An Idle Dream, Quite Gone Now
Fifteen years ago we held a funeral for Prof. Binford. This morning, he died.
It began about a month ago, at the start of term, when the evenings were still warm, and the sky was sometimes blue, and students and faculty alike could hardly contain the eagerness with which they greeted the return to regularity. Early one morning, the third or fourth day of the term, the groundskeeper entered the chapel and found a mound of cutlery covering the altar. Everyone assumed that it was a prank or some sort of initiation to one of the dining societies, and while I must admit that it did strike me as a bit sacrilegious, it seemed harmless enough. But, as you will imagine, Prof. Sleatham found nothing amusing about it, and he very badly attempted to carry out an investigation. He must have questioned every woman in the college twice, but when no one admitted to having anything to do with it he gave up and turned instead to haranguing the students from the lectern. “This conduct is expected from pubescent boys,” he scolded them, “but is not becoming of either a lady or a young scholar, and certainly not of someone who is both.” I’m sure he thought his speech was the pinnacle of erudition, but no one took him seriously, and the students continue to mock the phrase, even after all that has happened. He has changed much from that terrifying embodiment of discipline we knew, and when I see him now, I can scarcely believe that we were once so frightened of him. This business went on for only a few days, and when it was over the term began in earnest. Really, the whole affair was quite silly to everyone except for Prof. Sleatham, and if I didn’t know how this sad tale ends, I wouldn’t even have connected the episode to the horrifying events that followed.
It was perhaps not quite a week later when the murder occurred. Well, murder is what we called it then. I know better now – but I’m getting ahead of myself. The University tried to keep the affair confined within the Walls, but of course that effort was doomed from the start, and you will have read about this in the newspapers. It was a weekend, and a pair of students had stayed until last call at the Silver Prince at Claytemple. I don’t know what they were doing so far from the Hall, and it doesn’t matter except that it meant they came back alone very late – the porter didn’t even see them come in, and was probably asleep. The poor man was fired, of course, though whether he was awake or asleep or whether there had been an army of porters wouldn’t have made any difference. According to Mary, as they were passing the chapel, they heard a crackle, like a stack of wood suddenly igniting and then right in front of them there was a man. He vanished as suddenly as he had appeared, and then Mary, too startled even to move, saw that Jane had fallen to the ground. I will spare you any of the gruesome details (the newspapers didn’t!), but when the porter arrived with a light it became obvious that Jane had been stabbed and, unable to speak, she died within minutes.
Jane wasn’t especially interested in science, and as a Third Year, she was studying Ancient Literature, but in her first year I had been one of her tutors. She was bright and energetic and engaged. She did a very good paper on the theory of comets in the philosophical poetry of Carus, which I read over again in the days after her death. So much potential, all of it gone now, and to no end. Well, the University Police came and discovered nothing. There was no physical evidence except for Jane’s blood and the wound from which it came. There was simply no indication that anyone had been in the portico except for Jane and Mary, and after carrying out a series of interviews with everyone in the college and then throughout the whole University they simply gave up and issued a statement suggesting that students should try harder not to get murdered. Jane’s father is an important solicitor at some firm of important solicitors, and he attempted to bring in a private detective, but Vice-Chancellor Plompter wouldn’t allow it. This is when Jane’s father went to the newspapers, at which point the Metropolitan Police demanded entry to the University in order to carry out their own investigation. Again the Vice-Chancellor refused, and the Metropolitan Police came up with a suspect, an escaped prisoner, and insisted that the Charter only granted immunity in purely internal matters.
This was a tense time for everyone. The whole University was engaged in an internal debate about whether a centuries-old charter should really govern the policies of an institution in the modern world. You will agree, I think, that this is a valid discussion, but of course the matter was really just an attempt to politely express frustration that the administration was more interested in its own survival than a girl’s murder and the potential threat to the community. Faculty and students alike were divided on the issue, and among the students in particular the question took on a measure of debate about the value of the peerage. There was a fight in the Exham dining hall that would have resulted in a duel had not another student informed the college. It was at this point that the Duke of Ilchester decided to intervene in his capacity as Chancellor, and the Commissioner quickly backed down in the face of a public fight with the Savior of the Empire. But behind the scenes some compromise was reached, and the private detective was brought in after all. He was an exceedingly charming man, and I don’t doubt that if someone had been hiding information, he would have discovered it. He stayed on for about a week, finding nothing of course, but I think doing a great deal to repair the reputation and mental state of Mary, both of which had been deeply bruised by the University Police.
