The Sea of Ash Read online

  Are the faces only partly formed, or is it the sickly glow of their interring space that keeps them indistinct? They are mournful things, no matter, the eyes smudged or bandaged, the woeful mouths biting at the air. One moves closer to the window than the rest, and a thin arm slides out and paws at the steam that is now blurring the dark room.

  I dive forward and pull both remaining levers at once. One is stuck, rusted and resistant, but I persist, and they both slide toward me at last.

  The entire room jolts -- a hurtling vehicle impacting against something stationary. The lights flicker and fade, but I see a trace of movement before they are blinded entirely. The puppet figure flops back down in its seat, the book-like chest closing as the chair retracts into blackness, emitting a shrill metallic screech.

  I find myself in total darkness, and, after a few clinks and rattles, in silence.

  "You broke it!" Vincent Banchini screeches like a little girl when he enters the Spirit Machine.

  Steam in the air accentuates the beam of his flashlight as it sweeps about the room. Next, it is blazing in my face and I am being interrogated.

  "What did you do?"

  I can hardly think at this time. I point at the levers.

  "The bad door opened -- there were faces -- something was climbing out -- I pulled one lever but nothing happened, so I pulled the other two."

  "Simultaneously?" Vincent's voice remains high as if he has been enraged into a second puberty.

  I nod, and the man covers his face with a hand and groans. When he drops his hand he swivels and aims the light at the right door.

  "Nothing got out, I hope?"

  "I don't think so. The metal figure retracted, and the door shut."

  Vincent skulks about the room and peers into the clutter of components, looks up and down and behind things. I apologize repeatedly, but the man is too busy muttering to himself to take note.

  "Thousands," he's saying, "it will cost me thousands to fix this thing."

  I find my way to the door and step out into the little hall. Such a relief to be out of that room! Vincent exits right behind me and calls over my shoulder, "Tabina!"

  The being in the burka appears presently. Vincent has replaced his flashlight with a cigarette. He gestures with it.

  "Show this man the door."

  This is a dreadful motel room, but it suits my mood. I almost embrace it as a punishment, though I'm afraid to touch anything lest I catch some dreaded disease. The crooked pictures are uglier for their crookedness, and the pulsing music from the adjacent chamber reflects the baseness and lack of aesthetics that typifies this modern culture, despite its glorious technological sophistication. (Ironic how we seem to be becoming a more stupid lot as our technology advances...perhaps, in some way, it is culpable).

  I am confused and disheartened. I honestly don't know what to make of my experience at the Banchini House. While I am stung by Vincent's rage, I am also angry with him for coercing me to try out the machine after I had made it clear that I did not want to. Certainly I'm guilty for causing injury to a unique piece of Victorian technology, or, worse yet, a metaphysical device.

  But is it really the mystical machine that it is made out to be? Pond believed it was, and didn't his experience bear out that opinion? How can I distinguish whether the things I saw were more than a magician's stunt? What did I really see? Was there a hidden projector painting faces on the steam?

  More irony...for one who had set out to retrace a trail of supernatural exploration, the thought that keeps me from falling asleep is this... What if the things I saw were indeed real? And on that note, what if I did not shut the machine down in time to stop that ghastly creature from getting out into this realm?

  5. BRINKLOW'S DISAPPEARANCE

  Eunice Rice was despairing over her failing memory. She could scarcely remember where she set down a teacup, yet her childhood days returned to mind vividly, exhuming the colors and sensations of the village that had been home; wild August fields buttered with goldenrod, meteors spitting across the cold night sky, ponies and dizzy dragonflies, a restless puppet of unpainted wood, and an old woman who lived under the ice of Beeton's Pond and chewed at it with her horrible teeth.

  Now, Eunice was an old woman, and with her memory what it was, she could not say for certain where the haunted bushel basket had come from. In the final pages of his journal, Simon Brinklow wrote of Eunice Rice and her preoccupation with her failing memory. And he wrote of a weathered, innocuous-looking basket filled with leaves.

