The White Forest (25 page)

I shook off Miss Herron-Cross’s disturbing words—keeping my mind focused on the issue at hand. “Did she ever mention someone called the Lady of Flowers?” I asked.

“Never,” she said. “Most of the time Evelyn didn’t speak at all. When your father first brought her to Stoke Morrow we all thought she was mute.” Miss Herron-Cross paused for a moment. “But there was the church she grew interested in—the one in Spitalfields. They didn’t worship God or Christ. What they worshipped did have something to do with flowers if I’m remembering correctly.”

“Spitalfields,” I said.

“That’s right. Not an area most of us would ever go to, but Evelyn Silverlake went there like the world couldn’t harm her. As if it didn’t truly exist.”

“And do you know why she died?” I asked, feeling like a child again in Miss Herron-Cross’s presence and disgusted with myself because of it. “Do you know what made her so sick out in the field of shale?”

She coughed and then spat phlegm into a handkerchief. “Evelyn Silverlake’s death was unnatural, to be sure. It was as though she . . . faltered. Like she could no longer hold her place in the world. And so she closed her eyes and looked at us no longer. She gazed instead at that place she was meant for.”

“What place?” I said.

“I already told you I don’t know that. I didn’t understand your mother, and I don’t understand you. Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

I did not thank Miss Herron-Cross as I took my leave, and I did not wish her peace. Instead, I thought of Mother, all alone on the Heath, closing her eyes and gazing on that other place.

I
returned to Stoke Morrow, and though Father had recently come home from his law offices I didn’t go to greet him. I couldn’t bear it. I had too many questions, and I knew that they would hurt him. He’d buried the past, endeavored to make as stable and normal a life for me as he could muster. I thought about Miss Herron-Cross’s comment about Mother’s absence during my childhood. She was right, of course, yet I also had many memories of Mother sitting at my bedside and whispering her stories to me. The more I thought about these memories, the more I realized the instances of storytelling had happened in the dead of night after Mother had returned from walking and everyone else was in bed. These were private moments between us. It was difficult now to remember the precise nature of her stories, other than the one about the pregnant oak, and the more I tried to conjure those narratives, the more tangled my memories became until it seemed Mother had spoken to me in an altogether foreign tongue. Or that she had not spoken at all but merely hovered over my bed, somehow imparting the stories through silence. I took Nathan’s journal to my bedroom and opened it, hoping to find answers there or, at the very least, distraction.

5th—Have had an uncommon time of it since my last writing, which I see has been days. Romegas recommended that I take a walk down a long country road to look at the ruins of a civilization called Crendi. The ruin is said to be Phoenician in origin, though, according to Romegas, it is perhaps much older. “Crendi was a favorite place of meditation for your own Theodore de Baras,” Romegas said. “It was, in fact, the last place he was ever seen,” Romegas said. “There is a temple in the ruin where the ancients made worship to the Lady of Flowers. You’ll find it intriguing, no doubt.”

I told him I would certainly make the walk, for sport if nothing else.

As I traversed the road from the auberge to the ruin, the Mediterranean sparkled like a gem to the east. Wildflowers grew alongside the road, and the sweet smell of those flowers combined with the scent of the sea to make the air into an elixir of life and death. The ruins of Crendi revealed themselves slowly. Large pieces of white rock appeared and, at first, seemed to be natural formations of the landscape. Then a post and lintel came into view, like our own Stonehenge. Finally came the remnants of buildings, most of which had collapsed. There was a flat-roofed circular structure which fit the description of Romegas’s temple, and I sat on a rock to take my lunch (a sandwich made with cured meat that was foreign to me—venison perhaps).

I’d forgotten my hat, and my skull was baking. To escape the punishing heat, I finally entered the temple though I was hesitant to do so. The place filled me with a sense of foreboding and made me think again of the disappearance of Theodore de Baras. To be sure, the bright sun had altered my perceptions. Mirages danced before me in the shadows of the temple, and I felt suddenly dizzy, barely able to stand. I went to the stone altar and sat down, searching for my canteen. Our captain had warned us of symptoms that could arise from heat exhaustion, and I feared I was suffering such an attack. It was when I began to drink that I had what I believed
to be another hallucination—this one far more concrete and distressing. Looking over my raised canteen, I saw a figure appear in the doorway. I understood immediately the figure was not a man, though it stood upright on two legs and swayed from right to left. It was simian in nature—apelike. Because it was backlit by the harsh sun, its features were cast in shadow, and I could not see its face. From what I could discern in the half-light, it was covered in long white fur, the same sort of fur that sprouted from the finger I’d found in the reliquary.

I lowered the canteen from my lips, and the creature was gone, as if it had never been there. I assured myself the vision was a product of sun-sickness and that I merely needed to get myself back to the auberge.

7th—I have not been able to put the vision of the creature out of my mind. On top of that, my sun-sickness is still with me. No food will stay in my stomach. The Brothers seem concerned, talking of dementia. Romegas himself visited my bedside, and I asked him if there was some species of white ape living on the island.

He raised his brow. “I suppose it’s possible. Some animal might have been brought over from the Africas. There was once a large cat that threatened an outlying village. But an ape is not likely, signore. Why do you ask?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “A symptom, very likely.”

