The Divinity Student (18 page)

Albert is the first to arrive. He just appears, although he’s not actually visible—it feels like light hitting blind eyes, a physical touch. If he’s anywhere he’s just above the Divinity Student and to the left. One by one they appear—after Albert come Niffruch and Dreyfic together, and then Chan after that, and the spectrum fills out piece by piece. Gaster comes last, and he’s right beside the Divinity Student, so close he can feel the Eclogue’s “waves” or “wind” berthing around him.

As they speak together he begins to forget their names, recognizing them only by their manner of speaking. The first one has a shrill, wan voice, and shrieks; two together make rustling, whispering sounds; one is almost wholly silent; here coughs and barks; and there the patter of fingers flicking together; this one hums, stuttering “mm” or “mm mmmuh”; from that one—a bubbling hiss and sneeze; a bestial lowing and shouting on one side; on the other a flat uninflected voice muttering on a single fixed tone; laughing or sobbing; and the last speaks by dancing in an awkward, heavy circle, invisible yet sensible. Together they’re all speaking the Catalog-language, the Eclogue-language, about everything, and behind everything.

The strain is terrible; the longer he stays the more tenuous and lost in the stream he becomes. Vaporous hot flashes shoot from underneath to curdle up and around brittle sensations of obscene toothache pain and he’s being whittled away, flying off in pieces that flutter away in high-pitched sounds like flocks of frightened birds. Pushing in farther it’s only more obscure and much deeper than he’s ever been, drawn into wide expanses filling with cold fibrous structures unraveling outward with no horizon visible only as greater shadows against dark fields, veils or endless surfaces both fluid and brittle, less moving than expanding—he’s the only limited thing—him and the twelve with him, but they’ve been gone a long time, they’re less limited. Only ghost sensations now, like tingling in phantom limbs, clinging together but strained to a point of tearing fragmenting and flaking away in flecks that reflect the dark—he’s still trying to remember enough, the twelve word-finders drop away completely—he’s looking for the medium past them, and what words they
really
use. The pieces twist around him in orbit, brittle weak feelings crumpling and collapsing pours over smooth planes searing hot along the edges and collecting in boiling beads, wash back into the Divinity Student wracked in his chair on waves from an empty-foaming ocean.

The Divinity Student knows this day will be his last. The divining machines verify it. It. The twelve jars that stare at him from all corners of the room tell him, the daylight that ebbs and flows in slow tides of color tells him, and the lightless patches in corners and along the edges of his room—they in particular tell him. He’s found the Catalog. His studies are completed. He sits at the desk, rocking back and forth just a little, feeling only empty waiting, the Eclogue yawning for his offering. The house around him is expanding to let it in. The air around his shoulders draws in frozen, painful needles in his fingers and down his legs, deep tooth-rattling shudders. With an absent feeling, he practically throws himself from the chair and out the door.

Miss Woodwind is reading in her room when the Divinity Student comes in. He sits down beside her, says nothing. She finishes the paragraph and puts the book in her lap.

“Well?”

He’s staring at the floor. Again she becomes conscious of the house’s low thrumming, fluttering hard under the floorboards—has it gotten louder?

“What is it?” she asks, but he only starts wavering gently backwards and forwards. Miss Woodwind gets up and grabs the arms of his chair.

“What are you doing now?” she says it loud, trying to get through, “come on, answer me! I’ve been here all this time waiting for you, at least you could tell me what’s happening!”

Either he’s dreaming again, or ignoring her, or he can’t understand her anymore, because he still says nothing. She throws up her hands, they land on her hips as she goes to the window.

“What am I doing here?”

Outside, she can see a car idling at the corner. It’s windows are dark; it’s impossible to see inside. Eventually, as if responding to her angry gaze, it drives off down the road in a bleary cloud of scattered paper. She thinks of her father slipping pages into developing pans and the heavy magnifiers he’d use to study them; she thinks of the office and misses it. Finally her thoughts spin out beyond her attention and she finds herself peering at an empty street. When she turns around, the Divinity Student hasn’t moved.

“You don’t even realize I’m here,” she says quietly.

She looks at him across the room, crumpled in the chair like a scarecrow.

“I know you’re here.” His voice is repulsive, it nearly pushes her back against the windowsill. But she screws up her determination and approaches his chair, his splayed feet in heavy shoes discarded on the floor.

