Selling

Selling




That morning the lane was wet and misty, as it often is in late September when warm moist air blows up from the south. The sun was behind a veil but barely, a slight thickening of the light behind the overcast. It was nine thirty, the usual time Tom began his rounds when the householders were off to work and the traffic in the lane reduced to the odd car.

Some lanes were more productive than others. Ones with heavy beer drinkers, too moneyed or lazy to return empties, were the best but the one he was pedaling along now had three houses which left aluminum cans in a cardboard box beside the garages for him to pick up. That morning all the boxes were filled to the top and he dumped them into the trailer bin thinking kindly of his benefactors. After covering a dozen more lanes, picking up the odd thing here and there, the trailer was full and he started on the long pedal home.

Home was a basement apartment on the riverbank. The building was ramshackle, cracks in the brick walls hastily filled with mortar mix, gutters hanging, flakes peeling from the front door, the last of a long ago coat of varnish. His apartment was in the basement at the back, a spot where the noise of drinkers and fighters was heard as rumblings far off in another county. Granted the natural light left something to be desired but then he had day glow fluorescents in his workroom. Rescued from the lanes they hung over a counter running the length of the wall in the second bedroom where he did his painting. On Friday and Saturday nights, when the crazies were at the height of their frenzies, he secured the door with three steel bars, turned on the fluorescents and painted happily late into the night with shouts, threats, screaming, running up and down the stairs and occasional gunshot as the background music.

There was a message on the computer from his brother Edward. Tom clicked on chat.

‘What’s up?’

“Small amounts of gleeful joy,” replied Edward.

“Jesus, are you using again?”

“No way. But I did have three cups of coffee and a donut.”

“Using of a kind.”

“Yes, but everybody does it so they don’t call it using. They call it normal.”

“Hmmmm.”

“I think I have a customer for you, Tom.”

“Who?”

“A retired drug dealer.”

“Are you sure he is retired?”

“Well, semi retired anyway. He lives in a big house on the river about two kilometers from you. His place is quite a spread, acres of lawn, sprawling ranch house, tennis courts, basketball court and a soccer field. He used to be a jock but now his knees are gone. I sent him the file you gave me and he likes the images. He says he would like to meet you. Wants you to bring the originals so he can have a good look.”

“Did you mention price?”

“Of course. Five hundred, right?”

“Right, but less for the less well to do and even less if desperate for rent money. Did he really sound interested?”

“Really interested. I don’t know anything about painting, as you know, but he seemed to be knowledgeable.”

“And how did you come to that conclusion?”

“He talked fancy, a lot of big words. Anyway, I hope you don’t mind but he was so interested I thought I better set up an appointment. Tuesday at five in the afternoon. Hope that’s OK.”

“That’s OK. Do you want to come?”

“Yes, seeing as I am a sort of agent, at least in this case.”

“Bang on the window at four?”

‘Right on.’



They rode their bikes, paintings wrapped and lashed onto Tom’s trailer. It was a lot farther than Edward’s ‘two kilometers’. The last part of the journey was along the river path. The place was obvious for the basketball court and soccer field fronted on the river behind a tall chain link fence. There was a gate and a guard in the far corner, the guard sitting in a lawn chair reading the newspaper. When they approached he got up and gave them an inquiring look.

“We have an appointment with Mr. Clusky for five o’clock,” said Edward.

“And you are?” asked the guard.

“Edward and Tom Mills,” said Edward.

“Just a minute,” said the guard. He turned his back on them and walked fifty feet away taking a cell phone out his pocket on the way. After a short conversation the guard came back and unlocked the gate.

“Follow the path. It leads to a door at the back of the house. Mr, Clusky will be there to meet you. Now, put you hands up on the fence so I can frisk you. Mr. Clusky says he’s sorry but precautions must be taken. He says many of those who did not take them are no longer with us.”

“Very true,” said Edward.

After the frisking they walked the bikes along the path. First it went between the soccer field and the basketball court. Then it wound through a beech wood, emptying into a flower garden bordering the back of the house. True to his word, Mr. Clusky was waiting at the back door, or, to be more exact, one of the back doors. He was smiling.

He was a big man. “John Clusky,” he said reaching out a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. First Edward and then Tom shook it, their own hands disappearing entirely into that great muscled paw. “His knees may be shot,” thought Tom, “but his hands are still in good shape.” Clusky was a little under fifty with graying hair and the kind of suntanned face you only get by spending much of the day outdoors.

Clusky led them into the house. They stepped into a sunroom filled with potted flowers, heavy with their scents and as humid as the entryway to a public pool. In the far corner of the room was a sitting area with table and chairs and a counter with sink, fridge and stove. Neither Edward nor Tom wanted a drink and neither did John Clusky, so Clusky boiled water for tea and they sat at the table. Tom put the paintings on the end of the counter nearest the table.

Tom and Edward drank tea while Clusky took the paintings over to a window and looked at them. He held them up to the light coming in the window. Then he put them on a small table and stepped back to look at them again. Tom and Edward were on their third cup of tea when he came back to the sitting area. He placed three of the paintings on the counter and put the rewrapped remaining seven on the table. Then he sat on his chair.

“I’d like to buy those three,” he said jerking a thumb at the counter.

“Which ones are they,” asked Tom.

“ ‘Sad Morning’, ‘Easter Holidays’ and ‘Almost Gone’.”

“You have taste,” said Tom, “they are the three I would have chosen myself.”

“Well, I have always had an interest in paintings and images. I think I might have become a painter myself if I didn’t like money so much. In the library is a collection of prints of the Old Masters and the moderns as well. You paint like a modernist, unusual for around here. Mostly its flat realism, tractors, animals, old barns, nostalgia. I used to have quite a collection of that sort of thing when I was younger but it was like living in a grave yard having that stuff on the walls. I sold it all at auction ten years ago replacing it with pieces from New York and prints too  - Klee, Miro, Dali, people like that. Your brother said five hundred a piece but I want you to accept a thousand each. Is that OK?”

“It’s alright with me,” said Tom.

“Fine then,” said Clusky and he reached into his pocket, pulled out a roll of hundred dollar bills, peeled off thirty and lay them on the table in front of Tom.

“Count them,” Clusky said. Tom counted them.

“Right on,” said Tom.

“Good. If I see you to the door can you find your way back to the gate? I have people upstairs I have to get back to or we could spend more time together. The next time I’ll make sure I’m free and we can talk. I’ll phone you.”

“ Fine,” said Edward. Clusky walked them to the door and they followed the path to the gate where the guard smiled and let them out onto the river path.



Edward and Tom came in the back, bringing the bicycles with them and leaving them in the hall inside the door. Tom put the cash on the kitchen table.

“Three thou,” said Edward. “Not bad for a day’s work.”

“Hmmm,” said Tom.

 “So, what’s wrong? You don’t like money all of a sudden?”

“I have lots of things I can use the money for including paying off debts. But still, I can’t help think that this money is a little dirty.”

“Dirty?”

“Dirty.”

“Drugs you mean.”

“Yep.”

“All money is dirty,” Edward said. “If it’s not drugs then it’s some guy underpaying his workers or building substandard buildings to crank up the profit or whatever. It’s all dirty. The world is dirty. Get over it.”

“I think I’ll give some of it away to charity. Maybe that will help clean it up.”

“Some?” asked Edward. “How much?”

“Half maybe.”

“Fifteen hundred dollars?”

“Well, that’s half.”

“A quarter would probably do.”

“I read somewhere that in a situation like this people give half.”

“Well to do people maybe but not church mice like ourselves. After all we have to eat; we have to pay the rent. If you consider our situation – you being a penniless artist and me being a penniless bum -  I would say forty percent at the most.”

“OK, forty percent then.”

“At the most I said.”

“OK, then what’s below the most?”

“Let’s say twenty-seven percent.”

“How about thirty-seven?”

“Let’s settle at thirty-three then. It will make the math easier.”

Edward extended his hand across the table and Tom shook it.


Tom counted out one thousand dollars and put it in his wallet. Then he counted out five hundred and handed it to Edward.

“The thousand shouldn’t be considered in the ten percent, “ said Edward. “You are giving it away, remember?”

“Yeah but I decided to do that, not you, so why should you suffer? Take it please. It still leaves me fifteen hundred which is lots.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. And to include you in the blood money I’m raising your percentage so that means you gave some money too.”

“Well that just about covers all the bases.”

“Exactly,” said Tom.



The next morning Tom went to the charity office to hand in the money. There was a young woman at the desk and she looked at him suspiciously and who could blame her? Tom looked like a person who should be receiving charity rather than giving it. His jeans were worn and soiled. The neck of his T shirt sagged to the middle of his chest. His ball cap was so ancient and grimy it shone with a patina all its own. He hadn’t shaved for three days and his hair was uncombed. But he was well spoken and handed her a thousand dollars cash so she asked him to wait a moment and took the bills in to be examined by the accountant. She came back a few minutes later, the accountant following behind.

