After weighing my options, and having witnessed how well its been treated my friend over at The Starry Messenger, Not by Needs not Nature will be moving over to the WordPress formate. Below is a small, modest screen shot of the site.
The entirety of the site will be up there in time.
The final installment of The Split will be the first post on the new blog: http://notbyneeds.wordpress.com/. See you there.
Cheers,
Jesse
Don't forget to read the first four installments of
The Split
by Jesse P. Hiltz
Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.
Part V
Then the packages began arriving, addressed to my dorm. No return address. After cutting the thread, and unwrapping the brown paper, I look inside.
Nothing. Always nothing.
They began to arrive three weeks after I left the hospital. Small cardboard boxes. One box every three or four days, for two weeks.
Is this the way the game will be played?
These gifts were the only welcoming I received after leaving the hospital. On the drive home, my eyes glazed over the stone buildings. The stone was darkened and stained by the rain. It looked as cold and clammy as my skin. My eyes felt as if my brain were sucking them into itself. For nourishment, or clawing and grasping, trying to get out. I had already forgotten what comfort felt like.
Lynn rode with me but we not speak.
The sky was a dark grey, the clouds black. Inky. I had once saw a photograph of the fire cloud that hung over Halifax after the explosion in 1917. It loomed, lumbering away from the city, as the citizens ran, their windows melted, the iron bend, bones snapped, bodies were rubbed into the landscape, the buildings that housed trembled and melted away with them. Hell had risen from the water and masticated a terrified people.
Once home, I was alone. I walked around my dorm room like a shade. I sat on my bed and stared at the tower of empty shipping boxes. I would often look in the boxes, over and over, in case I had missed something. But there was nothing. I willed and wished that I might find a fibre or catch a waft of scent: a familiar thread that could run through everything I have encountered, came up against. To create a tight bundle of ideas and intuitions.
If certainty is the result of causes followed by effects, then everything is a clue, pointing back, beyond itself, to its origin, to another clue. We are all detectives in this sense. Yet, when we finish our work, if ever, we find that when we approach the origin, it too has evaded us yet again. So what have we found when we have no origins, but only further clues to hope for? Not ourselves, that’s for certain. We find something else though, something that’s not a presence, not a final state as with machines, not an appearance, but an aura. A side-ways glance.
When the hell fire too Halifax, where was the origin of this event? Was at the location of the SS Mont-Blanc, the munitions ship, or the Norwegian ship Imo that hit it? Was it with their captains? Captain Le Medec, who sent his ship into the centre of the shipping channel to avoid a collision? When Captain Haakon From ordered ‘reverse engines’, but instead of stopping, the fluid dynamics of the changing propellers alters their course and their intentions, sending them into the SS Mont-Blanc? Was it when the Imo struck and became lodged in the Mont-Blanc, igniting sparks? Or, was it when they attempted to pull back, lighting more fires? Was it when the Mont-Blanc’s crew abandoned the ship, and without a crew, it drifted toward the hapless city? Was it when the crew abandoned the ship without opening the seacocks? Would they have drowned the fire and saved the city? Was it when the English speaking Halifax men didn’t understand the French warnings? Would a translator have saved the people? Was it when the drifting rogue, Mont-Blanc, reached Pier 6 and lit the munitions cargo stored on land? Was it at 9:04 am, that moment of paranuclear rupture? Or, was it long before, when Compagnie Générale Transatlantique purchased the Mont-Blanc to carry munitions to France? Was it then?
Is it all of these things or none of them? No, it something that cuts through them all, a diagonal line that intersects them all. But why can’t I speak of this thing? How do I speak of this diagonal line that cuts through the constellation. What of my constellation? What of my diagonal line? What of the leviathan?
I find it’s aura everywhere within these mysterious and anonymous gifts: the packages, Cornelius’s story, in Furlong’s very identity, in the churning waters of the Split.
Perhaps one needs to take the diagonal look at the angular events? How does one do this? Sherlock Homes’ morphine, opium, heroin... something near the margins. Is this the signature that activates these signs? Are we all detectives in this way?
Thus, I began my investigation anew. Certainty can only take you so far. There is a leap that takes you from regarding the constellation into its fabric. It is then you see that it was neither points, nor stars, drawn into relations with each other – but rather, it is a membrane, it lives along this diagonal plane.
How will I know myself when I find myself there?
But the packages stopped arriving and with them, life seemed to stop altogether.
There was nothing to determine the passing of time but the rising and falling of the sun. Daniel came by to chat and didn’t stay long. I’m not sure what we spoke of, or if we spoke at all. I stopped waiting for Lynn’s visits. “How should I react to this?” She cried. “I can’t see you like this?”
She walked out the door. I tried to follow her. Perhaps if I had followed, thing would have turned out differently. Is this a passing glance of redemption? But I could not move. The morphine sat on my chest like a dwarf.
How did I not notice her absence?
Even now, even in this correspondence, I cannot focus on Lynn. My mind does not allow it. Lynn, how have you been taken from me? I did not known that I would never see her again.
