The Croning (25 page)

He dreamt of becoming lost in the dark woods, of being chased by children with knives, of stumbling through the trees and falling among rocks piled high in a clearing, of lying helpless as a turtle on its back as the sun boiled red and dripped away into blackness.

In the morning, he heated coffee while the floors were yet cold and starlight leaked through the window. He warmed milk in a saucepan for Thule, who waited patiently beneath the table, his long pink tongue nearly dragging. Don hunched at the table and studied the photographs. He didn’t like them any better than before, and even less when he considered their at least tangential relation to
The Black Guide
. Eventually, he stuffed them into the envelope and dropped it into a drawer and set to fixing breakfast.

5.

Monday, Labor Day, was more of the same. They began at daylight and quit only when darkness stole over the land.

Kurt collapsed on the couch during the ten P.M. news and fell asleep with his mouth hanging open. Don left the television on for white noise, not tuning in to whatever atrocity the media had fastened on today. He idly rued the fact he’d lost track of current events—on the domestic front, he was aware of the current president, but had not a clue what the man’s policies were; when it came to foreign events, he was marooned on a lee shore. If pressed, he seriously doubted his ability to quote the latest big ticket crises; he couldn’t even name the current Canadian prime minister. The whole political mess, the universal squalor, the essential pettiness of mankind oppressed him and he’d submerged himself in work and writing and books.

When the late show started, Don rose and went to Michelle’s study. He hadn’t exactly planned to bust in. The day’s events had effected a sea change in him that eluded definition. He thought of Bluebeard’s young bride, of locked doors and dire warnings, and smiled feebly. The image of Michelle as Bluebeard was far less amusing than it might’ve seemed.

The door was locked; not to bar Don, who knew better than to disturb her things, but from ingrained habit of raising nosy, destructive children. Fortunately, he knew she kept the key in a decorative dish full of antique and foreign currency such as Buffalo nickels and rupees. It had been a while since he last entered the study. He’d probably ventured inside less than a dozen times since they began spending summers at the house. Michelle discouraged it, claiming it as a sanctuary. She professed fear her unorthodox filing system (scattered papers and open texts everywhere) would be disrupted by a careless intrusion.

The room was large and stuffy in the manner of chamber a 17th century historian might’ve called home. Ceremonial spears and knives, and pink sandstone figurines of Brahma, Shiva and the celestial court contributed to the East Asian and British-India motifs. Michelle tried to hang one giant wooden fertility mask specific to an Aboriginal tribe deep in the Australian Outback over their headboard until Don emphatically put his foot down; there it stood, canted in shadow, grinning terribly behind a wicker shield. She’d developed a love for Aboriginal art in recent years; she accumulated carvings and etchings, figurines of skinny, cadaverous Dreamtime spirits, an authentic didgeridoo (despite it being verboten among the tribes for a woman to play the instrument), and a boomerang cut from light, lacquered wood.

Leather and clothbound tomes weighted floor-to-ceiling shelves, overflowed her desk, a relic she’d imported from the British Consulate in Indonesia, which had in turn recovered it from a local museum that specialized in artifacts from the days of the East India Company, and it might very well have originally furnished the office of a company governor. Also upon the desk were a skull, an hourglass full of white sand, and a laptop; paper weights and inkwells, a calligraphy kit in a teak box, and cubes of sealing wax. Maps and parchment cascaded amid the piles of books.

The majority of the documents were scribed in Greek, German, and Latin. Michelle collected scholarly papers much as her aunt had collected dolls; a substantial portion of the material was purchased from European libraries and churches and private dealers; the remainder were transcriptions she endeavored during her spare moments. He was struck simultaneously with childish wonder and claustrophobia, the latter sensation serving to fend his natural curiosity more than Michelle’s mild neuroses could’ve managed.

