Edging his way out of the traffic flow and pushing open the creaking boarding house door, the Irishman stepped reluctantly out of the morning sunlight and into the stale-smelling dimness of the entryway. Maybe, he thought, what bothers me is the possibility that I’ll be like this myself soon, living in a crummy hole and mumbling jumbled memories to people who aren’t listening anyway.
He crossed the dusty entry, stepped through the stairway door—and froze.
In front of him, beyond a narrow beach, stretched away to the horizon a vast, listless lake or sea, reflecting with nearly no distortion the full moon that hung in the deep night sky.
Duffy’s stunned mind scrabbled for an explanation like an atheist at the Second Coming. I was slugged from behind, he thought, and brought here (Where’s here? There’s no body of water this size within a hundred miles of Vienna) and I’ve been unconscious for hours. I just now came to, and I’m trying to get away.
He took two paces toward the lake and tripped painfully over the bottom steps of an old wooden stairway. Leaping to his feet, he stared around him bewilderedly at the close walls and the stairs. He ran back through the entry hall to the street, stared hard at the front of the building, the crowded sunlit street and the blue sky, and then slowly walked back inside.
He winced when he stepped again into the stairwell, but the old, peeling walls remained solid, almost sneering at him in their mundanity. He clumped hurriedly up to the second floor and knocked on the door of Vogel’s room. Then he knocked again.
A full minute after his third and loudest series of knocks, a chain rattled and the door swung inward, revealing the cluttered mess of blankets, books, bottles and paper-rolls that Duffy had always seen there.
“Who is it?” rasped the ancient, scruffy-bearded man who now poked his head around the edge of the door.
“It’s Brian Duffy, Gustav. I’ve brought you food and ink.”
“Ah, good, good! Come in, son. Did you bring any...?” He did a pantomime of sucking at the neck of a bottle.
“I’m afraid not. Just ink.” He held up the ink pot. “This is ink. Don’t drink it this time, eh?”
“Of course, of course,” Vogel said absently. “I’m glad you happened to drop by today. I want to show you how The Death of Archangel Michael is coming along.” Duffy recalled visiting the old artist two weeks ago, for the first time in three years, and being greeted with the same casual “Glad you happened to drop by today.”
“Come on,” the old man wheezed. “Tell me what you think of it.”
The Irishman allowed himself to be led to the far wall, which was fitfully illuminated by two candles. Filling the wall entirely, from floor to ceiling and corner to corner, drawn with painstaking care on the plaster in a near-infinity of fine, close-knit penstrokes, was a vast picture.
Duffy gave a polite glance to the maelstrom of churning figures. When he had first seen the picture, possibly seven years ago, he’d had to look close to see the faint outlines of the shapes on the white plaster; and when he left Vienna in ’twenty-six the wall was a finely shaded drawing, crowded and vague in subject but faultless in execution. Now it was much darker, for every day the artist added hundreds of strokes, deepening shadows and, very gradually, blacking out some peripheral figures altogether. Three years ago the scene pictured seemed to be occurring at noon; now the tortured figures writhed and gestured in the shade of deep twilight.
“It’s coming along wonderfully, Gustav,” Duffy said.
“You think so? Good! Naturally your opinion counts in this,” the old man chittered eagerly. “I’ve invited Albrecht to come and see it, but lately he hasn’t even been answering my letters. I’m nearly finished, you see. I’ve got to complete the thing before I lose my sight entirely.”
“Couldn’t you call it finished now?”
“Oh no! You don’t know about these things, young man. No, it needs a good deal of work yet.”
“If you say so. Here, I’ll stash this food in your pantry. Don’t forget it’s there, either!” Still looking at the old man, Duffy pulled open the door of the narrow pantry; a gust of fresh, cold air, carrying a smell like the sea, ruffled his hair from behind, and he closed the door without turning around. “On second thought,” he said, a little unsteadily, “I’ll let you put it away.”
Epiphany’s father, intent on touching up the shading of a cloud, wasn’t even listening. Duffy ran a hand nervously through his hair, then laid a small stack of coins on a box that seemed to be serving as a table, and left the room. Descending the stairs he was careful to stare straight ahead, and he won his way to the street without being subjected to any more visions.
He strode unhappily back toward the Zimmermann Inn. What, he asked himself, almost ready to cry, is going on? Until today I hadn’t seen any outré things in nearly a month. I’d hoped I was through with all that. And at least those satyrs, griffins and unseen night-fliers last month were, I think, real, since other people saw or were affected by them. But what about this damnable lake? Would another person have seen that? Maybe I’m crazy and haunted. That’s it. Epiphany, will you take an insane husband to match your father?
From the walls came echoing the boom of cannons as Bluto and his crew of assistants tested the city’s artillery for range. I wonder, Duffy thought, not for the first time, if the Turks really will try for Vienna this year. I suppose they will. And what with the shape the old Holy Roman Empire’s in, they’ll probably sweep right through and be in Ireland in two years. I should take Eilif’s advice—just throw myself into the tide of warfare and keep too busy to go mad.
The soldiers were rowdy downstairs, shouting for the casks of bock to be opened just two days early, and the clamor eventually helped rouse the Irishman from his unusually deep and prolonged afternoon nap. He stared at the ceiling for a few moments and tried to remember what dream it was that had left him with such an oppressive, though unfocused, sense of dread.
There came a rapping at his door. “Mr. Duffy,” called Shrub, the stable boy. “Werner says come down or be evicted tonight.”
“Coming, Shrub.” He was glad of even this annoying interruption, for it was a summons to rejoin the world, and for a moment the world had seemed on the point of going to bits like a scene painted on shredding canvas. “I’m coming.” He put on his boots and sword and left the room.
At the door to the dining hall he paused to run his hands through his gray hair and shake his head a couple of times. Odd, he thought—I feel as if I’m still half asleep... as if that damned dream, the one I can’t remember, is still going on, and is in some way more real than my perceptions of this old door, my hands, and the smell of cooking beef in the warm air.
“Don’t hang back,” came Anna’s cheerfully exasperated voice from behind him. “Push on.”
He obediently stepped through into the wide hall and moved aside for her to pass with her tray of pitchers. All the candles were lit in the cressets and wooden chandeliers, and the long room was packed with customers of every sort, from foreign mercenaries with odd accents to middle-aged merchants sweating under the weight of many-pocketed display coats. Probably a third of the company had upturned their empty or nearly-empty mugs, and Anna and two other women were kept busy refilling them. Several dogs who had got in somehow were growling and bickering for scraps under the tables.