch," he called as he walked out.

   I watched him go, and then picked up his card. It read ELLIOT TIBERIUS LOWELL, and nothing else.

   Lowell’s comments regarding the lethargy of old age proved prophetic; I saw nothing of my employers that day. I sat in silence for the rest of the day, hunched over the easel on my stool, carefully plotting guidelines, marking in the tiny concentric circles indicating the hills and ditches of a plot of land that human eyes would probably almost never see. I put Lowell’s card on my boss’s desk and tried to put it out of my own mind. As I worked, though, I would often lift my head and gaze wide-eyed around the office; I knew I would not find anything, was not even really looking for anything. My mind was telling me that something terribly serious was happening to me—good Lord, Brazil!—and though I attempted to force the thought away, my instinct was to remain aware of my surroundings, lest some other bourgeois tornado come reeling into the room and whisk me off to Dubai or Finland.

   I tried to put Lowell's offer out of my mind, not because I felt he was anything less than completely serious about the project, but because I felt for sure that my superiors would never sign on. The contract we had for the forests would not be completed for almost a year, longer if I were to take off on this ridiculous trip. Despite the man's assuredness regarding the power of money to change a person's goals, we were a small firm and this contract needed to be finished. Responsibilities at home outweighed ventures overseas.

   In point of fact, as the day went on, I became less excited about the possibility of the trip and more irritated by Lowell's presumptuous nature, his dogged determination that his money could gain him anything he desired. Aside from being a paid contract, what we were doing in Massachusetts was important work; our maps would be the standard for the entire state, for as long as they lasted. Having been responsible for what would essentially be a part of the nation's official conciousness-- it's not the world's greatest achievment, but it would be something, something real-- and here this man thinks that he can stroll into my office and throw me some coins, and all of that goes out the window? So I could make his 'proper American map' and he could build his ostentatious pleasure-house with his family's money? The notion began to disgust me.

   At one point my frustration overtook my professionalism and I made a sloppy line on the map, poorly measured, poorly drawn, off-projection so obviously that a child could see. I threw my pencil across the room in anger. It bounced off a far wall and rolled under a filing cabinet. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. The words Brazil, Isla Grande, Niteroi, Lowell had been clamoring through my brain all day and I felt that the sound of them was beginning to drive me mad. I snapped the lights off, locked the front door and stepped out into the night.

Persistence - Part I: Halifax

2008-09-23T14:20:00.001-07:00

Writer's Note: This story, "Persistence", is my longest and most involved. I will be posting each section individually, likely over a somewhat long period of time. This draft is not the final edit of this story, but any changes between here and then will likely be minor.

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PERSISTENCE
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part II: Triumph (Link)
Part III: Stories (Link)
Part IV: Ellen (Link)

Part I: Halifax

   In the summer of 1958, I was preparing for my final year of study at my small university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I was studying folklore and mythology, fairy-tales and urban legends. The stories that settle around any human area, the stories that come into and out of our minds, as surely as air to our lungs. I was romanced by the idea that these stories were everywhere, the kind of things that hide just below the surface of human life, stories that are considered uncouth and pointless by the society in whose creation they play such an intimate role.

   Convinced as I was of the presence of these stories in every human society large or small, it was a habit of mine to take short weekend trips to the small towns of Nova Scotia’s south shore to plunder fresh material. I devoured these stories, carefully marking them down in small black notebooks held together with masking tape at the spine, kept closed with frayed and drying elastic bands. As an H.P. Lovecraft devotee, my favorite stories involved the macabre– I had visions of carefully recording these wonderful creations of the general and undeniable insanity of the common human soul, publishing them in some great black tome that would rumble a deep bass thunder when dropped on a coffee table. A book whose indomitable mute presence would shock an entire room into uneasy silence. I knew I would never want for material; the unwritten tales in the communal consciousness of a small town are nearly always gruesome, if not outright disturbing. My duty was merely to find them.

   I had recently received a letter from a friend and planned to read it quite carefully, given that it was of importance to the next trip I had planned. This friend of mine shared my love of man’s unrecorded nightmares and had heard of a small town named Triumph, somewhere a few miles down the coast from Lunenberg. He had heard rumors of some strange mythology or superstition in which the town was involved and, happening to be driving through the area, stopped in to ask some questions. I gathered that his search was unsuccessful, and he went off to find his imagined subterranean cult elsewhere. Nevertheless in conversation he returned to Triumph often, and though he had nothing of a particularly gruesome nature to recall, I noticed a distinct change in his voice and his eyes whenever the topic came up. Slowly I became convinced that there was more to this story than I was being told. I suspected my friend of no trickery, but assumed that perhaps he had only touched the surface of something, something more subtle than he had at first imagined, and though he had concluded the search was pointless, I suspected there was perhaps more to be found.

