Grimscribe (20 page)

On the lower floors of the building a number of lights were in use, weak as guttering candles. The highest story was blacked out, and I noticed that many of the windows were broken. Nevertheless, there was sufficient light to guide me into the school, even if the main hallway could hardly be seen to its end. And its walls appeared to be tarred over with something which exuded the same smell that filled the night outside the school. Without touching these walls, I used them to navigate my way into the school, following several of the greater and lesser hallways that burrowed throughout the building. Room after room passed on either side of me, their doorways filled with darkness or sealed by wide wooden doors whose coarse surfaces were pocked and peeling. Eventually I found a classroom where a light was on, though it was no brighter than the swarthy illumination of the hallway. 

When I entered the room I saw that only some of the lamps were functioning, leaving certain areas in darkness while others were smeared with the kind of greasy glow peculiar to old paintings in oil. A few students were seated at desks here and there, isolated from one another and silent. By no means was there a full class, and no instructor stood at the lectern. The blackboard displayed no new diagrams but only the blurred remnants of past lessons. 

I took a desk near the door, looking at none of the others as they did not look at me. In one of the pockets of my overcoat I turned up a little stub of a pencil but could find nothing on which to take notes. Without any dramatic gestures, I scanned the room for some kind of paper. The visible areas of the room featured various items of debris without offering anything that would allow me to transcribe the complex instructions and diagrams demanded by the class. I was reluctant to make a physical search of the shelves set into the wall beside me because they were very deep and from them drifted that same heady fragrance of decay. 

Two rows to my left sat a man with several thick notebooks stacked on his desk. His hands were resting lightly on these notebooks, and his spectacled eyes were fixed on the empty lectern, or perhaps on the blackboard beyond. The space between the rows of desks was very narrow, so I was able to lean across the unoccupied desk that separated us and speak to this man who seemed to have a surplus of paper on which one could take notes, transcribe diagrams, and, in short, do whatever scribbling was demanded by the instructor of the class. 

"Pardon me," I whispered to the staring figure. In a single, sudden movement, his head turned to face me. I remembered his pocked complexion, which had obviously grown worse since our class last met, and the eyes that squinted behind heavy lenses. "Do you have any paper you could share with me?" I asked, and was somehow surprised when he shifted his head toward his notebooks and began leafing through the pages of the topmost one. As he performed this action, I explained that I was unprepared for the class, that only a short time before did I learn it had resumed. This happened entirely by chance. I was coming home from a movie theater and decided to take a short cut across the school grounds. 

By the time I was finished illuminating my situation, the other student was searching through his last notebook, the pages of which were as solidly covered with jottings and diagrams as the previous ones. I observed that his notes were different from those I had been taking for Instructor Carniero's course. They were far more detailed and scrupulous in their transcriptions of those strange geometric figures which I considered only as decorative intrusions in the instructor's diagrams. Some of the other students' notebook pages were wholly given over to rendering these figures and symbols to the exclusion of the diagrams themselves. 

"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't seem to have any paper I could share with you." 

"Well, could you tell me if there was an assignment?" "That's very possible. You can never tell with this instructor. He a Portuguese, you know. But he's been all over and knows everything. I think he's out of his mind. The kind of thing he's been teaching should have gotten him into trouble somewhere, and probably did. Not that he ever cared what happened to him, or to anyone else. That is; those that he could influence, and some more than others. The things he said to us. The lessons in measurement of cloacal forces. Time as a flow of sewage. The excrement of space, scatology of creation. The voiding of the self. The whole filthy integration of things and the nocturnal product, as he called it. Drowning in the pools of night. . ."

"I'm afraid I don't recall those concepts," I interrupted. "You were new to the class. To tell the truth, it didn't seem you were paying attention. But soon enough he would have gotten through to you. Told you to look up there," he said, pointing to the blackboard. "You remember that much, don't you? He was very captivating, the instructor. And always ready for anything." 

"I thought that he recovered from the sickness that caused his absence, that he was back teaching." 

