The Divinity Student (7 page)

Without waiting for a response from the oak, he sits down and opens the box, trying to remember how he played with Filemon the night before. The oak’s boughs sway in the hazy light, its smell comes to him on the wind, settling in his face and lulling him into a reverie. Behind him, in the water, he can sense a change in the orbit of the oro larva. Each one parts its lips and sends a bubble to the surface, a tiny puff of breath popping into the air, filling the courtyard with a fresh cool green odor that lingers in his nostrils and wreaths his head. Cool and calm now, the Divinity Student begins pressing the box first on its sides, then around the rim, moving languid fingers over holes in the top, the edges and corners, playing as he had with Filemon, sending a resonant wood-tone through the stones and glass and up to Magellan’s office. The music grows wide and full without becoming loud, mingling as had the chant with the light and the water sounds. The trees rustle their fingers.

When he’s done and turns—there’s a black boat waiting for him, motionless in the narrow channel. Rock steady, it neither tips nor sways as he gets on board and sits—it’s small, carved from the trunk of an ebony tree, and polished. Once he sits, it begins to move, drifting toward the black recess in the wall. As he draws near, the Divinity Student can feel spray misting in his face—in he goes. The Orpheum weighs heavily down atop the arch a foot above his head, a turn, and all light dims and vanishes.

The progress in the dark is quick and steady, cobwebs of stale air brush against his face. It’s lightless and silent as empty sleep.

Presently, a dim phosphorescence limns a dirt shore before the prow of the boat. Drawing in close, a narrow beach, with cypress and willow trees beyond, stiff blades of grass, lit with eldritch yellow light. The boat glides hissing up onto blue sand, and the Divinity Student disembarks. He glides across the beach leaving no footprints, and moves cautiously through the copse to an open patch beyond. He looks up—no ceiling, around—but no walls, the light has no source. He sinks to his knees, pulls out a matchbox with a small mirror set in the bottom. He holds it in the palm of his left hand, and swings his pendulum in an arc over it. His right hand is the still point. He listens to the crickets, the cries of mourning doves from dead trees looming like spiders; in the gloom, the pendulum is a pale smudge drifting over his palm. It takes a long time, but eventually it stops, pointing straight ahead, toward a break in the trees.

Where he passes the leaves change color. Stepping over a low hummock, the grass beneath his feet shifts from yellow to blue, and up ahead—a ruddy glow, grainy at the edges, halos a boulder. The Divinity Student draws in close, and feels the rock warm against his palm as he feels his way to the light. He finds a small clearing bordered with frosty blue and purple-black flowers hiding in the lee of a rock face, crowned with flaccid tendrils of moss, and dead trees. Tombstones and crosses shine bleakly in clumps of grass all around, ringed round by a ruined wrought-iron fence. A few ghost lamps hang from posts, the grassy face of the clearing is littered with parcels, bundles. Dimly he can see small gray forms skipping over the ground like pebbles on water, carrying things to and from an open pavilion sprawling in the center of the clearing. Coming closer, the Divinity Student sees Magellan lying on a couch under heavy veils, his face still painted white and black, but now he’s wearing regal garments, a yellow half-coat and long green vest, ruffles at his wrists and throat, knee-pants and white stockinged calves marble-smooth tapering into black slippers. Incense coils around his dreaming head from braziers fanned by his imps, who pour him cups of poison that he drains in contempt of death.

The Divinity Student enters the burying ground unchallenged, lets Magellan’s blood-purple canopy draw him in, up to the couch. The high priest’s eyelids are painted dark, now two diamond-shaped openings in his face, the Divinity Student feels their non-gaze settle on him. He sits down in front of the couch, an imp slipping a cushion underneath him as he kneels, and opens the music box again, slowly, letting the air calm his fingers, not talking nor trying to talk, but just playing as the oro in the oak grove had directed.

The air guides his fingers. A ululating phrase whistles out like a jet of steam, or a moth’s fluttering wing, and repeats itself over and over again. Magellan snaps bolt upright; wan, hollow shapes come swirling in the pallid light around the circumference of the clearing, fast drumming follows, thundering up under the phrase, levitating it.

Magellan rises from his couch, bringing his arms out wide, he permits his familiars to bear back his sleeves, and he cuts his white arms with a cobalt knife.