   It being summer, my friend had gone home to his parents’ house in Moncton by the time my curiosity got the better of me and I had decided on a trip to the mysterious town. I penned him a letter, explaining my intentions and asking for directions and advice. Now that I had his reply, my planning could begin in earnest. Sitting down at my kitchen table, I opened the envelope and read the following:

   July 14, 1958

   Dear Jason,

   Glad to hear from you! I’m happy to hear that everything is going well. Aside from a devastating kind of boredom, I am also in relatively good spirits. I have found work as a government clerk. It pays well but is quite tedious, and I am looking forward to returning to the collegiate life.

   So you’re planning to visit Triumph, are you? Listen, my friend, I think I should tell you at the outset that I think it’s a bad idea. It’s not for your safety that I caution you, merely to keep you from wasting your time. Triumph, aside from lacking any kind of interesting legend that I could come across, is simply not a very hospitable town. It’s a fishing village of three hundred at most, with very little in the way of modern conveniences. The local people aren’t overly fond of outsiders and will not treat you with a great deal of hospitality. Were there something of note worth recording about the folklore of Triumph (which I seriously doubt there is) you’d need the devil himself to get it out of them.

   If you are determined to see Triumph, however, I can try to help as best I can. I don’t know exactly how to get there, only that it’s quite near Lunenberg. I simply went to Lunenberg and offered a man with a pickup truck a dollar for a drive out there. I suggest you try to make a similar arrangement to save yourself some trouble; half of the small towns on the shore aren’t even on most maps, and I doubt seriously that Triumph is on any.

   Once you get to Triumph, there’s a large granite building near the waterfront. Its owner is a man named Cyrus Peterson, and he rents a few rooms to travelers. It’s hardly luxurious, but it’s the closest thing to a hotel you’re going to find. It’s also worth noting that Cyrus and his son Jebediah were the greatest help in my own research, as they are much more amenable to outsiders than the rest of the townsfolk. Cyrus is greatly learned in the town’s history and Jebediah is quite familiar with its streets and locales. He may be willing to show you around, and his father will be happy to tell you anything you care to learn, as long as you provide him an ample supply of whiskey. I will write them now and tell them a friend of mine may be stopping in.

   Beyond that there’s little I can tell you. If you’re hell-bent on going through with this then I wish you the best of luck, although again, I would advise against it. When a town like Triumph is subjected to the investigational brilliance of a man like myself, nothing remains unhidden!

   Warm Regards,
   David Riley

   The caution he advised did not seem strange to me at the time. David often remarked on Triumph’s dullness, but I knew that there were stories everywhere, probably more numerous in places where other forms of entertainment are sparse. I was quite happy to read that the town had a hotel and that what seemed like a very knowledgeable resident had been alerted to my arrival. I was certain that this was merely a matter of asking the right questions, which my friend had not done. I was getting a good feeling about this trip and felt sure I would uncover something fascinating about the town of Triumph. I packed my things and set off for the road.

   That day the weather favored me, which was a stroke of luck, because the traffic did not. I walked for what seemed like ten miles before a passing motorist acknowledged my desperate thumb and pulled over to let me in. The driver was a young woman who talked my ear off about nearly every aspect of her life. That ride took me most of the way to Lunenberg; the rest of the trip I shared with several large bags of grain in the back of a rumbling, coughing flatbed. I arrived in Lunenberg at a fortuitous time, when several residents of the nearby villages were gathering supplies. I found a teenager who was in town buying huge spools of rope and he offered me a ride free of charge, which I gladly accepted.

   The drive took about half an hour. From Lunenberg the road grew narrower and more rough. We turned on to what seemed like an access road, barely wide enough for the truck itself; once or twice my driver had to carefully detour into the woods to allow the passage of other vehicles coming from the other direction. Small hand-painted signs pointed this way and that, down roads even more close and tangled. We turned at the sign marked TRIUMPH and bumped along through clawing branches for a mile or so before the forest suddenly dropped away and I saw we were driving through a large yellowish field. Far to the right, that field drew close to the endless storm-grey ocean which lapped at Triumph’s weathered shore. A slight mist turned to heavy fog quickly as we drove, and evening began to close in. Looking out the window, I saw first scattered sheds and warehouses, then poorly-maintained houses on the perimeter, becoming more dense and somewhat more presentable the closer we got to the town proper. When we arrived at what I took to be the main road, there were very few people on the streets. Peering into windows I saw large stoic mothers preparing bottomless stews on wood stoves.