The accountant, a rat faced man with a ginger beard, glared across the counter at Tom. He had the bills in his hand and shook them at Tom. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said.

Tom needed no more than that. With the quickness of a striking cobra he leaned over the counter, snatched the bills from the accountant’s hand and ran out the door. They ran after but were no match for Tom. Tom was over fifty but lean and well muscled while they were fat layered and office bred. He was turning his third corner as they were coming up to their first.

At the apartment he washed, shaved, put on clean, presentable clothes and replaced his ball cap with a barret. He put all the money in a secret place and walked over to Edward’s. He was still asleep, thank goodness, otherwise he would already have gone to the bank. Edward got out of bed and let him in. Tom explained the situation.

“That’s low,” said Edward.

“Very low,” said Tom.

 “I thought gangsters had a tradition about that,” said Edward. “When they are dealing with civilians they deal honestly, even generously.”

“That’s what I thought too,” said Tom.

“Well,” said Edward, “I suppose it’s true ninety-nine percent of the time and we happened to get the one percent.”

“Yeah.”

“Good thing you were able to snatch it back from the accountant or things would have been much worse.”

“I just thought of something,” said Tom.

“What?” asked Edward.

“The office probably had a camera.”

“O my God!” said Edward.

“But then I wouldn’t worry about that when I come to think about it. It’s probably a grainy old thing and the cops have better things to do than setting up an operation to catch an old codger trying to pass a few hundred in counterfeit bills. It will end up at the bottom of the worksheets and no one will ever get to it. But still we should get rid of the stuff right now. You never know.”


They walked to Tom’s, retrieved the money from his secret place and made their way down to the riverbank. The traveled the path until they came to a group of cottonwoods hanging out over the stream. Here they climbed down through the trunks onto a narrow shelf on the bank and built a small fire of twigs. They laid the bills onto the fire one by one, somewhat reluctantly. When they were charred they stirred them with a stick and added more twigs. When everything was white ash they stirred it again and then buried it with a layer of mud they scraped from the shelf wall.

They climbed up the bank and walked the six blocks to the soup kitchen. It was midmorning so there were only a few people sprinkled about in the large dining room. Turkey soup and a corn beef sandwich, a cup of tea and two lemon cookies for dessert. They sat at a table overlooking the side yard of the church where the children from the daycare were chasing one another about, above everything a blue, fall sky. When they had eaten everything and only the tea was left, they leaned back as best they could on the folding chairs provided, sipped their tea and looked out the window. After some time of silently, companionably contemplating the scene before them, Tom said,

“I suppose he’s happy with his big house and money stashed away in offshore accounts.”

“And let’s not forget the stashes of cash, huge wads of it and real cash too, not like the funny money he gave us,” said Edward.
“But then, of course,” said Tom, “he no doubt worries someone will come to take it away from him.”

”And in the world he lives in, someone taking it away from you means they shoot you dead,” said Edward.

“True,” said Tom. “But then we all die sometime, anyway, Edward.”

“Yes,” said Edward, “ but some die sooner than others and since they worry about it all the time, thinking of the others they knew who were killed that way, then they die perhaps hundreds of times before they actually, really die, startling awake in the middle of the night, that sort of thing.”

“Maybe, but Clusky didn’t seem to me to be the type who would startle awake in the middle of the night. I would guess he sleeps a solid eight hours.”

“But to do such a rotten thing, wouldn’t that bother you?”

“Well, it would bother me but maybe for him it makes him happy. Maybe doing things like that for him is a dark joy, a kind of weird pleasure.”

By now the tea was cold and they got up, walked to the long counter, poured the dregs into the sink and placed the mugs in the rack. They said goodbye to the cook who was making soup for supper and walked out into the bright sunshine.

The Proper Arrangements

a                Proper Arrangements

   Things started out watery and drippy.  Wet from the morning fog settled on his hat and mackintosh so that when he put his hand to his shoulder his fingers came back covered in droplets; bright clear droplets, despite the murky light, sparkling like clear diamonds against the fluted texture of his finger pads. Thank goodness he had placed the plastic cover on his fedora before he left the house otherwise the felt would now be soaked, the brim bending down like the mouth of the sad clown in the posters advertising a coming circus stapled onto the telephone poles along the street. Fortunately by nine AM the breeze blew off the fog exposing  blue sky sprinkled here and there with wispy white cloud as if someone had shredded the cotton from the top of an aspirin bottle and tossed it high  into that feathery blue. His first ten calls produced not a single sale, not a bottle of lotion or even a fingernail brush, by God. When the sun came out he decided to bring his disappointment to the boulevard at the end of Rex and sit down with it on a park bench. He placed his fedora beside him and poured a cup of tea from the thermos he carried with him.

   The streets were empty now, children in school, workers at bench or desk. A few moments after he sat down, the gaffers, who at this time of the morning drifted onto the grassy boulevard at the end opposite his bench, began to gather. A flock of aging black birds, (they were always dressed in black or dark, dirty brown) they clustered like a landing of crows, first pecking their beaks towards one another in greeting and then bending their weary old backs to sit on two benches under a giant elms. Jeremy did not like the gaffers. He considered them crude and irreverent. They leered at the young women passing by. They passed raunchy jokes among themselves, laughing uproariously in the most vulgar way. They smoked pipes and rolled cigarettes. They spit loudly into the street after hawking up gross mouthfuls of greenish phlegm. They picked their noses and scratched their genitals like a pack of baboons. But since they performed all these disgusting operations in a proscribed circle, one which did not impinge on anyone else, they were left alone. The policeman on the beat often came by to pass a few moments in their company. He cracked a joke. They laughed. What were policemen, after all, but gaffers in waiting? Big, bluff Irishmen with potato noses and fat spongy cheeks like the bread dough now rising in bowls in their wives’ kitchens.

   Jeremy himself was a Scotsman of the small variety, short, thin shouldered and delicately boned. His mother had always told him that he was the descendant of Scottish Lairds but he deeply suspected everything his mother told him on such matters. His mother was a terrible liar and great inventor. As the real circumstances of her life did not suit her, she had long ago decided to dream up a series of fictions, which with time and repetition, eventually supplanted the real world with one more suited to her liking. Not that Jeremy minded. At first, many years ago, he had sat in judgment on his mother’s stories. He had chosen an allegiance to a literal truth and had engaged his then middle-aged mother in many pitched battles, which, on occasion, he was foolish enough to believe he had won. But he found that an inevitable pattern established itself in these conflicts with his mother. First she would argue in her calm, reasoned way and then she would haughtily retreat into silence, refusing to say a word. The subject under discussion would not come up again for a long time, perhaps six months or a year. But when it did finally come up again it was as if their previous conversation had not occurred. He came to realize that it was impossible to correct her errors. The field of her mind was absolute, maintaining itself in a state of great shining clarity. His own foolish jabbering, his nit picking heresies were simply ignored, waited out. She wore him down. She ground away at him with the power of her relentlessly fecund, inventive mind. Once Jeremy came to realize that all this was as inevitable as the sun rising or dark descending he began to enjoy his mother’s inventions and eventually came to see the fictive world she lived in to be superior to the boring, every day world of their rather eventless, impoverished lives. He began to look forward to her stories as a spot of colourful entertainment in an otherwise dull and drab existence.

   Jeremy’s mother, sequestered now in a Church sponsored home among prayers, knitting and quiet whispers, employed her time in the repetition of old lies seasoned now and again with the new ones she thought necessary to keep things fresh and contemporary. All these weird personal fables, these creations of a baroque imagination, she worked and polished into seamless stories which she presented to him on his Sunday afternoon visits with great vitality, skill and originality. What did it matter if they were ‘true’ or not? After all, from his observations over the years, what was presented, in the newspapers, in schools, as official history was just as suspect, just as shot through with the levered, personal point of view. His mother was merely acting as the whole world acted, perhaps even more moderately for she never claimed her personal ‘distortions’ to be official bastions of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’.

   According to his mother he and she were related by blood to the royal Stuarts. The original vehicle of this relation was a grandson of the Young Pretender, popularly known as ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, the last serious standard bearer of the Stuart cause, whose forces were defeated at the battle of Culloden in 1749. Subsequently the Bonnie Prince removed to France where, like many Bonnie Princes, he filled several houses full of children, some of whom were legitimate, some not. Jeremy’s mother claimed John Frail, her husband’s great great grandfather to be a legitimate bearer of the Stuart name. According to her, after a great dance of legal wrangling and fancy political arabesques, he managed, at the age of thirty, after changing his name to Frail, a popular name in the Hebrides at the time, to claim a small island as his inheritance. Here, again according to his mother, said John Frail, really John Stuart, held a kind of underground Stuart court and fired the Hebridean people with new pride in their ancestral heritage. That the Scots, who were at the time making millions in banking and working long hours in the shipyards building war vessels for the British Empire, had much time in their busy lives for sentimental journeys into the past, seemed highly unlikely to Jeremy but his mother was quite capable of waxing eloquent on the new spirit inspired by the blood royal's presence among the people. She could go on for some time telling stories of depressed Celts restored by ‘the touch’ to happy and productive lives, young mothers calmed in the travails of childbirth and so on.

