The elongated visage, eyeless and suffering, disintegrated under pressure from another, quite distinct face, the way a form in flowing paint is pushed out of shape when another color is poured into the mix. The rounder face with owlish eyes, replacing the first, was quickly pressed aside by several others: human shapes with streaming hair, men and women and mixed gender, some faces well defined and others only sketches. Some looked directly at us; others didn’t seem to see us, and shattered themselves against the windowpane.
They sang, with some occasional harmony but mostly discord—they were the dissonant choir. Some of them looked fairly happy, or at least pleasantly distracted; a good many others seemed to be grieving, endlessly grieving . . .
I began to make out words in their unrehearsed oratorio, just phrases here and there. “Why aren’t you here, when . . . when . . .” “I thought I’d shoot myself too but I was afraid, I couldn’t do it, I just sat by the bodies till the police came and I waved the gun, then the police did it, they shot me . . .” “I can smell my own dead body, I can’t get away from the smell . . .” “Mama mama mama no . . .” “Quoi de neuf? Pas grand chose . . . grand chose . . .” “Don’t hit me again, again. Don’t hit me again, again . . .” “Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes!” “Don’t . . . don’t . . .” “I won’t, I won’t . . .” “Peux-tu m’aider!” “Damn you to hell, sir, damn you to hell!”
I felt sick to my stomach, listening to them. The walls seemed to vibrate with the cries . . .
“Do you speak Latin or French or any other language?”
“Some Spanish, but . . .”
“But you find you know what the spirits you see are saying even when they sing in other languages!”
“Yeah. One of the French ones said, You, help me, in French . . . Some guy spoke in Latin, something about I did what I could, let’s see you do better . . .”
Doyle nodded briskly. “Here the tower of Babel does not stand—though the turret of Doyle does! But here in the afterlife the world itself is our translator.”
I winced as another face deformed itself against the window.
Doyle came over and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t be afraid of them—this is a mere psychic storm!”
“A mere psychic storm? Come on, Doyle,” I moved my chair back from the window. “What is it?”
Doyle glanced at me. “Good Lord, but you look white as a ghost yourself. Don’t be afraid, dear fellow! There might be a bit of leakage from the storm in here—but we’ll be sheltered enough, on the whole. If at some time you are outdoors, and too close to the heart of it, why, you may find it rather overwhelming. Some people retreat to the basement and wait it out in psychic storm shelters because they’re afraid of psychological contamination—and some get a touch nauseated by the experience. But really it’s all a lot of fearmongering. A little ectoplasm, a slipping in a slick of spilled anxiety, nothing grievous . . .”
The ectoplasm in question was seeping in through tiny cracks along the edges of the window frame, coming through in a sheet of pearly vapor that then twined itself into the shapes of hands, fingers, reaching for us . . .
“Doyle,” I said harshly, pushing my chair back sharply with my feet, “what the hell is a psychic storm?”
Doyle cleared his throat. “No need for a chap to raise his voice—”
“Doyle!”
“Right. Most of the forgetters . . . souls who don’t know who they are . . . the simple way to say it is, they are too insubstantial to incarnate in places like Garden Rest.” He looked ponderingly out the window. “Eventually, after muddling about over land, in places like the swamp, they find their way to larger clouds of such soul sparks, far away, over the sea. Usually the sea cloud is too distant to see from Garden Rest. To mariners they might appear to be lightning storms.”
Mariners? I didn’t want to interrupt him to ask about it. But I imagined sailing on the Purple Sea . . .
Doyle seemed worried about wasting time. He clearly had some sort of plan. He went on, his tone taut with impatience. “When a cloud of sparks reaches a state of maximum concentration, a wind builds up, on one side, a wind that is quite indistinguishable from psychic will. It is wind and will at once. It is as if the afterworld itself has taken a breath and exhaled. This exhalation blows the forgetting sparks into a swirling ball, driving it in over the land, where it becomes a psychic storm. As the storm wears on, something like the whirling inward pull of a galaxy takes place amongst souls instead of stars, and in the spiral’s center the sparks suddenly come into contact, and in reaction are blasted outward, diffused into the ghostly form, as you see here . . .”
The ectoplasmic fingers were reaching into the room from around the window frame . . . but when they reached a certain distance into the room, just short of me, they became wispy, and dissipated—and vanished. But outside, faces still battered against the window like leaves blown by a hurricane.
Doyle opened a drawer, took out a bottle and two small glasses, and poured afterworld whiskey for us, as he went on, “After the storm reaches its peak, most of the souls . . . the forgetters . . . are absorbed into the afterworld background. Some seem to become the nascent core, very thin indeed, of Earthly reincarnations.”
“They end up in someone back on Earth?”
“Generally. Others are absorbed into the background mind of the afterworld itself, to be radiated downward and consumed by matter on lower planes. It’s all quite painless to the forgetters. Of course, some few forgetters struggle to become something more substantial. They may even accumulate enough ‘selfness’ to join us here, on this level. I have met people who were once forgetters. But that will wait for a later conversation. A tot of whiskey? You might find a dram reassuring.”