   “Well, you going anywhere in particular?” my young driver asked. It was one of a very few things he’d said since we met.

   “Do you know a Cyrus Peterson? I was told he rents rooms.”

   “Yeah.” the youth replied curtly, taking the next right. After a few seconds we were outside the hotel. Large and granite-faced, stained with the rains of decades by the sea. Not ominous, but ancient and lifeless, grey. A light, cold rain was beginning to fall. In the yellowing glow of a streetlight the rain billowed like sheets in the wind, washing against the granite behemoth. Somewhere the rain dripped and plinked onto something metal. I climbed down from the cab.

   “I live up the street here, brown house. You need anything, let me know.” I turned to thank my driver but he was already pulling away. The look he gave me as he drove away was not a trusting one.

   Eager to get out of the rain myself, I went into the hotel. I was in a sort of parlor, and the rooms were suffused in a dull yellow light. To one end of the room was a massive wooden desk. From a door behind the desk, a large man suddenly burst into the room. He was broad-chested and stout, wearing a white shirt to match his hair and chomping on the end of an unlit cigar. He gave me a grin.

   “Hello there!” he called. “Hell of a night, isn’t it?” I looked out a dirty window and saw that the light rain had turned into a proper storm. Waves of rain crashed and foamed in the street. A gust of wind shook the window in its sash.

   “Yes,” I replied. “It came on fast. I hope it’s not here to stay.”

   “Oh, don’t you worry about that,” the man smiled. “It’ll blow itself out soon. We get lots of little squalls like this around here. I’ll bet it’ll be a fine day tomorrow.”

   “Good to hear.” I stepped up to the desk. “You must be Cyrus Peterson?”

   The man nodded. “And yourself?”

   “I’m a friend of David Riley, I was told he’d written to inform you of my arrival.”

   “Oh yes, that’s right. That guy was out of his head. Thought we were some crazy people out here.” Cyrus laughed loudly. “Imagine that! I believe he’d been listening a bit too long to those shows on the radio.”

   Cyrus saw me to a comfortable room. As David had warned, modern conveniences were conspicuously absent. What troubled me most was the lack of a telephone; I had expected at least to see one behind the counter downstairs. When I asked, Cyrus told me that telephones had simply never become popular in Triumph. “Nobody sees the point,” he told me. “Everybody you’d want to talk to lives right down the street.” However, aside from the lack of the telephone and the general antiquated appearance of the furniture and appliances, the room seemed perfectly reasonable. I was suddenly struck by a profound exhaustion. I had hoped to stay up late and try to get some stories out of Cyrus, but instead I simply laid back on my bed, kicked off my shoes and drifted into a deep sleep.

   I was suddenly awoken several hours later by something I could not identify. I thought it had been a dog’s bark, but upon reflection I was sure there had been no noise at all. Nevertheless my every muscle was tensed, my hands in tight fists, my eyes staring fixedly into the inky black void in front of me. I was sure something was outside my window.

   Turning and switching on the tiny electric light on my bedside table, I walked to the window and opened it. Outside I saw nothing but the rain, lessened again now, drifting over the street like fine snow. If there was something here it was here no longer. With a sigh I turned back to my bed, prepared to surrender my search and go back to sleep. Just then, in the corner of my eye, I noticed something moving. My eyes snapped to a small figure, hidden almost completely in shadow, only the suggestion and metaphor of a person amidst blackness. A young woman, perhaps, huddling in a fetal position, hands covering eyes in equal parts shame and fear. Nothing was said but I knew her name. It was Ellen Daress.

   And then the room was flooded with light. I was in my bed. The corner of the room where the figure had been was empty. The window was still shut, the light on the table extinguished. For all its imagined reality, my encounter with the figure had been a dream and nothing more. Yet the name would not leave me and remained foremost in my mind as I climbed out of bed and looked for the shower.

The Hatmaker Cycle - Part III: Retribution

2008-09-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

THE HATMAKER CYCLE
A Tale of Intrigue, Headwear, and Justice
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part III: Retribution

   The bastard. The dirty bastard.

