That night, after bathing, I lay on my bed, simply staring. I should have left those other tunnels alone and not disturbed the dead. What I had found there had taken what little will to live I had left. Now it was just a matter of deciding how I would hasten the end of my life. ''Should I leap into the pit, a graceful dive and never-ending fall into the bright yellow heat, my body disintegrating before I hit the bottom," I wondered, "or, like my dead host, Harrow, should I swim for it?"
"Have you seen the kraken?" I asked Silencio, who sat on my dresser with a worried look. All night he had been imploring me by way of looks and hand gestures to eat the tray of food he had brought up.
He pulled some nit off his fur and wiggled the fingers of his opposite hand around it before bringing it to his mouth and crunching it between his teeth.
I resumed my despondent gaze as Silencio jumped down from the dresser. I thought he had left the room, but a moment later I was recalled from my reverie when I heard him rummaging in the closet. A few seconds later, he was on the bed, hoisting up the travel bag I had brought to the island with me. I watched without interest or comment as he unfastened the snaps and reached inside. What he brought forth was a parcel wrapped in blue paper and tied with string. At first, I did not remember ever bringing such an item with me. Then the monkey kicked the bag back on the floor and, lifting the parcel in two hands, tossed it onto my chest. The next thing I knew, he had returned the travel bag to the closet and left the room.
I lay there looking at the package with both fear and wonder as if it were the tentacle of a kraken. Lifting it slowly, I ripped the paper away, and as I did, a very faint mixture of scents was released. One of these was that of parchment and ink and the other was distinctly the perfume of Aria Beaton. These were, of course, the pages of her notes on the memories of the story of her grandfather's journey. I tore away the rest of the blue wrapping and string, remembering that I had packed it in such a manner to protect it on the trip from the mainland.
Up till that moment, I had been unable to lay my eyes on the manuscript without shaking uncontrollably. All the time I had spent in my holding cell while my trial was dragging along I kept the pages in the opposite corner from my bed, and if my gaze landed on them, I quickly averted my eyes as if I were seeing a ghost there instead. Now I did not have the same aversion to it. I held up the bulk of pages and read the first words: Dear Physiognomist Cley.
Soft piano music drifted up from the back porch of the inn, laying a melody over the constant bass of the distant ocean. The breeze lifted the curtains, and I began to read the Fragments from the Impossible Journey to the Earthly Paradise.
Dear Physiognomist Cley:
A number of days ago, at your request, I spent some time delving into the physiognomical attributes of my late grandfather Harad Beaton in an attempt to discern both his personal worth and any "secrets" he might have to reveal concerning an expedition he had taken many years past. My reading of his features, which have been turned to blue spire, merely confirmed that he was an ordinary man with a rather low physiognomical quo-
tient. What is more interesting is that as I ran my hands over his hardened face, I began to remember snatches of the story of this journey he had related to me when I was a child. I began to write these down, thinking that they might be of some use to you.
Once I began, I could not stop. The memories turned into waking dreams, and, as I recorded them, I believe I was experiencing what some mystics call automatic writing. I wrote so rapidly, without looking at the page, it was as if some unseen hand were guiding my efforts. Although I did not re-experience the entire journey, I did experience quite a bit of it. There are gaps that probably will never be filled in. When the journey did come to me, it was as if I were there with the miners in the wilderness, an invisible witness to their quest.
Seeing Aria's script, I could almost feel her hand moving across the page. Breathing in the vague scent of her perfume, traces of lilac and lemon, it was as if she were there with me in bed. These things calmed my mind and I began to grow weary as I continued reading. Her earliest fragment was a vision of the Beyond. There was great detail concerning the unspoiled beauty and strange vegetation and animals the miners saw as they headed deeper and deeper into those woods Bataldo, Cal-loo, and I had passed through. I could see them with their lantern helmets, their pickaxes slung over their shoulders, walking in single file, joking and laughing. Some of their names passed by me. Twigs broke and branches rustled as a herd of albino deer broke into a small clearing and bounded away through the trees. The moon was out at midday and Harad Beaton was longing for home.
The next thing I knew, I was scrabbling beneath the stick of the corporal of the day watch. My mind was so full of the Beyond, even his curses and punishment did not clear away the undergrowth and enormous cedars until we were well on our way through the maze of dunes. Before entering the mine, I had to ask him again what it was he had rolled that morning.
"Ten, you dimwit," he yelled, "a six and a four." He seemed like he wanted to give me another beating, but the night was beginning to lighten, so he pushed me toward the mine instead. "Perhaps you will die today," he said as I stumbled through the entrance.
His words caused me to remember that I had planned to do just that, but I never seemed to get around to it. I realized as I pounded into the rock of my tunnel, sweating, heaving for air, that I would have to stay alive at least until I had finished reading Aria's manuscript. I worked with great vigor that day.
Whereas Flock's tunnel was filled with a make-believe garden, my mind was overgrowing with images of a real wilderness. As I worked, I began to wonder if Beaton had ever made it to paradise. This thought, no bigger than the grains of sulphur that flew about me following each blow of the pick, buried itself in my mind like a seed with the potential to blossom.
I was lying in bed, reading aloud to Silencio a passage from Aria's Fragments concerning a demon attack the miners had sustained in a tract of pines on a steep hillside. My monkey friend sat by my feet, wide-eyed, grasping his tail with one hand and covering his eyes with the other. A miner by the name of Miller was being disemboweled by three of the filthy creatures amid a torrent of rhetorical description. Blood was flying, duodenum was drooping, groans from the nether end of hell were being loosed into the wilderness when I was interrupted by a knocking at my half-open door.
The sound frightened me, and I thought, ' 'Could it be the morning already? I just began reading a few moments ago."
Silencio jumped down off the bed, bounded twice, and then leaped up just as Corporal Matters of the night watch entered the room. The monkey landed deftly on the man's left shoulder and strung his tail around the corporal's collar like a necklace.
"Good evening, all," said Matters, wearing a broad smile.
I had neither seen nor heard him since the night I had first arrived. Because of his absence, I had just assumed that he was really one and the same person as the corporal of the day watch. It was my theory that he had two wigs, one black and one white, and he would pretend, from reasons of insanity, to be two people. Now seeing him, though, smiling, reaching up to pet Silencio, I had to change my mind.
"Cley," he said, "it's good to see you. Sorry I wasn't by sooner to check up and see how you were getting on."