    John Stuart’s son emigrated to the American continent in the early eighteen hundreds. Jeremy’s mother claimed that he, through a series of circuitous name changes, cut outs, etc, apparently necessary subterfuges to guard against the enmity of certain powerful men, to be the great grandfather of her dead husband, Jeremy’s father. When Jeremy said to her that considering the number of descendants in that populous line, even if this were true, then it would not have been anything special, his mother fixed him with a terrible eye. After a pause in which she scoured him with those old fierce eyes whose antecedents were perhaps as terrible to the old enemies of the Scots as the Highland charge once was, she said, “The rest are bastards you foolish boy,” employing a directness of language which he had never before or after heard her use. John Frail’s grandsons frittered away the money he brought with him from the old country, their sons becoming carpenters, boat builders, makers of furniture and coffins  - skilled, yes, but nonetheless workman even though ‘of the higher variety’ as his mother phrased it. Jeremy’s father, who died three years after he was born, operated a workshop in the basement of the house he inherited from his parents, producing an inexpensive line of furniture for his workman nieghbours. After his death his mother turned the workshop into living quarters for herself and Jeremy, renting out the rest of the three story house. Jeremy was brought up on the proceeds of this meagre rental income.

   “And who has the Hebrides island now?” Jeremy asked. But his mother cast an imperious hand toward the ceiling saying, “What does it matter? Danes of some kind or another. Sheep breeders, fishermen, tourist guides, something of that kind.” Jeremy couldn’t help thinking that being of that kind might not be so bad if you owned an island to go along with it but his mother held in high contempt all worldly ambitions not having to do with the Blood Royal and, suspecting, (most accurately) the motivation of his inquiries, refused to answer any more questions.

   The drift of all this was that Jeremy was in the direct line and therefore his question to her was, if so, what was he doing here in the colonies selling brushes door to door. Here his mother took refuge in vagueness. She was unsure she said. There were many details which remained obscure and rightly so for some shield must be cast over such matters or malevolent persons might use unguarded information to perpetrate violent and evil acts. The Hanoverians, according to his mother, were anxious on such matters. Their anxiety was not a danger to anyone, excepting perhaps themselves, may it rot the linings of their ursurping stomachs and curdle the contents of their unholy bowels, but gaining detailed knowledge of the Stuart line would bring about great dangers. Surely even a brush salesman could appreciate that such knowledge in the hands of Hanoverians or their agents, would spell disaster. They had the ear of certain organizations to whom falls from high buildings, mysterious disappearances, gruesome motor vehicle accidents, silently slipping tortured corpses into the sea, were all in the course of a day’s business. The resources of the Blood Royal were more modest and thus they were forced to rely on the time honoured weapons of the powerless – subterfuge, secrecy, obscuration, veils leading to veils leading to veils, etc. To speak in an unguarded way of such things was dangerous and unwise. To even know of such things in an unguarded way was dangerous and unwise. Therefore he should stop being such a noodle head and asking questions she had no intention of answering for the obvious reasons given above.

  At this point (this conversation occurred some fifteen years before) Jeremy began to think his mother mentally deranged, paranoid. He even thought of trying to convince her to come with him to see a psychiatrist. But after several weeks of revolving this in the back of his mind, he gave it up. He decided that there was no way that his mother would ever repeat the things she told him in the presence of a psychiatrist. Even if forced to wait on one by some magical power he did not possess she would sit there very coolly denying every word he said, insisting that the pressure of her son’s employment had driven him mad and, as everyone knows, the mad are great ones for insisting that they are quite sane and the others, especially those who are near and dear to them, are really the mad ones. Such a contest with his mother played out in the court of a psychiatrist would surely end in his utter defeat. Besides, even if she were mad, his mother was harmless. She had never suggested that the postman was a Hanoverian agent and that Jeremy should do away with him at the first opportunity or anything of that sort. If she were indeed mad she was just a harmless old spider building a series of complex webs at the bidding of a chemical imbalance or some weird warping of the DNA and thus of no harm to anyone. 

   According to Jeremy’s aunt, his mother’s sister, ten years her senior, who lived in another city far away to the west, visiting Jeremy and his mother for two weeks every summer until ten years ago when age and health brought her traveling to an end, his mother always had a tendency to ‘drifting and dreaming’ as the aunt put it. As a child her play with dolls was much more extravagant and went on for much longer than it did with other girls. For her dolls she worked out elaborate and complicated lives involving plots and secret pacts, sudden disappearances, journeys to far off places of refuge involving mysterious lovers, malevolent forces, witches, violent kings, agents of evil whom she dressed in dark clothing and fitted with masks similar to the ones worn by Zorro and the Lone Ranger. She spent several hours every day alone in her room conducting these ‘operas’, as Jeremy’s aunt called them, amidst her dolls and other figures she constructed of sticks, pieces of cloth, wire, straw stolen from her mother’s kitchen broom, papier mache and odd bits of clutter rescued from the garbage bin. These creatures operated in a maze his mother made by suspending pieces of butcher string from her bedposts to nails pounded into the window and door jambs which she then covered with small ends of cloth given her by their mother. The action took place in this city of multicoloured curtains. There was even a gibbet composed of coat hanger wire wrapped in black cloth from which hung four butcher string hangman ropes suitable for multiple executions. From these ropes, according to Jeremy’s aunt, hung, for the most part, the evil agents with masks and black capes, which to his aunt seemed reasonably appropriate for they were, no doubt, murderers, abusers and perpetrators of numerous evils and thus it was not surprising that they ended up hanging from a gibbet. Sometimes, however, one of the golden haired, blue eyed dolls, dressed in long blue gowns, hung there all by herself. When this happened all the other characters, even the evil agents, were placed in attitudes of deep mourning about the foot of the gibbet, perhaps including those who had placed her there now overcome with deep regret. There were several carriages pulled by wooden horses whisking actors from one scene to another and a paper mache pirate ship occasionally taking a party off across an imaginary sea to another country.

  Jeremy’s mother was very religious. Despite his own strict Catholic upbringing, or perhaps because of it, Jeremy saw all religious belief as a form of mania. He was quite willing to admit its beneficial effects, for instance the relative harmony which prevailed at the seniors home where just about all the inmates were fervent and devout believers, partakers of the sacraments and so obedient and orthodox they were like members of a second chance nunnery, a membership conferred upon them by age, impoverishment and the fact that they were either widows or spinsters. There were regular prayers. In the corridors there were often black suited priests. The place was run by Sisters of Charity who wore long black robes and astonishingly white starched wimples  - quick, elegant, direct women possessed of great intensity and force of personality. The viaticum was administered every morning to those who wished to take it. Sundays the able bodied went to the Cathedral. Here they sat through the Bishop’s mass with its pomp, bright vestments, stained glass windows, its gold gilded altar, the choir, the sung liturgy, the sweet, angelic altar boys, the press of the crowd. For shut ins there was a mass in the dining room where even the most ancient and decrepit could be present in their wheelchairs. All these activities had to them a purposefulness, a solemnity which was very impressive. Without them what would there be, Jeremy often asked himself, but a bunch of disassociated personalities hurtling towards death? Old women crying their despair into the darkness? They may very well all be maniacs in the sense of participants in a group mania but Jeremy could not help but come to the conclusion that without their faith and ceremonies they would be much diminished, much worst off. Unbeliever that he was he had great respect for the comfort given and the humane results of their belief and always treated its forms, observances and intellectual structures with tolerance and respect. Because of this his mother did not take him to task for his unbelief. That he acted as if he were a believer, that he did not mock and challenge, was good enough for her.

