The Divinity Student (17 page)

A shadow falls over him from above, and in a moment he finds that he his vision is suddenly less foggy, and that the heat has abated a little. He looks up but the brilliance of the sky blinds him to the descending shade—someone’s coming down out of the sky. The shade is presently standing beside him. And now black gloved hands, like spiders in lace cuffs, take hold of his arm, clamping down vice-tight through his heavy coat, and guide him up the street. And out towards the edges of town. And up the steps to the house.

Once under the eaves his vision finally begins to clear. The house exhales cool air on him, and he basks in it. His head, plagued by slabs of day-heat out in the sun, turns glassy clear, and the swaying dizziness of the street is arrested as decisively as the motion of a pendulum is stopped by the clockmaker’s hand. A shade ascends out of sight behind him even as he turns to it, vanishing with a rustle of petticoats.

The Divinity Student falls out of his cot, lies on the floor, jarred but only just barely awake. He has dreamt the dream he’d dreamt before, in the hammock, but this time he changed more completely, into something impossible to remember, and it was the woman who had come through the window who was waiting for him in the clouds. The ugly, ginger ache behind his eyes wakes up, too, and he holds his head in his hands, yawning until his jaw hurts. He’s graduated to a new level of pain; his muscles feel like they’re being rubbed with sour stinging fingers and his joints shriek against each other like glass on glass.

Still exhausted, he pitches himself forward and drags himself to the chair. Tonight they’re going after Gaster—the last of the twelve word-finders. Tonight the Catalog will be complete. Gaster is kept on permanent display in a public building, but the place empties out after hours and they can take him then. The biggest obstacle is a tight noose of guards present twenty-four hours on the premises, but Teo has remedied that now, with the help of a forger he knows in the Street of Clockworks. For a small sum and commission he has happily faked three passes for them as “security inspectors.” The Divinity Student lays his head on the desk, feeling blunted and feeble, wanting only to rest and rest. Over and over he relives the dream, seeing clouds parting in front of him and half-remembering being drowned by a feeling he couldn’t describe. Relapsing the sky is black before him, a gaping absence—but all the same it’s reaching out and spanning the distance to snare him, and all the time he’s reaching out his hands to meet it. He comes back to himself, and realizes that Gaster is the key, Gaster and then rest. Gaster, and then the mission is over.

There’s a lighted candle over there on the windowsill. The blade of flame is tiny and dwindling, poised at the tip of the wick between empty air and a lake of liquid wax steadily rising, strangling the fire. The Divinity Student stares at the candle with a sense of recognition, falling against himself back into reverie. He stares at it from under his eyelids, until everything around the light dims and wavers, and although he’s smothered and weighed down with exhaustion, he’s thinking clearly, he knows the candle is burning away its own substance, sublimating itself invisibly into the air. It’s eating itself. Swaying slightly back and forth he realizes that it’s hollowing itself out, and going faster and faster, that it will either drown in its melting flesh, or shrink starving away to nothing. Then—snap—and he’s out of it again. He catches himself with his mouth open, blowing just gently toward the candle, but it’s all the way on the other side of the room, and his breath isn’t enough. The Divinity Student sneers at himself. He gets up, walks over, and pinches the candle out with his fingers. Outside it’s getting dark—he pulls on his heavy coat and heads downstairs.

It’s when he’s doing something important that the pain changes. He still feels like a walking scrapyard, but the leaden, crushing vise at his temples relents a little. It doesn’t vanish, rather it changes character, and focuses into a sweet toothache pain, and all his senses light up like a window display. He feels as unreplenished and unrefreshed as before, but at these times his machine parts take over and carry him along where he directs, like servants tending a bedridden invalid.

Miss Woodwind emerges from the kitchen and meets him there in front of the door, puts a black doctor bag in his hand. She says something to herself and fetches Teo, who’s in the basement grinding his knives. Outside the air is dry and cooling, night’s veil drawing across the sky again, San Veneficio lighting up in front of them, orange streetlights and wan porches, rolling in rows up and down and at all angles, making the town look like a tangle of frozen rail cars knotted together in big strands crisscrossing the desert. It’s exhilarating. All together, they go quietly, avoiding main thoroughfares where they can and sticking to the slums, smell of stale frying fat and old cabbage. Now and then, drawn wasted faces peer out at them, but something in the air the Divinity Student carries with him keeps them at a distance. The three of them are charged. Teo carries a knife ostentatiously in his belt, but people scrabble aside from a mere look from the Divinity Student. His face is scoured with death.