During this time something strange began to happen in my rooms. One evening after a late night at high table, I came back home and could not open my door. The key worked fine and the knob turned, but it simply would not budge. It took two porters several minutes, but eventually they were able to force the door open enough to permit me to slip through and see what was the matter. Every single book – hundreds of them – had been removed from the shelves and stacked neatly against the door. Another prank, I thought, though I couldn’t imagine how anyone had managed to pull it off, as the only other exit was one of the two windows that led nowhere but straight down to the quad seven stories below.
Of course, I should have been angry at such an invasion of my privacy, but these weren’t my books – they were Prof. Binford’s. Since I took over his rooms when I came back to the Hall, I had never touched his books, or used his desk, or even just stood there and looked at the office. Once the damage from the accident had been repaired, I set up an office of my own in the laboratory, and for fifteen years this room where we once spent so many hours has been nothing more than a dark hallway through which I hurry to reach my bed. But now here were his books in front of me, demanding my attention and forcing met to light a candle on his desk. I’m certain the sudden appearance of sentiment was, in part at least, the product of too much after-dinner brandy, but I dismissed the porters and set about returning the books to their proper place, remembering those happy years. I wish you had been there with me.
There is no need to tell you that I slept neither well enough nor long enough that night, and so the next evening I retired early. In the middle of the night, I awoke as if it was morning, though it could scarcely have been later than two. As I lay there weighing the virtues of forced sleep or putting the quiet hours to some productive purpose, I began to feel as if I was no longer alone. There was no fear or dread or sense of danger. It wasn’t at all like one of those childhood moments when you awake in the night with the certainty that something malicious is under your bad, but rather it was like one of those childhood moments when you’ve woken after an hour or so of sleep and can sense that your father has finally come home and is in the kitchen speaking to your mother and you want to get up and embrace him. I took that feeling as an encouragement to give up on sleeping, and I began to look forward to sneaking down to the kitchens to put on some coffee without waking the rest of the college. As I was hovering at my door, making sure that I had with me everything I would want for the day, I glanced at the window and saw there the silhouetted head of a man who must have been seated at the desk. I was startled, and I’m embarrassed to say that I shrieked. He stood up, and I saw that he wasn’t so much a man as a black figure in the shape of a man without any visible features, like a shadow given substance. And then there was a crackle and a low hiss and he was just gone.
I should have gone into the stairwell right then. I was at the door, there was a threat in my rooms, and I should have gone out. But I didn’t. My first instinct wasn’t to flee from the danger, but to see it, to classify it, to understand it. Just as I was fumbling around with a candle, I heard a door open and shut, and the heavy footsteps and even heavier breathing of Prof. Curtis as he tried to bound up the stairs. Mercifully, he had a candle with him, and together we looked around the rooms, first to make sure the intruder was really gone, and then to see if he had left behind any evidence. We found only one thing: the word HELP carved into the desk.
Naturally, the investigation was on again, but, again, nothing positive came of it. Save for the inscription, there was no evidence that anyone besides me had been in my rooms that evening. No one said anything to me directly, but I was aware that people thought I had fabricated the whole episode, and the word ‘hysteria’ was bandied about when people thought I wasn’t listening. Yet, I had only to endure this for two days, when once more the chapel became the focus of this strange business.
Just before tea, a gigantic thud followed by a piercing shriek reached the ears of everyone in the Hall. I stopped what I was doing in the lab and looked around at the post-graduates who had also paused in their tasks. The sound came again, and then a third time. By the time we reached the quad almost everyone else was already there, hovering around the entrance to the chapel. The iron doors were dented and the ornate embossments that decorated them had been smoothed away, as if someone had taken a battering ram to them. While we stood there transfixed, it happened again. We all watched the doors cave further inward, and we covered our ears against the grating of metal as the hinges tried to hold on. At first, it did appear that something was striking the doors, but as I stepped closer it became clear (to me, at least) that something was tugging at them from the inside. The bell in the steeple began to ring, at first slowly, and then faster and faster until noise and echo elided into one painful cacophony. After a few more seconds, the doors were ripped from their hinges and they flew into the church and smashed against the altar, where they clung like nails to a magnet. The bell kept clanging, and then it slowed and then the doors collapsed to the chapel floor and everything went silent.
I expected Prof. Sleatham to close the college on the spot, but instead he commanded everyone to go about their business as if nothing had happened. How he thought anyone could do that, I do not know, but I decided that ‘normal business’ included some hours spent with my students over pints at the Bitter Huntsman and left the Hall immediately. We took it as a given that the altar had become highly magnetized, and while none of our explanations as to how such a thing could happen were in any way satisfactory, it was nonetheless a relief to speculate about the cause. When I returned to my rooms, I found all of Prof. Binford’s books strewn about on the floor, mostly opened, some upturned, as if someone had been hastily searching for something. They were piled high, and I was faced with the option of picking up or stepping on them to get into the bedroom. The sight of the mess wearied me, and not for the first time I wished I kept a cot in the laboratory. It occurred to me to alert the University Police or Prof. Sleatham or even just a porter, but what I really wanted was to go to sleep and awake in the morning to discover that all of it had been a dream. But this is when I found the key to the whole affair.