  Many, in those days, were enthusiastic about the reforms of Vatican II. This was not so with his mother. Of course she was officially obedient to all pronouncements from proper authorities in the Church. However she could not help but think of John XXIII, at least in his human manifestations, as a vulgar peasant led astray by populist notions. For her the chief tragedy of the century was not the wars and mass killings but the vernacular mass. To turn aside from the great tradition of the Latin Rite, which, in a long uninterrupted line had believers speaking the praises of God in the same language and form extending back into the centuries, was a terrible mistake for which the Church would be punished by chaos and confusion, all the evils brought down upon the heads of the builders of the Tower of Babel for their hubris and unholy pretension. That the priest should face the congregation, exposing the holy rapture of his union with God to the rabble seemed to her to be unseemly. That they could gaze upon the host elevated above his head for a few brief moments seemed to her quite sufficient. Sundays she went to the Cathedral but the other mornings of the week she, accompanied by a few old maids whom Jeremy always thought of as her entourage, attended a Latin Rite mass down the street at a Dominican Abbey. Here, his mother and her cronies could say the Latin responses in exactly the same way as they had came forth from the mouth of the Young Pretender some two centuries before. Jeremy suspected that his mother saw the vernacular mass as an attempt by levellers to break this connection, to leave it floundering in a sea of grasping rabble infected with the terrible disease of what she called the Cromwellian heresy, that is that each individual made up their own rules after nightly conversations with a rational, administrative God. This, according to his mother, went against the common knowledge and inheritance of the human race, casting adrift the great bulwarks of Order, Obedience, Hierarchy, Tradition and the place assigned by God for the individual in both the natural and eternal order.      

  The downfall of the Stuarts was, for his mother, also a great tragedy, the greatest in all human history, but one softened by her surety of their reestablishment in their ordained and proper place. The details of this ordained and proper place were a little vague, for his mother had no real notion of economics or political structures. Indeed she thought of these things as the encumbrances of lesser minds leading into the blind alleys and mazes of the twentieth century. Talk of a Stuart resurfacing was expressed in mystical language and went something like this. Driven mad by the unholy confusion of the secular states, in a frenzy of egoism, rage and destruction the masses would rise to throw off the yoke of commercial Mammon. The streets of the cities would flow with blood while the rabble indulged themselves in a bacchanalia of lust, murder and drunkenness. Virgins would be raped, Ministers of the State struck down in the corridors of the Houses of Assembly. The rich would be burned alive in houses where once they composed the tableaus of deep degeneracy. The cities would empty out as millions tried to escape the violence and mayhem. Of course they would escape into a vast maw of starvation and disease. The roads would become lined with festering corpses. The four horsemen of the apocalypse would harvest a mountain of skulls. Deep rivers of human misery would overflow their banks creating innumerable scenes of human suffering. This would go on for some time until perhaps some three quarters of the human race was wiped off the face of the earth. Then a period of shock, remorse, and deep quiet would ensue. It was in this period that the people would come to their collective senses and search about in the ruins for the pillars of truth and reality which they had so long neglected. One of these pillars would be the restored Stuarts, in some mystical way now cutting across all barriers of race, custom, language to become the universal saviors of desperate and fallen humanity. Lifted upon the shoulders of the justly chastised populace, they would usher in a new age of Justice, Obedience and Absolute Rule. The second pillar would be the remnants of the Church Hierarchy, which the judgment of God (perhaps in the form of a Highland dirk) would miraculously merge into the first; thus the Keys to the Kingdom and the seat of human judgment would be joined together in the body of the Stuart King. (no Queens, Jeremy’s mother would not have it) Some might wonder how such a demure old Catholic lady could dream such horrible pyrotechnic dreams but there you have it.  

   After twenty minutes of sitting in the sun Jeremy rose, hefted his sales case, remarking in his mind for the thousandth time how he should find some way of wheeling the beast and thus saving the wear and tear on his small, thinly muscled frame, and started off towards the head of his next street of call.  Sullivan Street. The first customer, Mrs. Slaney, gave him a cup of tea on the front porch and ordered one cat brush, one fingernail brush and a roll of fancy ribbon. Next door Mrs. Drapeau took three bottles of shampoo and two comb and brush sets for birthday presents. Three houses down Mrs. Delaney was put down for face scrub and an expensive brush set for her daughter’s graduation and so on until three o’clock (he skipped lunch being on a roll) his order book was almost full. After a brief wait at the stop he climbed aboard the number ten bus and rode it home. There, Mrs. Gillian, the landlady, gave him a phone message from his mother. He was to appear at the home at 7:10 that evening on an important matter. This was the exact wording repeated by Mrs. Gillian in a deferential tone for she thought Jeremy’s mother a lady of great distinction, always repeating her messages verbatim as they seemed to her to be expressed in a genteel language so different from what she, Mrs. Gillian, used for every day occasions. Jeremy thanked her and climbed the stairs. In his room he shed his outer clothing, hanging everything neatly in the tiny closet inside the door, removed his shoes placing them together to one side of the bureau and lay down on the bed. The next thing he knew he Mrs. Gillian was calling him for supper. Pot roast, homemade bread, blueberry pie. Then, after thanking Mrs. Gillian warmly for supper (she was truly a wonderful cook and a gem of a landlady) he left the house in the cheerful frame of mind brought about by a fine meal, and took the number seven bus arriving at the home at 7:04.

   “I have decided,” his mother said when he came into the room.

   “Decided what?” asked Jeremy for his mother’s mind was chock full of things being decided in a very systematic, logical process much like an automobile assembly line with vehicles in various stages of completion. 

   His mother looked at him sharply. “You know very well what I mean, Jeremy.”

   Usually Jeremy would defer to this with a smile and perhaps a nod of his head but today he was fortified with a stomach full of digesting nutrients and he spoke up for himself. “You forget, mother, that there are other people in the world besides yourself, people who may not understand you when you speak in a cryptic manner.”

   “The horses. Gray and finely combed of course but the number was causing me problems. I have decided that ten would be pretentious. Six will be quite sufficient.”

   His mother was speaking of the horses which would pull her funeral cortege. Long ago Jeremy had given up trying to convince her that if one were rich and the funeral director given ample notice one could have a funeral cortege pulled by any number of horses of any description and colour, but an impoverished old woman with a son who sold brushes door to door was not in that category. All his efforts to disabuse her of these notions of grandeur had been met with the same indulgent smile then swept aside with a flourish of details concerning ribbons, the braiding of the horses manes and tails, the amount and design of the silver decorations on the harnesses and so on. He had learned to listen very attentively even closing his eyes to imagine the particulars she was laying out before him. 

   “Black ribbons I suppose to secure the braiding but you would suppose a funeral would allow the occasional use of some other somber colour besides black – deep purple perhaps but custom is custom and we don’t want to cause scandal.” His mother was thinking of the funeral of a man who she claimed to be a direct line descendant, held in the south of France, whose lover had tied bright pink ribbons onto the door handles of the hearse carrying him from the church to the grave site, announcing to the world, or at least that part of it which was listening, that the corpse therein had been gay or was gay if you saw gayness as a condition which continued after death. Everybody who knew him already knew this for he was not one to disguise the nature of his sexual desire, rather the opposite. What bothered his mother about this performance was not that the corpse was gay but that the organizers of the funeral had been so remiss as to allow such a solemn occasion to be abused by the exhibitionist tendencies of his paramour. All the more reason to have trusted aides or trusted sons to insure that indignities were not visited upon your corpse after death. But secretly, Jeremy was sure, his mother longed for the bright colours disallowed at funerals especially as her procession would be the only proper one allowed her in a hard life of obscurity and self denial and it seemed a shame that that the colours involved should be limited to the funereal spectrum. 

   Six horses then. Grays, big Arabian mares, driven by driver and assistant in tails and silk top hats, footmen on the running boards the same – handsome, hearty fellows to beat off the crowds and clear the way through traffic. The coach glassed, the coffin open until it reached the grave. The tomb had already been decided upon – granite, windowless with a cornice carved with resplendent archangels. Here she would await secret ambassadors from the old country who would ship her remains across the sea to their final resting place filled with the posthumous glory of the Stuarts. His mother was convinced that her temporary tomb was now awaiting her at a local cemetery some ten miles away. Jeremy had decided that this was a relatively harmless delusion and even brought her pictures of tombs in a book from the library from which she picked out some of the details. His mother was also convinced that an inner coffin of hammered copper set into an outer of polished oak sat in a storage room of the funeral home and was thus ready to be pressed into service immediately upon her death. The copper was necessary for ‘respectful preservation’ as she put it during the hiatus preceding her journey across the sea.    

   Of course she was to be buried in a simple pine coffin atop the by now crumbling casket of her husband, William John McKenzie, dead these thirty years and no doubt properly mouldering. The coffin chosen by Jeremy was second up from the bottom of the list at Snow and Glaston’s Funeral Home and even then barely affordable from the tiny savings of her only son. The marker would be limestone, an archangel carved into each upper corner, but archangels with wings folded, the kind with wings spread out being too expensive. The Funeral Home hearse would transport the body to the gravesite, a small cemetery two miles down from the big one where the plots were cheaper. The casket would be closed. There would be no crowds to peer in curiously even if they could see through the darkened windows and no press for the footmen to clear a way through. Indeed there would only be Jeremy, a few cronies from the old neighbourhood and perhaps a half dozen old ladies from the home carried from the service in the Cathedral’s chapel to gravesite in two Funeral Home cars, black Chevrolets. Jeremy would pay fifty percent of the costs up front from his savings. The rest would be paid in monthly instalments over a period of three years. 

