The Grimscribe's Puppets (5 page)

The piece he chose was a song of praise, familiar to me from the hours we had spent in shared prayer. He sang in Latin, a language I doubted any one of the audience members understood, but they did not throw stones, nor jeer him offstage, nor even dare to speak: shocked into silence by the beauty of his song and the heartrending pathos with which it was performed.

Friedrich sang of the Lord’s majesty and wisdom, of His unerring faithfulness and devotion to His people. He offered up this praise not to heaven, but to the curtained box before him, wherein sat the Count and from which Friedrich’s eyes never strayed, not even when he had uttered the final note and the stillness lingered.

It was a thing of pure and bracing emptiness, so much like the darkness into which we had awoken, all of us, on the night the oak had burned. For the Lord had come at twilight, and left us again, so that we knew not in which way to turn for succor, and could only continue, sustained by the memory of a song which faded more each day and would soon be inaudible.

Friedrich produced a dagger from his cloak. He unsheathed the blade and held it aloft so all could see. And then, with one rapid motion, he jerked the dagger across his throat, the noise of rending flesh blotted out, mercifully, by the roar of applause that followed.

He collapsed and lay twitching, the life-blood pooling beneath him. Still the cheers continued. His corpse was dragged away, but the din did not cease, the crowd rousing itself to new heights of adulation when word reached us, slowly, that the Count was greatly pleased by this last performance. The competition was over; Friedrich was the winner.

At this, anger stole over me, and I could not quell the rage within my breast. I snatched a stone from the ground and leapt to the terrace below. The Count’s box was unguarded, the Watchmen having joined the others in raucous cheering and applause. I threw back the curtain and readied the stone, steeling myself to do violence to the merciless leper inside, who had, I was sure, brought this madness down upon us.

But the box was empty. It did not hold the Count, nor could it ever have done so. The heavy curtain hung from three sides of the square box, while the fourth and final wall consisted of nothing more than unpainted timber. I dropped the stone and fled the roaring crowd.

The sun had set by the time I reached the Abbey. I slipped into the garden through the east gate, grateful to find myself alone, if only for a moment. I collapsed to my knees before the oak and looked up past the empty branches. Dusk lay over the world, heady with the fragrance of roses and wood-ash, the odor unfaded since the autumn.

The Prior found me there. He did not scold or shout but merely took me by the arm and helped me inside. I reminded him, he later said, of Saint John, my namesake, as he knelt before the cross and waited, breathlessly, for night to fall.

By Michael Cisco

It’s the same basement I’ve been carrying around inside me. I know it somehow. That feeling alone tells me I’ve come to the right place, although I know I’ve never been here before, nor seen this before. In every clue that brought me here, there was something I recognized, all the same, and all of that comes together to be this place.

There is the emblem. It’s on the wall before me. A figure there, with something in its outstretched hand that coughs twice. Two jolts go through my chest. Two hammer blows. In quick succession. Quickly, one. Quickly, another. A kind of dull, twisting pain, like a cramp, down inside. More and more intense. Two points in my chest, haloed with asthma. The asthma spreads. My lungs won’t move. Then, cold, leaden dullness comes slamming down. I watch myself slacken and drop.

~*~

B: The secrets of the universe, is that it?

A: “Something like that. Why not?”

B: Well, you tell me.

A: *sighs* “It’s not the sort of a thing you can tell.”

B: No? ... Afraid you’ll sound ridiculous?

A: “It does sound ridiculous. And why bother? You’ll say I’m insane and that will be the end of it. And a good thing too.”

B: Fine by me.

A: “... Why bother, after all? You won’t believe me.”

B: OK.

A: *sighs* “I mean, what’s the use? Someone tells you an incredible story and you believe him, just like that?”

B: I’ll believe that you believe it.

A: “Then what does it matter what it is? Let’s just say I believe in Martians and fairies and pixie dust and leave it at that.”

B: All right.

A: “... The question is, how did I come to believe it?”

B: You mean, how did you become the sort of person who believes in such things?

A: “Right! Yes!”