   Michael pulled the chamber open and snapped it closed. It was a good gun. Well, he assumed it was a good gun. He didn’t know a whole lot about guns but the guy who had sold this gun to him told him it was a good gun, and judging by the gigantic white van full of guns that the guy drove around, it probably wasn’t unrealistic to assume the guy knew a thing or two about guns.

   In any case, it would do the job. Michael was angry- Shakespeare-style murdering-angry- he was angry, but he wasn’t stupid. And when that son of a bitch got what was coming to him, Michael wouldn’t be anywhere near the place. Peering through the massive scope, Michael would strike from a distance. He would forego the intense pleasure of seeing the bastard die, up close and personal, because he had no desire to spend the rest of his life in a Mexican jail for shooting a hatmaker.

   He sat back on his haunches, careful not to topple off the side of the wall and into the stream rushing along nearby. It was a good spot- it was out of the way with zero witnesses, it gave him a good view of the bastard’s shop and would allow for immediate disposal of the murder weapon, but if you had to pick any spot to sit your ass for hours on end, the top of an old granite wall would probably be pretty far down on your list. He hoisted the rifle again, feeling the ache in his arm as he did so. You better hurry your ass up and stand by your window for a good minute or so, you old son of a bitch.

   Michael had given the situation a lot of thought in recent days. He was queasy about killing someone. Hell, to tell the truth and save a lie he was downright terrified. But it had to be done. He was sure of that. The dirty bastard had ruined his father’s life, and a son has to honor his father. It says so right in the Bible. He wished he could have been the one to find them, not his father, his father who of course had simply left. Michael would have given the son of a bitch his reward right then, with his bare hands if it came to that.

   This hatmaker had seduced his father’s wife. Not his mother, thankfully- she had died years ago- but there was no doubt in Michael’s mind that his father had loved this woman, that her betrayal had scarred him deeply. It had driven him to that harlot, hadn’t it? And that had resulted in his almost complete financial destruction. And that, on top of everything else, had resulted in his suicide. Michael had been the one to stumble upon that scene, his father swaying gently under the tree out back, his face blue. Killed, in essence, by a dirty fucking hatmaker. Well, terrified as he was of the prospect, Michael was going to settle the score today.

   He was going to settle the score right now, he realized, as he snapped back to reality. The hatmaker had finished whatever he was working on and leaned back in his chair, just barely exposing his head to Michael’s scope through the plate glass window. Michael would have preferred to have the bastard standing in plain view but after two hours sitting on a granite wall he was ready to take what he could get. He aimed carefully. He could make the shot, he thought. He had been practicing for the last couple days and as it turned out he had something of a knack for sniping. Something he probably would have never learned if not for this ridiculous turn of events.

   Michael held his breath. He willed his hand to steadiness, squeezed the trigger slightly with a sweaty fingertip. He said a hail Mary and prepared to take his shot. Now or never, Michael.

   A flash of green.
   He pulled the trigger and felt the recoil.

   His heart thumped painfully in his chest. It had happened so fast and he had not been able to stop himself in time. Good lord, what had happened? What had he done?

   Almost against his will, he put his eye to the scope, hoping to God that it had been a trick of his eye, that the hatmaker and only the hatmaker was now lying dead.

   Oh God. A green dress. Long, blonde hair.

   Michael lost all ability to reason. He didn’t care, anymore, even if he was caught. He had the presence of mind to toss the rifle into the brook rushing by the wall, and he dropped to the ground and set off at a run for the hatmaker’s shop.

   There were screams as he reached the square. While the onlookers could only stand by and stare with horrified expressions at the dying woman, Michael could not help but run up to the angel he had inadvertently destroyed.

   The harlot. Good God.

   In a blinding flash Michael saw it all. This was not an accident. This was the work of God. There was no other explanation. He had been angry. He had been Shakespeare-style murdering-angry. But he had been angry at the wrong person. Who was this hatmaker? An honest man, a man who took pride in a simple trade. An honest man who had done wrong, there was no doubt about that, but everyone does wrong. This man’s crime was loving another man’s wife. The harlot had been the one who destroyed his father’s life, taking him in his moment of greatest weakness, pretending to love him. Michael had been right to buy the gun but he had aimed it at the wrong person. And, in the very last second, in His great wisdom, God had put the right person between his crosshairs.

   The door jerked open. “Ay dios mio!” came the cry from his one-time enemy. Michael spoke in a daze. “We need to call the police.” Perhaps he would turn himself in, perhaps he would not. He thought not. If God desired him to be caught, he would be caught. His eyes traveled up the harlot’s body and moved to meet Juan’s eye but they stopped at his chest, where a perfect hat rested atop a heaving breast. It was the most beautiful hat he had ever seen.