"Oh, he's back. He was always ready. But somewhere he must have made some enemies. Did you know that the class is now being held in another part of the school? I couldn't tell you where, since I haven't been with Instructor Carniero as long as some of the others. To tell the truth, 

I don't care where it's being held. Isn't it enough that we're here, in this room?" 

I had little idea how to answer this question and understood almost nothing of what the man had been trying to explain to me. It did seem clear, or at least very possible, that the class had moved to a different part of the school. But I had no reason to think that the other students seated elsewhere in the room would be any more helpful on this point than the one who had now turned his spectacled face away from me. Wherever the class was being held, I was still in need of paper on which to take notes, transcribe diagrams, and so forth. This could not be accomplished by staying in that room where everyone and everything was degenerating into the surrounding darkness. 

For a time I wandered about the hallways on the main floor of the school, keeping clear of the walls which certainly were thickening with a dark substance, an odorous sap with the intoxicating potency of a thousand molting autumns or the melting soil of spring. The stuff was running from top to bottom down the walls, leaking from above and dulling the already dim light in the hallways. 

I began to hear echoing voices coming from a distant part of the school I had never visited before. No words were decipherable, but it sounded as if the same ones were being repeated in a more or less constant succession of cries that rang hollow in the halls. I followed them and along the way met up with someone walking slowly from the opposite direction. He was dressed in dirty workclothes and almost blended in with the shadows which were so abundant in the school that night. I stopped him as he was about to shuffle straight past me. Turning an indifferent gaze in my direction was a pair of yellowish eyes set in a thin face with a coarse, patchy complexion. The man scratched at the left side of his forehead and some dry flakes of skin fell away. I asked him: 

"Could you tell me where Instructor Carniero is holding class tonight?" 

He looked at me for some moments, and then pointed a finger at the ceiling. "Up there," he said. 

"On which floor?" 

"The top one," he answered, as if a little amazed at my ignorance. 

"There are a lot of rooms on that floor," I said. 

"And every one of them his. Nothing to be done about that. But I have to keep the rest of this place in some kind ofmndition. I don't see how I can do that with him up there." The man glanced around at the stained walls and let out a single, wheezing laugh. "It only gets worse. Starts to get to you if you go up any further. Listen. Hear the rest of them?" Then he groaned with disgust and went on his way. But before he was entirely out of view he looked over his shoulder and shouted to me. "There's another one you might see. A new one. Just so you'll know." 

But by that point I felt that any knowledge I had amassed-whether or not it concerned Instructor Carniero and his night classes was being taken away from me piece by piece. The man in dirty workclothes had directed me to the top floor of the school. Yet I remembered seeing no light on that floor when I first approached the building. The only thing that seemed to occupy that floor was an undiluted darkness, a darkness far greater than the night itself, a consolidated darkness, something clotted with its own density. "The nocturnal product," I could hear the spectacled student reminding me in a hollow voice. "Drowning in the pools of night." 

What could I know about the ways of the school? I had not been in attendance very long, not nearly long enough, it seemed. I felt myself a stranger to my fellow students, especially since they revealed themselves to be divided in their ranks, as though among the initiatory degrees of a secret society. I did not know the coursework in the way some of the others seemed to know it and in the spirit that the instructor intended it to be known. My turn had not yet come to be commanded by Instructor Carniero to look up at the hieroglyphs of the blackboard and comprehend them fully. So I did not understand the doctrines of a truly septic curriculum, the science of a spectral pathology, philosophy of absolute disease, the metaphysics of things sinking into a common disintegration or rising together, flowing together, in their dark rottenness. Above all, I did not know the instructor himself: the places he had been . . . the things he had seen and done . . . the experiences he had embraced . . . the laws he had ignored. . . the troubles he had caused . . . the enemies he had made . . . the fate that he had incurred, gladly, upon himself and others. And of course I could not know anything of that "new one" about whom the man in the dirty workclothes had warned me, the one who may have also been an instructor, after a fashion-the instructor's instructor ... and his accomodating enemy. 

