Memoranda (15 page)

“So, here we have it,” said Nunnly. “The monster has returned.”

“It was terrifying,” said Anotine. “Cley, you're lucky he didn't kill you.”

That is when I looked around and noticed that we were all standing there naked. The gentlemen finally left after offering assurances that we need only yell and they would come running. Anotine and I went back to bed, but she was no longer in the mood for experimenting. She fell asleep in my arms, and I was left to lie awake and consider how I was going to save everyone.

The following afternoon, we all stood, this time fully clothed, at the edge of the island a few feet behind the winch.

“It's some bad business,” said Nunnly, pointing to where the ground had disappeared beneath half of the giant mechanism.

“Through the night, things have gotten worse,” said Brisden. “The rate at which the island is disappearing seems to have increased radically. What would you say, Anotine?” he asked.

She nodded. “No question about it.”

“I wonder if the monster's visit has anything to do with this?” said the doctor.

“At this rate,” said Anotine, “we don't have much longer. There is every indication that this process will continue to accelerate.”

I could see that what they were saying was true. The winch now literally teetered on the rim, the process of disintegration readily visible.

“Do you think Below will leave us here to die?” asked Brisden.

“I'm not counting on him,” said Nunnly. “He left us here with you, didn't he?”

Brisden tried to smile, but the intensity of his stare fixed on the precarious circumstances of the mechanism showed his concern.

“We need a plan,” said the doctor, “and I'm sorry to say, one that might run contrary to our host's prescribed protocol. Are you all in agreement?”

“You mean revolt?” asked Nunnly.

The doctor nodded.

“Count me in,” said the engineer.

“Anotine?” Hellman asked.

“On one condition,” she said. “That Cley becomes a full partner and is no longer viewed as a specimen.”

“What the hell,” said Brisden. “Now that I think of it, this place bores me to tears. As for Cley, I have no objections.”

The doctor and Nunnly agreed that I was now part of the group. I thanked them for their vote of confidence.

“You can reserve your thanks,” said Hellman, “until we tell you what happens when you go against the wishes of the island.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You mean Claudio?” asked Brisden.

The doctor nodded.

“We shouldn't discuss this anymore right now,” said Anotine. “The minute our minds light up with these thoughts, the Fetch will be swooping down on us.”

“True,” said Nunnly.

“We discovered the other day that it can't pry into your thoughts if you are drunk,” I told them.

“It wobbles like a one-winged bird,” said Anotine.

“Well,” said the doctor, “I suggest we begin drinking as soon as possible.”

“My place?” asked Nunnly.

“Sounds good,” said Brisden, who separated from the group and walked over to the winch. “Say good-bye to your favorite toy, Doctor,” he said as he reached his hand out and gave the heavy wooden base a slight shove.

That was all the force that was needed to send the huge thing sliding, slowly at first, and then with all its weight over the edge. The rest of the group joined Brisden at the rim to watch it fall. Plummeting with great speed, it punched through clouds and appeared to diminish in size as it went.

Nunnly clapped. “Tour greatest accomplishment since arriving, Bris,” he said.

“I feel now as if I had always wanted to do that,” said Brisden.

“I'm wondering if it will disturb the dream of the ocean,” said the doctor as it splashed into the liquid mercury, raising a geyser of silver liquid that must have been an eighth of a mile high.

“Could the disturbance awaken its sleep?” asked Anotine.

The doctor raised his eyebrows in contemplation of her question. “Perhaps,” he said. “Or perhaps it might cause a nightmare.”

As far as I was concerned, a nightmare was more to the point. Events were now moving at an alarming rate, and a solution was nowhere in sight. I had forgotten for so long about the antidote that it was hard for me to again get my mind around the method of how I had even arrived on the island, not to speak of the absurdity of what I had meant to do there. I never thought that I would be thankful for being struck by a demon, but without Misrix's visit I surely would have drowned in the unreal reality of the place. The worst complication of all was that I had fallen in love with Anotine, and there was no amount of reasoning that would change that. Women I could never truly have, like the theme of islands, seemed to be a recurrent motif in my life.