Redemption through words – what could I have said to here at that point? Words would not hold water, or ferry meaning. They were all vessels, yes, but ships without home ports, marooned without hope. Or worse, they are secretly ablaze in a harbour about to erupt.
Will they blow?, the Halifax spectators must have thought. I heard them pass by me, these dangerous words, in an echoed parade. How does one have courage?
Vince Coleman sends his last telegraph: “Stop trains. Munitions ship on fire. Approaching Pier 6. Goodbye.”
On a Sunday, I lost the ability to sleep. On a Tuesday, I bought a ferry ticket to the United States. To Boston. To follow the trail back to Furlong; the only clue I had. My only first move. So I leapt....
***
Leaning over the railing on the ferry, I was mesmerized by the rolling of the grey Atlantic waters. That shared waters of the Split. My attention was stretched already. There is a liquidity to travel, a flowing from place to place. It is explicit when traveling by water; the water tipped its hat to me with ever wave, silently and rhythmically. My own reflection reminded me that I hadn’t eaten or slept. I stared at that image of my self unable to pull it up into the ferry with me. Such a sad wretch, lying in the water, unable to drown.
***
My God. What have I done?
My black wool overcoat and satchel was decorated with the fragile white. I could not brush them off. The thought of damaging them was unbearable; they was so natural and safe. I roamed along Boston's streets until the day ended, and the farther I walked, the more the buildings began decay - as if the day of reckoning began earlier there than else where. The building looked black, like coal. Do they not have street lights here?
Exhausted and freezing, I found myself on the water front. My side ached with each breath. A broken a rib? My leg is so sore. It was so dark, I was had to sit down. I spotted a bench beside the water, in a small, unkept park. Is it safe here? Each route I took in this damned city, felt like a mistake. I tucked my chin deeper into my jacket. My cheek felt tender against my collar. My face. Am I marked?
The night was silent. Moon was a murmur in the snowy sky. Sound of the streets grit under my feet was deafening. Is it safe here? How could I stay hidden when everything announced my presence. I must rest. I moved down a path between to great buildings. Does anyone live here? Are like dead monuments? I heard what could have been a rat, a cat, or a man. It would not make itself seen. I want to be like you. I want to be unseen.
I entered the garden. The silhouettes of weed husks, clusters of tall grasses. Is that a man shirt? I stepped on some glass. It crackle thundered. Is darkness thinker than the light? Like water, sound travels faster here. The land was raised slightly above the still water. Is this a berth of some kind? Not frozen but suspended.
I reached down to situate the location of the bench. In the dark, objects seem to move on their own. The relief of rest was haunted by vulnerability. Is it safe here? Safety is the feeling of being enclosed, this is the embrace. But safety is only understandable when exposure is own ultimate fear. A hug is safe because it limits our exposure to the Outside. Within an embrace, whatever there is to fear, remains outside of it. But what one feels when one sits on the outside, fully exposed, easily taken, easily hunted. Animals never allow themselves to be put in this state. If forced into exposure, an animal will fight as though it were death. As though - why does man make such an artificial distinction? It is death.
Fatigue, however, confuses exposure for embrace. It mistakes the darkness for cover. Is this why man foolishly sleep at night?
Then, the moon’s light flickered, far out, on the water. A tiny glimmer. Then another. A movement in the water. A sweat broke and the air never felt so cold. The space around expanded around me. Then a sound, a whispering of the motion that disrupted waters glass. There it was, where the glimmer shone, a rippling stole out from the dancing light and began to creep toward the shore, toward me. Closer, the aberration moved toward me, almost delicate, must it purposive. I tried to stand but was fixed to my place, my limbs fixed to there position. I am exposed. And worse, hunted.
The swell reached out and touched the stone wall of the water front – then nothing. Silence again. Stillness. But I felt it. I felt its aura.
I shook with even attempt to move. What holds me here? God damn you!
The break of a twig, the scuff of a foot, a dragging, a rustle, a flutter – the dead, black space around me began to stir. Out of side and never in the same place. They move, but always towards me.
Something touches my back. My body wants to jump, to react but I remain restrained. The tension wracks my body. The scream catches in my throat, bloated my laughs, they burst.
The water heaves again, scattering the sounds back into the night. They wait, but they fear what’s in the water. They fear.
Words escape my lips: “Why... do you come to me now?”
Recognized, the whole of the black water, as far I could see, yielded as the slick, black skin of the beast broke its surface. Coiled and knotted, it claimed the entire world. Before me surfaced milky dead eyes. The water glided off its oily skin as it came over the embankment for me. I want to run. I need to run!
But I stood, took two long strides, and with bursting lungs, leapt into it gapping maw. Pain streaked my side as I jumped up from the bench. Groggy, my eye shot around the water. Stillness. My God. My God. Disregarding the dangers of the dark alleys and streets, I wrapped my coat around my aching ribs and limped way from the water, into the darkness.
Hours later, I saw a wore wooden sign, on a darkened brick building, written in faint Chinese. I have found you at last. A dark place. A secret den. One of that last in the Eastern United States.
