VIII

It had been a silent day, an utterly still day. This, Cordelia knew, was the day’s true nature. A still day in spite of the morning and its anxious pacing, a silent day even in spite of the extended verbal tennis that followed. A still and silent day even in spite of the train tracks.

As much as they might put on airs, none of her visual metaphors, not even the treasured ones about light and its absence, could ever escape their homeland, a small rectangular region somewhere near the back of her head, close to the neck. It was there that they were born, there that they died, and there that she saw them prance about for her amusement and edification. When she daydreamed, or considered possible futures, she could make this cranial stage appear as large as the whole world, but only by peering so close that everything else disappeared from view. The actors were still ants, their ancestral town still smaller than a shoebox.

Today the town had been overrun by trains. Jump and wave they might, but none of her favorite ants—the ants who had linked their bodies together to portray the Five Fundamental Geomantic Chains (a lifesaver in the hardest class she’d ever taken), or the ones who had brokered a difficult truce with the glowworms, so that light itself could dance in her mind—none of them could catch her eye, because their little town was criss-crossed with train tracks now, and the trains towered above them.

They were functional trains, in good working order, and Cordelia knew that they had moved and would move. Indeed, whenever her attention strayed from the sights and sounds before her, she saw the trains and their journeys, bearing people and cargo forward and backward and sideways, and she knew that soon she would get onto one of them, and be borne herself, to a destination not of her choosing, to wherever she was supposed to be. (Not here.) But all of this motion was definitively fixed in the past or the future, journeys completed, journeys scheduled. There was so much motion, but none of it was happening now. Now all was still, and the tracks were heavy in their stillness.

Cordelia, alone in her dorm room, was for once at a complete loss. There were things, perhaps, which she had intended to do at the start of the day. But she knew now that the trains were ready, waiting for her, waiting for the appointed time, when she would board with a smile, telling herself that travel was good for the soul.

She knew she had gotten behind in several classes, even before she’d found the box. There was so much more to learn in the Catacombs, after all, than in Mrs. Purseslen’s course notes, meticulously arranged into sub-sub-subsections like some piece of expensive topiary, or the senile scribbles of Mr. Snoddery, who, it was rumored, had been a close ally of Hector Stein and now kept his job only through the good grace of institutional nostalgia. But doing homework, she felt, would be an act of hiding. The shades had told her that there would be a change, and then that the change would always have been, and so there would have been, in the end, no change. She did not want to look away from the change to come. She would await her train with a smile and a good word for the conductor, something about the pleasures of the open air, and she would not cling to the daily trivia of this tiny place, this dusty old shoebox.

It had scared her at first, what the shade had said. But when she went to see the Ells, she knew it was true, and knew she must accept it. Into the Headmaster’s Office she strode, then, Cordelia the brave, as on any other day. The Headmaster’s Office received her, with its stillness and silence. Lucifer and Lilith Vance were personable, if brief, and responded helpfully to her inquiries and plaints about the two hours of absurdist theater the shades had put her through. “Just these meaningless exchanges, on and on, like something out of Stoppard,” and they nodded appreciatively, yes, that’s just it, our star pupil shines again. She found her monologue running aground more quickly than she had expected, the morning’s exasperations suddenly without force, and when she fished for the next thing to say and came up blank, the Ells smiled and said some appropriate words and sent her on her way.

They had seemed different, hadn’t they? This question emerged again in the midst of her aimless evening thoughts. They had, Cordelia admitted to herself, grudgingly, with a little twitching motion as if to physically thrust her irritation off into the stale dorm-room air. It was a frivolous point. Not the sort of thing that matters. In the back of her head, she saw the Ells on their own train, waving to her out the window, as they sped off (had sped off, would speed off, have always sped off) to their appointed destination. They deserved to make it in the big city, didn’t they? Not to be trapped forever herding children, in this quaint Ren Faire snowglobe. The Ells were off to their city, and she wished them well, and hoped they would benefit from not having to deal with her anymore. She would be off in her own appointed place, far away.

Cordelia was in the bathroom. She had been here for some time, possibly. She emerged from visions of the trains to see her hands, a sink, the wood wall, the rustic gloom of candlelight. Why was so much of the Academy lit by actual flame, when mantic lamps were cheap, brighter, and so much safer? This was the sort of bracingly exotic thought that reached her only by rail. She had received many shipments of such cargo today, but it had been difficult to find anything like gratitude inside her still, silent self.

Looking up, she saw a face in what she knew was a mirror, and she supposed she must accept this as her own face. Another sensation shipped in from the big city: hating her own face again. No one would invite her to the Balls, or cast her in the Steinomachy, because she was special, chosen, her name whispered by instruments of fate in the Catacombs. Or, more plausibly: no one would invite her to the Balls, or cast her in the Steinomachy, because of this, with its beady eyes, its permanent scowl, its flabby jawline, its double chin. Did the instruments of fate ever choose a face like this? Only in idle fantasies, and in cruel jokes.

