{"id":460,"date":"2014-05-02T19:34:50","date_gmt":"2014-05-03T02:34:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/wordpress\/?p=460"},"modified":"2020-11-20T10:13:37","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T17:13:37","slug":"riddles-from-dystopia-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/?p=460","title":{"rendered":"Riddles from Dystopia (#14)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reproduced below is the fourteenth\u00a0entry in the memoirs of Joseph De Ville, a 2nd-century traveler of Route 14. To view other excerpts from his memoirs,\u00a0click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

September 15, 102 AT<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stories do not die of natural causes. They are dismembered\u00a0by censors, banished by governments, poisoned\u00a0by interpolators, kidnapped\u00a0by\u00a0plagiarists, castrated\u00a0by translators, prostituted by replication, asphyxiated by silence, executed by disinterest.<\/p>\n

The seven stories we told told as we plunged through Library’s layers\u00a0were more than the half-drunk\u00a0ramblings of runaways. They were the swan songs of ill-fated\u00a0pilgrims, the improvised elegies of doomed\u00a0men in a dying world. There were no funerals for my fellow\u00a0travelers, no clipped-out obituaries for their progeny to preserve in scrapbooks. Their stories are their only survivors.<\/p>\n

Yet I cannot repeat them\u00a0here, one after the other, as we told them in Library. They are too tedious for that, too disjointed. My readers will think them irrelevant. Instead,\u00a0I will insert them\u00a0into\u00a0these\u00a0memoirs where they lend\u00a0the most context\u00a0to my\u00a0narrative, where they\u00a0shed light on a character’s otherwise illogical decision, or explain why an especially unlikely event came to pass.<\/p>\n

They are meager\u00a0tributes to human\u00a0lives.\u00a0But this a meager place.<\/p>\n

Besides,\u00a0who am I to speak of tedium, of relevance — of readers? I am two yards of forgotten flesh at the brink of oblivion, pontificating to specters. Memories slip from my mind as sand from a clenched fist, lost to the wind\u00a0unless I catch them in this tattered notebook.<\/p>\n

This cruel place steals\u00a0the best memories first. It burgles\u00a0the idylls of youth, erases the\u00a0passions of romance. It shanghais\u00a0parents and disappears friends.\u00a0It leaves only those remembrances\u00a0which haunt, which shame, which torment — those\u00a0memories which\u00a0leech onto my\u00a0consciousness, suckling at it like some zombifying parasite, gorging itself there until nothing remains for it to consume, finally dying, dragging me with it.<\/p>\n

I remember verses. Verses from an ode\u00a0I learned at Madame Griddle’s. Even now, even here, so many years later, they\u00a0reverberate through\u00a0the crumbling corridors of my memory:<\/p>\n

Tonight! Tonight! New men tonight!
\n<\/i>We\u2019ll show them the road
\n<\/i>On first sign of light.<\/i><\/p>\n

If they should falter, fail or sway,
\n<\/i>We\u2019ll watch them collapse
\n<\/i>And die and decay.<\/i><\/p>\n

For us, the dying began in Library.<\/p>\n

We should have seen it coming. The omens\u00a0were literally written on the walls. Scrawled\u00a0in gold leaf, rendered in brilliant\u00a0color, etched\u00a0in coldest iron.<\/p>\n

Claude, having proposed the story-telling exercise to begin with, told\u00a0his story first. It\u00a0was masterfully delivered, full of self-deprecating humor and perfectly timed to begin and end\u00a0with the first and final sips\u00a0of our brandy.\u00a0We all laughed and clinked glasses, \u00a0extolling the man’s performance. Then we descended to Library’s second level.<\/p>\n

The mural we found there assaulted our mirth. Its centerpiece was a short wall in the middle\u00a0of the room that depicted two jousters on horseback impaling each other upon\u00a0their lances. These men\u00a0were familiar to us: they were the Knight and the Squire from Chaucer’s troupe. Red paint\u00a0was spattered across\u00a0the floor below them, simulating blood. The rest of the pilgrims encircled the scene, mouths open in cheer,\u00a0fists raised excitedly. The Pardoner and the Manciple were exchanging gold coins, settling\u00a0some dark wager.<\/p>\n