The Hatmaker Cycle - Part II: Violation

2008-09-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

THE HATMAKER CYCLE
A Tale of Intrigue, Headwear, and Justice
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part II: Violation

   She smiled as the hot breeze blew across her face. Swinging by her side was a black purse, loaded to the brim with American bills. The results of her latest tragic divorce. That made fifty-six, if her count was right; a number which nobody would ever know, least of all the American authorities or any of her past or future would-be soul-mates. A lady never tells.

   This last had been a breeze, though it had taken a little longer than it should have. A wealthy American businessman, jaded as could be, saddled with a plain and aging wife who, she assumed, failed to arouse his sensations the way a lithe young blonde would. Curiously enough, however, the trouble with this last job had been convincing her mark to leave the bloated old wench. If she had believed in love she might have applied the term to this kind of utterly foolish attachment. She had nearly given up hope, resigned herself to the fact that this businessman would never allow her to become anything more than a girlfriend on the side. She laughed softly as she strolled down the street– he was either very optimistic or very stupid if he ever sincerely believed that an overweight forty-something number-cruncher could possibly satisfy a gorgeous woman like herself, and as a girlfriend, no less.

   In any case, just as she was getting ready to cut her losses and run, God proved once again that He loves a thief. She wished she could have seen the look on the old man’s face as he opened the door to his bedroom only to find his wife engaged in something rather frantic, under the covers with another man. He told her that he didn’t even say a word. He took everything that would fit in his car and drove off to find the gorgeous blonde who had stolen his heart. Because he knew they were destined to be together, forever, and nothing else mattered. Two weeks later they were husband and wife. A month after that she was strolling down the sidewalk in the summer sun with a black purse and a bank account both full to bursting.

   She was ready to go. She had grown somewhat tired of Mexico and she had her eye on somewhere a little cooler. England, perhaps, maybe work her way toward Italy. She had never seen Italy and she imagined the rich men there were as desperate as they were in Mexico, or America, or Canada, or anywhere else on this ridiculous planet. Yes, she was ready to move on, but she wanted to do one more job. Just a little one. She had no idea why but she felt compelled to pull a one-night job, the kind she used to do when she was poor and had yet to realize the full potential of a rocky divorce. The kind of job that takes no planning- find a guy, get him to bring you home, fuck him until he falls asleep, rob him blind and get the hell out. She normally wouldn’t consider risking it, but as she was ready to leave anyway the chances of her getting caught were slim to none. That’s it, then. The next shop, perhaps. I’ll go into this next shop and we’ll see what develops.

   She stepped to the door and her hand reached for the knob when she suddenly felt a burning pain in her chest. She had heard no noise, felt no impact, but it felt as though someone had stabbed her with a red-hot dagger. She considered briefly that it could be a heart attack, but that was foolish. She fell to the ground as the blood made a mess of her new green dress. And she did so like this dress.

   As her vision began to darken she half-heard the door swing open, half-saw her would-be victim staring at her in horror. She had a strange sensation that another had arrived, who? She couldn’t see anything anymore. She was briefly struck by the silence, the utter silence. And then there was no more.

The Hatmaker Cycle - Part I: Dedication

2008-09-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

THE HATMAKER CYCLE
A Tale of Intrigue, Headwear, and Justice
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part I: Dedication

   Juan carefully shaped the leather fedora into a perfect crease. He realized he'd been holding his breath and released it in a slow, easy exhale. Another perfect hat. He sat back on his stool and looked around: perfect hats everwhere. He basked in his perfect hats. Nobody could make a hat like Juan. Fucking nobody.

   Suddenly there was a commotion outside his door. Most people who came through Juan's door were insipid tourists looking for a hat, any old hat, so they could wear it and when people asked where they'd gotten it they could say quite casually "Oh, this old thing? I picked it up in Mexico." People like that didn't appreciate a fine hat. And if they weren't tourists they were greasy workers, looking for something to keep their faces out of the sun. Juan would spend ten or fifteen minutes carefully pitching the exquisite Panama he had spent nine hours crafting with the utmost care and the dirty bastards would say "Do you have something with a wider brim?" They said it in Spanish, of course, but somehow that made it even more insulting.