Presumably on the assumption that no one would ever wish to consult the book, Prof. Binford had hollowed out his copy of Waterhouse’s Principles of Analytical Calculation and made a place suitable for securing his private journal. When I removed the little book from its hiding place I felt immediately connected to it, and I remembered seeing it resting on the corner of his desk. My desk, now. For the first time, I actually sat in his chair and looked at the room from his perspective. Somehow it seemed right, but at the same time I felt as if I were getting away with something. I am sitting there now, Beth, as I write to you about these things. That night, I stayed awake almost until sunrise, reading through his journal, and in the end finally able to formulate a hypothesis.
I am certain that you will have already guessed the source of this strange haunting, but if you have not, it will all become clear to you now. It began during our second year, at that magnetism conference the Society hosted. No doubt, you recall as vividly as I do the poor reception of Prof. Binford’s paper and the unnecessarily harsh rebuttal that Fisher gave in his comment. At the time, I too was unconvinced by his arguments for treating light, electricity, and magnetism as different manifestations of a single phenomenon, but I could not believe that other scientists could behave so brutally. He bore it so graciously and with so much dignity. Do you remember how he took us aside afterward and told us that when we had professorships of our own, we would have to make a choice about how to treat our colleagues? I think about that conversation often, and it has become almost like a bit of scripture upon which I reflect when I am fighting my own instincts to berate a colleague. I remember expecting that he would divert all of our efforts toward proving his suppositions correct, but instead he simply announced that the Academy had spoken and that therefore we should work on some other problem. And that was that.
Except that it wasn’t. This journal records his continued work on the project, in secret so that he would avoid the type of serious criticism that might jeopardize his position. During our last year of study, he merely tinkered with formulae, but when we were gone and he did not take on any more students, he began a series of practical experiments. The work is excellent, Beth, and quite sound. I will show it to you next month, and then we can decide what to do with it. But that’s another matter entirely. There was some sort of mishap early on, and Prof. Binford’s investigation into the matter led, ultimately, to the accident fifteen years ago, his own death, and to the death of Jane Caxton.
It began when an unexpected power surge caused an overload in an electrical-field generator he was using. He records that a stepladder he had left in the middle of the field vanished from sight and then returned a few seconds later. ‘Blinked out’ is how he describes it in the journal. It took him months to recreate the power surge, but when he did, he became able to make objects disappear for several minutes at a time. He proceeded quite scientifically from this point, and the journal is full of detailed records of everything he put into the field, how long each object ‘blinked out,’ and whether anything at all was different when the objects returned. Moreover, he has nearly endless pages speculating about the nature of the phenomenon, ranging from the impact of the electrical field on the behavior of light waves to some brief alteration of the passage of time. When he couldn’t be alone in the laboratory, he devoted his time to expanding his theoretical model to include time, and even began to question the nature of light. There are some notes regarding the construction of a device that might allow one to perceive light as a physical property, and I think we will want to follow up on that.
At night, when he had solitary access to the laboratory, Prof. Binford continued to expose objects to the field. Eventually, one returned slightly altered. The bottom of the wooden crate was now stained reddish-brown, as if it had been sitting in mud for the hour it had been gone. His journal at this point overflows with excitement, and an almost childish impatience as he was forced to wait several days before he could begin again. This next time, the crate came back covered in the reddish-brown mud, and with three symmetrical claw marks on one side. At this point, he put aside all of his work on light and time, and assumed that the objects were being moved across space to another location, that he had accidentally discovered a means of transporting objects over great distances instantaneously – a sort of matter transmitter. At this point, he began to spend his days on long walks in search of the reddish-brown mud, first only in the University quarter, and then throughout the City. Eventually he found an alley in Clearchurch that he thought must surely be the place – it had reddish-brown soil that turned muddy when exposed to water, and seemed also to house a number of stray cats. He hired a pair of local boys to look out for his next crate and to mark it with an X when they saw it. But none of his crates ever returned with their mark, and they insisted that, although they had stayed up very late looking for crates, they never saw any.