Miss Woodwind guides the Divinity Student across the big boulevards—otherwise he’d get disoriented, forget where he’s going and what he’s trying to do, walk through a wall, make mistakes. She doesn’t look at his face: she’d made that mistake before and seen his eyes darting this way and that, peering at nothing, and, following his gaze, she’d almost seen . . .

Presently the crowds thin out, the exodus from the business end of town is over for the night, the people are already lost elsewhere. The Seleucid building is at the northernmost corner of a small, star-shaped square, a big blocky thrust with circular portholes lined in brass, and now that the people have gone, each is a blank, placid well of suggested space inside. The lobby is a glass-fronted box, with a couple of guards pacing around between the ashtrays and potted palms. Miss Woodwind leads them to a nearby alley where Teo has stowed the handcart earlier, and they retrieve the rope from it. They cross the empty plaza to the lobby and stand mute in front of the glass doors.

A dough-faced guard walks up, the Divinity Student holds up his forged pass. The others follow suit. The guard’s eyebrows rumple and his mouth stretches a bit at the corners in an unconscious ingratiating grin—he doesn’t know whether to ignore them or curry their favor. The doors sigh open, with a gust of antiseptic, air-conditioned air. The other guard approaches.

“I wasn’t told about any inspections.”

The Divinity Student glowers at him, and the guard backs away. For a moment he wavers, then nods and lets them pass. They head straight for an open freight elevator and instinctively the Divinity Student presses the button marked “five.” The door slides shut on the guards’ flummoxed faces.

Fifth floor. Miss Woodwind is the first in the corridor, jumping ahead of the Divinity Student. The hall is dark and empty, a double set of swing doors set directly into a far corner.

Now they’re in a big room with long transparent white drapes hanging like ghosts at the windows. Arranged along the walls are the skeletons of monsters glossed with lacquer to prevent evaporation, encrusted with precious metals and gems. The younger, or naturally smaller, varieties leer from dim alcoves and display tables. In the center of the room, still slowly rotating on a pedestal rigged with ribcages of struts and gear-clavicles, is Gaster. Among other things, and beyond his duties as a word-finder, he’s also responsible for the collection of old bones that stands watch over him now. During the day he meets his admirers, revolving in a pressurized case filled with invisible preservative gases. The visitors mill around, read the little plaque, and peer morbidly at his slack face and blanched hair.

The Divinity Student strides directly up to Gaster, and, as if pushing air before him in a solid sharp mass, a crack whips across the front of the case, and with every step he takes, the fissure widens and spreads. There’s a hissing sound; Miss Woodwind and Teo cover their faces, for their noses and eyes are already smarting and burning with the hot, buzzing, non-smell of that gas. Even Gaster himself looks singed. The Divinity Student reaches out his hand and taps the case once, and the front panel collapses like wet paper. Teo and Miss Woodwind stagger back to the door, then drop through. Taking a deep breath through flared nostrils, with relish, the Divinity Student steps into the case and draws Gaster tenderly to him, carrying him out of the room like a baby, head cradled on his shoulder.

Then, in the hallway—footsteps are coming, a few flashlight beams scratch across walls and framed pictures, guards coming from around the corner. Teo grabs the Divinity Student, who stands gazing lost in Gaster’s face, and pulls him along, following the bend in the hall, and Miss Woodwind starts trying doors. Finally, she kicks one open and they all pile into a small office with a window facing the street. She slams the door behind them and barricades it with a desk. Voices call from the elevator.

Working fast, Teo pulls the rope out from under his apron and ties it to the radiator, tossing the other end down to the street. He looks to the Divinity Student, but he in turn grabs Miss Woodwind by the arm and sends her through first, then Teo after. Flashlight beams itch by under the door, knocks and bangs up and down the hall, the lock rattles and starts to give. The rope breaks. Down below, Miss Woodwind is already on the ground, and Teo drops only half a story; he’s safe, coils of rope spiraling down on top of him. The Divinity Student gently presses Gaster’s face into the folds of his overcoat and bounds out of the window.