   In either case, neither of his standard customers ever made anything that could be called a commotion, as such. They just sort of sauntered in through the door and peered about quietly while Juan steamed at their lack of appreciation for his perfect hats. This commotion, however, was a commotion indeed, and Juan carefully set the fedora on the counter and walked briskly to the door.

   His brain half-registered the horrified scream of an onlooker as he grabbed the doorknob and pulled the door open to reveal a woman at his doorstep. She was beautiful, he half-thought. Gorgeous, really. She had long, blonde hair, a green dress that clung lovingly to her full, round breasts. Her legs were milky-white serpents enchanting him with their visual siren's call, terminating in delicate, perfect feet clad in the finest sandals Juan had ever seen. She was also rapidly dying of a bullet wound to her left lung.

   "Ay dios mio!" Juan shouted as he watched her struggling on his doorstep. A man, running, to the door of his shop. "We must call the police!" he yelled, yet Juan himself had already grasped that the urgency so apparent in the young man's voice was unecessary. They could take their time calling the police-- the gorgeous blonde woman had gasped her last breath and lay dead on the step. A chilling quiet fell over the market square, each onlooker refusing to believe what they had just witnessed. For such a beautiful, perfect young woman to be gunned down in front of a poor Tijuana hatmaker's shop-- somehow it was more of an injustice than any of them had encountered. Juan searched his heart for the right words but found no words at all. So he was silent as he removed the hat from his head and put it to his heart, a tribute to the ravishing woman he had never known, who had been so tragically cut down in the prime of her life.

   Sweat poured down the young man's face. He was too late. He was stunned, as if he had been shot himself. The deafening silence continued. It was as if even the animals were struck dumb by this travesty. The market that was normally frantic with activity was utterly, deathly silent. Juan finally broke his gaze from the woman's bloody body; he had decided to bring the woman inside, close the door, and call the police. He looked to the young man, hoping to gain his help to bring her perfect body into his shop so that he could make that terrible call, but the young man would not meet his gaze. He was staring, incredulous, at the hat that rested atop Juan's heaving chest.

   The young man gulped twice to gain his voice. "That is the most beautiful hat I've ever seen." he finally croaked, and wandered into Juan's shop, carefully stepping over the perfect body that obstructed his path to Juan's perfect hats.

   Nobody could make a hat like Juan. Motherfucking nobody.

A Lost Sun

2008-09-21T16:01:00.000-07:00

A LOST SUN
Dominic E. Lacasse

  God created a male and female Leviathan, then killed the female and salted it for the righteous, for if the Leviathans were to procreate the world could not stand before them.
-Rashi, Commentary on Genesis 1:21

   June eighth, 2007. This was the day we lost the sun.

   I grew up by the ocean. The sea was a huge part of the life of my small Maine town. Everyone worked at the fish plant, or on the boats, or in the marina where all the boats were hauled and launched and painted and scraped. Everyone had something to do with the ocean; that was what it meant to live where I lived.

   However, despite living immediately next to the surging grey waters all my life, I gave little thought to their mysteries. I remember hearing that we know more about outer space than we do our own oceans. After June eighth, I am inclined to believe this to be true. The depths of the sea keep many things hidden, things which perhaps we were not meant to see, things which remain hidden for a reason.

   I once read about an event known as “the Bloop.” This was a sound recorded by an undersea microphone. It was perplexing to scientists because it carried the audio signature of a living creature, but was so immensely loud that if it was living, it must have been several times larger than even a blue whale. No creature of this size is known to exist- or indeed to have ever existed at any point in the world’s history. This sound was recorded once, and once only. It was heard twice. Once by a microphone bobbing in a hard plastic cage hanging from a buoy somewhere in the Pacific, and once by the residents of my town. That was June eighth, the day we lost the sun. Now, nothing makes sense. If a thing like the thing that came among us on that day can exist, then the world is not a place of logic. Every day I wonder if I’ve gone insane.

   On the morning of the eighth I was heading to school, making my way down Lower Water street, just above the breakwater that formed the borders of humanity. It was an unusually calm day, as I recall. The town was just waking up. All around me I heard the sounds of a new day, saw my neighbors bearing the kind of placid happiness that one only feels on a chilly morning by the sea. The sun was rising through a hazy fog over the bay.

   I don’t know if I was the first to see it. I was gazing out to sea, hoping to see a whale, or perhaps an osprey or eagle soaring over the water. What I saw was an immense darkness, a shadow bigger than a house. At first I thought it was some kind of illusion, but it neither faded nor slipped away. Rather, it was moving toward shore with sleek and elegant bursts of motion. Before it rose a crest like I’d only seen ships make, and behind it a wake that was turning the entire bay from still water to a slowly churning bed of blue-gray.