I accepted, and the reassurance of the whiskey came not a moment too soon—the window directly across from me cracked. The crack was almost horizontal, slanting from one side to the other. “Doyle, I thought you said . . .”
“Oh bother,” Doyle grumbled. “It’s the wind, not the souls, doing that. I’ve been meaning to re-do these windows, I do think Brummigen did his part of the turret formulating sloppily. He was in a foul mood that day because we gave his lot a terrible bluing at cricket, the evening before . . .”
I got to my feet. A face was squeezing through the crack in the window. It came through like a sheet of translucent paper that writhed into the outline of a head—and then it darted at my face.
“Son of a—!” It’s all I managed to say before I fell back into the chair, spilling the rest of my brandy on my wrist, and hearing a sorrowful roaring in my ears. My eyes went blind, at first, just nothing but blackness, then, against the backdrop of aching darkness, pinwheels of fire flared out before me, perhaps some vision of the “galaxy” of forgetters. The pinwheels crashed together with a grand gonging sound and I found myself . . . somewhere else.
I was in a hotel room, somewhere high up, gazing off a balcony through heavy brown smog—smog as thick as dirty dishwater awash with gravy. I was in China, somewhere, around 2009. Someone behind me spoke in Chinese and I understood them.
She spoke in Mandarin, but I understood her in English: “I am going to take the child, we cannot live like this.”
I felt a small hand tug at my shirt. I turned and picked up my small daughter and I tipped us both over the edge of the balcony, whispering to her in Mandarin that we’re going for a ride, a ride, we’re going to fly like swans . . .
She didn’t scream. She laughed. Then we struck the ground . . .
Pinwheels, darkness . . .
“Fogg! Nicholas Fogg!”
I felt a strong grip on my upper right arm and opened my eyes. I was staring at a place where a floor and a wall intersected. I heard Doyle’s voice, “You back with the living, so to speak, dear fellow?”
“I didn’t notice you had a Persian rug in here, before,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse in my own ears. I felt like I might burst into tears.
He helped me to stand. I was wobbly and felt sick to my stomach.
“Not a Persian rug, but a good imitation of one,” Doyle said. “Here, I’ve set up your chair again, sit down . . .”
I let him ease me into the chair. He began to take my pulse—then desisted. “Absurd to take your pulse. Just the habit of an old physician.”
I looked at the windows. I could see the faces receding, rolling up, melting into flares of light. “Storm’s dying down?”
“Yes. Quite spent, I should say.”
“How long was I . . .”
“Ten minutes, perhaps . . .”
“Ten minutes!”
“Didn’t feel that long?”
I shook my head. “It sure didn’t. I was in . . . I think it was China. I had a little girl. We jumped over the balcony and died . . .”
“Oh, do have some more whiskey. I apologize, I must get the windows firmed up . . .”
“Not your fault . . .” I accepted the glass. “Thanks.” I felt dazed. “Sorry I dropped the glass.”
“Not at all. Sorry you were invaded—your mind was swept away into someone else’s. You relived some essential part of their tragedy. When there’s such a storm we can be rained upon by the sheer condensation of someone’s sad past! Most of the forgetters were deeply unhappy when they died.”
“If that what makes you a forgetter . . . surprised I’m not one.”
“You’re an old soul. That’s the reason. You have a lot of substance. You’re rather a complex chap, after all . . .”
“An old soul?”
“Yes. You developed over many lifetimes. Of course not everyone reincarnates. But . . . look at your arm. See the hairs standing up?”
I looked at the hairs rising on my forearm. I could see it—and feel it. There was a charge in the air. Doyle’s sharp mustache points seemed almost comically pronounced and his hair, I saw, was gently writhing on his head.
I had to smile. “Is my hair dancing about?”
He grinned, suddenly resembling Teddy Roosevelt in an old photo, and combed his hair back with his hands. “Yes—you see, the storm psychically charges the air, for a time. So some good came of all this, as I’d hoped . . .”
He stood up, brought me one of the volumes from his desk, and laid it open on my lap. “Now . . . observe.”
The text on the book’s pages was calligraphically written out, but was undulating on the page. It reminded me of when I was a teenager and I took the brown mescaline at the hot springs near Mount Shasta.
“That supposed to look psychedelic?” I asked.
“Psychedelic? That is a term I’ve heard, but it was never explained to me.”
“Hallucinogenic.”
“It does look that way, but in fact it’s different—drug hallucinations are illusions. This is actually shifting on the page. The psychic storm shows us a level normally invisible to those of us who are not sufficiently refined. Ah—you see, it becomes legible.”
I could read it now:
The semblance requires many layers of formulation and additional channels of inner circulation before the ways of life consent to take part. It is in the spirit of alchemy, but is more than alchemy.
“Who wrote this?” I asked.
“It was written at least a century ago, and, in fact, the author did not sign his name. Or her name. Read on . . .”
We who have attempted this direct genesis seek to emulate the creation inherent in the energies transmitted by the sun. My colleague suggests that reproductive instincts play a part. It may be so, for no one reproduces here, precisely, though there are creatures who seem to spawn in this world and some variant of biological evolution is indicated. Yet cells seem to function on different principles from the biology of the world before . . . It is a biology so intimately connected with mind that there is little distinction . . .