9th—Rumors are circulating among the men that a council of war was held last night to determine whether our battalions should be moved on into Stamboul and then toward Crimea. I am in no state to go to war. My remaining symptoms are as follows: extreme fatigue and dizziness, dryness of the mouth and eyes, and perhaps worst of all, night terrors. I awake nearly every night, drenched in sweat, and see the creature standing in my quarters—often hovering over my bed to examine me. I remain very still, and it puts its face close to mine. Such a face it is—not like an ape at all, but somehow more human. Like some hybrid or missing link. But the
eyes are the worst. Empty sockets. Sometimes after I’ve stared into them for a long while, I can see my own face reflected back from the depths of the holes. As if I am trapped down there, deep inside the white ape.

I’ve gotten it in my head that I do not suffer from sun-sicknesses, but rather the vision of the white ape at the temple infected me in some way—perhaps the air of that place put some disease in me. I feel that if I could only find the papers of Theodore de Baras, all would be made clear. I’d make sense of the ruin and what befell me there. But there seems no space in the auberge I have not searched which could contain the private library that Romegas mentioned.

I decided to walk the sunbaked streets of Città Vecchia, among black-hatted priests and clerical students. I stopped villagers nearly at random to ask if they knew of a white ape which inhabited the island. People began to treat me as if I was mad and finally, an old woman spoke to me in a voice barely audible above the din of the street. “You have been to Crendi?” she asked.

I told her I had.

“You went to pay homage to our Lady?”

“No,” I said. “I paid no homage.”

“Then you must make a sacrifice.”

“What kind of sacrifice?” I said. “What’s required?”

“You must decide that for yourself, Englishman,” she said, moving off into the crowd before I could ask another question.

By evening light, I made my way toward the ruins once again. It seems the wildflowers have all perished in this intolerable, baking sun. All that remains are blackish weeds that cover even the most modest patches of soil. The weeds have nearly obliterated a stone wall that runs alongside the path. The plants looked like a disease, spreading out from the central infection of the ruin.

I brought with me the severed finger from the reliquary, doing so almost on instinct, as one might bring a rosary to church. When I stepped into the shade of the temple, I took the finger from my pocket and studied it in the dim light. It looked just as it had in the auberge, desiccated and timeworn.

Just then, the temple walls appeared to swell and contract around me, as if I was inside a great stone lung. I placed the ape finger on the altar. “Is this what you want?” I asked the darkness. “Will this suffice?”

There was no answer, of course, and I felt foolish and even sicker than before. I took the finger from the altar, thinking I would still return it to the reliquary. It was when I turned to leave the temple that I saw the creature once again, crouched alongside one of the broken walls. The beast was digging in the dirt, making a small mound of soil. When it looked up, I felt a cold fear. I’d interrupted its business. It rose to full height, and I stared into the pits it used for eyes. They were the color of the space between the stars.

I attempted to make my escape, but the beast blocked my path. I stumbled back and fell against the altar. The beast came at me, putting its rough hands around my throat. It brought its face so close, and I was there inside of it once again, staring out from those terrible eye sockets. And worse yet, I felt it was now also inside of me.

How I made it back to the auberge, I do not know. But writing this, I feel that I am no longer alone. The creature has joined itself to me—like a rider on my soul. Is it possible that my experiments with Jane made me susceptible to such an experience? Did she open me to these alien elements of the universe?

I felt a flood of guilt reading this and wanted to stop. I had opened Nathan to this world, after all. And it was one that he could not possibly hope to control. I read on:

—I’ve grown sick of my silent searching. I feel full of the beast. At the auberge, I cornered one of the Brothers, a small man who could not defend himself, and told him I’d bring him harm if he didn’t take me to the private library, the one that held the papers of Theodore de Baras. I showed him my knife, and he complied. The library was located behind a tapestry in the burial vault. Of course it was. Why hadn’t I searched the vault more carefully?

The dead Brothers in the walls watched as I entered their sacred storehouse. Candlelight played off my blade as I asked the weak monk why Romegas had sent me to the ruin at Crendi in the first place. “Was I meant to be some sort of sacrifice?” I asked. “Or was it merely a means of disposing of me?”

The monk shook his head, cowering.

I showed him the finger I’d stolen, no longer afraid of being found out, no longer caring. “And this?” I said. “What does this mean?”

He seemed stricken by the sight of the ape finger and would not speak.

I told him to give me the papers of Theodore de Baras and leave me. I sat in the stone library and read the papers slowly by candlelight, translating the Italian. In de Baras’s words, I discovered not more of the same philosophical musings I’d come across in London, but a detailed description of a series of horrors that he’d enacted in order to explore what he called the Empyrean. His words changed my entire understanding of my current situation and of Jane’s. I intend to take the papers to her. I’ll show them as proof. And I’ll hope to God she will believe what they say and take action.

The narrative ended abruptly here. Nathan left the rest of the journal blank, except for a few symbols he’d drawn near the end and then scratched out. What horrors had he read of in de Baras’s papers, and why hadn’t he shown the papers to me upon his return to England as he intended? Who or what had prevented him from doing so? I was left to sit and wonder.