A Lonely and Curious Country (13 page)

After a while, the younger Miss Aylesbury opened up her page-worn notebook and began to write, the scratching of pen on paper an oddly eerie counterpoint to the drumming of the rain. After a while longer, hardly seeming aware of it, she began murmuring as she wrote, her words gradually becoming audible.

“From Leng comes Death to strip us of Life’s mask … silken folds of skin torn free to bone and entropy beneath --”

“Goodness,” Mrs. Aylesbury said, rousing as if from a torpor. “How morbid.”

“I’ll read another instead.” She turned a page. “Old when Babylon was new, sleeping beneath its mound, vast pavements and foundation-walls, stone steps leading down, to eternal night’s black haven where the primal secrets frown --”

“That’s still rather grim, dear, don’t you think?”

“We found the lamp, the brazen bowl.” Her eyes gleamed strangely in the reflected candle flames. “The oil, how it blazed! In its mad flash, the shapes we saw, vast shapes! The maze-wall, and the gate sphinx-guarded!”

“I think,” said Eleanor diplomatically, herself feeling rather as if she’d emerged from some half-dream, “that we’ve had enough poetry for now, don’t you?”

One by one they sank again into their private musings. They lit another cone of the same incense when the first was spent. The irritations and annoyances with each other did seem far and silly. It was better to sit here. So peaceful, so relaxing. Watching the fire-ruby ember shift and change as it burned its slow way down, releasing the musty, mossy, mildewy scent.

***

The younger Miss Aylesbury swayed in her seat. “Through what sphinx-paths winding in the night, pointed to by far blue rays! Where vine-choked gates of graven dolomite open to the stone-lanterned maze!”

“What was that, dear?” queried their mother, again like one stirring from a doze.

“It is the hour … the hour when the moonstruck … moonstruck …” Then she settled her cheek onto her notebook, yawned once, and fell asleep.

Mrs. Aylesbury blinked drowsily. “Oh, how odd. She must be very … very ...” Her head lolled onto her shoulder and she exhaled a slow, sighing breath as she, too, succumbed.

Eleanor stirred herself from her chair, and from her own attendant lethargy, with considerable effort. The uppermost third of the incense cone had become an ashen mound, the widening ring of the ember a strange twist of gold. As she reached for the dish, her hand struck it, knocking it askew. For an instant she suffered an image of scattering sparks on the braided-rag rug, igniting myriad hungry tongues of fire. But the incense merely wobbled, shedding flecks of ash, and did not spill.

She picked it up and carried it outside, holding her breath as she did so. Raindrops splashed on ceramic, hissing when they met the smoldering cone, forming a sooty puddle around it.

Soon, neither smoke nor steam arose from the sodden lump. Eleanor decided this was still an insufficient measure, and tipped the dish entire into a ditch of muddy water, where it sank with a gurgle.

As it vanished into the murk, she let herself breathe again. The distant low-tide miasma of the sea crept into her nose and throat and lungs. Her mind, however, felt more clear.

Had the incense been … drugged?

She almost could not believe it. Did not want to believe it, that much was certain. True, certain illicit substances were far from unknown at Star-Winds, but those who partook did so of their own knowing, willing accord.

Didn’t they?

Or did they?

The incense … the tea … the potpourri and soaps and candles … all the things they made … and sold … local farmer’s markets, street fairs … mail order … herbal remedies and traditional medicines …

The rain fell. Her wet hair hung limp along her cheeks, her wet clothes clung to her skin. Water trickled down her neck and back.

It seemed so quiet. She heard no voices, no laughter, no crying babies or barking dogs. Not even any music. No one else was out and about. Everything looked bedraggled, shabby and run-down, dispirited in the sodden, dreary weather. But for a few lights flickering through curtains and shutters, the neighboring cabins might have been deserted.

She went to the largest, a redwood lodge that served as home to Brother Zoar and his innermost circle. When her knocks brought no reply, she peered through a window. Sheets and swags decorated the walls and hung from the rafters, giving the effect of the interior of a nomadic tent. Bean-bags and oversized cushions heaped the floor, serving as beds for partially-clad people. Amid a clutter of water-pipes and wine jugs was a large incense-holder in the shape of a beaming, chubby Buddha. Several spent cones made gritty mounds of ashes in the burning-dish.

Her taps at the windowpane, then more knocking and calling, elicited no response. They merely slept on. If not for the steady rising and falling of their chests, she might have presumed the worst.

Hesperia had given it to everyone; did she know of its potent effects? Was this result her deliberate intention? If so, then
why
? And if not … if not, then …

It occurred to her that Hesperia was not among those slumbering figures. Neither were Chaos, nor Brother Zoar himself.

Despite the openness of the community, she nonetheless felt a qualm of manners as she let herself into the lodge. None of the three were to be found within. She passed through and came to the back deck, pausing briefly to glance out at its rain-sluiced redwood planks. A gleam out in the forest beyond, some shining amber beacon, caught and held her eye.

Why anyone would be in the woods at night, in this miserable weather …

“We know all the places where the most rare and secret things grow,”
Chaos had said.

And Hesperia …
“We’ll need to gather more soon; this is the last handful left.”

How they had whispered, soft, conspiratorial.

“Past the sphinxes.”

“Past the garden gate.”

“The labyrinth of wonder.”

How they had leaned so close and intimate, breath tickling silkily in her ears … the tantalizing allure of the
nithon
petals, like nothing she’d ever seen …

As she stepped closer to the sliding doors, her hip bumped the edge of a table. Something heavy and rounded wobbled atop it. Eleanor caught the item before it fell, and gasped at how warm it was to the touch.