B: Perhaps you believed someone. Or did you see something?

A: “... I saw something.”

B: What did you see?

A:“ ... ‘Circumstantial evidence,’ I suppose you’d call it. Because, when you see something like that, no matter how real it seems to you at the time, you tell yourself it was only a hallucination. Just a hallucination. That and only that is what you want to believe. But there were, in my case, other corroborating pieces of evidence that made it impossible for me to dismiss what I saw that way—”

~*~

With regard to the question of the existence of ghosts.

Ontological questions generally take yes or no for an answer, although there is always a special provision for suspension of judgement. Ghosts exist. Ghosts do not exist. Ghosts may exist. One wonders if there are any real differences between these answers. One doesn’t wonder if there is any real difference between these answers. One doesn’t know whether there is any real difference between these answers. In looking them over, though, one may notice some opportunity, an inchoate thought that could, apparently, re-render all three answers as different moments in a single answer, such that all three are true and none are false. Whether or not that re-rendering amounts to anything other than a piece of sophistry, however deftly brought off, would remain to be seen.

Here, in these paragraphs, the word “ghost” will stand for anything whose possibility is impossible and nevertheless calls itself into existence somehow.

Ghosts don’t exist. If one adopts this as an axiom—and it can’t be anything better, more solid, than an axiom, since you can’t prove a negative—the other possibilities are removed from consideration. Certainly, there is no physical evidence of the existence of ghosts. That is, some physical objects might somehow be associated with ghosts, but there is no way to prove that association, or even confidently to perceive it. Where other objects are detected easily, ghosts don’t have even the slight claim to reality extended to certain as yet undetected subatomic particles which nevertheless have places prepared and waiting for them in anticipatory physical theories which hold them to be mathematically and empirically indicated by the behavior of other, better known particles.

However, language, for example, is also not physically detectable as such. There are sounds and markings, emblems, but that these are to be associated like so, or like so—that the sound or image “table” means this object here—can only be divined from observing the behavior of certain persons familiar with the language in question on encountering these signs. From the point of view of physics, however, language is indistinguishable from noise. Language is as certain as breathing all the same. Physics therefore does not comprehend all that exists.

Kant argued that space and time are forms which spontaneously develop in the mind as the sine qua non of all experience. Even in those states of mind that seem to transcend time, thoughts usually unfold one after another, that is, in time. One might argue that a mystic state often involves much simultaneous experience, but then we might say this is the transference of an arrangement in time to an arrangement in space, like the translation of a syllogism or narrative into a diagram or a painting. Even though one might see the thing entire and at once, it seems still to be necessary to focus attention successively on different parts of the diagram or image, first this, then that, in order to understand it.

A more significant observation, however, is that Kant’s philosophy leans heavily on the distinction between subject and object. If this boundary is elasticized ...

This is no good. Start over.

Ghosts exist,

don’t exist,

might exist.

These answers are
all
still entirely too crude.

~*~

A: “What do you make of that?”

B: ... A dead dog.

A: “Keep looking.”

B: ... What am I looking for?

The photo: the other dog standing in the background, gazing off into the distance with what could be described as an expectant expression on its face. The dead dog lies there with its throat torn out, tufts of fur sticking up. The living dog has some shiny—or wet—patches on its dark hide, and its muzzle might be a bit ragged ...

B: Did the one kill the other?

A: “Mm. There’s a more precise word—keep looking.”

B: ... I don’t get you.

A: “Get a load of the ground around the dead dog.”

B: ... Smears of blood.

A: “Check them.”

B: *shakes head*

A: “Each smear is distinct. Each one has a dog’s paw print in it. Together they form a circle around the dead dog. Evenly spaced. No blood anywhere else.

B: Do you think someone drew this around the dog?

A: “There’s the artist.”

B: The other dog?

A: “That dog didn’t just kill that dog. That dog
sacrificed
that dog. See?”

B:... And?

A: “And now, he’s waiting.”