   By now others had seen the shadow. We simply stood and watched it. Nobody said anything to anyone. It was as though we understood our inability to comprehend whatever this was with words. We were silenced by the immensity of what was happening, though we did not as yet understand anything about it. Of course, we still don’t.

   The shadow slowed and stopped about a hundred feet from shore. The silence was deafening, every eye focused on the mysterious darkness that now lay motionless, blackening nearly half the bay with its immensity.

   And then, in one swift motion, the creature lunged from the water. Massive sprays of water seemed to hold glitteringly motionless in the sky as the great beast rose, higher than the houses on the waterfront, higher than the church steeple. Its great shadow covered block after block of our city as the creature finally reached its full height and seemed to settle on the sea floor.

   We were looking at a creature fully two hundred feet tall if it was an inch. The very act of its standing displaced enough water to briefly ground some of the boats on the waterfront. Its head was oar-shaped and massive, the water spilling from its sides back into the bay a roaring thunder. Below the head we could see only two massive limbs, as wide as redwood trees. Strange parasites, creatures the size of men that seemed to be all mouth, clung desperately to the creature’s flanks, so tiny in proportion that they seemed to go unnoticed. On either side of the creature’s immense head were its eyes, immense black orbs, at least twenty feet in diameter, glittering with an obvious intelligence which made the creature even more terrifying.

   We stood dumbfounded, to scared even to scream or flee. For a silent moment the creature regarded us with apparent curiosity. We simply stared back, unable to think. There we stood, human and leviathan, there we stood silent and waiting.

   And then the creature sounded its call. A minor note like the trumpeting of some unreal instrument of war blasted through our town in a cavalry charge of sound. Trees on the waterfront were broken clean from their trunks by the fury of the leviathan’s cry. A crescendo of breaking glass signaled the shattering of every window for half a mile. All who watched were thrown to the ground, the sheer force of the noise knocking us backwards several feet and sending us tumbling. Suddenly a large field of grass above Lower Water street burst violently into a maelstrom of flame. All who stood there were immediately incinerated as a vast tower of fire reached into the heavens. The note and the fire sustained and grew louder for several seconds before both suddenly vanished into the morning air. The monster stared silently.

   At last fear gave way to panic. We still could not think after what we had witnessed. We stampeded like cattle from the behemoth that had cursed us with his presence. I ran too, passing old women with broken bones sobbing in the street, passing a brother and sister clinging to each other and wailing with fear. I saw the men running up from the waterfront. Those who had been close to the monster looked like the retreating survivors of some hideous battle, with blood pouring from their ears down the sides of their faces. All was dust and smoke and glass and gravel and fear.

   As we ran the beast slowly turned and began to stride out to sea, crushing boats and raising great clouds of water until it at last slipped under the waves and was gone, as though it had never been.

   Soon we stopped running. We could no longer go on. The shock of what had happened sapped the energy from us and left us panting in the streets. I could just barely hear the sounds of the people around me, the cadence of running feet, the unnatural scream of car alarms, the too-natural wails of the injured and the frightened and the insane. And then a crack. There was a hollow, wooden cracking noise which seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth itself. And then another. The sound of cracking wood, as though some great giant was breaking a tree over his knee, crescendoed and filled the town. The screaming and wailing matched the rise in volume as we awaited with horrified certainty the next abomination to descend.

   In the field of ash above Lower Water street, a massive tree sprang from the ground. Slowly it rose into the sky, its trunk seeming to spiral larger and larger as it rose higher and higher, higher than the tallest buildings in town, taller even than the monster itself. Its branches spread like the arms of death, like a plague, and on them grew malformed leaves of black. The tree grew and grew, its boughs reaching out to cover the entire town, its leaves growing in dense thickets, bristling and dark. Slowly the leaves took over the sky, turning the grey sky black from one end of town to the other, closing us in, executing the final curse, blotting out the sun. In darkness now, we again fell silent. I listened to my own breathing and stared ahead and saw nothing. That day, we lost the sun.

