Notes (IX)

“The Northern Caves,” I began. “A Chesscourt Story.”

I paused, surveyed the circle gathered before me, and went on.

“The Manor woke, as it had woken in the earliest days of the age. The staff, which had executed its duties with undiminished diligence even in the darkest days of the Alcrash, rose at the first intimation of dawn. Maids and cooks immediately busied themselves, giving hardly a moment’s reflection to the newly natural clarity of the light, to the morning hush unsullied by the once incessant din of Angelic corpuscles. It was as though every turn of circumstance since that initial thornprick had been, at once, rescinded and cast into history’s bin of unused drafts.

“Only Maris, making her way to the mailbox, discerned an off note in the harmony. Strewn all about the grounds, making a mockery of the neatly trimmed hedges, was a great downy riot of pearlescent, gleaming wings. Maris marveled. She knew little of the forces at work in her midst, but she knew of the Alliance, and she knew that all about her were their sanctified droppings.”

I looked up and scanned a palette of downcast faces. “Is that enough? Should I pass it on . . . ?”

The faces snapped to attention. We were gathered here at my half-cocked suggestion, to perform a sort of group reading of The Northern Caves. I had promised Aaron, in that delirious moment in the Sheridan family’s second-floor bathroom—even now receding, in the canon of my memories, into a mythic haze, not so much a real place as a dreamtime in which demigods made decisions of fateful import, decisions always set in place and forever being made anew—I had promised Aaron that we would defeat TNC. Faced immediately with the task of glossing my own ambiguous words for an expectant audience of concerned Spelunkers, I declared, with a bit of the bathroom’s quixotic energy still coursing through my sinews, that we were going to read TNC. Starting at the beginning. Ending when we dropped, or it did. Six on one.

(“The whole thing?” Jenny had said. “It’s long, it’s tedious, it’s full of gibberish. Pages of the letter a. Come on.” I had said, yes, that’s why six readers can do it where one might fail. “This is fucking nuts,” Marsh had said, and it was the one moment thus far tonight when he’d seemed fully present.)

“I’ll take it,” Aaron said in response to my query: he would read next, starting where I’d left off. It was a heartening thing to hear Aaron speak. Ken had brewed him a mug of coffee and he had sat down on the floor with the rest of us, bundled in a blanket and sipping furtively, looking snug and convalescent. I kept expecting him to either keel over or launch into some new tirade. But he seemed to be rejoining us here, in this little circle of sanity and hope.

He snatched the stack of paper from my hands—not the whole of TNC, which was a pile of pages the approximate weight and girth of a newborn, but just a handful I’d grabbed from the top of the big stack—and continued where I’d left off, in a newly caffeinated voice, which only barely wavered.

“As in the early days, however, a full hour of morning light had passed before Tom and Sally, rubbing sleep from their eyes, stumbled their way into wakefulness. After long wanderings, they had returned at last to the attic of their earliest memories. Their first moments of consciousness were a joint confusion of commingled memories. They had woken into this bright quiet world before, many times, and each of them felt a vertiginous sense that every intervening thing had vanished, leaving an unbroken link between their earliest days and the day before them. It was not just that Eyris, the Conflagration, the Alcrash were gone—it was that, in this radiant hush, it was suddenly difficult to believe that they ever had been.”

Aaron put the stack down in his blanket-swaddled lap and took a long pull from his mug of coffee. He looked like he was enjoying himself. I smiled. (It was not just that our bizarre, jagged exchange in the bathroom was over—it was that, in this radiant hush, it was suddenly difficult to believe that it ever had been.)

Aaron picked up the stack again and continued, with relish:

“It was not long, though, before Sally’s lunar spiral awoke within her and spoke its mind to the Glassbeads which the Creatures had sown into the mechanical matrix within her brainpan. In communion once again with the Weave, she suddenly shuddered.

“Checkmate had been achieved on all boards. Both White Rooks in the shed had been taken and with them Aunt Mirth’s life. Aunt Wrath had sublimed to the Woven Echelons. Eyris was a ruin and Eyris Tower no longer linked Echelon to Echelon. In the Plains, time was running backwards again. The Subtler Weavings were gone. The thornbushes had lost their potency. Nine tenths of the Cherubim were dead, and Charles was no longer at sea, and everything was so, so different.

“‘Tom,’ Sally said, when she had regained a modicum of composure with the lunar spiral’s help, ‘though we are back in our beds, I can’t help but feel that all is not yet well.’

“‘I feel hale and hearty, myself,’ said Tom, with a smile and a stretch.