Again, the Divinity Student repeats the phrase.

Ghosts boil in the air, rustling and crying, libations fall to them on the ground, witch lights glimmer for them, alighting on branches turning trees into candelabras.

Again, he repeats the phrase.

The drumming fattens and shakes the earth, timbre deepening, growing empty and vibrant at the core, each tone dwindles to a buzzing at the corner of hearing just before the next is struck, and faster.

Again he repeats the phrase.

Vague whitenesses gather about him; they open their dark smudgy mouths and exhale together, filling his head with a voiceless whispering of breath like wind in trees, whistling and yawning all around him, rising up over the thunder of the drums to lighten his head.

Again he repeats the phrase.

Sensation now of his face being pressed against something like a metal barrier, already it bends as he is pushed into it. Magellan steps forward, lifting him, lightest possible touch of Magellan’s hands under his arms, as if he is only a column of air, bursting through headfirst and the metal shatters and tears, rising into a rare darkness he has seen before, frozen a moment over the earth in a column of light, the unique nothing in the shadows of Magellan’s eyes, flame rilling over his body, blood and perspiration and the rustle of dry papers sewn inside like a rag doll. He’s a column of air. He’s a vapor. He is evaporating out of a jar of formaldehyde.

The sun settles mundane light on a courtyard filled with trees. Quiet, not busy yet, empty canals of free standing water, the Divinity Student sprawled sodden on the pavement. A custodian wakes him, leaves him dazed on the ground and goes for a lictor or a guard. When he comes back, the Divinity Student is gone—wet footprints, sour smell of chemicals.

In an empty garage that. yawns onto the street the. Divinity

Student wakes, lying on his side, coming to himself only after staring at the supernatural brightness outside, blades of grass poking through the pavement, looking hot enough to burn. Turning to rise, the light stays in his eyes and colors the shadows.

This morning he won’t go to Woodwind’s, instead he forces himself sternly through the light, to assemble ingredients for today’s experiment. After two hours he finds a chemistry shop on Jack-o’-Lantern Street; it’s an impersonal place, simple metal racks with bottles, a counter, a plain old man behind the counter blowing test tubes from glass glowing pumpkin-colored. He pretends to browse awhile, always embarrassed when he has to buy something, eventually he gets up to the counter, has to wait five minutes for the attendant to finish blowing a flask. Finally, he manages to exchange a grubby bill for six long silver cans of formaldehyde in a brown grocery bag. A brief stop along the way back to buy some bread from a street vendor with a monkey, and he returns to the garage ready.

The first thing, he goes out back, under a tree, crumbles the bread and piles up the crumbs, kneels there nearby and waits. It’s quiet. He keeps his eyes on the pile, begins rocking gently back and forth, feels his coat moving on his shoulders, blood in his temples. He does it slow, humming, burns a little prayer written on the formaldehyde receipt on a bare patch in front of him, writes a signature in the dirt with the matchstick. His palms tingle, warm all the way up to the shoulder, that’s good, like a little silver filament up each arm. The Divinity Student sits rock-still and waits.

A lizard appears through an overgrown gap in the wall. Expressionless with concentration the both of them watching the pile of crumbs, he’s drawing the lizard with a quiet sound he makes in his nostrils, breathing the hot air out so as to make a pitch that sounds like straw rubbing together. The lizard likes that—it’s brown, a foot long. Legs moving in circles it comes forward to get that bread; the Divinity Student’s eyes go black; two black clouds settle over his eyes, black clouds like swarms of flies, and up comes the lizard. It starts eating the bread.

The Divinity Student’s hand whips out, strikes the lizard with certainty on the side of the head, sending it sprawling on its side, legs in the air—it thrashes and dies. The Divinity Student gets to his feet and runs inside, coming out again with the bag and a bucket. Hastily, he pops the tabs on the cans and pours the formaldehyde into the bucket, all of it, and then snatches up the lizard and eases it in, coiling it at the bottom of the bucket, his eyes tearing from the sourness of the stuff. With care, he lays a board over the bucket’s mouth and weights it with a cinderblock. In a day or so, it’ll be mature, heated in the sun. He pauses to draw a special mark on the bucket with charcoal, and turns towards Woodwind’s.

