The Secret Book of Paradys (111 page)

And as he wove and sped, Tiraud screamed. The scream burst from him uncontrollably, like steam from a kettle.

He reached the dayrooms of Madness, screaming like this, and screaming he thrust back among his brothers and sisters, the warders. So, being used to it, and to a particular reply, they took him, beat him, knocked him to the earth.

“What now? Are you cracked like the rubbish upstairs?”

“I saw –” said Tiraud, lying at their feet.

“Saw what?”

They did not seem skeptical, but as if they had anticipated this messenger out of the web of the building.

Yet even now he did not dare to tell the truth. He sat and nursed his knees. “Give me a bloody drink.” And then he thought of the image on the bottle and pushed the liquor aside. “Someone’s out,” said Tiraud. “One of them’s
escaped. Wandering in the corridors.” That was all he could say, to them, and to himself, to justify what he had seen. For what he had seen was not real. Then for a moment, he thought of the dead body in the sack. So he reached for the drink after all.

The warders became ferocious, accusing one another. How had one of the lunatics evaded the nightly shutting-up? (And Tiraud, drinking, realized he had not relocked the women’s dormitory. He had left them scampering about there and the door had only to be tried –)

And all at once, miles high it seemed, the bacchante cries of women flew through the upper air of the building and unravelled away.

“The beasts are out – all of them,” exclaimed Marie Tante, Her eyes lit, and Bettile put down her shawl.

There, in their cave of firelight, they listened. The vision seemed conjured in the room, the mad people in their white rags, flying along the upper corridors, down the steps, across the yards, and up into the other blocks, figures painted by a strange white light, like the moon, with streaming hair and outstretched arms.

Desel strutted forward.

“Idiots! Some of you – you and you, you three there – go to the men’s place and see to them. Use your sticks. And you women, you go after those bitches. You’ll be sorry, Tiraud, screwing your brains out on that trollop and forgetting the door. I know. Go and alert Volpe now. Why should
he
sleep, the bastard?”

In his downy bed, within his luxurious flat, Dr. Volpe, full of dinner and brandy, was dreaming.

He performed on the piano to a vast audience, up on a great white stage. He felt his genius flood from him.

But it was very cold. His fingers were losing feeling. They stuck to the keys, burning. It came to him, the piano was made of ice, and the stage also was ice. In horror he stared about him, and found he was adrift on the ice floe in the midst of a coal-black sea by night. And from the sky rang hammering blows.

These blows woke him. He lay huddled, the warmth slipping back into his body, gradually understanding that someone smote on the door. His housekeeper had gone to the City on some errand. He would have to attend to the door himself. And what could it mean, this nocturnal racket, but only trouble?

Still shivering, he lit his lamp, and fumbling himself into his dressing gown, he sought the door.

The warder Desel and some other man stood there.

“The lunatics have escaped, doctor, and are running all over the buildings,
perhaps the grounds.”

“What?” said Dr. Volpe.

Desel repeated his cryptic news. Volpe sensed, correctly, that even in agitation, Desel drew enjoyment from Volpe’s fright.

“They must be caught,” said Volpe superfluously. “They may damage things – they may harm themselves.”

“The others are going about, doctor, trying to capture the wretches. They will, of course, be as gentle as they can, but restraint or blows are probable.”

“No, no,” feebly said Volpe.

Desel glowered with authority.

“They’re violent. Suppose they get out on the road?”

“Ah … yes.”

Volpe drew back into the room. He strained his ears but heard nothing at all, not the faintest cry.

Desel said, “We’ll inform you, doctor, of events.”

“Yes,” said Volpe. “Good, trustworthy men. I can leave this – in your hands.”

When he had shut them out, Volpe bolted and locked the door. He hurried to the window.

Something pallid flitted among the chestnut trees – or did he imagine it? He was sensitive and now his nerves were bad. He could no longer see anything moving there.

A loud crack caused him to jump. He gazed transfixed at the hothouse. Some panes of glass had given way, he could not see them, yet he felt the hiss of coldness coming in upon the winter fruit.