I entered a old wooden door and then through another, locked and heavy. The interior was dimly lit, and smelled sweet and exotic. I walked lamely through a common lounge. Oil lamps, tapestries. Each step reminded me of terrible pain in my leg. Black silk traps, soft carpets with embedded histories. Men lay on thick cushions, outside of their lives, escaping, exhaling thick plumes of fragrant smoke. With every breath the room grows dimmer, pushing the light out.
I was lead by a man. I did not ask his name. He did not ask mine. We are not friends, nor did even do business. He provides a haven, a survive, and I required sanctuary. Once I entered his door, I was freeman paying to be a slave.
We entered a hallway of dark, stained wood and many heavy, black curtains that hid the shamelessness of the room’s interior. The man drew one of them back and I entered like a boy into a bordello.
There was a burrow, with a lock, for my belongings, but I had none. There was a lovely worn black velvet couch, a small engraved side-table, and an opium pipe with lamp.
“You need food?” The man asked.
“No.” I could not eat, but I did change my clothes. I had to. The Chinaman didn’t ask about the blood.
As if on cue, the man returned with a small decorated wooden box. Red with golden ornamentation. I reclined gingery on the couch and he opened the box and placed it on the table to my right. He lit the opium lamp and left.
I gazed down at the small box at three small, dark pea-shaped spheres, and thought of my visit Hymel, and what brought me to this last point.
Return soon for the final installment of The Split.
She left, and I did not hear from her for three days. That first night she was gone, I sat in the very same chair I sat in when I had relayed my tale. I just remained sitting, alone, facing the bed where she had wept. The blankets were gathered where she had clinched her fists, and the room still had the gesture of her scent. Lilac.
III
The second morning I rose earlier, before even Hymel. After last night’s discussion on Cornelius, I was becoming more attentive to my actions and their interpretable intentions. Intentions of what? I also thought. Was it to know something? Yes. What I wanted to know... Yes, but then, I could not yet tell. When I had thought of what grabbed my curiosity about this location, the Split, I could recall nothing of solidity, just fragments of themes, none of which cohered. A gap in design lurked everywhere in this place. It drew itself together in the actions of the others and, lacing itself up, flirted whorishly with the knowable.
I ate smoked bacon and hard boiled eggs with boiled tea and milk. The tea was charcoal grey, like dark water, not the amber hue of Earl Grey. This was bitter, but on that second day I learned to like the tea. I would have never complained in Hymel’s presence.
That day we were to go to the Split itself. I had been anticipating the opportunity to see that great scar in the cliff. It was sunny so we packed for the long hike - three and a half hours out and three and half hours to return, all on foot. I had once walked in the Scottish Highlands when I was younger. The lush green hills roll for kilometres and would disappear into thick evergreen forest. So too the Cape looked, like a thin slice of Scotland laid out in the sea.
We drove to the wharf again and parked the truck there. Bib loaded up his massive shoulders with the gear and we approached the forest. A small path sliced in the thick branches marked the way. And slowly, I entered after Hymel and Bib.
And we hiked.
Every step and every turn, twist, and foot hill seem to pull me, an internal magnetism that draws the soul. The path dodged in and out of hugs fur trees and thick alder bush. The longer we walked, the colder and more moist the air became. On and on. The air seemed to get substantially weighty and thick to breath and when I exhaled, I felt like the substance, the fog, stayed within in lungs making them heavy. I thought myself ill. Perhaps catching a cold.
The sun had all but disappeared during the walk. Afters hours, the forest gave way to a great clearing which was surrounded on all side by the white walls of the sky. It gave it the illusion of floating there in air. I approached the edge of the grassy edge and my sinews and joints stiffened upon seeing that I stood on the edge of the cape, looking down forty meters to the mud and mammoth rocks.
For a moment, a flash nothing more, I felt pluralized; another person had an impulse, a thought, that wasn’t my own. This thought was, yes, obviously mine, I thought it, but then there must have been someone listening to the thought. But that was me too. I heard the whisper: jump. It was the articulation of a want... No. Not the want but the elation of not flying, but being unheld by any sort of foundation, ground, suspension. That was what I both thought and heard – Yes, there were two of me – one thought and the other, in horror, felt the beads of sweat push through his skin. And flash, the moment ended and I stepped away, reformed, in subdued terror.
Only metres away, Hymel and Bib set about their surveying ritual, setting up the equipment and locating position flags. I wiped my forehead and looked out over plans of red mud - the water was again just a silver trim on the horizon, somewhere on another coast.
I walk out to the tip of the cape again, where the high cliff was sheared off. And there, after gap stood the Split. It was huge, dark tooth that jutted out of the mud. My eyes traced its outline, trying to somehow circumscribe its image but I could not keep it all in my sight. There was always something outside my sight, a remainder. I could not understand the Split or its power over me. I had viewed such geological displays before. What is rock to a man? I thought. But, I did not believe myself. There was a sublime presence to the Split. It was defined and marked out by the ocean’s violent of unconscious nature. I watched the Split for many minutes, perhaps an hour, trying to understand its presence.