In a fugue of commingled indifference and pain, Cordelia walked, out of the bathroom, out of the dorm, into the halls of the Academy. There was no one in them at this late hour, no people anyway, but her paranoiac eyes kept warning her that the fine differences in coloration on some dim patch of wall might be not wall, but shade. Once or twice, she was even right. She saw the shade, and the shade saw her, and it went on its unfathomable business, while she went onward, with heavy turgid footfalls, on no business at all.

A wide and picturesque staircase, abutting a wall, led down to the first floor, into Main Hall. The big window was high up on the same wall. Tonight the moon was high and clear and bright, and it filled Main Hall with a haunted light that made Cordelia stop in her tracks. The walls of Main Hall were blue, fashioned out of some gemstone or other in interlocking polygon shapes whose beauty none of the busy students, except chosen Cordelia, ever stopped to appreciate. Under the moonlight, Main Hall was a buffet of deep blues and wistful whites. The air was filled with dust—always there even in these well-used halls, to give the atmosphere the right wizardly touch—and the swirling motes made solid columns out of moonlight.

Cordelia sat down upon one of the final steps. Her feet touched the floor of Main Hall. She was crying. These sobs, she realized in retrospect, had been building steadily for hours, and at last they had found their moment of release, in this perfect place, under high gothic arches, among moonbeams.

She looked up, and though the tears blurred her vision, she knew the scene. The Academy in all its faux-medieval finery. A girl alone. She weeps. Does no one understand her? There is no one there to comfort her, but the scenery responds. The full moon has come out to bathe her tear-stained cheek in its soft yet bright light. Enough light to see her by, but not so much that there are not deep blue shadows all around her, the mirrors of her fragile, shadowed soul. The ceiling is high enough to add reverb to her every emotive noise.

She thought: I should be singing opera.

She thought: I definitely have the frame for it, anyway.

Sometimes you do have these fantasies. But the line between a fantasy and a joke, thought Cordelia, is always thin. She was starting to get the joke, and starting to tire of it.

Sometimes you do have these fantasies. Sometimes in the fantasies Chester kisses you in the heavy dusk of a Main Hall alcove, and sometimes he goes on to do more. And then, in other fantasies, sometimes Chester is but a side character, and it is not his name but yours that the instruments of fate whisper in the darkness. Your name that the Ells mutter, amongst startled laughter, taken aback yet again. Then other things happen, or don’t. Choose your own adventure.

But in the end you’re just the ugly girl with the funny name, and nothing else special about her, and when you cry it is just crying, not weeping. And the fantasies don’t look right, with you in the middle of them. They have the structure of a schoolyard taunt. (Hey Cordo, wanna be my date to the Gloaming Ball? Hey Cordo, wanna leave this life and learn mancy at the Academy? Oh, you thought I was serious.)

Cordelia could see clearly, in her mind, the train track stretching back into the new past, heading right through town and on into the new future. In the new past, as in the old past, she had made a big mistake. In the new past, the Ells—magnanimous as always, in any past or future—had forgiven her, and allowed her to stay at the Academy, which she knows full well is small as a shoebox, a fitting hole for her far smaller spirit. In the new future, she wakes up grateful every day.

If it has to be a fantasy, why does it always have to be this one? Can’t there be a train to some other fake town, some other tourist trap that hasn’t outworn its welcome?

Cordelia wanted to scream. To pound her big useless fists against the beautiful walls. But she knew that escape route had already been blocked. The room was ready for any and every permutation of the melodramatic heroine schtick. The moonlight would shine ever so prettily upon her quaking body. No.

There was only one way to escape.

The box!

The box, she knew, would not try to prettify her wretchedness. The box would paint her wretchedness in true colors, and she would sigh with relief: reality at last. Granted, this was exactly what got her in so much trouble, and what she was not ever supposed to repeat. But she was wretched and ugly, and opening the box again was a wretched and ugly thing to do. And the box would agree! It was a perfect chain, every link supporting the next.

The box had still been there, on Lucifer’s desk, when she’d gone back to see the Ells today. That was curious, wasn’t it? Why was Lucifer leaving such a dangerous thing on his desk, for any visiting student to see? So many things around her did not make sense, and each one made her see train tracks leading into some foggy, unknown realm.

She was moving fast, purposefully, Cordelia the brave again. Her mind buzzed with questions and plans and maps and trains. The Headmaster’s Office would be locked at this time of night, but for some reason this did not seem like an obstacle worth worrying over. There were ways, for the special and chosen, to do anything they pleased in the Academy.

