“Datelined Columbus, Ohio; September 24th, 1973. Martha Nelson had been in an institution for the mentally retarded for 98 years. She is 102 years old and was first sent to Orient State Institute near Orient, Ohio, on June 25th, 1875. Her records were destroyed in a fire in the institution some time in 1883, and no one knows for certain why she is at the institute. At the time she was committed, it was known as the Columbus State Institute for the Feeble-Minded. ‘She never had a chance,’ said Dr. A. Z. Soforenko, appointed two months ago as superintendent of the institution. He said she was probably a victim of ‘eugenic alarm,’ which he said was common in the late 1800s. At that time some felt that because humans were made ‘in God’s image’ the retarded must be evil or children of the devil, because they were not whole human beings. ‘During that time,’ Dr. Soforenko said, ‘it was believed if you moved feeble-minded people out of a community and into an institution, the taint would never return to the community.’ He went on to add, ‘She was apparently trapped in that system of thought. No one can ever be sure if she actually was feeble-minded; it is a wasted life. She is quite coherent for her age. She has no known relatives and has had no contact with anybody but Institution staff for the last 78 or 80 years.’ “
Talbot sat silently in the small boat, the sail hanging like a forlorn ornament from its single centerpole.
“I’ve cried more since I got inside you, Talbot, than I have in my whole life,” he said, but could not stop. Thoughts of Martha Nelson, a woman of whom he had never before heard, of whom he would never have heard had it not been by chance by chance by chance he had heard by chance, by chance thoughts of her skirled through his mind like cold winds.
And the cold winds rose, and the sail filled, and he was no longer adrift, but was driven straight for the shore of the nearest islet. By chance.
He stood over the spot where Demeter’s map had indicated he would find his soul. For a wild moment he chuckled, at the realization he had been expecting an enormous Maltese Cross or Captain Kidd’s “X” to mark the location. But it was only soft green sands, gentle as talc, blowing in dust-devils toward the blood-red pancreatic sea. The spot was midway between the low-tide line and the enormous Bedlam-like structure that dominated the islet.
He looked once more, uneasily, at the fortress rising in the center of the tiny blemish of land. It was built square, seemingly carved from a single monstrous black rock…perhaps from a cliff that had been thrust up during some natural disaster. It had no windows, no opening he could see, though two sides of its bulk were exposed to his view. It troubled him. It was 11 dark god presiding over an empty kingdom. He thought of the fish that would not die, and remembered Nietzsche’s contention that gods died when they lost their supplicants.
He dropped to his knees and, recalling the moment months before when he had dropped to his knees to tear at the flesh of his atrophied umbilical cord, he began digging in the green and powdery sand.
The more he dug, the faster the sand ran back into the shallow bowl. He stepped into the middle of the depression and began slinging dirt back between his legs with both hands, a human dog excavating for a bone.
When his fingertips encountered the edge of the box, he yelped with pain as his nails broke.
He dug around the outline of the box, and then forced his bleeding fingers down through the sand to gain purchase under the buried shape. He wrenched at it, and it came loose. Heaving with tensed muscles, he freed it, and it came up.
He took it to the edge of the beach and sat down.
It was just a box. A plain wooden box, very much like an old cigar box, but larger. He turned it over and over and was not at all surprised to find it bore no arcane hieroglyphics or occult symbols. It wasn’t that kind of treasure. Then he turned it right side up and pried open the lid. His soul was inside. It was not what he had expected to find, not at all. But it was what had been missing from the cache.
Holding it tightly in his fist, he walked up past the fast-filling hole in the green sand, toward the bastion on the high ground.
Once inside the brooding darkness of the fortress—and finding the entrance had been disturbingly easier than he had expected—there was no way to go but down. The wet, black stones of the switchback stairways led inexorably downward into the bowels of the structure, clearly far beneath the level of the pancreatic sea. The stairs were steep, and each step had been worn into smooth curves by the pressure of feet that had descended this way since the dawn of memory. It was dark, but not so dark that Talbot could not see his way. There was no light, however. He did not care to think about how that could be.
When he came to the deepest part of the structure, having passed no rooms or chambers or openings along the way, he saw a doorway across an enormous hall, set into the far wall. He stepped off the last of the stairs, and walked to the door. It was built of crossed iron bars, as black and moist as the stones of the bastion. Through the interstices he saw something pale and still in a far corner of what could have been a cell.
There was no lock on the door.
It swung open at his touch.
Whoever lived in this cell had never tried to open the door; or had tried and decided not to leave.
He moved into deeper darkness.
A long time of silence passed, and finally he stooped to help her to her feet. It was like lifting a sack of dead flowers, brittle and surrounded by dead air incapable of holding even the memory of fragrance.
He took her in his arms and carried her.
“Close your eyes against the light, Martha,” he said, and started back up the long stairway to the golden sky.
Lawrence Talbot sat up on the operating table. He opened his eyes and looked at Victor. He smiled a peculiarly gentle smile. For the first time since they had been friends, Victor saw all torment cleansed from Talbot’s face.
“It went well,” he said. Talbot nodded.
They grinned at each other.
“How’re your cryonic facilities?” Talbot asked. Victor’s brows drew down in bemusement. “You want me to freeze you? I thought you’d want something more permanent…say, in silver.”
“Not necessary.”
Talbot looked around. He saw her standing against the far wall by one of the grasers. She looked back at him with open fear. He slid off the table, wrapping the sheet upon which he had rested around himself, a makeshift toga. It gave him a patrician look.
He went to her and looked down into her ancient face. “Nadja,” he said, softly. After a long moment she looked up at him. He smiled and for an instant she was a girl again. She averted her gaze. He took her hand, and she came with him, to the table, to Victor.
“I’d be deeply grateful for a running account, Larry,” the physicist said. So Talbot told him; all of it.
“My mother, Nadja, Martha Nelson, they’re all the same,” Talbot said, when he came to the end, “all wasted lives.”
“ And what was in the box?” Victor said.
“How well do you do with symbolism and cosmic irony, old friend?”
“Thus far I’m doing well enough with lung and Freud,” Victor said. He could not help but smile.
Talbot held tightly to the old technician’s hand as he said, “It was an old, rusted Howdy Doody button.”
Victor turned around.