The water returned and with it, a dense fog. It engulfed everything. Sound and sight were dampened and the Split seemed to back away from me, into it. The water rose and not being able to see its base, I felt like the Split could watch me from the fog.
The silence was gradually replaced by the muffled roar of the waves.
Hymel’s voice faintly sounded through the whiteness: “You’d better back away from the edge of account of the fog.”
“Indeed,” I yelled and stepped away from the tip, moving through the fog toward the centre of the clearing. The air was thick, milky, so I had to walk with care. I could have easily walked form one side to the other and over the edge without even knowing until the end. I could make out Hymel and Bib’s silhouette in he fog, they were packing up their gear.
I was halted when my foot scuffed on something rough in the grass. The thick, moist blades were blackened. I knelt down and made out, a little further away, a scorched patch at least two metres in diameter. I had then recalled seeing a fire on the cape that first night but could not recollect seeing the scorch marks before the fog. I inspected the ash. There were several partially burnt logs, but it was mostly ash from coal. I stirred up the ash with a stick and unearthed hard unburned lumps of coal. Someone had been burning something at a very high heat, perhaps, I thought, it was a camping fire by some folks on a hike. I dismissed that idea. It seemed unlikely anyone would use coal for a camp fire: the stench and smoke would be terrible. I stood up to continue on, toward Hymel, but something else caught my eye in the ash. There was a clump of yellow stone, and as its vial smell hit me, I determined it had to be sulphur.
“Raymond,” Hymel yelled through the fog. “You be careful lad, I don’t want you going over the edge.”
“I'm fine,” I responded, finally reaching them.
We ate. Hymel insisted that the fog would lift but it did not. It remained thick for hours until, nearing late afternoon, Hymel decided we should leave. He said it was better to hike in the fog then spend the night on the
Though the path was well marked, it was proving hard to follow. Again, I followed behind, Hymel and Bib, not trusting myself to find my way otherwise. While I was trying to keep pace, my mind kept roaming back to the fire spot and the sulphur. I snapped awake after stubbing my foot on an old root. I could barely see my own feet and the path was littered with knurls.
We walked silently for sometime. Hymel and Bib were barely visible a head of me. My mind drifted back again. Perhaps it was a blacksmithing project of some kind? One uses coal for that. Yet the sulphur? What of that? There was a snapping in the forest. A tree branch breaking. I turned toward the sound and my foot caught on another blasted root and was thrust face-first into a small thicket of alders. I landed softly in the shrubbery; the shear surprise made me want to both laugh and scream. I floated there awkwardly, suspended above the ground. I reached toward the forest floor to push myself up and among the wet leaves and soil, my hand touched something unnatural. It was smooth and leathery. Square and stitched. I picked it up: a wallet.
After struggling to my feet, I opened it and quickly searched through its contents. There were a couple bills, scraps of paper, a key and identification: Donald Wilcox. He was forty or so, from the University of Boston - Furlong’s university - dark hair and fat cheeks. He must have accompanied Furlong when the shark was found. But that didn’t seen like it could be so. Why would they be on the cape? That would have been six years earlier; this wallet looked relatively intact, probably only lost from a month at most. The only explanation was fairly dull: there was no reason to think that this person had anything to do with Furlong. He was probably just a tourist, a traveler, like I was. Maybe just here looking for rocks.
The key had a small green tag tied to it. The lettering was faded but were still legible. It was a key for a room in the “Department of Biology” in Boston.
I heard footsteps coming toward me. I tuned and I slipped the wallet into my jacket pocket and brushed myself off. It was Bib.
“What’s going on here?” He asked gruffly.
“Nothing,” I replied. “I fell. I’ve two left feet, no good at dancing either.”
He examined me quietly before turning. Without knowing, I had just played my turn in this little game we were playing. While he looked at me, I felt the same urge I had felt on the edge of the cliff; a splitting of self. He played his - he again said nothing. His silent inquisition was a guillotine. When we locked his eyes, I thought to strike him, or spit in his face, tear at his face. Why? Even now, I shrink in horror at my own impulses. I break a sweat. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then my face will deceive me, I thought. He will, with his own eyes, see through my own, and into my secret searching for that which I cannot name.
We returned to the cabin as darkness fell. The fog remained. We supped and retired for the night. Hymel regained a bit of his chatting demeanour, and thus I listened to his ramblings on hydroelectric engineering late into the night. Bib reached into a woollen sack and retrieved a pouch of pipe tobacco and we smoked in bed until sleep found us.
I was swept, or rather, pulled into a dreaming state. As the fractured images became clear to me, the cubist landscape formed to the shape of deep woods: the path to the Split. The images swirled around me; I must have been turning, looking, searching. I then seemed to be in the heart of the woods. The trees rushed by me, perhaps I was running, perhaps being transported. I turned toward my back, and saw a fire there. It was contained but explosive.