He ran his hand over the spines of Michelle’s books, brushing fine dust from them, studying the titles, albeit randomly, uncertain why he’d chosen to snoop among her belongings, or what he expected to find. Most of it proved to be the usual fare: thoroughly pedestrian texts, a goodly deal of which he’d personally acquired for her, such as
The Golden Bough
. Then there were the books Michelle had secured during her travels; primarily accounts by obscure (to Don, at any rate) anthropologists and daring explorers regarding remote expeditions to jungle tribes, replete with illustrations and the occasional photograph. Nonetheless, the majority of the books came with the house; these latter comprised fragments of the celebrated Mock collection. According to Michelle, Aunt Babette’s portion, for example, rivaled the archives of a city library.

He’d counted seventeen encyclopedias in five different languages, and two hundred textbooks of varied subjects that ranged from architecture to metallurgy. There was a lesser sampling of esoteric manuscripts detailing occult practices and theory by authors of formidable stature. Among them, Dee’s
Liber Loagaeth
and
De Heptarchia Mystica
; and Trithemius’s
Steganographia
; and a smattering of other masters, the likes of Agrippa, de Plancy, and Mathers. Don dabbled in comparative religion and European folklore as an undergraduate, had taken semi-permanent residence in off-campus bookstores and antiquarian shops—this morbid preoccupation with the macabre and the uncanny served as a useful counterbalance to his overwhelmingly rationalist bent, plus, it impressed the hell out of Michelle, who was quite scandalous when it came to reading habits. On the other hand, he suspected such hoary tomes might be a contributing factor to his nyctophobia.

Spread across one wall and a portion of a bookcase was Michelle’s great genealogical map in progress; a colossal mosaic consisting of dozens of parchment scrolls taped together at the edges. The Mock family tree branched and forked and branched again like multitudinous veins radiating from a burst capillary, the whole of this diagram taller than Don and twice as wide. Quite obviously the ongoing project of successive generations, it began in quill and was illegible to Don’s eye, what with bleeding ink and moisture and mold discolorations, and, not the least of which, the fact it vacillated between various foreign dialects. Also, despite the enormous amount of labor, it seemed raw and incomplete; many of the branches and tributaries dwindled to dead ends and question marks. Michelle had checkered its width and breadth with pushpins and sticky notes.

To supplement her drafting, she had stacked ten or eleven books of the Mock family history on a worktable and nearby stools. These dense, leathery tomes belonged to a nineteen-volume series normally tucked in a corner behind a low stand surmounted by a flock of stuffed Canadian geese. The books were products of exemplary craftsmanship. A number of her ancestors had earned livings as printers and lithographers, including several of moderate renown; a handful served at the courts of French and Spanish Kings, and, according to legend, the Vatican itself during the latter days of the Renaissance. These nineteen volumes purportedly documented the Mock lineage and historical accomplishments, warts and all, and would constitute the primary source of Michelle’s genealogical inquiry.

He asked her once if she intended to write a book; this exasperated query came on the heels of a particularly unpleasant summer wherein she’d locked herself into the study and refused to come forth for days at a stretch, leaving to him the housework, the bills, the raging bundles of hormones the twins had metamorphosed into when Mom and Pop weren’t paying attention. Haggard and ill-tempered, she snapped something to the effect he was a blockhead.
You are a Goddamned blockhead
, was how she put it, in fact. He agreed with the correctness of her assessment; however, this in no way explained the nature of her obsession, nor mitigated her dereliction of duty. She’d given him a long, wintry look, the coldest he’d ever received prior or since. Then she said,
Leave a girl her secrets, Don
. And he had; although neither of them were kids at the time of the exchange—Kurt and Holly were seniors and already had their letters of acceptance to college. Don pretended disinterest in his wife’s endeavor; a disinterest that became more or less reality as the years rolled by and they settled into their respective roles with clearly delineated boundaries. Accommodation had ever been a cornerstone of wedded bliss.

Don hefted a book that lay open on the table amid a clutter of Michelle’s crude charcoal sketches of female nudes. It bore a publishing date of 1688. Several pages were scorched; a circumstance shared by the majority of the books, indicating the collection had been rescued from a fire. The author’s foreword, one Fedosia Mock, explained her work was undertaken solely for posterity. This declaration echoed down through the generations. The books were intended as heirlooms to be kept within the confidence of the family; and from what could be inferred, women had scribed all of them.