  It was November of 1870 when he made the hilly trip from Massachusetts to the Rice homestead, situated on the outskirts of Shaftsbury, Vermont. Nearly eight years had passed since Brinklow had gone from passionate defrauder to one dedicated to supernatural exploration. His book The Path by Moonlight had been published (and scoffed at) by the time he had returned to America to pay a second visit to Fractured Harry.

  Settled in his room, Brinklow repeated the conjuration. He whispered the little song into a bottle, then left that in the lonely cemetery down the way from the Sumner Inn at Lexington.

  Harry, as before, came to his room, but this time he had a water bucket for a head. It was a sturdy thing of oak staves bound with bands of hoop iron. Two apples, like bulging red eyes, were held to the bucket by long rusty nails. His torso was a man's white shirt, rustling with autumn leaves and mice, while the legs were twisty branches of birch. This time Harry stepped very gently, for his feet were ornate preserve jars from India.

  When Brinklow had previously encountered this spirit, it had communicated a destination to him. He had gone to that place, of course, and from there ventured to another location of enigmatic significance. And on and on. Each place he visited seemed to be a stepping-stone bringing him closer to some great mystery.

  In his journeys, Simon had encountered things so terrifying that he hesitated to describe them, but he had also found undocumented beauty that language could not hope to convey.

  The man spent years traveling from place to place until he came to something of a dead end. It occurred to him that he might find direction from Harry, so he crossed the grey Atlantic, to the very spot where his adventure had begun.

  Once again Harry, in wispy words that were not words, described a place. An old farm in Vermont, and a Gate of Leaves. In the morning, Brinklow packed his things and headed north.

  The sky above Vermont was like an unfinished painting of the sea, the man noted in his journal, marking his arrival at the Rice farm. It was a stormless grey awaiting an artist's brush to add the detail of waves.

  Brinklow took great interest in Eunice's childhood tales about the strange puppet, and the lady in the pond, but he was most eager to see the unusual basket which had the town abuzz.

  It looked like any bushel barrel of its day, but for the fact that it was full of dry leaves, their bright October colors faded to browns and muted salmon. As for it being haunted, Brinklow had his own thoughts on the matter, based on what he had heard.

  A few examples: A chicken, tossed into the leaves in the basket, did not come back out. A pitchfork poked into the thing found no bottom. The container gave things as well took them. Eunice claimed that small coppery fish flew out of the leaves on several occasions. When dropped they shattered like glass. But, when tossed up into a night sky, the glimmering fish would hang in the dark like stars.

  On the 15th of November, 1870, Brinklow wrote: "The barrel appears not uncommon in any way. While it is weathered, I am not given the impression that it is a thing of great antiquity. The bands encircling the upright slats of wood are rusted, but sturdy enough. Likewise, the leaves within are ordinary to the eye, though I detect a subtle scent that reminds me of brine."

  Shortly after making that final notation, the man began a tactile examination of the bushel basket. He tapped at the sides with a penknife, then with a brave little smile reached his hand down into the leaves.

  Brinklow could find no bottom, though his arm was long enough that he sh
ould have. He thought he felt small slippery things brush across the top of his hand -- fish perhaps, swimming in the leaves. Then, he reported to the few witnesses present that he felt hair. Long, silken hair that might belong to a woman.

  The man tried to grasp the hair, but it slid from his fingers and hissed elusively through the leaves. He reached deeper, leaning over the edge of the creaking basket, groping until most of one arm was submerged. Again he got hold of the long slinky hair, grabbing onto it like reins, even as he felt something taking hold of him. A sinuous pressure coiled about his arm. He said it felt like a constricting snake.

  Whatever it was, it dragged him headfirst into the rasping barrel. Onlookers, standing a safe distance away, could not get to the man in time. They were stunned by the speed of his abduction. One moment he was there kneeling by the barrel, the next his feet were sticking straight up out of the leaves, his portly form impossibly swallowed before their eyes.