I sensed something coming behind, or along side me, I couldn’t tell. What was it? Who perhaps… Who indeed. Yes. There was a figure running. With me or for me? My instinct is to run faster. But I couldn’t see what is ahead, I was still looking behind me, keeping an eye, a fix, on the figure. I rushed out of the woods and the trees disappeared behind me. The figure froze there and paced just within the tree line.
I turned and found myself on the cutting edge of the cape. My feet stood on only an inch of light grass. Only the physics of dreams kept me from falling. I hung in the air half on the ground, half over the abyss.
The ocean was black and rolling, the sky was a mirror of this turmoil. The foams of the pounding waves, mimed the thunder cloud, both enveloped and churned into each other. In the horizon, the water and the sky became one terror. And within the rolling water’s violence, a sleek, glassy body rose and dove, churning in its watery element. Its long slender body stretched through the whole of the water, stretching forever, winding through the churn as if it were stitching it. It lifted its great head above the cape gazing down at me. It flashed deep eyes of onyx and shredded teeth of glass. Form what depths did this leviathan come? What God could create the fiend? No devil would create a beast to rival his own power. This dark thing must be of God; only a divine creature could be so terrible and not claim the earth as its own.
From its lungs swelled a great bellow sending tremors through the ground and stirring up the oily water and skies. There was a flash from behind me. The figure and the fire now set upon the clearing. I stood trapped between the beast and this mysterious man. There was no direction to choose. No choice to run.
The figure, with a swift gesture, cast something into fire making it roared with flame. Then and I saw the figure’s face. Jump. Suddenly I was him, standing by the fire facing the leviathan. The fire was a weapon. I casted my element against its own. The beast thrashed in the water, casting the black water up onto the cape. My hand.... I grabbed at the fire and casted into the see. The beast coiled and thrusting itself on the tooth of the Split, made it stutter. It encircled it and from that ghastly stone mass, it thrust its massive head toward me. In its soulless, blacks eyes, I saw my reflection grow ever larger. Then I was the beast, and the fire went out.
I woke in a start. The must have been late, for only the moon shown through the fog. I parted the drapes by my bunk and peered out into the night’s dark. The features of the night were softened by the fog’s blur. My eyes strained.
Movement differentiated a shape. A man carried two buckets, traveling toward a stairway that lead down the bank to the rocky beach. I dressed myself silently and left the cabin. I followed him down the stairs. My boots squeaked on the wet wooden stairs, startling me.
“Are you going to say hello or just follow me the whole way?” the figure asked.
It was Cornelius. He stood in the mist waiting for me.
“I thought, I might follow.” I laughed nervously. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure why I’m here.”
“Well, you’re here now.” He said. “I might as well put you to work.”
“What does that imply?”
“We’re picking the herring nets. That interest you, Bale?”
I nodded and we walked down the foggy beach. The giant flat stone rolled under my feet and made it hard to stride. Cornelius wore a thick pair of rubber fishing boots and stomped through the stones. The silence between us reached out to fill the beach. Our last conversation hung in my memory: I couldn’t tell if he was waiting for me to ask, or hoping I wouldn’t. I couldn’t help but rationalize that with his invitation to come, Cornelius wanted me to.
Our steps lead us out onto the mud. The tide had just receded and the ground was pepper with small crab remains. The mud’s ribs looked like tiny sand dunes, all slightly different. In the fog, I saw the silver flickers of the herring bellies. Cornelius began picking up the modest sized fish and dropped them into the bucket. I followed suit and, having never touched the slimy body of a fish before, I seemed to perform the duty with enthusiasm.
We worked in silence.
When the last herring was picked and the buckets full, Cornelius throw me a rag and I wiped my hands of the sandy slime. I tossed it back, but he simply wiped his huge hands on his trousers.
“Are you going to ask or what?” He asked. “I can’t tell if you’re scared or just too damn polite.”
“A bit of both, I suppose. I just don’t know what I’m asking, or what anyone is referring to.”
“Then what are you on about? What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
He looked at me, fiercely. Not like Bib, but he was trying to peer through the very fog I had been looking through; my fragmented impulses and misdirected thoughts stewing like the waters in my dream. I was sure that I was catching some fever. I was starting to feel a little light headed.
“Follow me,” Cornelius said and walked toward the shore. Instead of walking up the stairs where Hymel’s cabin sat, he started up a small path through coarse shore grass. He carried both of the full, fish buckets with little effort and I followed. In little time, I saw a small one-story house. A thin wisp of wood smoke drooled out of a tin chimney.
“Is this your house?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. He took the buckets into a side building and yelled out: “Go on in. The door is unbolted.”
I removed my boots and entered the small home. It was not much larger than Hymel’s cabin. Lightly coloured hardwood planks on the floors and white wash on the walls. I sat at the kitchen table. It was planted in the center of the room. Flower embroidered tablecloth. A sugar bowl on a doily. The curtains where lavender. Plates adorned roses and gold edging. This place had the tender touch of a loving wife, though I did not see any trace of her presence: no clothing, no smell, no person.