Because he had been woken, the brandy he had drunk was affecting him uncomfortably. His heart beat in a rattling way in the midst of his frame.

There was an impure and acid smell in the room.

Dr. Volpe turned, tracing the smell at once to the ewer of water standing beside his plants. He went to the ewer, sniffed at it. He recoiled. One of those men must have played a joke on him. It was in bad taste, and besides he could not think how it had been done, since neither of them had entered the room. The ewer, however, was full of their disgusting gin.

Volpe wanted to open the window and pour the muck out but was afraid to. Perhaps the mad people were on the roof and might, somehow, reach down –

And perhaps one of the mad people had got into his apartment as he slept, and contaminated the water.

Volpe was immobilized by terror for some minutes.

Finally, trembling, he lit the other lamps in the room, and then in the bedroom, and armed with the poker from the dead fire, he stole around, parting
curtains and peeking into closets.

No one was there, and nothing but the ewer had been disturbed.

A dreadful compulsion made him go at last to the ewer, dip in one finger, and lick it. The flavor was like venom; it made him gag, as he had known it would. He raised the jug and bore it into the bath chamber, pouring it away through the drain of the bath. Then he employed the tap, and from its nozzle ran a stream of stuff that stank just like the gin, that surely
was
gin, although how could it be?

Volpe shut off the tap and panted back into his sitting room.

In the lamplight, the birds’ eggs and the growing plants glistened oddly, as if they had been coated with moisture or frost. And on their pins the butterflies flamed, and the remains of the butterfly that had crumbled were like metallic dust.

Reaching the male dormitory, the three men found the door was shut and locked. The calling of the women had faded, and they had seen none of them. Marie Tante and her crew would take care of this.

There was no longer any noise, either, from the male dormitory.

Armed with their sticks, and certain other implements, iron hooks, and so on, the warders decided to go in and effect a lesson on the madmen who had howled of their own volition.

The door was undone.

The long room, substantially exactly the same as that which housed the women of the asylum, was undisturbed. But by their pallets the men stood, every one of them, voiceless and intent, as if ready. Even the worst cases, who seldom kept still even asleep, were poised and altered. The man worried by insects did not hit out at them, the swaying man scarcely moved. On the grinning face of the man who grinned, the pain had been mitigated by a curious attention.

“What’s this row, then?” asked one of the warders, irrationally, of the silence, and a couple of others hefted their sticks and hooks.

Thin as the thinnest rope, the mad sailor, Maque, walked forward from his bed place.

“I’ve sailed the seas,” said Maque, “but I never saw the cold country of the snow.”

“Shut up, you,” said the foremost warder. “Or do you want a bit of this?”

Maque leapt up in the air, straight at the warder. Maque’s bony hands and nails like claws tore furrows in the flesh of throat and face. And as the warder raised his stick, shrieking, his fellows roiled forward. But in that moment a colossal sound passed through the building, through atmosphere, through stone, and through every atom in between. It was the resonance of an enor
mous organ, or perhaps the music of the arctic wind that threaded some hollow pipe of ice floating in eternity.

After the sound, the wind itself rushed across the room. It blasted against the warders and threw them back, and they careered about with their eyes starting, yelling at the cold savagery of it, the sticks and iron ripped from their frozen hands.

Where they fell, the lunatics sprinted by and over them. As if at this signal, the prisoners darted out to freedom.

Of the felled warders, the two that could got up and pursued the madmen, shouting and cursing. One man, whose leg had been snapped, pulled himself along the corridor, begging his comrades not to leave him, but when he reached the turn of the passage a huge shadow went by and the warder buried his head in his arms, gibbering.

Marie Tante, Bettile, and their sisters could not find the madwomen. In small groups, they spread out through the buildings, searching. They too carried lamps and sticks, and a few had brought mad-shirts, in preparation.

From outside the blocks of the asylum, it was possible to see these lamplights passing up and down the windows of the buildings, and now and then over the yards, which gave the bizarre impression that parts of the masonry were shifting about, going from spot to spot, crossing over one another.