  6. DR. POND AND THE SPIRITO MACCHINA

  I am rereading the section in Albert Pond's journal where he visits the dark, clanging room beneath the towering Italianate house in Manchester, trying to see if his experience will give some perspective to mine.

  Pond, like Simon Brinklow before him, had embarked on a strange path of stepping-stones. His experience began with the discovery of Arabella, and (to recap) continued with the shell-faced baby, Brinklow's note, the discovery of Brinklow's books, the melting of the infant, the strange and hideous death of Professor Wakefield (who wrote of the overlap theory) and Fractured Harry, who sent him to the Banchini House in New Hampshire.

  Arcangelo Banchini, who built the house and invented the Spirit Machine, was in his seventies when Dr. Pond went to visit him, and while the man's health was failing, his mind remained sharp, and his dark eyes revealed great intensity. Pond wrote that his host was a very serious sort with no time left for humor or idleness. Similarly impatient with small talk, Pond respected the older man's directness.

  The machine-chamber was undergoing some modifications at the time; Banchini cautioned Pond that there had been some "difficulties" with it, and that it required some refining. A Belgian fellow, who had traveled a great distance in hopes of contacting his deceased twin sister, had left the room mysteriously deficient in fingers. There were no wounds, nor blood, merely a lack of digits. The man did, incidentally, enjoy a visit with his sibling.

  Pond had familiarized himself with the late Professor Wakefield's writings and was intrigued to read, according to the hypothesis put forth, that overlaps might be either natural formations or created. In the case of the Banchini device, the dimensional gateway did not exist in that spot prior to the creation of the machine.

  I find it somewhat reassuring that even Pond was apprehensive about taking his next step, so to speak, closing himself in that subterranean chamber amidst the noisy clutter, with the two doors facing him, and the unknown pressed up against the other side of those doors.

  Pond wrote of his intentions: "I could not help but feel a kindredness with Brinklow, and something more, a sense of obligation. He had reached out to me with his note, after all. He must certainly have been trapped somewhere, in who knows what conditions. Thus, my aim was to attempt to release him, or at the very least to gain some communication with him."

  Pond spoke Simon Brinklow's name into the trumpet-like apparatus hanging down to his left. In his journal he did a fine job of evoking the rest of his experience, detailing the dimness and the noise of the many moving parts around him, then the lifting of one of the doors on the other side of the chamber. In his case it was the left door that opened.

  "Once the door had retracted fully, I found myself gazing upon a seated figure the size of a grown man. It was gracefully shaped from metal, and rather skeletal, with a chest that made me think of a trilobite in that it was roughly ovular with pronounced ribs nestled against each other."

  The chair holding the puppet slid out on its track, and Pond had a better look at its face. While lacking any distinct expression, the bland suggestion of human features somehow displayed a kind of tranquility.

  The puppet stood up, and artificial hands reached to open the hinged plates of the chest. Pond found himself facing a soft luminosity that filled the opened area of the torso, like a window misted by moonlight and breath. After several moments he discerned movement there in the watery light -- a shape was moving toward the opening, when suddenly the entire room rumbled painfully.

  Pond grasped the arms of the chair as the puppet flopped back into its seat, rattling like a suit of armor. The sides of the chest compartment clanked open and shut repeatedly, a Cyclops blinking. Then its chair flew back and forth on its rail, backward into the darkness, then out into the only slightly more illuminated area where the man sat. It did this several times, squealing metallically until the sliding door came banging down on top of its head. That was when the room went black and Pond sat there listening as the works shuddered and pinged their way toward silence.

  It was at about that time that Pond felt something strike him in the chest, like a fist, and he himself blacked out.

  When Albert awoke he was on a sofa in the parlor of the large house, and Arcangelo Banchini was leaning over him, studying him with dark eyes.