I was close to a shaft of stairways leading to the upper floors of the school. The voices became louder, though not more distinct, as I approached the stairwell. The first flight of stairs seemed very long and steep and badly defined in the dim light of the hallway. The landing at the top of the stairs was barely visible for the poor light and unreflecting effluvia that here moved even more thickly down the walls. But it did not appear to possess any real substance, no sticky surface or viscous texture as one might have supposed, only a kind of density like heavy smoke, filthy smoke from some smoldering source of expansive corruption. It carried the scent of corruption as well as the sight, only now it was more potent with the nostalgic perfume of autumn decay or the feculent muskiness of a spring thaw. 

As I reached the first landing of the stairway, I nearly overlooked the figure standing motionless in a comer. This was certainly the newcomer to the school whose presence had been foretold to me. He was almost naked and his skin was of a darkness, an excremental darkness, that made him blend into the obscurity of the stairwell. His face was leathery and deeply lined, incredibly old, while the hair surrounding it was stringy and had been hung with objects that looked like tiny bones and teeth. They were tied up within long strands of hair and jangled in the darkness. Around the neck of this figure was a rope or thin strap which was strung with little skulls, dismembered claws, and whole withered bodies of creatures I could not name. Although I stood for some moments quite near to the ancient savage, he took no notice of me. His large, fierce eyes stared upwards, fixed upon the heights of the stairwell. His thin peeling lips were alive with a silent language, mouthing words without sound. But I could not read his speech and so turned away from him. 

I climbed another flight of stairs, which ascended in the opposite direction from the first, and reached the second floor. Each of the four stories of the school had two flights of stairs going in opposite directions between them, with a narrow landing that intervened before one could complete the ascent to a new floor. The second floor was not as well-lighted as the one below, and the walls there were even worse: their surface had been wholly obscured by that smoky blackness which seeped down from above, the blackness so richly odorous with the offal of worlds in decline or perhaps with the dark compost of those about to be born, the great rottenness in which all things are founded, the fundament of wild disease. 

On the stairs that led up to the third floor I saw the first of them a young man who was seated on the lower steps of this flight and who had been one of the instructor's most assiduous students: He was absorbed in his own thoughts and did not acknowledge me until I spoke to him. 

"The class?" I said, stressing the words into a question. He gazed at me calmly. "The instructor suffered a terrible disease, a great disease." This was all he said. Then he returned within himself and would not respond. 

There were others, similarly positioned higher on the stairs or squatting on the landing. The voices were still echoing in the stairwell, chanting a blurred phrase in unison. But the voices did not belong to any of these students, who sat silent and entranced amid the litter of pages tom from their voluminous notebooks. Pieces of paper with strange symbols on them lay scattered everywhere like fallen leaves. They rustled as I walked through them toward the stairs leading to the highest story of the school. 

The walls in the stairwell were now swollen with a blackness that was the very face of a plague pustulant, scabbed, and stinking terribly. It was reaching to the edges of the floor, where it drifted and churned like a black fog. Only in the moonlight that shone through a hallway window could I see anything of the third floor. I stopped there, for the stairs to the fourth were deep in blackness. Only a few faces rose above it and were visible in the moonlight. One of them was staring at me, and, without prompting, spoke. 

"The instructor suffered a terrible disease. But he is holding class again. He could suffer anything and did not shun enemies. He had been everywhere. Now he is in a new place, somewhere he has not been." The voice paused and the interval was filled by the many voices calling and crying from the total blackness that prevailed over the heights of the stairwell and buried everything beneath it like tightly packed earth in a grave. Then the single voice said: "The instructor died in the night. You see? He is with the night. You hear the voices? They are with him. All of them are with him and he is with the night. The night has spread itself within him, the disease of the night has spread its blackness. He who has been everywhere may go anywhere with the spreading disease of the night. Listen. The Portuguese is calling to us."