Chaucer was painted into\u00a0a corner of the room, beside and\u00a0behind\u00a0the Miller so that the\u00a0left side of his torso was hidden. He was staring\u00a0in the direction of the jousters,\u00a0his face contorted by\u00a0the same grotesquely wide grin that had unnerved us earlier. But where half of this grin\u00a0had been obscured on the level above, here\u00a0the whole feature was visible, so hideous that our eyes were at once drawn to it and repulsed by it.<\/p>\n

We then noticed the Miller, whose jaw hung open as if upon a broken hinge. The tip of a smoldering\u00a0coulter\u00a0protruded\u00a0from his abdomen. The tip protruded<\/em>, I thought. Meaning that he’d been run through from behind. My eyes flashed back to\u00a0Chaucer’s maniacal visage, and I remembered his hidden left arm.<\/p>\n

Clara screamed. In vacuum-like Library, forty feet underground, unadulterated by ambient noise, the pitch of her squeal\u00a0nearly shattered our eardrums, and its echos\u00a0seemed to carry on for centuries.<\/p>\n

We all turned, surprised to find that she was gawking not at the skewered Miller, but at her\u00a0own feet.<\/p>\n

She\u00a0had tracked blood across the floor.<\/p>\n

Its source\u00a0was immediately obvious; the spilled red\u00a0at the foot of the jousters’ wall — what we had assumed was dry paint — had been wet. But how? Surely whatever it was would have dried in the days or months since anyone had last set foot in this place.<\/p>\n

Reggie crouched beside Clara, dabbed a crooked\u00a0finger into the ruby liquid, raised it to his nostrils, and\u00a0touched it against his tongue. He did so swiftly, casually, like a gourmand sampling an obscure sauce. Several of the others bent\u00a0their eyebrows; someone gasped. My stomach turned a little.<\/p>\n

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “It’s real blood.”<\/p>\n

On instinct we scanned the room frantically,\u00a0half-expecting a corpse to drop from the ceiling or a drooling lunatic to burst through a wall brandishing an axe. We searched surfaces and corners for hidden latches; we felt along the jousters’ wall for openings and\u00a0edges. But we found no secret portals to alternate universes, no hidden compartments full of carnage. We were alone on Library’s second level.<\/p>\n

“What if someone is below us,” asked\u00a0Clara, “lying in wait in one of the deeper\u00a0layers?” She was pointing at an\u00a0iron book entitled The Man of Law’s Tale<\/em>, which abutted\u00a0a wall where\u00a0a small rabbit was painted. The animal was standing on its hind legs, its head cocked to one side, studying\u00a0the metal book with exaggerated\u00a0curiosity.<\/p>\n

We discussed Clara’s concern. It seemed valid enough, but\u00a0after grappling for a few moments with the notion\u00a0of a murderer\u00a0lurking in the chambers below,\u00a0our rational minds dismissed it, opting instead for\u00a0a\u00a0more palatable theory\u00a0involving an animal that a recently departed band of pilgrims had slaughtered and eaten here.<\/p>\n

An absurd rationalization, I realize now. An fear-induced trick of the mind, which defends itself against maddening possibilities.<\/p>\n

We did have one objective reality in our favor, however: Firepower.\u00a0Reggie and his shotgun were\u00a0inseparable — though not so inseparable as Farmer as his prosthetic sickle — and God only knew what weapons Scia had grafted onto her person. Andrea and I\u00a0wore\u00a0revolvers. Claude carried no weapons per se<\/em>, but he possessed a seemingly endless supply of bottles that he was\u00a0likely to\u00a0hurl at anyone who refused to\u00a0tip a glass\u00a0with him. If any threat awaited us below, we were more than prepared to meet it.<\/p>\n

We resumed our merrymaking, having assuaged each others’\u00a0fears with talk of fish blood and ammunition. After Claude poured drinks, Clara surprised\u00a0us for the second time that night by volunteering\u00a0to tell the next\u00a0tale.<\/p>\n

