“Who are you?” Tremeloe demanded, wondering why the anxiety that he ought to be feeling wasn’t making itself felt in his flesh or his voice. “Where the hell are we?”
“If I’m not much mistaken,” the other replied, “we’ve been reborn into the new era, beyond good and eviclass="underline" the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. I’m not at all sure about the freedom, though. or, come to that, the ecstasy. I shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t be possible. The memory wipe should have made it impossible.”
“Reborn?” echoed Tremeloe. “I haven’t been reborn. I’m not sure of much, but I know I’m an adult. I’m fifty-six years old — maybe more, depending on the depth of the amnesia. I’m a professor of biology at Miskatonic University, married to Barbara, with two children, Stephen and Grace. ” He trailed off. He was talking in order to test his memory rather than to enlighten the mysteriously anonymous other, but it wasn’t an awareness of pointlessness or a failure of remembrance that had caused him to stop. It was the realization that the stars really were shining through gaps in. something that wasn’t the floor. “Why has up become down?” he asked. “Why aren’t I aware of being upside-down? Why can’t I feel gravity?”
The voice didn’t try to reassure him. Instead, the other said: “Miskatonic? Have you read the Necronomicon?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tremeloe snapped — or tried to, since his momentary irritation was a mere flicker, which didn’t show in his voice. “It’s been locked in a vault for decades. No one’s allowed to see or touch any of the so-called forbidden manuscripts, since the unpleasantness way back in the last century. Anyway, I’m a scientist. I don’t have any truck with occult rubbish like that.”
“Do you know Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee?”
That question gave Tremeloe pause for thought. He blinked and squinted — and was glad to know that he could still feel his eyelids, just as he could still feel the movements of his tongue — in the hope that he might be able to make out his surroundings now that his eyes were adapting to the extremely poor light. He couldn’t. Above his head — or, strictly speaking, below it, since he seemed to be hanging upside-down — the darkness was Stygian. Around him, he had a vague impression of rounded objects that might have been heads, not very densely clustered, and wispier things that were vaguely reminiscent of fern leaves, but he couldn’t actually see anything. except the fugitive stars, shining through gaps in what was presumably a dense cloud-bank. Occasionally, the stars were briefly eclipsed, as if something had moved across them: a giant bird, perhaps.
Around him, the chorus of foreign voice was still going on. If any of the others could speak English, they were content to listen to what Tremeloe and his companion were saying, without intervening.
What was remarkable about the other’s question, Tremeloe reminded himself, when he came back to it reluctantly, was that Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had died more than a hundred years ago. or, at least, more than a hundred years before Richard Tremeloe had turned fifty-six. He was long dead, but not quite forgotten. just as the university’s famous copy of the Necronomicon was unforgotten, even though no one had clapped eyes on it since before Tremeloe had been born. Having no idea how to answer the other’s question, Tremeloe prevaricated by saying: “Do you?”
“I did, briefly — but that was in another place and another time. I infer from your hesitation that he’s long dead, and that you. died. sometime in the twenty-first or twenty-second century.”
“I’m not dead,” Tremeloe retorted, reflexively, although he did realize that if all the other hanged men in this dark Tarot space were earnestly discussing reincarnation, he might be in the minority in holding that opinion, and might even be wrong, in spite of cogito ergo sum and all his memories of Miskatonic, Barbara, Stephen, Grace, his hands, his legs, and his heart.
His heart would have sunk, if he’d had one, and if its sinking had been possible. I can’t feel gravity, Tremeloe thought. Aloud, he said: “Are you telling me that I really have been reincarnated?”
“Yes — probably not for the first time, although it’s impossible to tell how many layers of amnesia we’ve been afflicted with.”
“How?” This time Tremeloe succeeded in snapping. “When? By whom?”
“If you’d read the Necronomicon,” the other voice replied, with a leaden dullness that probably wasn’t redolent with panic because it had no more capacity to hold an edge that Tremeloe’s own, “you’d know.”
“And you have?” Tremeloe riposted.
“No,” the other came back, quick as a flash. “I wrote it — and no, I don’t mean that I’m the legendary Arab with the nonsensical name who penned the Al Azif. I mean that I too, like Peaslee, have lived in Pnakotus. except that to me, it was a home of sorts, though not Yith itself, and I’m not supposed to be out of it any more. The human brain I inhabited for ten years was supposed to have been cleansed of every last trace of me. I shouldn’t have been available for. this.”
“Has it occurred to you,” Tremeloe asked, “that you might be barking mad?”
“Yes,” the other replied. “How about you?”
Good question, Tremeloe thought. This is a nightmare — a crazy nightmare. There’s no other explanation. Please can I wake up now? Somehow, he knew that wasn’t going to happen. He might well be dreaming, but he was very clearly conscious that he was living his dream, and that he was not going to be waking up to any other reality any time soon.
Even so.
“The cloud’s getting lighter,” he observed. “It is cloud, isn’t it? That is the sky, isn’t it? It only seems to be beneath us because we’re hanging upside-down.”
“Yes,” the other answered. “It’s dawn. Whether we’re barking mad or not, this might be a good time to strive with all our might to lose our minds completely: to dissolve our minds into private chaos and gibbering idiocy, if we can. On balance. ”
The other shut up, somewhat to Tremeloe’s relief.
The dawn was slow. The shades of grey through which the bulk of the sky progressed as its patches turned blue and the stars were drowned seemed infinite in their subtlety, but Tremeloe soon stopped watching them, in order to concentrate on the tree.
The reason that he couldn’t feel his body was that he didn’t have one. He was just a head and a neck — except that the neck was really a stalk, and it connected him to the bough of a tree from which he hung down like a fruit, amid a hundred other heads that he could see and probably a thousand that he couldn’t. The things he’s intuited as leaves really were leaves, and really were divided up in a quasi-fractal pattern, a little like fern leaves but lacier. They were pale green streaked with purple.
The tree, so far as Tremeloe could estimate, was at least a hundred feet high, and its crown had to be at least a hundred and fifty in diameter, but he was positioned on the outside of the crown, about five-sixths of the way up — or, as it seemed to him, down — and he couldn’t see the trunk at all. He could barely see the ground “above” his head, but the thin streaks he could see between his head-fruit-tree and the next were vivid green and suspiciously flat, as if they might be algae-clogged swamp-water rather than anything solid.
The jungle stretched as far as his eyes could see. The birds in the sky really did look like giants, but that might have been an error of perspective.