Cornelius entered the house carefully placed his boots on a boot tray.
“Drink?” He took a jug out of the ice box and set in on the table.
“Sure. What are we drinking?”
“I don’t know.” He chirped. “Haven’t named it yet.”
He poured and I sipped the mysterious clear liquid. It was strong, but chilled and crisp.
And then he spoke, as I do now, in confession.
“Mr. Bale, this thing has sat on my mind, and often too. I feel as if I were cursed with it. That it clings to me and when you spoke to me the other day, I felt it lighten, like it was lessened somehow.”
I could understand what he meant. Yet, when he spoke to me I would feel heavier. The question suddenly to mind, how heavy is his burden, and will it become mine? But this didn’t bear any weight of its own. His need to confess was as strong as my need to receive it. I must know. That was all I could think. Tell me anything.
He began: “On the beach, what I saw – it was surprising but what I found was no shark, yet it was not a monster either. It was just a great smear, a mass of some kind of substance with a living form; an animal no doubt, but nothing with shape. No kind of thing that I’ve ever seen. It just was, and was dead.”
He sipped his drink.
“Do you know what I mean?” I asked.
“It was alive at one time,” he continued. “That’s for sure. But how it was alive, I don’t know that.”
“What did Furlong say it was?” The liquor was working; my ears were getting hot and my eyes floated a little.
“Furlong?” he laughed. “I never saw him. I was kicked off the beach when he got there. He came in, cleaned up the thing, and shipped it off. When the papers got there, the beach was clean and I was the only witness. That ask me what it was. So I say, I don’t know. ‘It’s not like anything I ever seen,’ I say. Without the body it’s not much of a scoop, you know. So, they leave after taking pictures of the beach and what not.
“Furlong talked to the papers on the phone and it was just a shark. You’d think I’d recognize something that that, don’t ya! Well that mades me look pretty damn crazy.
“I looked into it. ‘Went to the city and did a little looking. And you know what I found?”
I shook my head.
“In 1896,” he said raising his voice. “There was something like it buried in the sand on a beach in Florida. A big corpse, the same as I found: no organs, no real parts, just a glob of something. The papers said it was an octopus, but there wasn’t any legs, no tentacles. They called in the St. Augustine Monster. Monster, eh? They say its lots of things but can’t prove anything of it.
“Another, just a couple years ago, ten or so, washes up in Dunk Island in Australia. That’s no where near close to here. So what? Are they everywhere? More, in Querverille, France. Three years after I found mine, one washes up in Scotland. You know that? Most of those were called basking sharks too, but you know what? There is no proof of that.”
I was unsure how to respond to this. This man is mad, I thought. I poured another glass of the spirits.
“And then, after a good amount of time, Furlong comes back to the Bay,” Cornelius began again. “I thought it was odd, him showing up out of the blue, considering I’d never met the man before. He starting asking me about what I found. But he didn’t call it a shark.”
“What did he call it?”
“He called it the body. ‘That’s strange, calling it that,’ I say to myself. He asked if there was a place near the cove with gems and the like. ‘You mean gold’ I say to him. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Or anything else.’
“I thought that was a strange question. ‘There is,’ I say to him. The Spilt is full of amethyst; lots of folks have died trying to climb for to get it. He wanted me to take him there, to the Split, for a look. He said he’d pay, so I took him.
“When we reached the clearing there at the tip, he seemed to get really excited.”
I nodded. The liquor was starting to make me feel ill. His words, now more drunken, stumbled out between his whiskered lips, I felt myself sinking into my clothes.
“He began to act real strange,” he slurred. “He wondered around the clearing, pulling a book from a sack. He opened it up and read it for a bit and then showed me a diagram. I remember him wearing this great big cross around his neck.
“He keeps running around, doing this and that. So, I kept watching him. He inspected the clearing; poking and prodding the ground; picking and taken stones and soil in his hands and feeling it. ‘What is it that you’re looking for?’ I ask him. ‘The perfect place,’ he says. I so I say, “Place for what?’ ‘Sometimes a place holds significant, real presence. Where things exists in more potent ways than in others.’ Hat do you think of that?
He paused and drank.
“I could agree with that.” Cornelius continued. “People have always felt that there was something about that place. You can really feel nature, you know. You can feel the strength in nature. She takes care of her own. And don’t you think she doesn’t.”
“Did Furlong ever say what he was looking for? ...beside amethyst?” I struggled to pour another drink. “It seems to me, that he would have to give you some reason for his bizarre behaviour. He was acting queer, right? What of this?”
“He said a great deal!” Cornelius shouted. “He was dealing with dark deeds, if you ask me. The way he jabbed and poked at the earth... that book of his. I seemed like some sort of violation. I mean I fish, I take from the sea, and I hunt and take from the land, but his was indifferent. There was sometime odd about the way he touched the ground. Yeah, it was all mighty queer if you ask me. So I say to him again, ‘What are you doing here?’
Cornelius: “He said, ‘Nature is a mixing for four elements, and four qualities.’”