“So tell me what you’re doing! If you’re not collecting words anymore then why do you stay here? . . . You’re looking for something else!”

She brings her face down until it’s only inches from his. For a moment he weaves, barely able to find her eyes.

“ . . . Yes, you’re right.”

“Then let me in on it! Tell me what it is! I just have to know what it is!”

This is wearing him out. “I would tell you if I could.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?!”

He’s waving at her, trying to fend her off, “I can’t tell you anything more . . . it’s not for telling.”

“Are you a liar or just an idiot?!” she’s keeping after him, thin lipped and bright-eyed, “I want a sensible answer!”

But he’s already fading, his eyes are glazing and his mouth goes slack, his head falls back against the chair.

Miss Woodwind’s eyes bore into him a moment, and then she goes downstairs.

There’s the front door.

After a moment, she bites her lip, looks up the shaft framed with stair flights; her heart’s in her mouth, something awful pouring up into her, toward him. One last thought of him as he had looked, standing talking to her father for the first time a few weeks ago, and then she remembers him at the fountain in the park. Then she walks out the door.

Cars have been passing up and down the street all day trying to distract him, or trying maybe to shave off pieces of his thoughts as they go by, fragmenting his concentration. Sometimes they’ll idle directly in front of the house, and the Divinity Student will stand perfectly still, feeling the house shake to their engine hum, smelling the exhaust, the lingering outside pressing like a weight on his chest. Then, for no discernible reason, they’ll pull away. Then the pressure lifts like a fading headache. He’s come to suspect the insects, too. There aren’t many Teo doesn’t manage to kill, not just with knives, but with all manner of poisons and toxins tracing the edges of the house, baiting every door, window, crack. Those who do get through must have a reason, a powerful drive to get into the house, and seek out the Divinity Student. There’s no telling when a pair of tiny eyes may be watching, and the Divinity Student is constantly on the alert. He can’t let anything go wrong—just a little longer, until it comes. Once or twice a mosquito bit him, only to be killed and embalmed instantly with its first sip of his formaldehyde blood, and the Divinity Student suddenly felt the tug of its tiny mind as it perished, living its death along with it, connected together along a thread of formaldehyde. He smiles when that happens.

Teo is leaving. He’s disposed of Gaster’s body, and he’s packing his things. Teo can see the time ahead unspooling like a short ribbon striped with days and nights, and at the end the Divinity Student’s failing body will lie pale and curved on the ground with shadows over his face. However much longer it will last, he knows that the Divinity Student has no use for him anymore. So he puts his things away, and sends for a cart to carry off the last remnants of his shop. There are relations of his in town who will put him up until he can open a new shop, and pace in front of his mirrors again.

The last time Teo sees the Divinity Student, he’s standing on one of the landings on the middle floor, leaning on a precariously tilting banister and staring out into space. The butcher waves his hand a little, and says he’s going. The Divinity Student barely notices, inclining his head down only slightly, swaying, one suspender strap falls from his shoulders. He manages to unwrap a few waving fingers from the railing and makes a painful effort to grin, but his grin looks like death. Teo turns to go, and all feeling washes out of him, and he’s all but forgotten his friend by the time he’s out the door.

Completely alone in the house, staggering from room to room without point until he can barely lift his feet, then sitting with an empty head, staring at the wallpaper for a while, and getting up again. The place is empty. Wake up and there are cars going by outside, there’s a fly watching him from a windowpane. He crushes it with his notebook and cracks the glass. Despite the effort he rambles up and down the stairs over and over again, increasingly coming to rest up in his room, staring at the glasses gathering dust all around, and his rickety, derelict divining machines. Time runs out. Fasvergil and Ollimer fade away. He has the Catalog, he has translated it and now it is translating him. The Catalog was not intended for them. He has destroyed his notes.