   We would eventually find that the tree could not be cut by any blade we tried on it. Even when, in our desperation, we took the town’s stock of blasting dynamite and detonated it at the base of the great horror, the tree remained unscathed. We found that the branches bowed down to the ground in a wide perimeter around the city, the boughs hemming in on themselves in an unholy wall stronger than the most secure prison. We did not need to learn these things to know that we were trapped by something that could never be destroyed. We knew that as soon as we first saw the profane thing break from the roots of the earth. We investigated merely out of a sense of propriety. At the end of the day, when our knowledge was confirmed, none were surprised. We simply went home, exhausted, and sat quietly in the darkness.

   June eighth was now four months ago. The darkness has never once abated, nor have we ever managed to contact the world outside. I have my doubts that the world outside even knows. Quite likely for them there is no tree, there is nothing but a ghost town. We have lost the sun and perhaps we are all dead.

   From the ground enriched by ashes,
   Newly raked by water-maidens;
   Spread the oak-tree's many branches,
   Rounds itself a broad corona,
   Raises it above the storm-clouds;
   Far it stretches out its branches,
   Stops the white-clouds in their courses,
   With its branches hides the sunlight,
   With its many leaves, the moonbeams,
   And the starlight dies in heaven.

-The Kalevela

Quarantine

2008-09-21T15:45:00.000-07:00

QUARANTINE
Dominic E. Lacasse

   I was in a small room. There was a small lamp in the corner, a bed with the white sheets so tight and neatly folded that I was afraid to touch it. I was on a chair in the corner, hugging my knees, my bare feet resting on the cold rung between its legs. I was not scared, because my mother was outside. She was out there somewhere and the circumference of her zone of motherly protection surely enveloped me and kept me safe. So I was not scared, but I was confused. There was something wrong with me. I had woken up with red spots on my skin and they had taken me here and subjected me to the inquiries of several unnaturally clean, shiny, cold things and now I was in a small room and something was wrong with me.

   There was a soft knock on the door. My mother’s voice, too happy, not fooling anyone. “David? I’m going to come in. I’m going to tell you what’s going on. But I’m going to be wearing a costume, alright? Don’t be scared, it’s me, I’m just wearing a costume.”

   “Alright,” I half-spoke. A costume? I wondered briefly whether I was actually awake. But the door opened and there was a thing standing there, a big green thing with a glass face and the mouth of a machine. I recoiled instantly, but the mother voice returned.

   “David, calm down. It’s a costume, remember? It’s just a costume, it’s me in here.” The thing knelt and cast its glass face on me and I saw my mother’s eyes behind the mask. Confusion overwhelmed me and I could only stare blankly at her; subsumed in the unnatural world of a sleep-deprived child, everything seemed to me a circus of dreams. I felt seconds as nauseous waves of half-awareness as I watched my mother find words.

   “David, listen to me. The doctors say you have a thing called measles. It’s contagious, do you know the word contagious?”

   I wearily turned the stone-heavy pages of my mental dictionary and found the word. When you’re contagious it means that people can get sick by being near you. A friend of mine had told me about contagious when his sister’s eye had gotten sick and she wasn’t supposed to touch people until it got better.

   “It means something that people get from other people.” I said.

   “That’s right,” crooned my mother. “Your measles are contagious, but they’re not going to hurt you. The doctors have medicine for you and you’re going to be fine in a few days. But the baby could get sick if you go home now. That’s why the doctors gave me this costume so I could talk to you.” She held out her tarp-monster arms by way of example. “This costume keeps your measles from going home with me.” she said, and the words slogged through the white cloud of exhaustion and then struck home with a vibrant intensity.

   “You’re going home and I can’t?” I asked.

   “Yes, honey. I’m sorry, but I need to take care of the baby. You’ll be fine here; the doctors and nurses are very nice and I’ll visit you every day, just like this. It’s only for a few days, baby.”

   Processing the information was like rearranging stone tablets in my mind. All I could see was my mother at home, her protected territory encircling the house and the road and the backyard, but ending well before the hospital, which was all the way over by the school. It was not horror that gripped me but a kind of numbness. The room was a medium-place between healthy and sick. My mother, healthy. Me, sick. The costume and the drum-tight bed and the ostracization from the security of my mother’s presence was the area in between. My head felt heavy. My skin had red spots. I was contagious because of measles and it was the middle of the night.

   The tarp-monster with my mother’s face was lifting me and then I was on the bed, with darkness closing around me. “I’ll see you in the morning, honey, don’t be scared, I love you.” The words suffused into a dreamy blue mist as sleep overtook me.

   “Will I be different after?” The words floated up from some unknown source within me, but they meant something I couldn’t say and the concept was soon broken apart and annihilated by the empty unease of a troubled sleep.