I recognized that as Aristotelian physics from my philosophy course in first year.
Cornelius: “Atoms...’ he says, ‘Earth, water, fire, air were all just atoms.’ He said that on the Split the presence of things, the way that things stood out, were riper there. ‘Ripe,’ do you hear that?
“‘Ripe for what?’ I asked. I was starting to get a little startled. This story was impossible to believe.
“Ripe,” he said. “‘...for completion,’ he says. ‘For purification.’”
He looked at me a second. These words seemed to disturb him for that the others.
“That’s strange,” Cornelius sighed. “He was going to purify nature. What does that mean? I started to get... I don’t know... I just got so angry. It was like I was watching myself become wild or something. I just watch myself. I…”
“What did he say? Did he see your anger?” I stopped and tried to center my thoughts. This story wasn’t making any sense to me.
“Cornelius?” I said slowly and clearly. “Why is this man telling you this? What is he explaining? This doesn’t make sense. People don’t talk like this.”
“That’s right,” he stood a drink and looked at me. “They don’t. But he wasn’t just talking. He was incanting, praying, and confessing... all at once. He said that ‘the purification of nature mirrors the purification in man.’ It brings you closer to God. The universe was the human. Nature and man are a mirror of each other. The presence of nature, the potency of the Split, was the potency in him.” He was quiet.
“Right,” I said to myself. This was clear. The appearance of gems, amethyst, meant that it was a place of refinement. If man mirrors nature, his soul, like the earth, would be distilled into a purity, like the gems.
“And then,” Cornelius said. “He said that he returned because of the monster.”
“The monster,” I repeated. “On the beach?”
“Yes,” he replied. “He said that it visited him in a dream. The sea beast is a symbol for the turmoil that happens during the purification of the soul and the elements. You got to be torn a part before you can be put together purely....” He sipped his liquor. “And then he said he could show me.”
We were both silent for a moment.
This was a moment which hung over me. He said he could show me, I repeated in my head. The authority in those words scared me; the confidence to say, I will show you the monster. I can appeal to the beast. I can call the leviathan.
This was a decisive moment. I could know the answer. But a doubt was also pressing on me. Doubt, this scared me the most. You can only doubt when you already believe and I was not sure if I wanted to believe this story. Yet the doubt told me that I was already caught in it. This story, if it were true, was too much to take as true.
What is of science, what is of art, what is of nature and beyond, if it can be caved in under the weigh of some unnamed being that no one can explain to me.
“What did you say?” My voice was a whisper.
“I said, I wanted to see,” he said with shame.
And became to speak. Now though, all I can recall are swirl of images, dream-like, for their description was dream-like: hunting, smooth and without boarders. I can now see it all, as if I saw it myself:
A roaring fire on the cape
The waves lap a the rocks face
Sharps, cold, wet, salty
Instruments and vials in Furlong’s sack
Cornelius lying there, eyes strained and stretched open
Fear, or perhaps wonder, perhaps neither
The book, worn and dog-eared
Stained with colours and smells of coal
Sulphur, quick-silver
Vapours, warm ears, boiling and spitting
Black smoke, choking, burning and splitting
The heavens, the starts are blinding, turning
The grass, cool and damp, heavy head
Inhaul, burning lungs, soothed, free-breathing
The high follows
Exhale to sound of air currents flapping, whistling
The hush of the grass under foot, so soft, unnameable
The sound of fire snap and the water pound like fists
The earth moves
Furlong walks to the edge and Cornelius stands up
His back is wet from the grass
He follows Furlong to the edge
The water is raging, the sky is black
Oily, pitch, the smoke, heaving are scotched
The sea foams, like the mouths of rabid dogs
The leviathan rolls in the waves
Tossing and thrashing in its violence
The soul thrashing in own
It tears at its own fabric
“Both called to me,” Cornelius says. “Commanding me. Demanding.”
The Soul, the Beast, The Split.
“It lifted its head from the waves and called for his body. It called to me. It demanded his body.”
With a thrust
A silent act
Furlong falls into the churning basin
Into the water
Into the Beast.
“I can’t believe it,” Cornelius began to weep. “I did it. I pushed him... I pushed him over the edge. I killed him.”
“What of the Beast?” I shouted. “Tell me of the Beast! Is that what could have washed up on the beach? Is it the same thing?”
He looked at me shocked: “It was just gone. I don’t even know if it was really there to begin with. This monster, it was the greatest things I’ve even seen. What washed up on the beach could not compare.”
“Is it a derivative of some kind? A kin of the beat? What is the body? I have to know!”
“Stop!” He wept with such intensity. Heaving. But I could not empathize, I could only think of the beast. And Furlong, the faceless name, had been killed by the man that sat before me. A murderer. The severity of this fact too escaped me then. I could only focus on that image: the black sea and the rolling brute within it.
“What happened next, Cornelius? What did you do?”