Sitting, and with evening falling, the Divinity Student feels himself settling in his chair, dropping further and further, and he has no strength to resist. As the day fades, his eyes refuse to become accustomed to the dark, everything blends behind a screen of tiny, shimmering motes of increasingly diffused light. Months pass without the lifting of that curtain, the window beyond remains as black as if it were painted black. Over time, cobwebs gather across the panes; dust blankets him, the room, the whole world; and he sits without stirring a single finger, his breathing the only sound and movement, growing shallower all the time. In imperceptible increments the house begins to fade, each fiber of the wood, the glass, the plaster, all of them starting to blend into the air with a faint dying glow. Older, much older vistas are coming through now. Luminous forms swim in and out among the furniture fanning the air with spectral plumage, others sulk in shadow corners coiled ready to spring, still others hover basking in dull, motionless inertia. For the first time their voices are audible to him, the inarticulate noises and weirdly voiced half-words recited almost like verse in the air, which has become thick with things previously unseen. Cold drafts skitter along the back of his neck and roll in tides over him as he sits like a stone in place. Gradually, he begins to sense even the residual presence of the twelve word-finders gathered here, faint like people in weathered old photographs. This is where they came to find the words. There’s a feeling like autumn leaves piling on top of him—he’s become a piece of furniture himself, unable even to give the impression that he can move. With a hollow feeling he shrinks and shrinks, his insides ebbing away from his outsides, knowing implacably this is precisely how it has to be, to freeze and freeze, it’s all part of the story. A cold aroma gradually fills his nose and expands down into his chest, pressing down farther into his empty cavities and numbing his limbs, making him even drowsier, and even colder, and even less concerned with himself, and he wants to embark, finally, sink into the weight and rest. It’s a smell of repose, relaxing, peace and quiet, unending, ever-heavier dreams.

It’s the stink of wet dirt and rotting leaves—his eyes fly open and he instinctively recoils, pushing the chair over backwards and tumbling out slamming his head against the floor. Twisted dark shapes trailing shadows had flocked around him like buzzards, looming together wreathing him all around, they scatter fast back out of sight blurring, and the Eclogue suddenly is there, sharper, clear where it had been obscured, but still only looming, on the way but not arrived. The Divinity Student, his head ringing like a copper bell, drags himself across the floor like a man plucked from a freezing river. His bones are groaning like rusting machinery, but with every movement he gets going faster, shaking the cold, panic searing at him instead. He still has to finish properly, see it through or fail once and for all. Outside the cars are howling, their tires are whining on the pavement, their horns are blaring—and there’s another noise. Slithering on his belly like a snake the Divinity Student slides out the door and down to one end of the landing, near the windows. Muscles complaining he lifts himself on the lower lip of the sill and peers out. There are three cars swerving drunkenly on the street below, jumping the pavement and splintering fenceposts, gouging furrows in the yard, spinning their tires and kicking up paving stones through the porch windows. The air is boiling with shadows ducking in and out through their windshields and doors, shadows with vicious bent figures and low whistling voices, whipping elastic through the air like clothes on a line.

Downstairs a crash that could only be the front door, slapped flat to the floor. Barking dogs and heavy padding with clicking claws in and out of the rooms, scaling the stairs, filling the house, baying, fighting each other. The Divinity Student is on his feet, the din getting intolerable with a dozen answering voices in every room responding in every register until the floor shakes and the walls rattle and the ceiling cracks. Black dogs the size of calves loping through doorways, and things beyond describing prowling, flying, dancing, swimming, lurking everywhere until they’re all he can see. The Divinity Student runs up and down the stairs batting them out of his face, running from room to room, trying to escape. The cars are roaring in the yard horns droning like sirens, and inside the babble and the shriek and mutter surging louder like bedlam, so keep running from one room to another, keep running, stop and turn back and run again, rescue, rescue, breathing hard in a panic but never stopping going round the house, looking singlemindedly set on finishing. Run and watch the house dissolve before his feet, the last tenuous fabric going translucent dark and fading away until wooden floors turn cobbled streets and plaster walls of stripping paint and bubbling wallpaper go marble and stone and ebony with wrought-iron fixings, lamps to streetlights, tables to monuments, bookshelves to shops, curtains to trees, windows turn from inward to outward and the ceiling yawns translated into an endless void lit with huge heat-distorted constellations where minutes ago there were gaslights. The must of an old house going to earth and stained with formaldehyde turns to the manycolored spectrum of a city’s smells, and the streets of San Veneficio burst out on all sides cutting between looming houses crammed with people, and around him, still weaving things and shapes like an army rushing around him in the dark, voices broadening too to a dizzying variety until the vastness of the sound homogenizes into a seething drone and the kaleidoscope of silhouettes and luridly colored luminous things blends together into a transparent, boiling cloud.