Chapter the Fifty-second. Thursday, July 10, 2003
n the ensuing moments a great deal was discussed, both with those who stood outside the steel door and those two men who stood below upon the grassy back lawn of the asylum. All that had been said by Chivery during his brief window of lucid self-possession was relayed to me and to the others who were most receptive to it, and there was confirmation in the telling of it, for now I knew what had driven the professor in his obsessitor way to put so much upon those cellar walls and upon his classroom board and into his thick notebooks. The professor was attempting through the brilliant intellect that had been gifted to him by the Almighty to save us from the impending deluge, and so we listened closely and spread the word that there was soon to be convened at the church an important meeting to which all would be summoned who could help to put into place the things that Chivery had advised.
We would send a contingent of colliers skilled in explosives down to Belgrave Dam to dynamite out a part of that barrier which otherwise would doom us to total submersion beneath the impending floodwaters. They would be accompanied by an armed escort of deputy sheriffs. We would send men and women to every house and farm throughout the valley to spread the word and draw the residents to the asylum and All Souls’ roofs and to the upper floors of the campanile for protection from the deluge. We knew that not every man and woman would believe us, would choose to heed the warning, would be so willing to leave his or her own place of seeming safety. We knew, as well, that there would be those who would not be content to sit upon a roof and wait — that they would wish instead to leave the valley entirely and would not listen to what we had to tell them about the dire consequences pursuant upon such a precipitant course of action. But we would do our best — our army of forewarners — to reduce the number of casualties with solid logic, the freight of emotional urgency giving ballast to our entreaties.
Betweenwhiles, the locked doors to the rooms and wards of Bedlam were being unbolted and flung open. Walter Skewton was being restored to his sister Jemima Pilkins and a very drugged and drowsy Hannah Pupker was being handed out of her cell to Amy Casby and Mrs. Lumbey, who did not have the heart in that liberating moment to tell the young woman what horrible tragedy had befallen her father and mother and sister. Though Charlotte had the pleasure of telling Gus that his son was residing only a mere two storeys above where they stood, she was loathe to let him know what was presumed to have happened to their estranged daughter Alice, and perhaps she could not have spoken the sorrowful words even should it have been her immediate desire. Yet Gus knew the truth from the way that she hung round his neck and wept heavy tears, the source of her grief assaulting both of their souls.
As Antonia and Mrs. Lumbey and Dr. Timberry made their rounds with their keys throughout the bleak asylum, Timberry taking special care to make certain that the Rokesmith “Ruins” were handled as gently as possible, Antonia Bocker whispered to her friend Estella that she had something to say and that it could not wait, for the time to say it may never come again.
“What is it, Antonia?” asked Mrs. Lumbey with a quizzical look. “That you are sincerely sorry for all those years of gall and wormwood between us? Because I am, too. Most sorry. We could have been good friends, had we only gotten past our early enmity.”
“That is all water under the bridge, Estella. Orderly! Be careful with that patient; he has a bad foot.”
“Then say it, Antonia. Say whatever you wish. We are all probably destined to die anyway, so nothing you say will matter much in the long term anyway.”
“My, but are you not the inveterate pessimist! Orderly! Who is in this room? Is there anyone within? We will find out. Estella Lumbey, I have loved you since we were young girls and you first stole my heart with that gift of a child’s mud pie.”
“You have loved me?”
“Yes. I gave my heart to no one else, because it was only yours I wished to have. Orderly! Get me a cloth, for this man is drooling like a Great Dane!”
“Well, I’m happy that you let me know, Antonia. I have always valued your good opinion and now I have reason to value it even more.”
Antonia embraced Estella, and though she held her only briefly, it seemed to Antonia Bocker a veritable eternity of warm bliss.
As she pulled away, the accompanying orderly finally found the key to unlock the door before her.
“That took you long enough!” Antonia admonished the young man, who had a cleft palate and was perhaps all too often and cruelly admonished simply for the way he looked. The orderly opened the door to a small ward of a dozen or so beds, each empty, for their occupants stood clustered together in one corner of the room, cowering fearfully. There was quite a range to their ages: the youngest perhaps in his thirties, the oldest a man perhaps in his eighth or ninth decade. And they were a rather odd-looking lot: men and women, some drest in hospital-issued gowns and pyjamas, others wearing ragged and tattered Outland clothing. A man who sported a front-brimmed Outland cap bearing a large letter “P” on it spoke for the others: “Are we being liberated?”
Antonia nodded.
“Can we all go home?”
“Where is home, young man?”
“Pittsburgh,” answered the capped man.
“Jonesboro, Arkansas,” said another.
“Brooklyn Heights,” said a woman wearing a long nightshirt bearing the caricature likeness of a yellow-hued boy with a serrated head requesting in caption that someone should eat his shorts.
“How on earth did you get here?” asked Mrs. Lumbey.
“We all hiked in at one time or another,” said the first man.
“To see the aliens,” said the woman. And then brightening:“Are you one?”
Upon reaching the Summit of Exchange, Phillips and the Senator saw that which at first glimpse could only be thought to be some sort of magician’s mirage — a diabolical illusion of death and carnage such as one would produce to shew a battlefield in its quiet, elegiac aftermath. But this was no proscenium concoction, no grand sculptural tribute to human depravity. What lay spread out before the blinking, disbelieving eyes of the two men was real — as real as the flies that buzzed and flitted among the fresh corpses. Here lay not soldiers, fallen upon their guns and swords, but men and women and children, riddled with bullets and pierced and bludgeoned, crumpled one upon another in odd configurations of twisted, twining limbs, some with frozen, horror-stricken gazes, each bathed and streaked and mottled with deep red blood — their own blood shed together in the suddenness of their fall.
Phillips felt himself choking at the sight, and even the Senator, being no stranger to death from his life spent as soldier and criminal lawyer, had never witnessed anything to match the wholesale butchery evinced in this place. And so he stepped back, and so he held his hand to his mouth in involuntary, incredulous revulsion. What was even more incredible about the scene was the fact that amongst all the dead bodies was one man who was very much alive. He was a young man, and he wore uniform drabs that mimicked in their grey and green blotched pattern the look of forest foliage — a solitary man performing the solitary task of putting leaden bodies into barrows. The man, who was quite young — not much older than his late teens — turned to see his two visitors standing at the other end of the killing place.