We went on like this, drinking and storytelling and descending, until the sun set. Not the real sun. The real sun,\u00a0oblivious to Library’s horrors, oblivious even to Earth’s death spiral, to the Chasm, to the Scourge, to the self-destructive, rapidly devolving race of barbarians that populated its third-nearest satellite\u00a0— the real sun\u00a0went on\u00a0shining blithely somewhere a hundred feet above us.<\/p>\n

The sun that set in Library was the false sun, Chaucer’s sun, the unnatural source of our light, and it\u00a0moved across the ceiling and down the west wall\u00a0as we opened books and descended staircases. On the sixth layer the sun had dipped beneath the simulated\u00a0horizon. Yet there was light. It was an counterfeit gloaming, a\u00a0crepuscular aftermath\u00a0of amber and purple, and it emanated, faintly, impossibly, from the walls themselves. We inspected them\u00a0for hidden\u00a0bulbs or films, even putting\u00a0Scia’s bionic eye to the task. But finding no such implements, we were left to\u00a0conjecture\u00a0that the paints themselves were somehow luminous.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0waning light in Library\u00a0illuminated increasingly weird murals, each more disturbing than the last.\u00a0They\u00a0depicted perverse\u00a0adaptations\u00a0of the canonical\u00a0Canterbury\u00a0Tales,\u00a0riddled with scenes of massacre and rape, painted in such grisly detail that the brandy churned in our stomachs as\u00a0we beheld them. Where the actual Canterbury Tales killed off the occasional non-essential\u00a0character, the variations on Library’s walls killed off the\u00a0pilgrims themselves. In the Pardoner’s Tale, the three youths\u00a0whose greed eventually led to\u00a0their mutual murder\u00a0were\u00a0replaced by the Cook, the Franklin, and the Prioress. In the Man of Law’s Tale, Satan was pictured peering\u00a0over the shoulder of a\u00a0demoniac pilgrim — the leathery Shipman — as the latter thrust\u00a0a blade between the spreadeagled legs of the Second Nun.<\/p>\n

While the pilgrims brutalized each other, Chaucer stood somewhere in the background committing more subtle, but equally sinister\u00a0crimes: slitting throats while no one was\u00a0watching, slipping poison into tankards. And grinning. Always grinning.<\/p>\n

Other characters, non sequiturs<\/em>, occurred\u00a0in the tableaux\u00a0as well. The wind-up bird from the first level attracted friends, and the lilliputian\u00a0robots could be spotted in the trees that flecked\u00a0the murals’ backgrounds. By the fifth layer, branches were so full of these winged automatons that they bent and buckled. The rabbit recurred as well, always near the iron books that separated Library’s layers. The cat from the first layer abandoned its pursuit of the wind-up bird, having\u00a0developed\u00a0a fondness for\u00a0the legs of whichever character was performing\u00a0the most heinous\u00a0murder. In the fourth level, a little girl with ponytails joined Chaucer, holding one of his hands while the other went about its deplorable work.<\/p>\n

In the sixth layer, all the pilgrims were dead except for Chaucer and Harry Bailey. These two were painted on opposite walls, staring at each other across a floor\u00a0littered with corpses. Harry’s face was\u00a0burning with hatred, his fists clenched and his teeth bared. Chaucer’s teeth were also exposed, but in that same insufferable grin, and he was holding a hangman’s noose in one hand,\u00a0the little girl’s tiny hand in the other. The cat was\u00a0wrapped\u00a0about his ankles. Swarms\u00a0of wind-up birds populated the walls, arranged in orderly rows\u00a0on logs and in tree branches,\u00a0gazing with sightless eyes toward the center of the room,\u00a0as if they expected\u00a0some spectacle to unfold there.<\/p>\n