   “Have you got all that, Jeremy?”

   “Yes mother,” he replied and indeed he did for he had copied it into the notebook he carried with him for such purposes. If, or perhaps when would be more realistic, his mother brought up archangels, braid tying ribbon or reception arrangements he could flip to his index, written in a small print script with cross references, and put his finger on the necessary information in a matter of minutes. His mother was delusional, yes, but she had an impeccable grip upon the details of her delusions, even more of a grip, Jeremy sometimes thought than if they were real. He found it best to have good notes for although the general shape of things in his mother’s mind remained the same, she sometimes changed a detail here and there. Years before he had learned to leave spaces for corrections and he entered them in the same tiny, tidy script he used for writing orders for brushes, ribbons and lilac body powder. Even though his mother’s wishes were quite insane he still enjoyed the journeyman task of writing them down and adding new page numbers and cross references to the index. His mother liked to watch him do so for his careful, painstaking jottings gave to her decisions a reassuring concrete reality. When he finished his notes, he placed the book back into the inside pocket of his suit coat. 

    At that precise moment, Edna, one of the Home’s inmates who, over the years, had taken on the role of his mother’s confidant, traveling companion and maid, came in to the room as if by signal although as far as Jeremy could make out there had not been one, carrying before her a tray of tea and cookies. She was a small thin woman, one of those who even in her seventies remind you of the phrase ‘a slip of a girl’. She had a thin elegant face with a high forehead and a lovely, radiant, childlike smile. Jeremy knew little of her background. Not long after his mother moved into the Home twenty years before Edna had taken up her role as his mother’s aide de camp as naturally as a kitten might curl up to a large maternal cat. She placed the tray on a small table in front of his mother and then, at her invitation sat opposite the old lady and poured three cups of tea. They chatted about the daily happenings in the Home while nibbling cookies and sipping tea. Jeremy caught the 9:07 and was home in bed by ten o’clock.

  One year to the day after that evening Jeremy’s mother had a stroke. She was rushed to the hospital. When he arrived she was in bed and very pale, the white coverlet up to her chin. At first he thought she was asleep but something about the rhythm of her breathing told him this was not so. When he came to the side of the bed she opened her eyes and with a motion of her head beckoned his ear down towards her mouth. In a harsh whisper she said, “Never mind.” 

   “Never mind what, mother?”

   “All those things I told you. The proper arrangements have been made.” As soon as she said this she shut her eyes and drifted off. Jeremy sat in a chair beside the bed until the night nurse reminded him twice that visiting hours were over. At the desk in the hall a young doctor told him she would be unlikely to survive the night. Jeremy thanked him and took the bus home. His mother was eighty six. Right up until the stroke she had been physically active and mentally alert. Of the two of them Jeremy had always considered his mother, despite her delusions, the most intelligent and the most aware, alive. He would miss her terribly but he was not so deranged as to wish her deprived of a quick and merciful death for his own selfish reasons. He was happy it had turned out this way for her. He was grateful. A long disability before death would have been hard for a woman like his mother to bear.

   The next morning, at 6:31, she died. Jeremy was given the precise time by Edna who arrived one hour before him at the hospital. She established this time from the pendant watch she held in her hand, his mother’s one valuable possession. When she told him the time she looked at him expectantly as if some comment on this figure should be forthcoming. When Jeremy failed to produce one she looked at him pityingly, exactly, it seemed to Jeremy, the way his mother often looked at him when she was alive. “The grandson, William,” she said.

   “Died at the same time,” said Jeremy. 

   “Yes,” said Edna giving a radiant smile to find her pupil such a quick study.

   “Although there is some controversy,” said Edna. “Four said 6:31, two 6:30, one 6:32.”

   “Probably a matter of inaccurate watches,” said Jeremy.

   “No doubt,” said Edna. 

   The attendants came to remove his mother’s body and Jeremy and Edna left the room to let them do their work. They waited until the gurney was wheeled out and watched it move down the corridor and out of sight.

   “I’ll have to phone the funeral home,” said Jeremy.

   “There is no need,” said Edna. “The proper arrangements have been made.”

   “What did you say?” Asked Jeremy.

   “The arrangements are made. There is no need for you to do anything.”

   “I don’t understand,” said Jeremy. “Are you telling me mother made separate arrangements I know nothing about?”

   “I suppose you could say that. You mother is on her way to be embalmed. The coffins are waiting.”

   “Coffins?”

   “Yes. An inner coffin of hammered copper, an outer of polished oak.”

   “What are you talking about Edna? Two coffins. Arrangements made. By whom? Upon whose authority? With what money?”

   “Resources have been provided.”

   “By whom?”

   “Sush. Such things cannot be talked about in such a public place. I will tell you later in private.” After saying this Edna opened her purse and handed him a sealed envelope. “Put this in your pocket.”

   Jeremy took the envelope between the fingers of his right hand. He turned it over looking for a name but there was no writing on either side. Just a plain white sealed envelope.

   “What’s in it?” he asked.

   “Isn’t that rather obvious?” Edna replied.

   “Not to me it isn’t.”

   Edna sighed. “Your mother told me you might present difficulties. ‘He’s rather naïve, Edna,’ she said to me.” She gave him a severe look and then continued. “The envelope contains a plane ticket. Flight 416 leaving tomorrow at 7PM. I will pick you up in a taxi at 5. We will be arriving in Nice late afternoon. No need for a suitcase. Any clothing you own would be inappropriate for the occasion. In your room at the Chalet you will find all the clothing you will need. Your mother gave us the sizes. Trust a mother to know the sizes of even an aging son. The envelope also contains cash. Use whatever you need to pay rent in lieu of notice. Perhaps you might like to arrange with your landlady to have surplus belongings stored for later shipping or given away to the Salvation Army.”

                                                  ^^                            

   The coffin was open and you could see his mother’s severe dead face through the glass. There were eight horses instead of six, Arabian mares, three footmen on either side of the coach and a driver but no assistant. The braids on the horse’s tails and manes were tied up with ribbons a deep dark purple and there were bright silver fastenings on the harnesses. People lined the road, the men holding hats in their hands, women with their heads bowed and when the carriage pasted by in it’s slow, sedate procession they slipped onto the gravel roadbed and followed along behind. 

   When they reached the cemetery the procession turned off the road and wound its way along a gravel path barely wide enough for the wheels through what seemed an innumerable series of graves, markers, elaborate carved stone memorials until it came at last to a large granite faced mausoleum. It was exquisitely worked, the entire front carved with figures of archangels, in some places praising God with uplifted arms, outstretched wings, in others carrying the souls of the recently departed upwards to their heavenly reward. From a cornice of huge overhanging stones protruded a series of incredibly hideous gargoyles, laughing, leering, so realistically portrayed in attitudes of fierce mockery that it seemed the placid beauty of the angels, their counterpoint, their opposition, were about to be overthrown in favour of a bacchanalia trumpeting the absurdity of all human things and the meaningless profanity of death. These figures so terrified Jeremy that he lowered his eyes to avoid them but found himself raising them occasionally all through the ceremony, very elaborate and very long, as if these figures held for him a deep allure, a fatal attraction. The language of the liturgy was Latin. The entrance to the tomb was piled with flowers, the overly florid flowers of warm countries, their sickly sweet perfume mixing with the smell of incense burning in half a dozen censers to create a pall which, in the completely still, soft spring air, encasing the mourners in a nauseous fog.

   When the ceremony was finally over and his mother’s now closed casket carried by the pall bearers into the tomb, Jeremy turned away and walked some distance along the path up a hill until he was alone, away from the crowd. Here, under a yew tree there was a bench. He sat down and looked back at the tomb where the crowd was yet to disperse, still a great knot of several hundreds no longer quiet and worshipful, focused on the single point of the Bishop’s movements, his deep baritone Latin readings from the book of the dead, but now turned toward one another and creating an incredible din of laughter, exclamation, and loud, vociferous greeting. He had made some kind of accommodation with these people. He knew, in a fashion, who they were.  Yet still they seemed unreal to him. He could not help thinking that they were illusions, phantoms, composed from memories of old lithographs, and in the end mere figments of his mother’s imagination. He closed his eyes and listened to the bright, clear notes of the birds singing in the trees around him. 