  Pond had lifted his hands and examined them. "Well," he'd said, "I appear to have all my fingers."

  Banchini was profusely apologetic, like a man whose prized dog has bitten a guest on the leg. It was clear that his pride was wounded, because his invention had malfunctioned. Pond was gracious nonetheless, and expressed interest in returning for a second try as soon as the machine was up and running again. He had gotten a titillating glimpse, and that, he assured his host, had made the trip worthwhile.

  As for the blow to his chest, there was no mark to be found, no bruising, no redness, no injury that could be seen, although in his journal Pond would confide that the area just above his solar plexus felt both sore and tingly.

  7. SEPTEMBER

  I must be going mad; there can be no other explanation. Days have passed since I have been able to sleep. All I do is pace my rooms and peek out around the shades. Maybe I need to talk to a therapist -- maybe I'm suffering some sort of anxiety disorder. I've probably spent too many years reading strange old books.

  Following the upsetting incident at the Banchini House, I decided to postpone the rest of my adventure indefinitely. It was a sad thing, admittedly, and I've admonished myself over it, abandoning the dream that I had waited years to pursue. But something happened in that dark underchamber, something that frightened me deeply, and so I made the painful decision to return home.

  I know it's foolish. In fact, nothing notably alarming occurred until this past Saturday. Every year the Eastborough Library holds a sidewalk book sale, selling off old unloved books for charity. The public is invited to bring boxes of their own to offer as well. Most of the books are works of dreadful fiction, but I've found some diamonds among the coal. Since my return I've been trying to read things other than archaic esoteric texts, so I thought I might give the sale a try.

  It was a fine day in the first week of September, blue-skied, bright, with the early leaves turning. There was even a trace of coolness in the air, a great relief, considering the muggy August I had suffered. It was the kind of day that makes me want to eat plain doughnuts and drink hot cider.

  Long tables were set up on the sidewalk along West Main Street; others crowded the front lawn in front of the noble old structure of beige stone. I wandered among the tables, quietly scrutinizing their contents. Books were stacked in irregular gravity-defying pillars and stuffed into cardboard boxes, the white splits in worn bindings giving the impression that their titles were emerging through static.

  There were a good many potential buyers perusing about, and they seemed nice enough, book-lovers being a more civilized lot. I picked up a slim volume on British war ships of the late 1700s and was standing in the shade of a maple, flipping through its pages, when I felt some
thing cold touching my arm.

  Looking down, I noticed a pale hand lighting on the back of my wrist. The wrinkled fingers were slender, with nails that looked like tiny bleached trilobites.

  Instinctively I stepped back and looked up to see the face of the person who had touched me. There were leaves tangled in the long white hair which blew across the face -- a shifting mask obscuring all but the toothless smile.

  A rush of adrenaline spun me from the stranger. I dropped the book onto the nearest table and found myself walking swiftly away from the crowd and the tables and the cool shade of the library. I crossed West Main -- blood parading through my head with heavy feet -- and did not turn to look back until I had reached my car.

  Light flashed on the window of the heavy library door as it swung shut. Leaves trembled down onto heaps of faded books. People milled and hunched over tables. People chatted and smiled and made purchases. The world appeared ordinary -- no sign of the white-haired individual with prehistoric fingers.

  I drove straight home, where I have remained since. Sleepless. Pacing. I obsess over the incident, replay it over and over in my mind. Was the hand that touched me as cold as my memory tells me it was? Wasn't it simply some nice little elderly person on the verge of asking some innocuous question? How could someone really have little white trilobites for fingernails?

  There must be something wrong with me, acting this way. I think about the Banchini House and what I saw in the opened chest of that metallic demon. But what did I see? Those faces bobbing in the strange light were nothing other than images cast by a hidden projector, weren't they? The one that was reaching out, or pulling itself out, was no more than a clever illusion. That has to be the logical explanation. It was a prank, a little something to agitate the imagination.