The winch had surfaced after its fall—an insignificant dot in the infinity of the ocean below. I could commiserate with its situation. We all watched as, slowly, it sank again beneath the silver waves for the last time.

“Who's next?” asked Nunnly.

15

A stiff north wind had begun to blow by the time we left the edge of the island and headed back toward the village. As we passed through the wood, the leaves now fell in torrents, swirling around us and moving along the ground in green waves. It was as if the trees had determined that they should be completely barren by evening.

“It looks like rain,” said Brisden.

I gazed up through a hole in the now tattered canopy of branches and could see dark clouds passing in front of the sun. The day had taken on an autumnal feel, and that glorious light was slowly losing strength as the sky tinged toward a dull violet.

“Twice in the same week,” said the doctor. “I don't recall that ever having happened before.”

“I remember entire years when it didn't rain once,” said Nunnly.

Anotine moved in close to me, and I put my arm around her. I could feel her shivering slightly, and I knew it was not from the drop in temperature. She slowed her pace, and when the others had moved on ahead of us a short distance, she whispered, “You are here to help us aren't you, Cley? You've come to save us.”

I stopped walking, surprised by her comment.

She looked up at me.

I nodded. “How did you know?” I asked.

“The dream I had two nights ago. In it you revealed to me the secret for restoring the island. I tried so hard to remember what you said, so that I could take it back from sleep with me into daylight. But the second I opened my eyes the words that formed the plan dissolved like the boundary of the island, crackling into nothing.”

“If I tell you now, the Fetch will come,” I said. “Wait until later, and I will tell everyone. When I do, you must support me, for the others will never believe what I will say.”

“I promise,” she said, and reached up to kiss me.

As we began again our journey toward the village, a light drizzle started to fall. We walked without speaking, but I wanted to remind Anotine that a plan was not a guarantee of success. While crossing the field to the steps that would take us to Nunnly's rooms, we passed the Fetch, its green stare trained on a bird that lay dead on the withering grass. Not wanting it to notice us, we slipped quietly past, and once we were in the corridors of the terraced village, sprinted the rest of the way to the engineer's quarters.

By the time we arrived, the drizzle had turned to a true rain. We came through the entrance to find cigarettes burning and quarts of Schrimley's and Rose Ear Sweet opened on the table. Nunnly and Doctor Hellman drank from glasses while Brisden directly engaged a pint bottle of the notoriously bitter distillation known as Tears in the River. Two seats and two glasses awaited Anotine and myself. We took our places and Nunnly poured. When we had our drinks in hand, Brisden lifted his bottle toward us, and said, “Here's to chaos.”

“Get the noise machine, why don't you,” said Hellman.

Nunnly got up from the table, and as I followed his movement to the back of the room, I noticed for the first time that the walls were covered with diagrams of machines. The drawings of gears and hobs and axles rendered in a clear, clean, black ink upon pure white paper were startling in their complexity and beauty. Arrows curled around the designs and indicated directions of rotation and thrust. They covered every inch of the back wall and much of the side walls as well.

Off in the left corner was a drawing table, its surface tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. Next to it on one side sat a stand, holding jars and cans full of brushes, quills, knives, half-melted candles, and bottles of ink. On the other side was a mattress that lay directly on the floor with no box spring or headboard. I pictured Nunnly late at night, overcome by exhaustion from working away at the depiction of one of his mechanical masterpieces: the brush drops from his hand as he falls from his chair onto the waiting mattress.

From under a stack of used paper, Nunnly retrieved a wooden box with a crank handle on the side and carried it to the table at which we were sitting. He placed it down carefully, and then, with his right hand, turned the squealing crank in a counterclockwise direction no less than fifty times. When he finally let go, the box began, very gently, to hum. He walked over and took his seat.

Anotine turned to me, her eyes closed, and said, “Shhh, just listen.”