   The noise of boots crunching gravel came towards him. Jeremy remained seated with his eyes closed until they climbed the path and stood before him. Then he opened his eyes and looked up at the three figures standing in front of him. The foremost was a man with a great mane of silver hair, dressed in an expensive banker’s suit. He went down on one knee, reached out and grasped Jeremy’s left hand and brought his lips down to kiss the heavy ornate ring his dresser early that morning had insisted he wear. The man held his closed lips to the ring for several long moments in a weird fervour of mystical union. Then he brought his head up and looked into Jeremy’s eyes and said in a voice husky with emotion, 

   “My Prince.”

   Then the white haired man was whisked away as if blown by a sudden gust of wind and replaced by another. A long line of people, both men and women, were now climbing the path. Jeremy could see, through the leaves of a grove of trees to the south, a bright flash of blue sea. For a sudden, absurd moment, he had an urge to be upon that blue sea, sailing. But he knew this could not be so. Just as the dresser that morning had insisted on the ring, there would now be a long uninterrupted line of insisting, of instruction, of requirements, a long line from which it would be impossible to escape. He would have wept but it occurred to him that with his heart was now grasped in a iron hand, a cold iron hand perhaps just emerged from the cool depths of that blue sea and that weeping would be a useless and extravagant gesture. “Who are you?” he asked the woman now genuflecting before him.

    “Recently arrived,” she said and smiled as if this assertion was the answer to everything.

   “Of course,” replied Jeremy. “Of course.” And he raised his hand to the next supplicant, a long nosed man with a face like a knife who held, in the deep caverns of his eye sockets, a pair of terrible enigmatic eyes.

                 

    

The Corridor

The Corridor

The Corridor was open every day but Wednesday. On that day, at 10 Am sharp, the huge steel doors closed, moving on tracks recessed into the ceiling and coming, in the center, to a rubber cushioned stop creating a loud, resonant boom.

When the doors were open you could see the length of the Corridor, perhaps five hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, cut through hard rock. The floor was covered with dust and dirt but the walls and ceiling were rock and glittered with sparks of metal and silica. The opening at the other end showed sky and only sky. No plant, no bush, no rock, jutted into the rectangular aperture, only sky; sometimes clear, sometimes cloudy, sometimes dark with rain, or white with fluffy, falling snowflakes. No Observers, as far as Horten knew, had ever entered the Corridor let alone walked its length to see what could be seen through the opening on the other side. All he knew for sure was that there was an opening and it had a set of doors, seemingly, seen in the distance, the same as the doors on his side. Before his doors fully closed you could see the far doors closing, operated, apparently, by the same mechanism or at least sharing the same timer. When the doors closed they remained so for twelve hours exactly, reopening at 10 PM Wednesday evening.

An inquisitive man, Horten had for some years spent some of his off time, considerable, for Observer tours were six months on, six months off with the addition of a sabbatical year every five years, traveling in search of anyone who had knowledge of the Corridor. Some of the men and women he met and spoke with were still active, some retired. Some were Observers, others soldiers and construction technicians. After many hundreds of interviews, many in far off places at the edges of the Empire, for such workers were often recruited from the fringes, he had collected many rumors, suspicions, hypothesis, theories and suppositions but very few facts and the facts he collected he knew before he began seaching for them. They were: a) The Corridor was there near the top of one of the southern mountains. b) Going back as far as human memory could go teams of three Observers had kept watch over it twenty-four hours a day, year round. c) The doors of The Corridor closed every Wednesday at 10 AM and reopened at 10 PM and d) The Corridor led nowhere and seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever.

In addition, many of those he consulted told him that they felt the Corridor to be in some way malignant. Some even used the word evil. A few described it as weird, strange, haunted. One woman, in a farming village in the northeast, called it ‘a hole where wicked emptiness sometimes comes’, a translation into the official language of the tribal word ‘zlygul’. Although he learned little from his travels and his consultations, Horten did not regret them for he was a restless man never happier than when he was on the move meeting new people or sitting on the side of a dusty road looking over a view which he had never seen before.

Then one day, when he had just arrived in the small town where he kept an apartment, an hour’s travel from the capital, he received a phone call. The voice at the other end would not give their name but it did give him the name and address of an army officer who, many years ago, after long years of service, had retired to his place of origin, a tribal region in the far northwest. The voice told him to write the man for he had information he might find useful. All this was expressed in vague, abstracted language. It did not mention the Corridor and from some caution instilled in him by the use of this vague, abstracted language, Horten did not mention it either. When the phone conversation ended he sat down and wrote a brief note explaining that he was interested in information on the Corridor and really nothing else. If the officer had some he would be delighted to correspond with him and possibly even to come and see him in person. Experience had taught him that retired army people were often lonely men given to drink and long, meandering conversations consisting mainly of personal reminiscences. He did not want to waste his time on another dead end. When he finished the note he went out right away and mailed it.

A reply came three weeks later. The man was away from his home visiting relatives in a regional city at the foot of the mountains. Yes, indeed, he had information about the type of tribal dwellings Horten was interested in and if Horten would be patient and wait for a month or so while he made inquiries, he would write him as soon as they were successfully concluded. There was no need for him to write back in the meantime. Horten’s letter had become mixed up with paper used to light the fire and destroyed but fortunately Tonsen, as he called himself, had remembered the address. In such affairs as traditional dwelling designs Tribal Elders could be quite sensitive and it was best to proceed cautiously. Horten came to the conclusion that the man was a paranoid, the kind who derives pleasure from weaving mysterious, nonsensical webs, the productions of a diseased mind, having nothing to do with the actual world. He put the letter in the files and expected to hear no more of it.

After a month of reading, working out at the gym and the occasional date with old girl friends, Horten grew restless and began to plan an excursion. He then received a second phone call. A woman asked to meet him for lunch in a cafeteria around the corner from his apartment.

The woman was middle aged and, although clearly from the Tribal Regions of the north, she wore the clothing of a middle rank bureaucrat. She smiled easily and was very gracious in her speech as the Tribal Regions people often are. At first she spoke of general topics – the weather, topical political events, operas playing at the big theaters in the capital, but when they were finished their meal she suddenly changed her tone, saying, “ Tonsen has information about the Corridor which he has been collecting for many years. He knows something of its purpose. He has gathered evidence from among his own people who have served in the army, as construction workers and even Observers over a period of many years. It is traditional among his people to pass on the knowledge of disturbing events one has participated in or even heard of to a member of one’s clan before dying as a preparation for the journey into the afterlife. Tonsen himself is over one hundred but the memories accumulated in his person go back many, many hundreds of years. So far this has been kept among his people but he thinks that now may be the time to change that. He feels that if this knowledge were introduced slowly into official culture it might eventually lead to the ending of certain cruel abuses. He would like you to come see him. It is better for such matters to be dealt with face to face.”

“It is a very long journey to where he lives,” replied Horten, “and to be truthful I am not interested in making it if I am not convinced that it will be worth my while. I have spent a lot of time and money in the last few years traveling to people who had little or nothing to tell me. Can you tell me something substantial, something factual, which would make me change my mind? The last thing I need is another wild goose chase.”

“There is death involved. There are ruins on the mountain connected with deaths in the past. Within the next year an installation will be made on the mountain which will be connected to other deaths, soon to occur. This is verbatim from Tonsen. Please don’t ask me to explain any of it. I am competent only to repeat his words.”

“Then please tell him I will be there as soon as possible. Before I leave I’ll write him a note telling him the day of my arrival.”

“Thank you,” said the woman. “The old man will be pleased.” Then, without another word, she got up from her place and left the cafeteria.

Tonsen’s home was far off the beaten track. After a two thousand kilometer journey to where the railway ended at the foot of the mountains in a little trading town, Horten traveled north by mule with a group of traders. They followed a trail, or series of trails, which wound their way through small valleys and across sharp, spiny ridges until, five days later, they entered a village. The village was remarkably tidy, composed of stone houses laid out in a circular pattern and surrounded by gardens and fields divided by low stone walls, very neat and well cared for. A rock bottom river, perhaps ninety or one hundred feet across, divided the village in half. Connecting the banks was a wide stone bridge.

A visitor from the official culture was unusual in the mountains. Four Elders came out from their houses and met him at the end of the bridge as he was crossing with the traders. They invited him to eat a meal in the lovely stone courtyard of one of the Elder’s houses. There he was told that Tonsen lived a day’s walk west, a little higher up on the shoulder of the mountain. He would need a guide. An Elder sent off a young man who returned half an hour later with a skinny boy perhaps twelve years of age. The boy could not speak the official language but the Elder told Horton this would be unnecessary as it was a simple matter of letting the boy go on ahead and following along behind. Horten slept that night on a straw pallet in a marvelously cool room in the Elder’s house and he and the boy left at first light the next morning. They traveled on foot. “Even the most nimble footed mule needs some kind of a path,” the Elder said.