He lands square on his feet from five stories, stamped on the pavement a sound like a gunshot. For a moment he’s perfectly still, then, exhaling, he straightens his legs. He walks, limping only a little, and tenderly places Gaster in the handcart. Teo, moving very slowly, goes to help him push the cart up the alley. Miss Woodwind follows too, also very slowly. Above, lights flare in the empty office, heads pop out the window and stare, stabbing their lights down the side of the building, up and down the radiating streets. There is no sign of the Divinity Student. They are getting away.

Over the past few weeks, Teo has become more and more thorough, his technique now demonstrating a decidedly greater degree of precision and skill. Now he’s dissecting Gaster slowly, piece by piece, flaying him first with exquisite care, and always watching himself in the mirror, imagining himself on the table. Periodically, he sprays Gaster with a bottle of formaldehyde to keep him fresh; now he too finds the smell refreshing. If he takes his time and breathes the mist in deeply, he can feel the more acute sensations inflicted on the body—sharp decadent pain welling up like foul water in his limbs, pocketing itself inside him, making him wince and recoil from the body and then step up and carve into him again, like someone endlessly inspecting a painful wound, or someone whipping himself. Desden still curses to himself, but he’s taken to cursing quietly, muttering all the time under his breath, almost as an afterthought. It’s the cutting that seizes his interest, and he knows this time will be the last, at least for now. As he walks around the table to start on Gaster’s left side, passing the empty skull, he thinks of the Divinity Student at work upstairs, and wonders what will happen.

Earlier that day, Miss Woodwind found a fragment, transcribed in the Divinity Student’s handwriting, in the attic room:

“I was sent to suffer and learn and to join the Eclogue. From dictation: you split off and are the ghost sent to encounter my soul as a stranger, bring with you the offering of the first, lost image of us together. When you are caught dreaming, look in a mirror to wake yourself. I correspond to San Veneficio in this way—its soul is brought to me by the saints who are my eyes and ears.”

She drops the page in disgust. “Crazy rubbish!”

The Divinity Student is beginning. Hoses curve in the air around him, one from each of the twelve jars, drawing formaldehyde through an air pump onto an aluminum plate on the table. Each hose adds a different color of fermented memory: gray-green, yellow, brown-orange, tea colored, and clear—they collect in layers without mixing. When the plate is filled, the Divinity Student turns the pump down to a trickle, empties his lungs, and fits a mask, connected to a porcelain dome suspended just above the plate, over his mouth and nose. At the same instant, he drops a catch and sends current running through the plate. The formaldehyde hisses and vaporizes, boiling up into his face, and with a single breath he draws it all into his lungs. His head snaps back against the chair and his arms fall stiff over the armrests. On the table, a thin trickle of chemicals dribbles from each hose onto the plate, skipping in beads over the electrified surface and melting into steam, breath drawn into the Divinity Student.

He loses all sense of his body immediately, his limbs go warm-numb and seem to fall away, and then his senses fall away, too.

The first thing is a clear cycling chime like a ringing glass that passes through at intervals. He’s got nothing else but that and a feeling of something like a lightless explosion—solid and frozen . . . not warming but still melting into wind or waves. He’s going very far. Although he can’t see, there are shapes around him, darker shadows looming against the dark like cliffs and frothings like sea foam. There are things that seem like panels of transparence, windows, lightless as everything else but looking as if he’s peering through something, from one dark to another. At first he thinks they’re moving past him, but no . . . their positions are fixed, he’s the one who’s moving. Gradually, a low thrumming sound becomes audible, from no particular source, as if all the surrounding landscape rests on a blurring membrane. He continues to move “forward,” and then he starts smelling a warm, sweet, acrid smell, like wood alcohol, but it’s a secondhand sensation, from far off or somebody else. Now he can feel ropes whipping around him, or maybe flying stones, but it seems more like taut ropes spanning vast invisible distances, whipping through the air with a low whistling sound, dropping tiny currents of air or water, small disturbances in the air.