Dignity fled. Now the confession. “My daughter’s. My first daughter. Emily. She died at two years. Diphtheria, you see. She was a perfect little girl. When she was ill I took a lock of her hair and kept it with a few of her things. A rattle, a christening dress…”
“All missing?”
“Yes! But it’s the hair that seems… the most terrible loss. It’s all I have of her, really.”
“And you want my help finding these items?”
“If it’s not too trivial.”
He softened his voice. “It’s not trivial at all.”
She looked at him with a gush of relief: she had made herself vulnerable and he had done nothing to hurt her; he had understood. That was what it was all about, Vale thought, this roundelay of shame and redemption. He wondered if doctors who treated venereal diseases felt the same way.
“Can you help me?”
“In all honesty, I don’t know. I can try. But you have to help me. Will you take my hand?”
Mrs. Sanders-Moss reached tentatively across the table. Her hand was small and cool and he folded it into his own larger, firmer grip.
Their eyes met.
“Try not to be startled by anything you might see or hear.”
“Speaking trumpets? That sort of thing?”
“Nothing as vulgar. This isn’t a tent show.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Never mind. Also, remember you may have to be patient. Often it takes time, contacting the other world.”
“I have nowhere to go, Mr. Vale.”
So the preliminaries were over and all that remained was to focus his concentration and wait for the god to rise from his inner depths — from what the Hindu mystics called “the lower chakras.” He didn’t relish it. It was always a painful, humiliating experience.
There was a price to be paid for everything, Vale thought.
The god: only he could hear it speak (unless he lent it his own, merely corporeal tongue); and when it spoke, he could hear nothing else. He had heard it for the first time in August of 1914.
Before the Miracle he had made a marginal living with a traveling show. Vale and two partners had trawled the hinterlands with a mummified body they purchased through the back door of a mortuary in Racine and billed as the corpse of John Wilkes Booth. The show played best in ditch towns where the circus never came, away from the rail lines, deep in cotton country, wheat country, Kentucky hemp country. Vale did all right, delivering the pitch and priming the crowds. He had a talent for talk. But it was a dying trade even before the Miracle, and the Miracle killed it. Rural income plummeted; the rare few with spending money wouldn’t part with their pennies just for a glimpse of an assassin’s leathery carcass. The Civil War was another generation’s apocalypse. This generation had its own. His partners abandoned Mr. Booth in an Iowa cornfield.
By the blistering August of that year Vale was on his own, peddling Bibles from a frayed sample case and traveling, often as not, by boxcar. Twice he was attacked by thieves. He had fought back: saved his Bibles but lost a supply of clean collars and partial vision in one eye, the green of the iris faintly and permanently clouded (but that played well, too).
He had walked a lot that day. A hot Ohio Valley day. The air was humid, the sky flat white, commerce listless. In the Olympia Diner (in some town, name forgotten, where the river coiled west like lazy smoke), the waitress claimed to hear thunder in the air. Vale spent his last money on a chicken-and-gravy sandwich and went off in search of a place to sleep.
Past sunset he found an empty brickworks at the edge of town. The air inside the enormous building was close and wet and stank of mildew and machine oil. Abandoned Furnaces loomed like scabrous idols in the darkness. He made a sort of bed high up in the scaffolding where he imagined he would be safe, sleeping on a stained mattress he dragged in from a hillside dump. But sleep didn’t come easily. A night wind guttered through the empty flames of the factory windows, but the air remained close and hot. Rain began falling, deep in the night. He listened to it trickle down a thousand crevices to pool on the muddy floor. Erosion, he thought, pricking at iron and stone.
The voice — not yet a voice but a premonitory, echoing thunder — came to him without warning, well past midnight.
It pinned him flat. Literally, he could not move. It was as if he was held in place by a tremendous weight, but the weight was electric, pulsing through him, sparking from his fingertips. He wondered if he had been struck by lightning. He thought he was about to die.
Then the voice spoke, and it spoke not words but, somehow, meanings; the equivalent words, when he attempted to frame them, were a lifeless approximation. It knows my name, Vale thought. No, not my name, my secret idea of myself.
The electricity forced open his eyelids. Unwilling and afraid, he saw the god standing above him. The god was monstrous. It was ugly, ancient, its beetle-like body a translucent green, rain falling right through it. The god reeked, an obscure smell that reminded Vale of paint thinner and creosote.
How could he sum up what he learned that night? It was ineffable, unspeakable; he could hardly bring himself to sully it with language.
Yet, forced, he might say:
I learned that I have a purpose in life.
I learned that I have a destiny.
I learned that I have been chosen.
I learned that the gods are several and that they know my name.
I learned that there is a world under the world.
I learned that I have friends among the powerful.
I learned that I need to be patient.
I learned that I will be rewarded for my patience.
And I learned — this above all — that I might not need to die.
“You have a servant,” Vale said. “A Negress.”
Mrs. Sanders-Moss sat erect, eyes wide, like a schoolgirl called on by an intimidating teacher. “Yes. Olivia… her name is Olivia.”
He wasn’t conscious of speaking. He had given himself over to another presence. He felt the rubbery peristalsis of his lips and tongue as something foreign and revolting, as if a slug had crawled into his mouth.
“She’s been with you a long time — this Olivia.”
“Yes; a very long time.”
“She was with you when your daughter was born.”
“Yes.”
“And she cared for the girl.”
“Yes.”
“Wept when the girl died.”
“We all did. The household.”
“But Olivia harbored deeper feelings.”
“Did she?”
“She knows about the box. The lock of hair, the christening dress.”
“I suppose she must. But—”
“You kept them under the bed.”
“Yes!”
“Olivia dusts under the bed. She knows when you’ve looked at the box. She knows because the dust is disturbed. She pays attention to dust.”
“That’s possible, but—”
“You haven’t opened the box for a long time. More than a year.”
Mrs. Sanders-Moss lowered her eyes. “But I’ve thought of it. I didn’t forget.”
“Olivia treats the box as a shrine. She worships it. She opens it when you’re out of the house. She’s careful not to disturb the dust. She thinks of it as her own.”
“Olivia…”
“She thinks you don’t do justice to the memory of your daughter.”
“That’s not true!”
“But it’s what she believes.”
“Olivia took the box?”
“Not a theft, by her lights.”
“Please — Dr. Vale — where is it? Is it safe?”