She reached the door, and tested it. Locked, as expected. She watched a train recede sideways through time, into some past, not the old past and not the new. She crab-walked three steps to the right, knocked twice on a blank patch of wall, and then recited the password, a melodious snatch of Old Mantic. There was the clunk of ancient machinery, and the wall parted before her eyes. A secret passage. How had she known about it? Because Chester had used it, and she remembered everything Chester had ever done.

It was pitch black inside the passage, but she remembered its shape, and could find her way without even needing to touch the walls. Her plans reached their completions with a dreamlike rapidity. Here was the Office, laid out before her, dim under glancing moonlight. The desk, the box.

In a final gesture of irreverence, she sat down in Lucifer’s big, ornate chair. It was not very comfortable. Why would Lucifer Vance, of all people, tolerate an uncomfortable chair in his own office? It was as if the world was arranged to be seen and touched only in certain ways, and revealed its shoddy artifice the moment a spoilsport visitor strayed from the script.

When she opened the box this time, it was different.

 

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She was a shrivel still, and there was still space around her, but the space was far vaster. She was a single geometric point, suspended in an ocean. An ocean bigger than the whole earth.

She was pointedly aware, this time, of the insufficiency of words. She did think the word ocean, just then, but she knew it did not even begin to describe what she felt around her. This time, though she was a mere point, the ocean did not recoil at her touch. It caressed her with feelings and ideas, and there were no words for these either.

But she cannot look back on the experience, now, and remember it truly, without words. When she remembers it now, she remembers the words she would later learn for this feeling, the words used to designate it in the lingo of Blackhat Squadron:

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The ocean opened its secrets in a rush to her eyes and ears and fingers and tongue and other senses she had no names for. Train tracks dispersed in an infinitude of directions, and she could follow any of them as far as she wished in an instant. As she followed one track she saw the thing she called herself grow smaller and younger and less wise, until at the end it had become an infant, knowing nothing of friends or world. This bawling, ignorant thing was Cordelia, too, was it? Just the same as her? She saw the insufficiency, now, of this word “Cordelia.”

Other tracks connected the Ells she knew to things she did not know. She saw the insufficiency of the words “Ells,” “Lucifer,” “Lilith.”

The whole of the Academy was a drop in the ocean, smaller than a shoebox indeed, and she could move in any direction and see it change, step by step, into something else. There were many other things that were called the Academy, but they were not the Academy she knew. What use was this word, “Academy”?

In a flash she knew that she could change it all. A push in any direction, and the Academy would slide along some appointed track and become something else entirely. Choose your own adventure.

But how could she, a shrivel, a point, know the ways of the tracks? Know how to move in the fullness of the ocean? Any plan of motion she might devise would have its origin in words. She could speak only in words, but she was asked to speak in worlds.

She screamed, no! But that was a word, too!

She screamed and screamed that there must have been some mistake. This wretched, shriveled thing, which called itself by the word “Cordelia” because it did not even know itself, was not worthy of this great responsibility. A case of mistaken identity, surely. Where was the sleek, swimming ocean-dweller who was meant to see this?

The ocean heard her screams then, and honored them, though they were only words. Everything outside the shoebox vanished. Gradually, her eyes adjusted to see things on the scale of ants rather than oceans. Before her was a desk, and on the desk was a box. She gingerly replaced its lid.

Before her, too, was a face she had only seen before in reverent portraits hung high on Academy walls.

“Hello, Cordelia,” said Hector Stein.

“You’re . . .” She wasn’t even sure what she intended to say. Several possibilities presented themselves. How strange, to sling words back and forth with a being you wrongly call by a name, as both of you float, isolated points in an ocean.

“Yes. I am Hector G. Stein, founder of this school. I’ve come back, because this place needs me.”

“They . . . the Ells said you . . . that we’d never see you again.”

“The Ells,” Stein said with a devilish glint in his eye, “are wonderful people, but they have never had any fucking clue what I was up to.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I used your box. And then I used it again, because I’m just that much of a fuck-up.”

Hector Stein smiled, a Cat-in-the-Hat smile: don’t you see, children, that life does not stop the moment you disobey your parents?

“You aren’t a fuck-up, Cordelia, and I say that as someone who knows a thing or two about fucking up. This Academy has been in a sorry state since I left. You’re right to be angry, and you’re right to go looking for answers. So many students, and you’re the only one looking in the Catacombs, following my tracks. They put on that stupid play in my honor every year, but the only thing in this sad place that makes me feel honored anymore is when a student like you decides to fuck some shit up.”

Special, chosen, Cordelia the brave!

“Now,” said Hector Stein, tall and imposing, making slow certain steps toward the desk. “I would love to make small talk, but there is something I have to do as soon as possible. You have my comm link. You’ve seen what it can do.”

Hector Stein picked up the box in one assured motion, and held it casually, as if there were no ocean inside. Who was this man? What demoniac creature of words could know such responsibility, and not shudder?

“I’m back, and this is my Academy. It’s time to make some changes around here.”