Curiosity piqued, coupled with the dread of sleeping in his bedroom, Don cleared a spot on the desk and switched on the wicker-shaded reading lamp. He unfolded his bifocals from his shirt pocket and casually flipped through thin, wrinkled pages of Old Church Slavic in block text. The whole was marred by copious handwritten notations and doodles in the margins. Quickly examining random volumes (the latter of said having reverted to standard nineteenth century English), hesitating over the last, which bore a printing date of 1834 by one R. Mock, he determined the scribbling was a recurring affectation of whomever perused the manuscripts, and judging from its angular, cramped style, most definitely signified the handiwork of a Mock scion. He rummaged through the many drawers of the desk until he found a notepad and began to jot down observations of his own.

Following two hours of lackadaisical study, he began to build patterns of association between the half-dozen texts Michelle seemed to have currently settled on; collectively, their scope spanned from 1618 to 1753 and represented the labor of four successive authors. Originally called Velicioc, or Belikcioc, confusion reigned over which was correct, the Mocks had indeed emigrated from southern and eastern Europe, chivvied by enemies or misfortune—the antecedents were vague on the matter; nor was the year recorded anywhere; authorial assumption placed their arrival in Britain between 1370 and 1400, although this struck Don as extremely fanciful conjecture. The histories, what he could decipher via the English notes, proved by turns excruciatingly dull and titillating. He was interested to discover the bulk of the sprawling family hadn’t embraced Christianity as per the social norm of the age except as a matter of expedience, a behavior reminiscent of the Vikings’ grudging capitulation when the Great Church first laid claim to the souls of northmen. Instead, the Mock ancestors stubbornly clung to agnosticism, and, in less frequent instances, outright pagan customs. These customs derived from sects of ancient Slavic cults; secret societies that hearkened back to the nomadic tribes.

The references were manifestly intriguing, but equally oblique, as if the historians preferred to obscure the nature of their spiritual doctrine from all save the initiated. This frustrated Don, although he sympathized with the authorial discretion—in those times, men were often persecuted, even burned at the stake for the merest intimation of blasphemy. Yet, laboring to untangle the circuitous language of an entry regarding the year 1645 that touched upon various, evidently unwholesome ceremonies certain elder family members brought to Essex, Suffolk and Cumberland from the Carpathians and environs, he cursed the dearth of concrete details, the maddening ambiguity that hinted of the carnal and the sinister.

The narrative appeared in a volume wherein Michelle had inserted scores of old, old bookmarks she’d plucked from various specialty booksellers; a peacock fan of faded reds, blues and purples, each marker labeled with enigmatic abbreviations and notational symbols and cross references. The passage in question was accompanied by an elaborate woodblock illustration inscribed,
The Croning
(
fig. i
); a depiction of thirteen naked, apparently middle-aged women encircling a massive boulder. A buxom figure lay supine, draped across the face of the stone, shackled or bound in some manner. Don instantly recognized this piece as the subject of Michelle’s sketches.

The drawing was exceedingly baroque, freighted with peripheral figures: winged gargoyles; demonic beasts that resembled kangaroos with tusks (these latter feasted upon the carcasses of men in Conquistadors’ distinctive armor); cherubs; flautists; and, peeking from the roots of a mighty oak tree, shadowy woodland sprites, imp faces twisted in dark merriment. Its overall effect was singularly disturbing, like a Bosch simplified and shrunk to minuscule dimensions. Michelle had scratched in a list of initials and alchemical symbols; she’d even gone so far as to make a charcoal sketch of the original on a piece of textured art paper. Aggravatingly, figures ii and iii (as promised by the index) were casualties of the fire, damaged beyond recognition by charring and smoke.

When the antiquated orange rotary rang, he nearly leaped straight up out of his chair. He picked up on the third ring.

Michelle said, “Hi, dear. Just checking to see how it’s going there.” The connection was poor; her voice buzzed, fading in and out.

“Um, everything’s fine. How are you girls?”

“What?” The roar in the background sounded like a jet lifting off.

“How’s everyone?”

“We’re all lovely. What are you doing, dear? It must be beastly late there.”