It was made of bronze, and she initially took it for some sort of lidless little teapot – short and stout, as the rhyme went; there was its handle and there was its spout – but it held no liquid, no dregs of leaves. She thought next that it might be an incense-burner and cautiously sniffed at it, anticipating that same dank, mossy, fleshy scent.

What she smelled instead made her think of hot oil left too long on the stove, not quite to smoking but very nearly to the point of bursting into flame.

Fine lettering embossed the object’s curving metal side. She ran a fingertip along it as she puzzled out the archaic-looking script.

The Nameless One For Whom We Raise A Thousand Smokes.

The voice that recurred to Eleanor then was that of her own sister.
“We found the lamp, the brazen bowl
,” and something about a mad flash, great shapes, gates and mazes.

The residue coating the inside of the brass –

“… lamp, the brazen bowl …”

-- container looked greasy, like streaks of paraffin or petroleum jelly.

Acting on an impulse – even a compulsion – she could neither understand nor resist, Eleanor found and lit a match. The matchhead flared, then guttered in the breeze. Before it could blow out, she dropped it through the lidless opening.

With a flash – “
a mad flash!”
– the oily substance ignited. It burned glassy-clear flames etched and shot with lightning-blue. Thin beams sprang from the lamp’s spout, a dancing, dazzling intricacy of –

“… far blue rays …”

They pointed in the direction of the light, the amber beacon. There, the rays touched upon and illuminated –

“… great shapes … the gate, sphinx-guarded … gates of graven dolomite … the stone-lanterned maze …”

She set a hand to her head, which seemed filled with voices, all speaking at once.

“… the hour when the moonstruck poets know …”

The rays
did
touch upon and illuminate shapes she swore had not been there before. Statues, two hulking granite statues, of winged lionesses with the heads and breasts of women. Sphinxes. They stood moss-encrusted and climbing with ivy, flanking a gateway topped with a carved arch of some pale-hued, crystalline-glittering mineral.

Through the archway was a narrow path, a high-walled maze, marked by lampposts also made from granite and set with golden lozenges of glass. She caught a glimpse of someone just turning a corner – fleeting though it was, she was sure she recognized the long white hair of Brother Zoar.

Without pause for concern or consideration, Eleanor slid open the doors and stepped outside. Heedless of the rain, she dashed across the deck and down the steps toward the forest.

The far blue rays and amber beacons vanished as she left the brazen bowl behind, but she did not need their guidance. Within moments, slipping on wet grass, she reached the place where she had seen the sphinxes.

They were not there.

She blinked and wiped raindrops from her face.

They
were
there.

Looming above her, stern-visaged, terrible and strange, the sphinxes
were
there. And between them, the gate with its carved arch … but the gate held only nothingness.

Not blackness, not blankness, not emptiness.

Nothingness.

Eleanor hesitated, then stepped through.

The rain stopped as decisively as if she’d gone indoors, but no ceiling stretched above her. The maze’s high, vine-choked walls were open to the sky. Open to the pink sky, a sky not rose-pink with dawn or blushed with sunset’s fires but pink nonetheless, a pink sky where the stark outlines of birds like herons flew.

She stood, dripping, on a path of dry bricks, porous-seeming as if cut from thirsty pumice. The air felt balmy. It smelled not of cold fog and wet brine but of a more stinging alkaline; she thought of salt-flats and deserts.

When she looked back the way she’d come, she saw the silent sphinxes continuing to loom there. She saw the backside of the arched gateway, and the nothingness it held.

Spindly insects buzzed faintly as they ticked and batted against the lozenge-shaped panes set into the stone lampposts. She recognized them no more than she recognized the vines that grew up the high walls, or the kinds of trees whose boughs interlaced above the decorative stonework at their tops.

This was not the world as she had always known it. This was someplace else altogether. Someplace strange, unreal and unfamiliar.

To call out, to raise her voice, seemed a terrible transgression. Eleanor hastened on instead. The path was indeed a maze, bending and switching, splitting off in every direction, filled with hidden alcoves, intersections and dead-ends.

“The labyrinth of wonder,”
Chaos had said.

And, indeed, so it was. Within moments, she’d all but forgotten in her fascination her true purpose for coming here.

Or
was
this her true purpose in coming here?

Were they not, perhaps, one and the same?

Each pace she took brought new angles of view. Apertures in the walls, slanting from width to narrowness like castle windows, offered peeks at tantalizing features – terraced gardens, crumbling slabs and statues, puzzling shrubs laden with shiny clusters of fruit, low bridges spanning pools where what resembled monstrous lily-pads and lotus-blossoms floated against the reflected pink-hued sky.

These always seemed but a turn or two ahead, yet when she reached where they should have been, she found only more of the winding maze itself. She saw broken towers, decaying spires twisting upward to weathered white turrets, and a gaping hole where stairs descended into a blackness darker than eternal night –

Or had that been something her sister said, reciting from her poems?

“… stone steps leading down, to eternal night’s black haven where the primal secrets frown …”

The vines rustled against the walls. A bird cried somewhere on high, its screech that of a madman. Thin, brittle leaves whirled around Eleanor in a frenetic blowing dance. The insects buzzed and ticked against the amber glass of the stone lampposts.

Somewhere, it seemed, a cracked flute played, the music splintered and atonal, the sort of music to which lunatic throngs might caper.

Another turn in the maze brought her to a gate, this one not flanked by sphinxes or topped with an arch but a simple gate of corroded metal bars. It hung askew on a hinge, wedged partway open and weedily entangled as if it had not moved in centuries. The pumice-brick path she walked on continued a ways past this gate, but more and more weeds straggled through cracks, and it was swiftly overgrown and lost.