“I turned to run, but his stuff was everywhere. His books, his other belongings, were strewn about. I tried to pick them up but I felt like I was being watched. I panicked and gathered what I could from the grass, and threw it into the fire. Some things, however, I could not burn. I could not, burn his bag. It seemed to contain his most prized possessions: the book, a diary, wallet, some photos. I didn’t really dig around; I just took it and ran.
“I still have it, but I’ve never looked in it. I can’t bear it.”
I had never seen Furlong. Not a photo or any likeness. He had only been a name. He might as well have never existed for me. Now that he was dead, Furlong was erased.
“What did he look like?” I said. “Furlong, I mean.”
“He... ” he sighed. “I don’t know.”
“Try,” I insisted, as caringly as I could.
“Ah... He was younger than me, by twenty years or so.”
“Making him, what, forty, forty-five?”
“Forties, yeah. With a fattish face. Dark hair. He wasn’t heavy set, his face was, but he was shortish. Relatively plain. I think he may have been greying.”
Then it came to me: the sham.
“This him?” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the leather wallet from the trail. I removed the identification card and handed it to Cornelius.
He turned white and nodded slowly: “That’s him. Sure as day, this is him.”
He examined the card and pawed around in his shirt pocket and removed a pair of spectacles, placing them on his face. “This says Donald Wilcox? What is this? Where did you get this?”
“I found it on the trail to the Split. It looks like it was lost; it was in the bush.”
He stood up hastily and left the room. After rummaging through a coat closet, he returned with a leather side-bag which, I could only assume, belonged the dead man. Cornelius sat it heavily on the table and dumped its contents out. There was a book, black and leather bound, a stack of photos, a small wooden box, some papers, but no wallet.
“I…” Cornelius grasped at words. “I… he said his name was Furlong…”
I began to examine the contents. The papers especially caught my attention. I flipped through the pages. They were notes. To my surprise, I found that the handwriting matched the notes I had found at the library. It seemed I had been following Wilcox’ lead this whole time. The problem was learning the author’s identity only also to find out that he was dead.
I was overwhelmed.
I sat the papers down and picked up the book. The leather cover bore gold lettering: The Book of Materials by Albertus Magnus. The pages were well read, and oil stained, with blackened finger prints. I flipped through the pages and the pungent scents of sulphur, coal and musk swirled in my nostrils, lightening my head. The book binding was cracked in many places one of which caused the book to flip open to its ninth chapter. The words were underlined and fine neat notes crowded its margins. It read:
We see the powers of the stars influencing the powers in the powers in the material so as to produce something for which it is suitable. And alchemy also proceeds in this way, that is, destroying one substance by removing its specific form, and with the help of what is in the material producing the specific form of another. And this is because, of all the operations of alchemy, the best is that which begins in the same way as nature, for instance with the cleansing of sulphur by boiling and sublimation, and the cleansing of quicksilver, and the thorough mixing of these with the material of metal; for in these, by their powers, the specific form of every metal is induced…
The words continued and the theme was specific. Alchemy, the beast, Wilcox... The scope of these circumstances was ridiculous, out of control. I could not keep in mind all these pieces of the puzzle. Many of those pieces turned out to be wrong anyhow. Furlong, was not dead, as far as I knew. Cornelius was a murderer, whose motives were far from understandable or even expressible. At this point he just sat in silence. He did not drink. He did not speak. He only gazed at the identification card on the table. His understanding, his confession was tainted, because he did not then understand, until then, what he had done. He began his confession with the understanding that he had killed Furlong, but now Furlong was just as faceless to us both.
“Cornelius,” I felt like I was speaking into an empty room.
“Cornelius,” I said more sternly.
He lifted his head.
“Can I take this stuff with me to the city?”
He just stared at me: “Why would you want these things? These things are tainted with death. Why take it with you?”
“You don’t want it do you? Why don’t I take it with me?” I said.
“What?,” he shouted. “My God boy, this is murder. I’ve killed a man! The time for interest is long gone. I should be in prison. Jesus. Don’t you know, I’m going to Hell for this?”
“You’re a God fearing man...”
“This beast, this Hell, is not something sanctioned by God.” He slammed his fist on the table.
“I should take it,” I said, gathering the items into the bag. “You don’t want these things hunting you? I mean this could have been an accident. We can’t tell form the story, so...”
“Accident,” he said quietly. “That was no accident. I pushed him.”
He paused for a moment: “I can see now what it was. All those around here know what I’ve done. They know I’ve done something. Those friends of yours, Hymel and the other one, they know. I’m sure of it. They cut my traps, they steal my livestock, and they all know I won’t say a word. They know that I won’t say a damn thing because if I do... Well, we know what can throw back at me, don’t we?
“If you want that stuff, take it,” he grabbed the bag from my hands and swept the contents into the bag with one sweep. “Take it all, I don’t need it anymore. I can see already that whatever has hunting me found a much better host in you, my boy.”
He shoved the bag into my chest. His accusations infuriated me. I headed for the door.
“It’s so clear to me now, Mr. Bale. I’m free. It is you who have been trapped.”
He began to yell as I slammed the door.
“It’s got you now to keep it company. It’s got you!”