A faint noise of very fine glass slowly fracturing issued from the mechanism. Before long, though, it increased slightly in volume and arranged itself into a tinkling music that sounded like icicles being struck by minute tin hammers. The song was slow and sweet, eliciting a sense of nostalgia. I looked around at the company and saw that they all had their eyes closed and were following every note with emotional intensity.

I thought of them for the first time as a group, their different personalities and the focus of their individual studies, mixing together in a cocktail of inspiration. They were not merely symbolic objects containing secrets waiting to be remembered. If that were the case, there would have been no need for them to carry on lives and interact. I realized that Below was, through them, using the mnemonic system as a type of laboratory for creativity. Not only was he storing ideas here on the floating island, he was blending them to create new hybrids of thought. The researchers and their interactions, their conversations, constituted an imagination engine whose output was gathered and brought to consciousness by the Fetch. In short, Below was thinking without having to think about it.

When the box ran down and the last plinking note had sounded, Doctor Hellman turned to me, and said, “When I hear that, I can't help but believe that things are going to work out for the best.”

“Very pretty,” I said, and they all smiled at my approval.

“Let's have another drink,” said Nunnly, “and then the doctor can explain what happened to Claudio.”

We each assiduously worked at our poison until our glasses were emptied and then refilled. Brisden polished off the bottle before him and reached down next to his chair to lift another pint he had at the ready. As he twisted off the top, he said, “I can hardly remember what Claudio looked like.”

“I remember his thin black mustache,” said Anotine.

“Hair that curled upon his head in a rather remarkable wave,” said Nunnly.

“An altogether serious-minded fellow,” added Doctor Hellman. “Claudio was a numbers man. He worked mathematics like an artist. The tune you just heard was composed by him. It is a theorem of his transposed into notes. For him, numbers had personalities, equations were like plays or stories, great comedies and tragedies that could make him laugh or cry. An interesting fellow, but ill-suited for life on the island as it is prescribed by our absent employer.

“His vanity got the better of him, and he eventually came to the decision that he would no longer share his discoveries with the Fetch. We all cautioned him that to meddle with its work might be a tragic mistake. We did not know the extent to which we would be proven correct. One day when the head swooped down to extract his recent findings, he managed to duck beneath it, come up from behind and grab its long locks with both hands. It attempted to free itself, and the wailing it sent up brought us all scurrying to see what the commotion was. When we arrived he was swinging it by the hair, slamming the head into one of the walls in the courtyard outside his rooms. He gave it four or five bone-crunching whacks before it turned on him and bit his hands, finally liberating itself. It sped back to the tower emitting the sounds of a child weeping.”

“He was very proud of what he had done,” said Brisden.

“To say the least,” continued the doctor. “The next day, we were all sitting at the club, that room where you, Cley, initially materialized. We were drinking and playing cards, when suddenly there appeared a figure in the doorway. He was a tall, exceedingly thin man with a bulbous forehead and a chin that came nearly to a point. I remember his plain brown suit and how snugly it fit his emaciated body. His fingers were long and graceful, and they wriggled like unjointed worms when he spoke. ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,' he said.”

“Wait,” said Anotine. “Do you remember his head was shorn but for two long braids in the back?”

The others nodded.

“The look he wore on his face was what I imagine my expression will be when I go to the closet and find there is no more Tears in the River,” said Brisden.

“Or mine, when you next open your mouth to speak,” said Nunnly.

Brisden grinned around his cigarette.

“A nightmare,” said Doctor Hellman. “Then he said, ‘I am looking for Professor Claudio,' in a high, whistling voice. We were all too amazed at the sight of another person on the island to respond. Claudio finally came to his senses, and said, ‘I am Claudio.' The stranger excused himself to the rest of us and walked over to the mathematician. In an awkward manner, he leaned down. I thought he was going to whisper something to the professor, but at the last second, he put his lips over Claudio's ear, covering the entire thing. Then began the most horrifying process I have ever witnessed. I don't know how else to say it, but that he sucked the life right out of him.”