He was patient and compassionate, but in the end Caroline remembered it as if she had read it in the brutal cadences of a newspaper headline:
and then, more terrifying:
But these were only naked facts. Far worse was the knowledge that Guilford was beyond her help, impossibly far away, possibly injured, possibly dead. Guilford dead in the wilderness and Caroline and Lily alone.
She asked her uncle the awful question. “Is he dead?” she whispered, while the earth twisted under her feet and Lily ran to the bench where Lady had been abandoned, eyelids drooping, with her skirt hiked over her head.
“Caroline, no one knows. But the ships were attacked well after they put the expedition ashore at the Rheinfelden. There’s no reason to believe Guilford has been hurt.”
They will all lie to me now, Caroline thought: make me a widow and tell me he’s fine. She turned her face to the sky, and the sunlight through her eyelids was the color of blood.
Chapter Thirteen
For the purpose of the séance they drove to Eugene Randall’s apartment, a sad widower’s digs in Virginia, one wall a shrine to his deceased spouse Louisa Ellen. Stepping inside was like stepping into the archaeology of a life, decades reduced to potsherds and clay tablets.
Randall kept the lights low and proceeded directly to the liquor cabinet. “I don’t want to be drunk,” he explained. “I just don’t want to be sober.”
“I could use a shot myself,” Elias Vale said.
Inevitably, Vale lost himself to his god.
He thought of it as “summoning” the god, but in fact it was Vale who was summoned, Vale who was used. He had never volunteered for this duty. He had never been given a choice. If he had resisted… but that didn’t bear thinking about.
Randall wanted to speak to his lost Louisa Ellen, the horse-faced woman in the photographs, and Vale made a show of calling to her across the Great Barrier, eyes rolled to conceal his own agony. In fact he was retreating into himself, stepping out of the god’s path, becoming passive. No longer his, the need to draw breath, the rebellious tides of bile and blood.
He was only distantly conscious of Randall’s halfhearted questions, though the emotional gist of it was painfully obvious. Randall, the lifelong rationalist, wanted desperately to believe he could speak to Louisa Ellen, who had been carried off by a vicious pneumonia less than a year ago; but he couldn’t easily abandon a lifetime’s habit of thought. So he asked questions only she could answer, wanting proof but terrified that he might not get it.
And Vale, for the first time, felt another presence in addition to his god. This one was a tortured, partial entity — a shell of suffering that might actually once have been Louisa Ellen Randall.
Her voice choked out of Vale’s larynx. His god modulated the tone.
Yes, Vale said, she remembered that summer in Maine, long before the Miracle of the New Europe, a cottage by the sea, and it had rained, hadn’t it, all that cool July, but that had not made her unhappy, only grateful for beach walks whenever the clouds abated, for the fire in the hearth at night, for her collection of chalky seashells, for the patchwork quilt and the feather bed.
And so on.
And when Randall, florid with the pulse of blood through his clotted veins, asked. “Louisa, it is you, isn’t it?” — Vale said yes. When he asked, “Are you happy?” — Vale said, “Of course.” Here his voice faltered fractionally, because the Louisa Ellen Randall in his mind screamed out her suffering and her hatred for the god that had abducted her, who brought her here unwilling from— from—
But these were the Mysteries.
It was not Louisa Ellen’s voice (though it still sounded like hers) when Randall’s flagging skepticism began to recover and Vale’s god delivered a sort of coup de grâce, an oracle, a prophecy: a warning to Randall that the Finch expedition was doomed and that Randall should protect himself from the political consequences. “The Partisans have already fired on the Weston,” Vale said, and Randall blanched and stared.
It was a concise and miraculous prophecy. The wire services featured the story the following night. It ran under banner headlines in the Washington papers.
Vale neither knew nor cared about all that. His god had left him, that was the welcome fact. His aching body was his own again, and there was enough liquor in the house to keep him in a therapeutic oblivion.
Chapter Fourteen
Lake Constance. The Bodensee.
It was not much more, geographically speaking, than a wide place in the river. But in the morning mist it might have been a great placid ocean, gentle as silk, fresh sunlight cutting through the fog in silver sheets. The northern shore, just visible, was a rocky abeyance thick with silent forest, mosque trees and sage-pine and stands of a broad-leafed, white-boled tree for which not even Tom Compton had a name. Moth-hawks swept over the shimmering water in rotating swarms.
“More than a thousand years ago,” Avery Keck said, “there was a Roman fort along these shores.” Keck, who had taken Gillvany’s place in the Perpicacity, spoke over the ragged syncopation of the boat’s small motor. “In the Middle Ages it was one of the most powerful cities in Europe. A Lombard city, on the trade route between Germany and Italy. Now it might never have existed. Only water. Only rocks.”
Guilford wondered aloud what had happened to the vanished Europeans. Had they simply died? Or could they have traveled to a mirror-Earth, in which Europe survived intact and the rest of the world had gone feral and strange?
Keck was a gaunt man of about forty years, with the face of a small-town undertaker. He looked at Guilford dolefully. “If so, then the Europeans have their own fresh wilderness to hack and gouge at and go to war over. Just like us, God help ’em.”
Camp at Bodensee. Diggs at his fire. Sullivan, Betts, Hemphill at their tents. Meadow green with a small leafy spreading plant like turquoise clover. High overcast, cool gusty wind.
Postscriptum. Or perhaps I should stop pretending these notes are “postscripts” admit that they are letters to Caroline. Caroline, I hope you see them one day soon.
Journey largely uneventful since Gillvany’s tragic death, though that event hangs over us like a cloud. Finch in particular has grown sullen uncommunicative. I think he blames himself. He writes relentlessly in his notebook, says little.
We made our camp in the meadows Erasmus described. Have seen herds of wild fur snakes in great profusion, moving over the land like cloud shadows on a sunny day. Ever-resourceful, Tom Compton has even stalked and killed one, so we dine on snake meat — greasy steaks that taste like wildfowl, but a refreshing change after tinned rations. Our boats are securely stowed well up a beach, under tarps and beneath an outcropping of mossy granite, effectively hidden from all but the most exhaustive search. Though who do we suppose will find them in this empty land?
We await the arrival of Erasmus with our pack snakes and supplies. Tom Compton insists we could have had any number of animals free of charge — they are (often quite literally!) all around us — but Erasmus’s beasts are trained to pack and bridle and have already relieved us of the need to ferry all our kit by boat.
This assumes Erasmus will show up as promised.
We all know each other very well by now — all our quirks idiosyncrasies, which are legion — and I have even had several rewarding conversations with Tom Compton, who has shown me more respect since the near wreck of the Perspicacity. In his eyes I am still the pampered Easterner who makes a soft living with a photo-box (as he calls it), but I have shown enough initiative to impress him.