I peered into the hazy darkness, but saw nothing except a bit of whorling smoke. I suddenly felt dizzy and lightheaded. It was because I had not eaten all day, I told myself; I should have been less proud and presumed upon Cornelia’s hospitality for a meal. Then, while I watched, the whorl of smoke began to expand and change shape. A face emerged from the murky darkness — a boy’s face, twisted with agony.
“See!” cried the soldier. “See how the poor lad holds his own head in his fist, like Perseus holding the head of the Gorgon! See how he stares, blaming me!”
Indeed, out of the darkness and smoke I began to see exactly what the wretched man described, a headless boy in battle garb clutching his dismembered head by the hair and holding it aloft. I opened my mouth in awe and terror. Behind the boy, other shapes began to emerge — first a few, then many, then a legion of phantoms covered with blood and writhing like maggots in the air.
It was a terrifying spectacle. I would have fled, but I was rooted to the spot. The soldier clutched my knees. The old slave began to weep and babble. From within the house came the sound of others in distress, moaning and crying out.
“Don’t you hear them?” cried the soldier. “The lemures, shrieking like harpies!” The great looming mass of corpses began to keen and wail — surely all of Rome could hear it!
Like a drowning man, the mind in great distress will clutch at anything to save itself. A bit of straw will float, but will not support a thrashing man; a plank of wood may give him respite, but best of all is a steady rock within the raging current. So my mind clutched at anything that might preserve it in the face of such overwhelming and inexplicable horror. Time had come to a stop, just as the old slave had said, and in that endlessly attenuated moment a flood of images, memories, schemes, and notions raged through my mind. I clutched at straws. Madness pulled me downward, like an unseen current in black water. I sank — until I suddenly found the rock for which I sought.
“The bush!” I whispered. “The burning bush, which speaks aloud!”
The soldier, thinking I spied something within the mass of writhing lemures, clutched at me and trembled. “What bush? Ah yes, I see it, too...”
“No, the bush here in your garden! That strange, gnarled tree among the yews, with yellow leaves all around. But now the leaves have all been swept in among the others... burnt with the others in the brazier... the smoke still hangs in the air...”
I pulled the soldier out of the garden, through the small door, and onto the pathway. I returned for the old slave, and then, one by one, for the others. They huddled together on the cobblestones, trembling and confused, their eyes wide with terror and red with blood.
“There are no lemures!” I whispered hoarsely, my throat sore from the smoke — even though I could see them hovering over the wall, cackling and dangling their entrails in the empty air.
The slaves pointed and clutched one another. The soldier hid behind his hands.
As the slaves grew more manageable, I led them in groups to my house, where they huddled together, frightened but safe. Bethesda was perplexed and displeased at the sudden invasion of half-mad strangers, but Eco was delighted at the opportunity to stay up until dawn under such novel circumstances. It was a long, cold night, marked by fits of panic and orgies of mutual reassurance, while we waited for sanity to return.
The first light of morning broke, bringing a cold dew that was a tonic to senses still befuddled by sleeplessness and poisoned by smoke. My head pounded like thunder, with a hangover far worse than any I had ever gotten from wine. A ray of pale sunlight was like a knife to my eyes, but I no longer saw visions of lemures or heard their mad shrieking.
The soldier, haggard and dazed, begged me for an explanation. I agreed readily enough, for a wise man once taught me that the best relief for a pounding headache is the application of disciplined thought, which brings blood to the brain and flushes evil humors from the phlegm.
“It came to me in a flash of inspiration, not logic,” I explained. “Your autumnal ritual of burning leaves, and the yearly visitation of the lemures... the smoke that filled your garden, and the plague of spirits... these things were not unconnected. That odd, twisted tree in your garden is not native to Rome, or to the peninsula. How it came here, I have no idea, but I suspect it came from the East, where plants which induce visions are quite common. There is the snake plant of Aethiopia, the juice of which causes such terrible visions that it drives men to suicide; men guilty of sacrilege are forced to drink it as a punishment. The rivergleam plant that grows on the banks of the Indus is also famous for making men rave and see weird visions. But I suspect that the tree in your garden may be a specimen of a rare bush found in the rocky mountains east of Egypt. Bethesda tells a tale about it.”
“What tale?” said Bethesda.
“You remember — the tale your Hebrew father passed on to you, about his ancestor called Moses, who encountered a bush that spoke aloud to him when it burned. The leaves of your bush, neighbor, not only spoke but cast powerful visions.”
“Yet why did I see what I saw?”
“You saw that which you feared the most — the vengeful spirits of those you killed fighting for Sulla.”
“But the slaves saw what I saw! And so did you!”
“We saw what you suggested, just as you began to see a burning bush when I said the words.”
He shook his head. “It was never so powerful before. Last night was more terrible than ever!”
“Probably because, in the past, you happened to burn only a few of the yellow leaves at a time, and the cold wind carried away much of the smoke; the visions came upon some but not all of the household, and in varying degrees. But last night the smoke hovered in the garden and the haze spread through the house; and perhaps you happened to burn a great many of the yellow leaves at once. Everyone who breathed the smoke was intoxicated and stricken with a kind of madness. Once we escaped the smoke, with time the madness passed, like a fever burning itself out.”
“Then the lemures never existed?”
“I think not.”
“And if I uproot that accursed bush and cast it in the Tiber, I will never see the lemures again?”
“Perhaps not,” I said. Though you may always see them in your nightmares, I thought.
“So, it was just as I told you,” said Bethesda, bringing a cool cloth to lay upon my forehead that afternoon. Flashes of pain still coursed through my temples from time to time, and whenever I closed my eyes alarming visions loomed in the blackness.
“Just as you told me? Nonsense!” I said. “You thought that Titus was pushed from his balcony — and that his wife Cornelia did it!”
“A woman pretending to be a lemur drove him to jump — which is just the same,” she insisted.
“And you said the soldier’s old slave was lying about having seen the lemures himself, when in fact he was telling the truth.”
“What I said was that the dead cannot go walking about unless they have been properly mummified, and I was absolutely right. And it was I who once told you about the burning bush that speaks, remember? Without that, you never would have figured the cause.”
“Fair enough,” I admitted, deciding it was impossible to win the argument.
“This quaint Roman idea about lemures haunting the living is completely absurd,” she went on.
“About that I am not sure.”
“But with your own eyes you have seen the truth! By your own wits you have proved in two instances that what everyone thought to be lemures were not lemures at all, only makeup and fear, intoxicating smoke and guilty consciences!”