And when Ceil was killed in the Rome Avenue raid, Gilrein was brought to Sanctuary by Frankie and Anna Loftus, a victim, though he couldn’t have known it at the time, of Quinsigamond’s own, uniquely twisted brand of political terrorism.
Gilrein agreed, by lack of argument, to stay a month. In his numbness, the time mutated into three years. His leave of absence from the force segued into an inevitable resignation. It was as if he was replaying his postgrad lost year down in the Zone, only this time the performance had been restaged from indulgent melodrama into a kind of endless, absurdist, horrific opera, a surreal fable of meaningless loss whose Greek chorus was played by a multicultural crop of children heard only, always, from a distance. Gilrein never learned whether the children had been cautioned to stay away from him or simply sensed the barrier of gloomy emptiness he emitted like organ music, perpetually warning of the madman hidden around the corner.
He couldn’t bear to live in the main house. Anna came up with the barn-loft alternative. They never talked about Ceil’s death, never discussed the raid and what went wrong, as if to bring up the subject, voice it, give it sound and attendant meaning, would be to make Ceil die once again. Gilrein spent his first season at Wormland walking the orchards daily, trying but never managing to lose himself in the gnarled maze of lifeless fruit trees.
Until that Friday when Frankie came to the barn and yelled up to the loft asking for some help with the furnace. Gilrein tried to shake him off, swearing ignorance regarding the mysteries of plumbing and heating. But Frankie wouldn’t listen and Gilrein ended up following him through the weaving jogs of the farm-house and down the foolishly steep stairs into the basement. It was pouring that day, as it had for most of the previous week, and the cellar seemed even more dank and oppressive than usual. Anna had bundled the kids up and taken the whole lot to a story hour at the public library, so the unnatural quiet of the farm accentuated the standard undercurrent of timber and joist groan that the stress of mismatched carpentry work had engendered over the years.
They wound their way toward the farthest rear reaches of the basement, came to a stop at an industrial-size oil burner looking like a horrible, grease-scarred green oven salvaged from some long-abandoned detention camp.
“So what’s wrong with it?” Gilrein asked, immediately abandoning hope in the face of dozens of unlabeled valves, half of which were dripping rust-colored water. Frankie had enough money to heat the place with uranium if he wanted, so why didn’t he just phone up a repairman?
“Not a damn thing,” Frankie’s voice holding that barely repressed burden of restrained glee that in college had been, if not endearing, then at least pardonable, and now was just taxing on the patience.
“So what are we doing down here?”
By way of answer, Frankie led the way past the furnace and oil tanks to a narrow plywood door held closed with a padlock. He fished a key from his pocket, popped the lock, threw open the door, and stepped aside to reveal a closet housing nothing but stale air.
Gilrein stared at him. Frankie took a silver penlight from a rear pocket, snapped it on, and shined it at the closet floor. Set into the concrete was what looked like a municipal manhole cover. It was made of tarnished brass, maybe two feet in diameter, and in its center was a recessed bolt with an inlaid, swing-up handle below it. Gilrein got down on one knee, brushed away a thin cover of dirt. Above the bolt was some sort of design cut into the plate — something like a snake spiraling up out of the center of an open book. Below the bolt was an inscription.
“It says,” Frankie answered without being asked, “Liber Vermiculosus Vertit.”
Then he kneeled down next to Gilrein and began to unscrew the bolt. His face was apparent even in shadow, spreading into childish smile.
“You’ll get a little dirty,” he said, “but it’s worth it.”
Gilrein pulls the plug in the tub and sits still until all the water drains away. Then he climbs out, towels off, throws on some clean clothes and runs to the main house before he can debate the consequences of what he’s about to do.
The entire Loftus clan is currently in Miravago, ostensibly touring an obscure Inca ruin near the mouth of the Urubango River, but in reality bartering for the freedom of a nun, a Sister of Torment and Agony, who has been alternately captured, raped, tortured, and released by both rebel and governmental forces in a kind of round robin of philosophical sadism.
Unlocking the rear door, Gilrein lets himself into the massive kitchen, all wainscoting and ceiling timbers, overstuffed rockers and a central table so large and heavy you could park a car on it. He knows this is where the family tends to congregate and Anna once remarked, without any sign of mockery, that this was where the bulk of healing at Sanctuary took place. Gilrein wouldn’t know — he’s never eaten a meal here.
He quickly unbolts the cellar door and makes his way down into the basement, grabbing a flashlight off the first stair. He moves past the furnace and the oil tanks, comes to the closet and opens it. He unbolts the manhole cover and opens the lid, then lowers himself down into the earth, into the burrow where Edgar Brockden tripped over the line that separates the sane from the demented. The chamber where this new Eden was transformed into Gehenna.
The box is down here somewhere. He just needs to get his bearings. He sets off along a random corridor and begins taking turns based on instinct more than memory. He gets lost a half-dozen times but manages to find his way back to the starting point and try again. And finally, just before giving up and acknowledging that this is probably not a smart thing to do, he comes to the section he’s been seeking, the place where someone, possibly Brockden himself, graffitied the floor with the words THE SPIRIT GIVES UTTERANCE.
Gilrein goes down to his knees and begins to push books off the shelf closest to the ground, lighting up title after title until he comes to a series of books that have no title, a trio of odd-sized, ramskin-bound notebooks, imported from France, affixed with ridiculous taxes and tariffs. And filled with the handwriting of Gilrein’s dead wife, Ceil.
Three years ago, when he squirreled the notebooks down here, he believed he could never bring himself to either read them or destroy them. Now, he folds himself into a sitting position, fixes the flashlight into the crook of his neck, and opens to page one.
9
Field Notes: A Book of Evidence & Conjecture
A. From the files of the E Squad: For your eyes only. The names have not been changed. Only abbreviated. And as we all know, there are no innocents.
The tyranny of the notebook. The compulsion to record. The burden just seeing it. Witnessing its existence. Its extravagance — do I really need to import this exact brand from that tiny papetier on Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie? Did an animal have to give its life, its shell, its dignity, so that I might bind the words of my petty ego?
The notebook has become fetish object. It has taken on an aura, become magnetic, possibly radioactive. Perhaps it has become sentient without me consciously knowing it.
It is an infection. It is a virus. It is a disease and a weakness. It is the manifestation of the paralife. Which becomes the antilife. You can choose one or the other, life or antilife, but you cannot choose both. You either live or you record the living. You either exist or reflect the existence. Your days will become material. Your years will become fodder. The love you could have cherished becomes something to be described, to be transformed into graphical representation.
This act, this heinous process, is a cannibalism of the worst variety. It is vampiric in the most infantile and anal sense. It is insidious in the degree of its addictive qualities. And, do not be fooled, do not believe the lies — there is no antidote beyond death.