Daughters of Babylon (37 page)

“What have you done to him?” Silvina tried to push past the archeologist who was wearing the same tacky Bermuda shorts and hand-knit knee socks as the day they met. But the man she’d believed to be a spry senior citizen stood in the middle of the step, rooted as an oak. “He’s drowning, dammit—get out of my way!” She punched him in the chest; it was exactly like punching said tree.

“He’s not drowning.” The man-creature, whatever he was, examined his fingernails. “You’re sharing a memory.”

“Of what?”

“Oh, puh-lease, after the night you just spent, don’t dumb yourself down. You’ll get spit out like sour milk, and we don’t have time.”

It was quicksand, I thought you were the ghost of my dead brother…

Oh. That memory.

“What are you, anyway?” Silvina asked, feeling again the splitting off she’d experienced while reading and sorting poems. “Some kind of resident monster?”

“Actually, your buddy from the Amazon explained me rather well. We live in the boundaries, the land of djinn, beings who can go either way—deeper into spirit, shallower into flesh. Free will, everywhere you look. Short answer? I am the ally of Vivian Lansdowne. We made our acquaintance in your terms in 1974, the year that the Daughters—what is the phrase you people like to use?—got their shit together.”

The djinn version of Dr. Shirazi had the grace of a Persian scholar, mellifluous voice, dignified cadence, but his choice of words seemed to emanate from some smarmy sarcastic place, where words and rancid fish oil meet.

He turned his back on Silvina and started walking down the stairs.

“Where are you going?” she called out.

“I already told you. We don’t have time.”

He descended slowly, holding the railing, his steps cautious as one might expect from a man near seventy, but he wasn’t making progress. He just kept on descending the same seven stairs, as if they’d become an escalator going the opposite way.

Silvina looked behind, and there was no upstairs, no five more steps to the second floor corridor with the attic trapdoor, two rooms and a bath. It was just a miasmic grayish-teal, colour before it decides to be colour. She had no choice but to follow him.

And sure enough, when Silvie took a step down, the Doctor moved ahead one step. Six, five, four, three…they both stood at the bottom in the central corridor between the parlour and the
foganha
. “Why don’t we have time?” she asked. “What’s the hurry?”

He extended his arm with a grandiose gesture toward the kitchen. “Take a look. See for yourself.”

She turned and heard a great cracking like an earthquake, and her grand levees of reason, walls of rationality that had served Silvina, assured and promised her, things like this cannot happen burst their seams, and a deluge of oceanic, chaotic, unformed-but-forming, kinesthetic thought blasted through her muscles, through her bloodstream, through her sinews, bones, and organs, thoughts, beliefs and fears. Smithereens came to mind. Whatever smithereens were, she ought to be them by now, little human bits and pieces scattered everywhere, only she’d spent the night sorting rubielos from sestinas, septrois from octavos, which may have been the reason she was not washed away. It felt only slightly worse than standing in a fast-moving weather front. Rain falls, wind blows. Done.

Except for the gaping hole.

Silvina walked into the kitchen. The wall that held the copper pots with polished bottoms was gone. Everything else looked tidy and untouched, but the tongue and groove panel had been replaced with an entrance to a dark, dripping tunnel of stairs, giving off a blast of cold that was numbing Silvie’s nose and fingertips. And though she knew Dr. Shirazi was standing beside her, expecting her to exclaim something along the lines of,
oh my God, what is this
, she had no intention of fulfilling his expectation. Because she’d already seen it, read it over and over in a rubielo until she knew it to be more than a pretty collection of words, and she’d taped it to the stairwell in a state beyond awe. What she’d not anticipated was standing before the facts of the poem, or of being reminded of its title, “The Decision”.

There is a corridor

behind the Big Dipper

you can travel unseen.

I’ve left a lantern at the portal

to light your way, the width

of the passage is made

for one, admits no

shadows. Are you

brave enough—I think

you are—to meet who’s

waited all this time

to love you?

The transcriber of the poem had made only one small error. Or maybe two. She couldn’t see a lantern. The darkness beyond the natural light of the
foganha
looked absolute.

She turned to the djinn-ally-being who stood beside her, looking smug. “You think I’m going down there, forget it. This is not some stupid Gothic novel, and I’m less blonde than I look.”

“What were you planning to do instead?” said the Doctor. “Bake a cake?”

“Maybe.” He had a knack, she noticed, for eye holds. Once you looked at him, it was hard to look away. And as eye contacts go, it was not pleasant. Silvie could feel the lines of fear and doubt marching in like army ants, traveling, she supposed, the optic nerve, which led to the brain and spinal column. They weren’t her fears and doubts—or maybe they were. Maybe they were Viv’s or the grand accumulation of every person in a million years unfortunate enough to have summoned a being from the boundaries.

Peripherally, the kitchen was intact. Reaching out, she could feel the center island. The masking tape was there, the scissors and the coloured markers where she’d left them. So although she couldn’t see him, it was also possible that Gavriel was around.

“Really,” said Dr. Shirazi. “Once again, you disappoint. Do you honestly believe your poet friend is lurking around in some shamanic non-space, looking for ways to rescue you? What makes you think he didn’t cause this in the first place? What do you really know about the man, apart from a book of poems and what a California nut-case in parrot earrings told you?”

