“Or perhaps he had simply got very good at pulling the wool over your eyes. Just as he’s been doing it to all of us for the last eleven years.” Alice applied a toothpick indifferently to the interstices of her bread-mortared teeth before adding her codiciclass="underline" “My brother is a half-wit when it comes to most things, but not where duplicity is required. Here his wits overcompensate for every other aspect of his intelligence that is dull and insipid.”
“You wring my withers, Alice, like a choking vise,” returned my sisterin-law with wilting asperity. “Go straight to bed this instant!” Charlotte stared at her daughter with wild, reproving eyes and began to pound a knotted fist into her breast. She turned to her husband and said by way of explaining this sudden thumping of herself, “One look at her and the digestive aggravation returns. I can scarcely endure it!”
Alice rose, and, as she had been exhorted, quitted the room without further comment. However, a moment later, obviously prompted by an impertinent afterthought, my refractory niece returned in full filial ferment: “Hear me, Mama. Newman will be back to revisit torment upon us all, and that will be the joke on the four of you. But no one will be laughing, mind, least of all me: the chief recipient of his customary devilish rampages. And so I shall enjoy what few days remain to my holiday, no matter how you may wish to condemn me for it.”
As Alice shut the door to the sitting room with such force as to topple a japanned candlestick set upon the mantel shelf, and then was heard to stamp with delicious malice up to her bedchamber above, I wondered for a moment if there could be truth to anything that my young niece had said with such impudent confidence. Perhaps she knew her brother better than any of us. Subscribing to even a small measure of this possibility offered a commensurate modicum of hope, though I would never give her credit for it.
Perhaps he will be back as early as the morrow, I thought as I returned to my own lodgings later that evening. Even within the depths of despondency, I continued to hold within my heart a tiny, most insistent wish: that a promising turn of events would set everything to rights. How was I to know at that moment that there would be turns of events in surfeit, both good and bad, all intricately reticulated? How was I to know that what had happened to Newman would comprise, when all was said and done, only one slender thread in the tightly stitched garment that represented our collective fate, no single incident dictating the course of all the others, but all working together toward a most apocalyptic outcome?
Except, that is, for the very first. This seminal event, which had nothing to do with young Newman, had been born in its retail a few hours earlier at the home of a friend of my mother’s and came in the form of a casual conversational reference to a woman who had the night before taken a terrible fall from her upstairs bedchamber window. It was a nasty plunge upon punishing cobblestones, and no one, not even the most prescient amongst us, could guess at that time how important a role the plummet would play upon the stage of that tragedy — a tragedy that we here shall call The Last Days of Dingley Dell.
— NOTES—
HELIOGRAPHY, communication between distant points by means of visual signals obtained by reflecting the rays of the sun from a mirror or combination of mirrors in single transmission or relayed transmission, depending upon the circumstance. Short and long flashes emulative of the alphabetical dots and dashes that comprise the Morse code are obtained by opening and closing the operative shutter. Glass mirrors with a plane surface are used; hence the angle of divergence of the extreme rays in the reflected beam is the same as that subtended by the sun’s diameter at the point of about 32 minutes of arc, this small divergence rendering the flash visible from great distances. A chief diurnal means of instant communication between Milltown and satellite villages within Dingley Dell, largely employed exigently, although less climacteric uses have also been recorded.
TERRA INCOGNITA, the Latin term for “unknown land,” is the name coined by earlier Dinglians for all land beyond the border of Dingley Dell. The term is a bit of a misnomer when one considers that a great deal is known about the “T.I.” through Outland writings and through cartographic plates in the possession of the Academic and Lending Library of Dingley Dell. The term is more appropriately applied when speaking of that which is not known about the Outland, and more specifically about that portion of the Outland that closely circumscribes the Dell.
A jocular fingerpost once stood upon the summit of the Northern Ridge, directing one to the Terra Incognita. The sign was later replaced by the even more whimsical There be dragons. Both signs were later removed by trade authorities with a proscription against any further signage in this location.
Chapter the Second. Saturday, June 14, 2003
o began what was to become the longest month of my life, given all that eventually took place therein, as events began to transpire with accelerating rapidity over the course of those tumbling weeks. Like a stone dislodged from its shelf upon a craggy hill, one incident gave way to another and then another, the single stone gathering speed in its descent and dislodging in succession a great many other stones along the way, until that first stone, which had been unmoored quite unwittingly at the outset of those remaining crowded weeks in the life of the lost Dell of Dingley, begat the avalanche that would bury an entire valley and the unique society which once prospered there.
Now Newman Trimmers had not been the first child to venture from the narrow confines of Dingley Dell. There had been others, none of these young men and women, to anyone’s knowledge, having ever returned. My friend Vincent Muntle, who was the sheriff of Dingley Dell, had lost his older brother in a similar manner, and it was upon this date in June of 2003 that he chose to formally remember his older sibling, June 14 being the twenty-fifth anniversary of the boy’s departure.
Indeed, the date was a sad anniversary for us both, for it was exactly fifteen years earlier that my mother had died, victim of an overdose of chloral hydrate, prescribed for insomnia. Mama’s death was one of the reasons that I had joined forces with those who advocated for the creation of an overseeing Dingley Dell Medical Review Board, and the reason that I volunteered each year thereafter to help prepare that board’s annual accounting and general report. You see, the doctor who administered the deadly dose to my mother, Jacob Podsnap, had been responsible for a rash of other serious errors of judgement pursuant to his succumbing to a degenerative case of delirious dementia. Removing the deadly Dr. Podsnap from his murderous offices was a slow process and vigorously contested by his proponents in spite of the anecdotal evidence of his unfitness for that profession — evidence that, had it been properly documented, might have ended his blundering reign of terror some months sooner. I vowed that there should never be another Jacob Podsnap. It was a vow that, now in looking back, I was an arrant fool for having made. As you will soon see.
I had met my friend Muntle on the morning of my nephew’s departure, several hours before I was summoned to my brother’s house to receive the disturbing news. The bluff and burly lawman was on his way to visit the stone and concrete “bench of perpetual memory” dedicated to his lost brother George. It had been installed by his parents beneath the shady, tranquil boughs of a large oak tree upon the grounds of Heavenly Rest Municipal Cemetery. The brother’s name was inscribed on a wooden plate, the bench being one of many such benches in the cemetery, each commemorating one who had left the Dell never to return. There were no other markers for the Departed other than these austere places of rest and reflection. As one stood upon a hillock in the middle of the park, one noticed, interspersed amongst the gravestones, a goodly number of these reposing spots — a somewhat unsettling reminder in the aggregate of just how many Dinglians had quitted their protected home in both body and spirit, and were destined never to be properly interred amongst the Dingley dead.