The office is empty; the building is quiet. He’s there, filling his ledger, every stroke of his pen scraping on the silence, until that is stilled too. The room is poising itself, something invisible is gathering—looking up from the page, it seems to him this place is more than empty, more than abandoned, that no one has ever been here, that he is dreaming the office, or that the office is dreaming him.

He pushes back in his chair and goes to the window, but outside the city is static and motionless; he can see no one. A set? Turning around, he examines the office, floor, walls, ceiling, furniture, all made of the same dull wood, stained black in places. The place could have been carved from a single block of wood, or maybe it grew this way naturally.

Pen and ledger rest waiting on his desk. Unconsciously, he puts his notebook into his pocket.

He rifles through Ollimer’s desk, looking for the Catalog fragment.

What are you doing?

I’m trying to find that bit of paper Ollimer got from the tree the other day.

What paper was this?

A fragment of a Catalog of unknown words . . . the original was destroyed somehow . . . he showed me one of the entries once . . .

Shouldn’t you wait for him?

I don’t trust him. What I’m looking for now, he got it from an oro, the same oro who sent me to Magellan to learn the formaldehyde protocol—don’t you remember?

An oro?

Yes—a tree spirit.

Do you mean to tell me that you’re breaking into his desk because you suspect him to be in league with trees? Trees that hand out Catalogs?

The Divinity Student starts slamming drawers in Blandings’s desk, and then Householder’s. Were they involved?

Then he stops. He’s heard something. Motionless, he tries to look out through his ears, finding only the sound of his breath, his heart.

But then, another tiny clinking sound, coins flattening on each other, through the wall.

Slowly, crumpling himself up into his hearing, he draws up to the wall, placing his feet with such care that not even a mote of dust is displaced, and presses his ear to the cool wood paneling.

The coins drop, one by one or in pairs.

He feels his face go hot and red, his collar tightens, for a moment he feels something like a fever thrum in his temples and along the seams of his cheeks and forehead, and his throat constricts around his breath. Something moves in his belly; he wants to shake or fall down, but he holds himself absolutely still, breathing through his mouth.

It takes him a long time, but he gets through the door and out into the hall, not knowing what’s happening to him—but there’s nothing at all. Everything is as it should be, and as it always was, except abandoned.

Then he hears it again, behind him, and he looks and there he sees it. He hadn’t ever noticed before, but here in this one place, the wallpaper is stretched tight over a door-sized hole in the wall. The heat and closeness of the past week has made the paper sag, and now the opening is visible. The noise comes from in there.

Dizzily, he steps forward and parts the paper with his fingers. The paper is red and velvet-feeling, opening easily along a seam, dilating without tearing to let him into the walls. The darkness grows transparent by degrees, and then he can see two candles burning on a tiny shelf set high above him. They burn before a small sepia photograph of a blank-faced woman with clear eyes, hanging on the wall, and beneath the shelf Mr Woodwind lies, sternly sleeping, hands folded on his chest, leaning against an upright board.

Will he wake up? The Divinity Student creeps forward, but again comes the rattling of coins, very near. Then he sees Miss Woodwind, sitting smiling beside a card table smoothly set with a white cloth, with a scales and a cashbox. A Chinese lantern sheds red light down over its tassels, makes her white dress glow red. To him it seems as if a veil or shadow lay between them, he can see her distinctly and yet she is vague as a blurred photograph. She extends her hand to him.

He waves his hands. “What?”

“Your notebook!” she says with a grin, and light flickers across her features, kaleidoscoping all colors from her lips and eyes, her temples, cheek’s hollow, and beneath her chin.

He hands it over, coming closer, into her fragrance, and he can see the perfume in a glassy fog around her. Miss Woodwind lays the notebook smartly on the balance. In a few moments she efficiently tallies the new weight of the book and compares it to the old, reckoning how many words he has collected by weight, and calculates his pay on a chart. She counts out seven heavy gold wheels from the cashbox and extends them, cupping the money on her fingertips, so that as she drops them into his palm, her nails brush his skin just barely, only just touching him. This is all she has to do. Now he won’t forget her looking up at him through the gleam of the gold, nor the touch of her hand. She smiles at him, pleased.