Mid afternoon, after a grueling climb during which Horten was forced to take more and more frequent rests while the boy bounded along like a mountain goat, seemingly tireless, they came to a surprisingly large stone house sprawling across a section of rough, rocky ground on the banks of a stream. After the boy had spoken for some time to a group of women sitting on a bench in the yard, some shelling beans, some making leather sandals and one sewing clothes for a small child, an old woman rose and approached him. She was about eighty, face wrinkled, skin overlain with the tiny lace like patterns created by long years of sun and wind, but, nonetheless, giving off a radiation of healthy vitality which was remarkable. She motioned him to follow and they went into the house. The day was just past its warmest with a clear sky. When they entered the house and started down a longish corridor the temperature dropped ten degrees. Horten could feel the sweat deliciously cooling on his overheated skin. The old woman walked slowly and he had to restrain himself to keep pace behind her. When she brought him into the room where the old man was laying on his bed, she turned and left immediately, saying nothing to either him or the old man.

When he saw who it was, Tonsen sat up, saying, “That is my fifth wife, thirty years younger than myself.” The old man gazed at him cheerfully through a pair of bright blue eyes.

“What age would that make you, sir?” Asked Horten.

“I’m not sure exactly but about one hundred and ten. The official records show one hundred and thirteen but I lied about my age to get into the army early when I was a young boy. In those days my people didn’t keep accurate records as they do now.”

“A venerable age.”

“Quite old, I admit but venerable is a quality of character, not age.”


“Quite so.”

“Did they give you water?”

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t it delicious? The stream gives the sweetest water in the world. Whenever I leave I long for it terribly.”

“It was very tasty.”

“You must have traveled a lot to learn to talk like that. Most outlanders would never refer to water as tasty.”

“This is my first time here but I have spent a lot of time in the mountains in the northeast.”

“Some of my people refer to the people in the northeast as terrible barbarians. As far as I can make out that is because some time long ago we had a war with them. As for myself, I met and made friends with many of them when I was in the army. I found them much like us. My wife will return soon with a platter of food. She is a wonderful cook and a good natured woman but very shy with strangers. Mountain women, especially with someone from outside, are like that. She will get used to you eventually.”

A few minutes later Tonsen’s wife reentered with a platter of food she placed on the table between them. Tonsen said something to her in their language and she laughed and shook her head. He said something else in a kindly, teasing tone and she approached Horten.

“Rise, Mr Horten, place you hands in hers and bow. That’s how it is done here.”

Horten rose, took the old woman’s hands in his own and they bowed each to the other. During this performance she was very self possessed and grave but the moment it was over she left. They ate. At Tonsen’s request Horten told him in detail about his journey. Judging by the amount the old man ate he was not in bed for reasons having to do with appetite. When the platter was empty a young girl entered the room and took it away. Tonsen rose from his bed and walked to the far corner of the room. There he bent over a pottery bowl and washed himself. He was naked excepting a loose undergarment about his waist. When he was done washing he dried himself with a bright blue towel and slipped a light cotton robe over his head. The robe reached down below his knees. He tied the waist with a piece of cotton rope. When he came back to the table he sat on the edge of the bed.

“I am still quite active but I am an old man and have a nap in the afternoon, especially on a hot day like today. Isn’t it wonderfully cool in here?”

“Yes.”

“I have granddaughters, great granddaughters, great great granddaughters and even great great great granddaughters. Did you notice that young girl who took away the tray?”

“Yes.”

“She is a great great great. Beautiful, yes?”

“Most beautiful.”

“Are you in the market for a wife, Mr Horten?”

“Well, not really, sir.”

“Call me Elgi.”

“Elgi then. You can call me Will if you like.”

“Will. I have heard it before, of course, many times when I was in the army. It always sounded to me like a mountain name.”

“Yes, I think you are right. It does sound like a mountain name.”

They sat in silence for some time. Horten examined the scroll painting on the wall above the head of the bed. The subject was an event in the life of one of the holy men or saints. The treatment was stylized but it was very well done. The holy man was sitting crosslegged. Around his head swirled a plethora of figures which Horten assumed to be gods and goddesses or perhaps saints from the past. When he brought his eyes back to the old man his eyes were closed. Horten wondered if he were falling asleep but without opening his eyes Elgi said, “I fear for you, Will.”

“Why, Elgi?”

“I have things I must tell you which will cause pain. I asked you to come here so I could tell them to you but now I hesitate. I have what in the official culture would be called a conundrum, a seemingly unsolvable problem. In some way I have been called to pass on this knowledge but there is no one here to whom it would be of the slightest interest. This is why, after hearing of your own investigations through old friends I had you contacted by phone and later had someone visit you. In the weeks since I heard you were coming I spent a lot of time in meditation. I spoke to some of the monks in the next valley over who, by the way, are not the holy prudes most outsiders think but rather wise in the ways of human beings. After all this I have decided but I am afraid you will be unhappy with my decision as it may force you to do something which you would not do if left to your own devices.”

“And what would that be, Elgi?”

“Marry one of my granddaughters or, if they do not please you, one of the women from here around.”

Horten stared at the old man with his mouth opened.

“Please do not think me a greedy old man seeking your salary and pension for my clan. I have more than enough and my clan is well established, lacking nothing. Rather I ask you to do this for your sake. I cannot bring myself to tell you what I have to tell you without your being grounded in the world of human beings and earth. I fear, as you are, the information would unbalance and eventually destroy you. I do not want to be responsible for your death or the marring diminishment of your life.”

Horten was shocked by this proposal but even more shocked when he realized he understood exactly what the old man was saying. In the grip of an icy vice of objectivity he found the old man’s logic utterly compelling. He stared at Elgi for a long time but Elgi did not stare back for he had kept his eyes closed during this speech and after.

Finally he replied, “I will have to consider.”

“Of course,” said Elgi, “all you like.”

For three days Horten didn’t see Elgi at all. One of his sons, a man in his seventies, who had been in the army himself, told him the old man had traveled further up the mountain to buy yearling sheep. On the fourth day he arrived back as Horten was helping his son repair a stone wall in the front yard. They went inside to a sitting room where Horten gave his answer.

Two weeks later he was married by a laughing, jolly priest to a great great granddaughter, a widow of thirty two. “I don’t want a young woman. I’m thirty-five myself,” he told Elgi. “Well, yes,” replied Elgi, “young women can be tempestuous but then so can the older ones.”

Hemi, Elgi’s wife, in the absence of Horten’s own mother or female relative, did the negotiating on his behalf with the prospective bride’s mother. It was a very pragmatic process. There were two children already. The wife wanted only one more. Her dead husband’s farm, where they would live, would remain in her name and revert to her children if she died before fifty. If after it would go to him to make his own division when the time came. Neither she or her children would have any legal rights to his salary or pension other than widow pension rights if he died before her. No second wife. No mistresses, excepting, in the case of her growing disinterested in sex in middle age, she would then withdraw her objection. They were married in a small ceremony, close family only. The big celebration would occur when he arrived back on his next leave. He lived with his wife for three weeks before he left. He was very happy with her and her children, two girls aged four and eight and she was happy with him. The day before he left Elgi summoned him to his bedroom early in the morning. He stayed until noon. Elgi told him everything.

After spending the night with his wife and a tearful farewell at the front gate in the morning, Horten and the young boy, who after a long absence, had mysteriously reappeared, began the climb down to the village. When he reappeared Horten asked him what he would like in payment for his services. At first the boy protested that he wanted nothing but after some delicate arm twisting he said he would like a lamb. After speaking with Elgi, Horten bought him two - on the generous side thought Elgi but Horten preferred to be generous. The boy was ecstatic and his smile of happiness was truly something to behold. They had to carry the lambs over the more treacherous parts of the downhill climb.

Two weeks later he was back on another tour at the Corridor.

“Who built the Corridor? What purpose does it serve? And what is on the other side?” Horten addressed these questions to Folger, in the lunch room, five months into the tour. Folger looked up from his book and smiled. He was an affable, easy-going man who spent most of his time reading large, leather bound volumes of ancient history. All Observers had an interest or hobby which occupied a great deal of their time. Their duties were light and if they did not have something concentrated to do in their idle hours, they would go mad.

“Nobody knows. Certainly not me,” said Folger.

“Why are there no histories I wonder?”

“Don’t know.”

“There are histories on everything else.”

“Mostly, thank God,” said Folger, pointing to his book.

“Don’t you think it’s because somebody doesn’t want people to know?”

“Probably.”

“Why?”

“Who knows?”

“I think I do.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

Folger eyes narrowed. He looked at Horten very sharply and then picked up his book. “Best you keep it to yourself, Horten. I know there are things which happen that are very, very unpleasant. I don’t really want to know about them.” He rose and left the room. Horten didn’t fault him. He was almost sixty and wanted to retire in peace. He didn’t want to have to drag a heavy stone after him.