You can guess what the next step was. Prof. Binford determined to transmit himself through the field. When I read this, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that this had caused the accident, but I was wrong. He successfully transmitted himself seven times before the accident destroyed the laboratory, and on his last three journeys he was gone for over a month. Much of the journal is an account of his expeditions, and if I hadn’t seen for myself, I would have thought this the record of a brilliant man’s descent into madness. I present for you here some of the early entries so you can observe the same evidence that I have. You will want to read the other accounts next month.
* * *
January 13, 1834 10:37:21 PM
Return: 10:38:29 PM
My first trip through the field. The process of transmission is unpleasant, almost painful. Every part of my being felt as if it were burning from the inside, and all around me was a blue lightning that almost blinded me. It is hard to say how long that process lasted, but since I was gone for only a little more than a minute, it must have been merely a matter of seconds each way. It seemed much longer. When the lights and the pain stopped, I found myself outside at night in a featureless landscape. Below me was dirt or hard sand, above me a sky full of stars – but they were all wrong. Supposition: I must have traveled to some remote location in the southern hemisphere.
* * *
January 16, 1834 11:02:33 p.m.
Return: January 17, 1834 03:17:54 a.m.
Four hours! Alas, four tedious hours, as the wasteland seems to stretch infinitely in all directions. Yet, much excitement, for I brought with me another journal in which to transcribe the constellations, and I have now checked them against Mr. Webb’s Southern Star Atlas and they do not match. Wherever I have traveled, it is not on this world. I will travel again in a few days, and this time I will return with samples of the soil and atmosphere.
* * *
January 28, 1834 08:42:29 p.m.
Return: February 7, 1834 06:51:18 a.m.
Over a week this time, and again I returned to the chapel instead of the laboratory. And the process of solidification is taking even longer – nearly ten minutes now. Several experiments have borne fruit, though mostly of a bitter sort. It is certain now that I am not appearing in precisely the same location each time, but at seemingly random points within a square mile, or something close to it. Everything I brought with me returned at the same time as I did or slightly earlier, even the items I buried. It does not appear to be possible to create a stockpile of tools and supplies, and I will have to bring everything I need each time. At least it is always warm.
* * *
The source of all our current trouble was suddenly obvious to me, as it will be to you. For fifteen years, Prof. Binford had been at this other place (whatever that might mean), and somehow was now in the process of returning. Setting aside my panic, I approached the problem as clinically as possible, but I was not able to come to any conclusions that would be helpful in fully returning Prof. Bindford to us. But before I allowed myself a few hours of sleep, I determined not to make the fatal mistake of attempting anything further alone. I have no doubt that we could have assembled a team of researchers to bring him home safely, if only I had found his journal sooner.
I awoke the next morning to the sound of the chapel bell. At first, I thought it was happening again, but the noise was rhythmic, jut the morning bell, so I determined to ignore it. As I tried to return to sleep, I realized it was a Summoning, and I hurried out of bed, made a bad show of descending the stairs while trying to put on shoes, and joined the rest of the college in the chapel. The doors had been removed since the episode on the previous day, but the altar remained, badly damaged from the impact. Prof. Sleatham addressed us from the lectern. As is his custom, he went on for far too long before coming to the point, but he was about to announce the temporary closure of the college when the lectern began to lose its shape. It started with, or at least was most obvious with, the beak of the eagle, which slowly liquefied and drooped toward the floor. The clock near the organ pipes behaved similarly, and soon every piece of metal in the chapel began to liquefy and twist and bend. There was something quietly horrifying about watching common objects lose their form, but we were all transfixed – until we were snapped out of it by the sudden shattering of the windows. For a few seconds, time paused, and shards of colored glass hung in the air, and then, just as suddenly, the passage of time resumed, and the glass rained onto the floor. There was a horrible crackling, like being on top of a mountain in the middle of a summer storm, and then a deafening burst like thunder and a figure appeared atop the altar.
Now there was a general panic, and everyone rushed to get out of the chapel. I won’t say that I was unafraid, but because I now knew what was happening, even if I didn’t understand it, I was able to remain calm, and I saw Prof. Binford stretch out his hand and smile and then collapse. When the chapel had cleared I hurried to the altar. He was alive and awake, but only barely. “Esther,” he muttered. It was a question. He was surprised to see me, or perhaps he wasn’t sure if that was really my name. I took his hand and tried to reassure him, but blood began to trickle from his ears and his nose, and then from his eyes. “It is not for us,” he told me, and then he stopped breathing.
For a few hours very late last night, I thought he was going to return to us, I thought we were going to get him back, but it was all a cruel joke. Something of this will be in the newspapers soon, but I wanted you to hear the full story from me. If I hurry now, I can post this today, so I will save any further comments for when you arrive. I was already looking forward to seeing you, of course, but now more than ever.
Give my love to Eric and the boys.