“‘I’m talking about the Angels,’ Sally said, with a note of pique in her voice. ‘The Angels need the flow of corpuscles from the Woven Echelons to live. They are mostly dead now, but a few remain, and they may even wish to start the Alliance again. I do fear for their safety.’

“‘That’s a good point, sis,’ Tom said. ‘The Seraphim and the Elohim will be able to hold out for a while thanks to their powerful spirals, but the Cherubim have a week to live, at most. And if they start the Alliance up again, I imagine the wave minds will object, and their situation will be even worse.’”

Kelsey, who was at Aaron’s right, nudged him on the arm—he had been going on for a while now. Aaron had clearly been enjoying himself, but now he happily handed the stack to Kelsey.

Kelsey took a moment to steady herself. Her voice was as unusually quiet as Aaron’s was unusually loud, and gave Salby’s words an altogether different coloration, one that implied devious subtleties, one pregnant with mordant implications.

“Sally nodded. ‘It’s a tough situation, that’s for sure. The wave minds don’t like us because we supported the Alliance when it froze the sea, so I doubt there’s much we can do to persuade them, if conflict arises. As for the matter of the corpuscles, well, there are two ways we know of to get them to the Lower Echelons, but I’m not sure either is a good idea. First, we could always try to harvest some of the corpuscles that fell to the ground during the Alcrash. But we’d need Lorrum machinery for that, and the Lorrums can’t spare anything now, not without leaving some of their sick brethren to die. Besides, they already feel that we’re indebted to them, not the other way around, after that fiasco with the Kingside Castle.’

“‘And the other way,’ Tom interjected, ‘is getting old Wrath to bring them down for us.’

“‘Right,’ Sally said. ‘And after all this chaos, I just feel like making contact with Aunt Wrath again is a bad idea. I feel it in my heart, and in my lunar spiral too. We worked so hard to get rid of the power of the Manor, and now that Aunt Wrath is up there with the Tilemakers, why, she could put all the boards back in place with a flick of her wrist, and then we’d be back at square one!’

“‘This sure is a doozy, sis. I think we ought to check with Charles. He may know some things we don’t, from his time at sea.’

“‘That’s a capital idea, Tom!’ Sally cried, and for a moment it again felt just as if they were just little Tom and Sally, carefree heirs to Chesscourt, as if no thorn had ever pricked Sally’s finger. To remind herself that this was untrue—that her scores of unnamed, beloved Cherubim even now depended on her—she held up her left hand and inspected her index finger, where indeed the scar remained, the scar that would never vanish.”

Kelsey looked up, as if from some deep reverie, and with a prim stately gesture passed the book to Jenny. (We were still clustered by gender, I noticed. Or was it that Jenny and Kelsey sat together out of some close bond unknown to me? Knowing what I know now, I suspect it’s the latter.)

Jenny began to read, in her clear stop-and-go monotone—a voice that felt almost mechanical, a voice that would have endeared her to the Lorrums. It endeared her to me, too.

“‘You know,’ Tom blurted out suddenly, ‘there’s another thing I’d love to ask Charles about. I’m starting to wonder about those funny caves an hour’s walk north of the Manor. Our journeys have taken us all over, to different Echelons and to the Plains, but we’ve never seen what’s in those caves. Of course we should sort out all this mess with the Angels first, but after that maybe you and I and Charles can take a look at the caves, and see for ourselves what’s in there.’”

Jenny wasn’t done, but she paused nonetheless. We all took a moment to steel ourselves. Until now the material we’d read had been relatively standard late-Chesscourt stuff. Tom and Sally’s voices were unusually awkward and childish, to be sure, but that fit the notion that they were in some way returning to the childlike state of the pre-Thornbush days. But here was the precipice. Take a look at the caves, and see for ourselves what’s in there. We were going to read The Northern Goddamned Caves—every word of it. We were going to absorb the entirety of Salby’s bloated, distended testament to “the obverse face of Mundum,” whatever the hell that was, and subject it to the collected acumen of the Cafe’s leading lights. No skimming. No skimping. We were going to fuck that thing up, and only the clear light of reason—a radiant hush—would remain.

I was here. Err was here, and safe, and apparently happy. The author of Life Among The Lorrums was holding forth a few feet away from me. This was my life—the part that mattered, anyway. All signs were auspicious.

It’s getting late now but I’m on a roll and should keep writing! The scotch is helping, I think. I’m going to take a break here though because I think I’ve narrated enough of the opening bits here. I can skip over a number of hours here, and start up again when the drugs get involved.