The words parted like curtains, and seemed to whisper, as a moving picture formed on the page like a slightly murky photograph of a one of the wiry shapes, like the remains of Morgan Harris . . . but this one was weaving itself from up from the ground, a slow animation on the book’s page, the formulating of a man’s shape. But the shape was more fully formed than Harris’s remains. Yet it was not quite human or alive. Two other men, seen from behind, had their hands stuck into the ground; a third, face hidden by rising smoke, seemed to be cutting himself with some elaborate instrument, and directing the blood . . . which was not blood but a silver liquid that moved through the air in a slow flowing, defying gravity, to pour into the wiry man-shape . . .
“You note that the iridescent silver of the life formulation flow,” Doyle said, pointing, “has much in common with the appearance of the ‘snail track’ material we found on Morgan Harris’s remains . . .”
I nodded. “Now that you mention it, I—”
I broke off when the image of the formulating man vanished in an explosion within its frame.
I just had time to see the words,
. . . the instability may be a message or it may be . . .
And then a new picture flickered into place, exposed by the psychic charge; another shape arising from the ground. But it wasn’t being formulated by anyone. It seemed to organize itself from the stuff of the soil. It was a monstrous shape, something like the lizard forepart of a Gila monster, but big, much bigger than a man, an indistinguishable mix of stone, soil, mulch, and flesh.
A ragged, bearded man stepped into the image, from out of frame, and seemed to be defiantly raving at the creature, shaking his fist and head, telling the beast to be damned and go away. The creature had eyes that seemed made of mushrooms; it had teeth made of broken crystals; it had a black, quivering gullet, exposed wide and wider as it opened its enormous maw—it emerged only halfway from the ground, like a sea serpent rising partway from the water; dirt trickled down its rugged sides, as it rose. It reared over the man, who shouted wildly, defiantly—madly. The creature angled its head down—and lunged, taking the raging man into its maw, so only the fellow’s wriggling bare feet remained. The monster swallowed—and the feet disappeared. A black, muddy tongue smacked along the stony jaws and then withdrew. The creature drew its head back, thrust it forward, as if about to belch—but out of its mouth came a fat blue spark, about the size of a bird . . . which flickered up and out of the frame.
The monster began to ripple away in the ground, like a swimming snake, the ground seeming to part for it like muddy water. The text undulated to cover the image and . . .
And then I felt a jolt of psychic intrusion, darkness and pinwheels, and I heard Arthur Conan Doyle’s voice, ruminating, muttering, miserable, as if echoing from some dark pit in the world . . .
“She would not die, she would not go, her unfailing kindness a wall between me and my love, my only love, and I must atone, atone forever for love, so long as she . . .”
I looked up at Doyle, but he wasn’t speaking. Yet I could hear his voice.
“ . . . so long as she lives . . .”
Doyle gave me a startled look. “I seem to be picking up a wandering bit of something from your memories, Fogg. About—a woman in Las Vegas?”
I blinked. “Me? My thoughts?”
“You are hearing something from me?”
“Um—yeah. It was like your voice, something about atoning? But . . . you weren’t talking. Not out loud.”
“I see. Yes. It’s not reading one’s mind, per se, not usually.” His eyes seemed suddenly flat, dead; his voice toneless. “It’s a sort of recording, an echo from the deep unconscious. The psychic charge from the storm transmits it quite inadvertently. Normally we have a protective sheath against unintended telepathy. It can be rather . . .”
He didn’t finish what he was saying, his voice breaking as he picked up the book from my lap and walked to the desk, his back turned to me. He cleared his throat. “The charge is seeping away. The books will . . . will show us only their text now . . .”
“I couldn’t read the text until the charge happened. Then the writing changed . . .”
He sniffed. “It can be read, with application, you simply have to get used to the calligraphy style.”
“What was that thing, in the second picture? The monster?”
“It’s called the Scargel. We don’t know who named it that or why. We are not entirely sure what its place here is. Sometimes it . . . seems to sort people out.” He let out a long, slow, windy breath. “But that is enough for now, Fogg. I will meditate on all this.”
He was still standing with his back to me.
I looked out the window. I could see the psychic storm in the distance, fulminating like heat lightning in dark clouds, seeming to shrink within itself, diminishing. The discordant choir was barely audible.
“I’ll . . . see what else I can find out about Morgan Harris,” I said, not at all sure how I would do that.
“Ah, yes.” He sat at the desk, his shoulders slumped. “Yes, do. I expect Touie is in the storm shelter so . . . you will have to see yourself out.”
There was an uncomfortable, indefinable embarrassment between us, palpable in the air itself. Doyle wasn’t pleased that I’d heard that echo from his dark places.
I turned away, and went downstairs, and let myself out the front door. I didn’t see Touie.
I walked past the ironic tombstone of Arthur Conan Doyle, and out the gate, into the kindly refreshment of the cleansed air soughing softly over the street.
The birds sang. Most of it was instrumental stuff; bird soloing. But I thought I heard one of them singing, “She would not die, she would not go, her unfailing kindness a wall . . . so long as she . . .”