A week later Janet, his other tour partner, came up to where he was checking the cameras at the mouth of the Corridor. “Why, in all these years, has no one ever gone to the other end of the Corridor? Do you have an answer for that, Will?”

“Yes. They are terrified the doors will close on them.”

“But the doors only close on Wednesdays, at a very specific time.”

“Yes but they are terrified that stepping into the corridor might change things.”

Janet thought about this for a bit and then said, “You are probably right. There is something conscious about the Corridor, don’t you think? Folger thinks it’s evil. He won’t even come close enough to check the cameras.”

“I know.”

“But you do.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think it’s evil?”

“No, but I think it is used for evil.”

“Used for evil? How?”

Horten looked at her. She was a chubby cheeked young women of twenty-eight. Most would not consider her a great beauty but Horten found her very attractive. Some years ago they had an affair. Five months ago when they got in the truck for the trip up the mountain he had showed her pictures of his new wife and children.

“Thanks for showing me, Willi. I get the message,” she had said.

“Now, Janet.”

She laughed. “Willi, you are so serious. I was joking, silly. Truly I am happy that you told me. You are a very sweet, considerate man.” She kissed him on the forehead and he blushed. Imagine that. An old campaigner in the love wars like himself and here he was blushing.

After looking off down the mountain for a while Horten said, “Janet, you don’t want to know.”

“O yes I do.”

“Janet, it is truly terrible.”

“Does it have to do with killing and stuff?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard rumors.”

“It would be best to leave it at that.”

Horton finished checking the cameras and they walked back to the lunchroom.

Five weeks before their tour was to end a unit of army engineers came up the road and camped on the plateau two hundred feet down from the lunchroom. Folger, the senior Observer, went down to see what they were up to. They were erecting a steel and concrete building. When Folger arrived they were already pouring footings. There were long flatbed trailers carrying steel, Euclids full of sand and gravel and a great assortment of other trucks loaded with plumbing, electrical and other kinds of building material. “What are you building?” Folger asked the Captain who came over when he saw him coming down the road.

“A hotel,” the Captain replied.

“Up here?”

The Captain shrugged and said, “Those are my orders.” Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

“A hotel,” Folger told Janet and Horten when he came back to the lunchroom. “Can you imagine? Whoever ordered this must be crazy!”

“Did he say anything else?” Asked Janet.

“No. He told me they were building a hotel and then walked away. Rather rude I would say.”

Horten was translating a text of tribal history. Around him on the table where he was working were three dictionaries and a grammer. During this tour his translating ability had improved dramatically. Improving his spoken language would have to wait until he got home. He didn’t look up from his work when Janet and Folger were talking. They both turned to look at him until, finally, feeling their eyes upon him, he raised his own.

“You know, don’t you?” Janet said.

“I know some things. As I told you before it would be best if you didn’t.”

Folger, the rude Captain having changed his mind, and Janet, argued with him for some time. Horten cursed himself silently. He should have said nothing. From the very beginning he should have kept his mouth shut. Finally he agreed to tell them. What else could he do? How could you refuse people with whom you lived together months on end as brother and sister?

“The Corridor has been here a long time. Much longer than anyone thinks or would believe.”

“How long?” Folger asked.

“Way back into history. Perhaps many thousands of years but at least three or four.”

“How do you know?” Folger asked.

“I have a reliable informant,” Horten replied.

Folger and Janet took a few moments to digest this. Then Janet asked, “Who…?”

“No,” Horten said.

They took even longer to digest this.

When they were done Folger asked, “OK. It goes way back into history. So what? What does that have to do with the army erecting a hotel?”

“Two hundred and fifty years ago another hotel was erected. And two hundred and fifty before that another and another and another and so on. At least twelve cycles my informant tells me but possibly many more.”

“How does your informant know this?”

“He knows it in the only way it is possible to know it - person to person transfer, oral tradition. It is the only way which cannot be controlled or suppressed. In all other ways of knowing, there is no record of it at all.”

“OK then,” said Janet, “let’s say there is something to this knowledge of his. So every so many years they erect a hotel. What happens after that?”

“First,” said Horten, “take a look at these.” He walked over to the filing cabinet, opened a drawer and extracted a file. He laid it on the table between Folger and Janet. It contained twenty photographs. Folger and Janet removed them from the file folder and spread them out on the table. They were pictures of ruins – decayed buildings, the outline of buildings, filled with rubble.

“What are these?” asked Janet.

“A mile down the road there is a trail which runs off the east end of a switchback. From the road it is barely discernable but if you walk along the side of the road, and are attentive, it is easy to find. There is a thick alder run there, twenty feet tall. The trail leads through the alders for thirty feet and then comes out onto a plateau much like the one they are now building the hotel on. From examining the ruins I would say there are at least four ages of buildings there. Enough for one thousand years if my informant is correct. He says there are other sites but would not tell me where they are. He showed me photographs. The site I found he didn’t know about. I sent him my information digitally. After you look at them I will destroy these prints.”

“”Did you send them on the official computer?” Janet asked.

“No. On a laptop.”

“There are ways to trace that,” said Folger.

“Yes there is. But there are also ways around it. And the laptop was bought on the black market and is now in a thousand pieces spread over a ravine five miles from the road.”

“So why?” asked Folger. “Why would someone want to construct a hotel every two hundred and fifty years out here in the boondocks?”

“That is the hard part,” said Horten, “the part you will regret hearing if I tell you.”

Folger and Janet looked at one another. “We’ve come too far now to go back. Tell us,”

said Folger.

“When the hotel is complete the observers are sent away. Nobody replaces them for six months. When the Observers and construction people are gone some kind of special medical unit comes up the mountain and takes over the hotel. They wear a strangely colored uniform bearing no insignia. They bring with them trucks filled with medical equipment and two enormous trailers. After they have settled in, on the next Wednesday morning, buses arrive carrying people.”

“People?” asked Folger. “What kind of people?”

“My informant’s information on that is patchy. He does know that some have been from minority cultures. Others have been prisoners of some sort. But not just men. There are women and children as well.”

“When the people arrive they are herded to the wide section of road in front of the Corridor door. Here their keepers allow them to sit on the ground and bring them food and water. During the last leg of the journey, lasting eight hours, they were allowed none. The food and water makes them happy. They drink and eat greedily. Then they begin to laugh and talk among themselves. At ten minutes to ten they are ordered to their feet and herded into the Corridor. They enter with some trepidation but they are far from terrified. For those who have never seen the doors closed, their butt ends and casings are far from obvious. The herders tell them they are going to a camp on the other side of the mountain. Some of the keepers even enter with the end of the line but after fifty feet or so they begin to back off. When the herders are clear and the head of the line is perhaps one hundred feet from the far end of the Corridor, the doors close and they are entombed.”

“How many?” asked Janet.

“Five hundred or so says my informant. When the doors are opened in the evening all those sent in that morning are dead. But they have been killed in a certain way. In some fashion they are drugged so that their central nervous systems are paralyzed, and then the major organs are removed.”

“They are alive when this is done?” asked Janet.

“Yes. The heart and lungs are left to the last. When the doors open there are five hundred cadavers with the major organ removed. ”

“Even the children?” asked Janet.

“Especially the children,” said Folger in a most bitter tone of voice.

“Even the children,” said Horten. “Two days later one of the trucks drives down the mountain and doesn’t return until the next Tuesday. More buses arrive the next morning. This goes on for ten weeks or so, according to my informant.”

“And the cadavers?”

“Dehydrated in drying ovens, ground into fertilizer and trucked down the mountain.”

“God!” said Janet.

“More like the devil,” said Folger.

Horten said nothing.

The hotel was finished in four weeks. The Observers were informed they were to accompany the engineering unit down the mountain.

“Will they kill us?” asked Folger.

“No,” said Horten. “The Engineers are witnesses as well. They would have to kill them too. Besides what are we witnesses to? Someone built a building on a mountain? Nothing terribly unusual.”

When the army van came to get them they stowed their luggage into the compartment in the back. All three climbed into the back seat, Horten in the middle, and the driver pulled away.

When they passed the hotel Janet and Horten watched it go by. Folger, on the other side of the van, turned his head away and looked out the far window.

“Why two hundred and fifty years?” asked Janet.

“Because the supply lasts that long, I suppose.”

“That’s what I thought too.” said Janet.

By the time they arrived at the foot of the mountain, off the switchbacks and onto the straight road, Folger had fallen asleep. Janet looked into the rear view mirror at the driver’s face. A young, bland, cheerful face. She turned toward Horten and said, “I suppose there is nothing we can do.”

Horten didn’t answer for so long Janet began to think he didn’t hear the question. Then he turned his mouth toward her ear and said softly, so softly she could barely make out the words, “No, there isn’t. At least not now anyway.”