She’d been thinking too loudly. She tried not to think, which sounded like,
dontthinkdontthinkdontthinkdontthink
, the kind of rhythmic, slapping screen door sensation that either signaled or brought on full-fledged synesthesia…and maybe this was a massive episode of cross-sensory malfunction, but holding the idea of a medical opinion didn’t solve a hoot in hell.

“Please come in,” said a voice from inside the tunnel. “There’s no one else who can help me. You’re my last hope.”

She saw the lantern first, a ball of light inside glass, swaying from a metal wire handle. Then the arm holding up the lantern came into view, a blue and yellow striped T-shirt, scuffed-up jeans, and high-top sneakers with red laces on a boy about seven or eight. He stood inside the corridor, looking at Silvina.

“Oh my God.” She dropped to a squat, which placed her a few inches shorter than eye to eye, because if she hadn’t, she might have passed out again the way she had on the stairs, and if there was one thing she needed to remember in this god-awful mess, it was to stay conscious. “I saw you last night when I read the rubielo.”

“I know. You swore pretty bad. Mom would never have let me say sweet mothering Jesus.”

“No need for you to say it either. I don’t usually swear, but I was shocked. Can you tell me your name?”

The boy looked past her, presumably at Dr. Shirazi whom she could feel behind her left shoulder like a slow-breathing, raspy stick insect.

“If you can’t tell me, it’s okay. I don’t need to know. I’m Silvie.”

“Isn’t it fascinating?” Dr. Shirazi said. “Allies and djinns, we come in all shapes.”

“I’m not a djinn,” the boy said. “My name is Thomas Haggerty.”

If there’d been a floor—there was, of course, or maybe not—Silvie would have fallen through it. Whatever lay beneath her and nothing, held. “Haggerty. Are you…?”

He nodded. “My Mom’s name is Blythe. I’m all she has, and I’m the reason she—”

Silvie reached across the threshold and pressed a finger to his warm, utterly genuine, boy lips. “No, that’s not true. You’re the reason she loves you.” He’d been about to say, I’m the reason she drinks, and from a Jungian point of view, he was probably right. In twenty years, Blythe Pendaris had never mentioned being a single parent with a son. She only obsessed, when three sheets to the wind, about a place called Queen of Heaven, Cue Vaitch—miraculous, but with no joy.

“Why are you in that dark place, Thomas? What happened?”

“You have to come in,” he said. “There’s no time.”

There’s no time.
Why did people keep saying that? She looked over her shoulder at the archeologist or rather, his impersonator. He wasn’t really Viv’s boyfriend or Dr. Shirazi. She turned to gauge Thomas’s expression. Rising to her feet, she decided. But before Silvina stepped across the space between the
foganha
and the corridor, she yelled something at the top of her lungs. Dr. Shirazi yowled like a wounded bobcat and shoved her, and the stone stairs he pushed her down were cold and slippery and the bruising agony went on and on. At last, she landed—
hard
—and picking herself up, felt consoled by the knowledge that, if nothing else, she’d chosen her last five words, in a space with no time, carefully.

The corridors of sound to word, of rhythmic clicks—
the prioress walks soundlessly along the open corridor of the cloister gallery
—were not devoid of light but more like infra-red, the colour of a photographer’s darkroom. What had become of Thomas and the djinn, she didn’t know—
holding a ring of iron keys close to her heart
. That she was being watched, she knew, but why? There’s nothing here of me to see. All my life I’ve done my job, I’ve done it well. What more is there to do do do do do do do do…?

The night is cold but windless, and the coarseness of her wool habit reassures like an old friend. The plainsong of the women, their
cantus firmus
sharp and clear as crystal, settles across the pine and oak forests of Reine du Ciel, rippling with the river whose current, swift with winter melt, crashes and foams to the orchards below.

The she that was beyond Silvie paused to absorb what she was receiving in word, thought, and image, but she didn’t understand, so she continued to walk through looping, coiling, tube-like halls, like boilerworks, with furrows made from bands of light. She ran her hands along the bands; they rippled, sending up small electrical charges that flared into honeycomb shapes in her brain.

A long row of flickering candle sconces light the northeast wing that does not smell of boiled turnip, caustic lyes but deeper musk of battles, outside world, man. The prioress stops outside a door, raises her hand to knock.

“It’s open,” he says.

Dr. Shirazi appeared at her left. “It’s good to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil, is it not, especially if it means we can know what happened to our dearest friends?”

“Why am I here? Where is—” She stopped herself in time, this time. No mention of the boy. “—the door to get out?”

“Oh, we’ll reach the exit soon enough. These corridors may seem endless, but so does a long dull afternoon at the office.”

The low-burning fire in the guest cell gives off the sweet essence of cherrywood. The man sitting at the edge of the bed looks up briefly, then returns his attention to the leather boot he is buffing with a scrap of chamois.

Silvina stopped, while the corridor kept bouncing softly like a spring. “Arturo? Is that you?” A few of the honeycomb cells ignited. She wanted to look deeper, beyond the need to understand why she knew the knight’s name. She knew the knight’s name because she knew the knight.

His silver hair is brushed and pulled back with cord, the chain mail that still fits him well glows with a soft filigree. The prioress drags her gaze from the weathered hollows of his face while taking in the smell of mutton grease and other unguents needful to an old soldier.

“Be careful,” she heard Thomas say. “Auntie Viv thought it was okay that Uncle Tar used poppies to remember. He boiled the flowers and smoked the tar. That’s why we called him Tar, it wasn’t just his name. He thought it was a game to think he’d been a king named Louis with a queen…”