~*~

The ghost story often simply stipulates that ghosts are real. Some do so in earnest, others only for the sake of what is known as a good story. Some purport to be true accounts, others make no claims, but most will go so far as to say they present a plausible encounter with a ghost. That is to say, a being who is not real, or not what he seems on a
very primal
level to be.

Lately, ghost writers have adopted a different approach. Instead of trying to win the reader over, if only for an instant, to the idea that ghosts are real, they show the reader instead that reality is ghostly. This is promising, but here one begins to feel that one is drawing near to an eddy where all tension goes slack, and which is haunted by complaisant sighs, because here one can relax safe in the assurance that no one will suspect the writer of trying to posit the actual existence of ghosts. It’s one thing to toy with ideas and tell stories, it’s another thing to make claims in earnest about unseen things in the world, or to really live the idea that the world is a treacherous illusion.

~*~

A: “After all, there’s no law that says that sacrifice is something only humans are capable of. Suppose sacrifice were a kind of automatic behavior under certain circumstances, like hunting, or mating? Why not?”

B: Whatever you say.

A: “You don’t believe it?”

B: The dog would have to be able to imagine an invisible or remote being. That’s asking rather a lot of a dog, isn’t it?

A: “He marks his territory without being able to visualize it on a map. He can wait for his master to return from somewhere out of sight, out of sense range. Why not this? And suppose something calls to him, for the sacrifice. Couldn’t an animal hear the same call that humans hear?”

B: Sure.

A: “You don’t believe it.”

B: I believe you believe it.

A: But do you believe it?

B: Does it matter?

A: I’m asking.

B: ... Well, let’s have a looong academic debate about it.

~*~

There are no levels of impossibility. Something either is impossible, or it isn’t.

A distinction here between personal and impersonal impossibility should not be made; even less so between subjective and objective. This is the case in part because one’s ideas having to do with ghosts have also to do with exactly the spots where these distinctions can no longer be made. Ghostliness might be a climatic condition like fog, which obscures or erases the landmarks by means of which object and subject, or persons and what aren’t persons, are recognized.

Pointless.

Humanity begins with gazing into a dead face.

There is a basic human intuition that the world is not as it appears to be. People have been saying that since the beginning. And they’re right. They’re absolutely right. There are things—in whose presence we are right now—that are as far out of reach of our capacity to imagine as a black hole is to an amoeba.

~*~

A: “The impulse comes from Them. The killer guides his unwitting victims to the place They designate for the sacrifice. He draws them there with their own curiosity, using a trail of clues.”

B: Artful fellow.

A: “The place always has a special emblem for the victim to see—has to see—before the sacrifice can be made. The killer uses a silenced pistol, and does not approach or address the victim, who usually does not even see him. It may be important, however, that the victim have some idea what’s going on. This would necessitate his receiving some information at first. Information forms the link, you see? You get one piece, and the rest have to follow, as surely as kicking the chair is followed by the chair’s falling down.”

B: Cause and effect.

A: Right!

~*~

Caught, beaten by police.

He whines and grovels until they give up, contemptuous. Then, the moment he is alone, his tear-streaked, fear-twisted face relaxes into impassivity.

It is a matter of adopting the correct response. Abjectly submissive behavior can transform hostility into disgust, which cools anger. It’s important to prevent damage to the body. The body is the first instrument in the sacrifice. The moment of deliverance from them will come. That is, it will be sent.

He always kept a cat, just one. Rescued from the street. He would pet and tend to it carefully, set out a water dish, a little bed for it. No food dish. No food at all. The days would pass, the cat would grow thinner and thinner. It would mew, and stare uncomprehendingly at him. He would pick it up and caress it, feeling the bones coming out. The cat would stagger from room to room, looking for anything it could eat. Looking for a way out. Then it would lie there in its bed for a few days, gradually withering away. The cries would slacken, weaken, stop. He would supply it any amount of water, even hold the fragile bundle of bones and fur in his lap and delicately pour water down its throat. When it eventually died he would discard it in the trash, or pitch the meager body into the incinerator, and go looking for a new one. Mere pastimes. There is so much time to get past. It was like a sacrifice. He was addicted to sacrifice.