Sometimes a shout would echo down the night, but it carried no meaning except alarm or rage.

No snow had fallen on the outer ground, or if it had, it was invisible. Only the great cold was there, and the moonless shine of stars.

In the last block, Dr. Volpe’s apartment burned with frantic light. Once or twice he appeared at the window. He had heard a peculiar sound but now believed it was only his overwrought nerves that had caused it, inside his own head.

Small pieces of glass from the hothouse lay on the grass like fragments shed from the duller stars.

The captives of the asylum strayed down, maybe from force of habit, to the rooms of straw to which they were herded by day. They had never been there in the dark.

Citalbo met Judit, and Maque appeared with blood under his nails. The rest followed them.

Uncoerced, they went into the annex where the warders had been sitting at their fire. This room was warm and magical, and the people called lunatic wandered about in it, examining the things their jailors had left lying, the
cards and pipes, and the hideous shawl, which Judit cast suddenly into the flames of the hearth.

They sipped, too, at the abandoned mugs of gin. But their systems had been denied alcohol so long they did not like it, indeed some wept and spat the gin onto the floor.

All about them, the madhouse was rife with searchers and destroyers, but here in this firelit heart they were in sanctuary. Had their warders returned here, they would have found these freed slaves easily. But they did not return. Only darkness and whiteness, with a flash of amber, came and filled the entry.

Then the people were afraid.

But Citalbo said, “No. This is the hour.”

And Maque said, “They’re mild birds. They don’t do harm.”

And Judit said, “He’s like a king, a great monarch. We must go with him.”

And so, as the Penguin moved from the entrance way, they went out, all of them. And in their path, right across the rooms of straw, there was a wall. And on the wall was a painting. It was of ice floes and sheets of ice, and beyond the ice were mountains. A marigold glow hung over it, and there before its face the Penguin was, as if it had been painted too, onto the wall.

“Penguinia,” said Judit. “I’ll give up my land, to be there.”

There are instants of immeasurable beauty. They evolve and are and cannot be argued with.

Out of Penguinia came the organ note that shook the asylum to its roots, and next came the wind of the snow. But it was not cold. It was warm as the fire on the hearth and much, much sweeter. And as this happened, as Penguinia breathed upon them, the wall of the painting opened, and became actual, like the gateway into a garden.

So they saw the soft, warm snows, and the trees blooming up from them with their apricot and orange fruit, and the sun purred on the ice, and a stream bubbled like champagne. Flowers grew in Penguinia, and beyond the slopes of white, a golden sea sparkled.

Some broke away at once and ran and ran through and ran out into the landscape of this country of heaven.

“I dare,” said Citalbo. “Let’s go there.”

And Maque and Judit and Citalbo walked up to the edge of the snow and stepped over among the flowers.

Then the others came after, all of them, the ones who slouched like sad apes, and the ones who shook and the ones who had cried alone in the night for years. And as the soft ground of Penguinia received them, they looked up in wonderment.

Judit bowed to the spirit, the great Penguin, and then alone hastened over
the snow toward the sunlit sea, where the seals were diving and descending like mink ribbons.

“Worlds set like suns,” Citalbo said, “and rise like suns. That’s mathematics.”

“There’ll be huge white bears,” Maque said, “and little white foxes.”

“But kind,” Citalbo said, “here.”

Behind them the rooms of straw had become only a hole of darkness, which was dissolving.

Maque looked back.

Through the aperture, some of the warders appeared. They had blundered into the lower building from the yard. Marie Tante was there, and Tiraud. They gaped at Penguinia.

“Close the gate, quick,” said Maque.

On the platelike faces of the warders was a look that had nothing to do with reason or duty. It was a gaze of fury and jealousy, of wicked, blind human bestiality, which had been cheated.

But then the hole back into hell went out, like a momentary flaw in sight. It was gone, and the world was gone, and there was simply
here
, which would be kind.

Only Tiraud ran at the empty space and smashed at it with his stick. Only Tiraud roared.

Marie Tante had already dismissed the mirage. As what? She did not have the wit to specify.

Moule sniveled, thinking she had gone mad.