The cathedral, which had been growing gradually\u00a0closer in the preceding layers, was nowhere in sight. But there was something about the watchful wind-up birds that reminded me of churchgoers. Something about the files of corpses painted on the floor that reminded me of pews. Something about the way the hangman’s noose swung\u00a0from Chaucer’s hand that reminded me of a priest’s\u00a0thurible. Something about the iron book at the center of the room — Alice’s Tale<\/em> —\u00a0that reminded me of an altar.<\/p>\n

This penultimate layer pulsated\u00a0with suspense, with the promise of some terrible conclusion\u00a0below. It was here that I told my own story, and I told it quickly, eager to clear the last layer\u00a0and terminate our exploration of this nauseating place.<\/p>\n

The final stairway\u00a0was different than the others. Reggie explained it to us before we entered.<\/p>\n

“There are actually two hatches, separated by a staircase. After passing through this hatch” — he pointed to the iron book — “you must close it behind you. The second, deeper hatch will not open unless the first hatch is closed. This means that for a brief time, you will be climbing in complete darkness. And the final layer, as you will see, is itself almost completely dark. What’s more, the staircase will hold only two of us at a time. In the interest of caution, I suggest that we travel in pairs. There are seven of us, so one of us will have to go it alone. I’ll volunteer to be the odd man out, seeing as how I’ve done this before.”<\/p>\n

“No,” said Clara. “That won’t be necessary. I’m not going down there.”<\/p>\n

Scia tried to comfort her sister, to convince her that it was more dangerous for her to remain alone on the sixth layer, twilit\u00a0though it may have been, than to descend into darkness with six protectors. But Clara would not be swayed.<\/p>\n

In the end\u00a0we proceeded in pairs, as\u00a0Reggie had suggested. He and Farmer went first, followed by\u00a0Andrea and myself. Claude and Scia went last.<\/p>\n

Library’s deepest layer was the size of a football stadium. When Andrea and I emerged on the other side of the second hatch, we found ourselves on a spiral ramp that led down to the floor of the enormous place. From our vantage point some seventy or eighty feet in the air, we\u00a0could see that the whole space would have been pitch black — and it very nearly was — save\u00a0for a single, massive image painted across the floor in shimmering\u00a0white. This image must have spanned a hundred yards, perhaps more. It was a curve of white teeth, a disembodied grin.<\/p>\n

There was nothing else here. Only the grin, and darkness.<\/p>\n

When the six of us were assembled on the spiral ramp, we wound our way down to the surface. We stood on the teeth of the grin, staring into its faint glow, sipping silently at\u00a0our last glass of brandy, soaking in the scale of the place, drunk with liquor and fear and wonder.<\/p>\n

Eventually, Farmer cleared his throat.<\/p>\n

His story was the most enthralling yet, fit for the climax of our descent. We had expected him to tell us about his sickle, about\u00a0how he’d lost his hand and what had compelled\u00a0him to replace it with so crude an instrument. But his story did not address the subject at all. And perhaps because it did not — because the omission suggested that there were more stories still, that we were just scratching the surface of this ancient man — we listened all the more attentively to the tale he did choose to tell.<\/p>\n

When Farmer\u00a0was through, Claude packed up our empty snifters and we plodded\u00a0back toward the spiral ramp.\u00a0We climbed up the dark staircase in pairs, the same way we’d come.<\/p>\n

On the layer above, Clara was dead, hanging from\u00a0her neck. The\u00a0rope was fastened to the banister of the stairway that connected the fifth and sixth layers. Blood dripped from her shoes.<\/p>\n

On impulse, I spun around to face Chaucer.<\/p>\n

But he still held\u00a0the hangman’s noose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reproduced below is the fourteenth\u00a0entry in the memoirs of Joseph De Ville, a 2nd-century traveler of Route 14. To view other excerpts from his memoirs,\u00a0click here. September 15, 102 AT Stories do not die of natural causes. They are dismembered\u00a0by censors, banished by governments, poisoned\u00a0by interpolators, kidnapped\u00a0by\u00a0plagiarists, castrated\u00a0by translators, prostituted by replication, asphyxiated by silence, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-riddles-from-dystopia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=460"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1137,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions\/1137"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}