The White Forest (29 page)

Branches extended upward into battens of thunderheads made from some diaphanous fabric. The vaulted ceiling, visible through
the clouds, was decorated with bits of mirror glass and polished shells, which picked up the light of our torch and flickered like strange stars. There were animals too—taxidermy pheasants and foxes peering from the underbrush with melancholy glass eyes, patches of fur worn away. Wind in the reeds, perhaps from a hidden phonograph machine, could be heard. Unlike an actual forest, this place offered no sense of tranquility—only a constant reminder of the unnatural dark—the rumble of man-made objects.

“This is what we call the inner forest,” the taller boy said. He was the cleaner of the two Fetches as well, though covered in freckles and moles. I wondered if he might be the Fetch who’d sliced through Corydon Ulster’s cheek while Judith looked on. “Do you like it, missus?”

“I can’t say I do. Where is Ariston Day?” I demanded.

“We’ll be there soon,” the shorter one said. “Please don’t grow angry, missus. We know you won’t take us to the Paradise if you’re angry.”

“What is this Paradise you’re talking about?” I asked.

“Watch your tongue now,” the taller Fetch said to the shorter. “Mr. Day wouldn’t want you talking to her like that. We’re not to say anything about the Paradise.”

“We never get to talk to anybody,” said the shorter.

“Then speak,” I said. “Tell me.”

“We know you’ve got some
abilities,
” the shorter said, “the kind Mr. Day has been looking for. We know you could make these trees talk to us if you touched us. You might even be able to make this into a
real
forest if you wanted to—a forest in the promised place.”

“I can do nothing of the sort,” I said. “You’ve been misinformed.”

They laughed quietly, stone rubbing against stone.

“We’re almost there,” said the taller. “Mr. Day is waiting by the water’s edge in the grove.”

I wondered how large this inner forest could be. What were the dimensions of the subterranean chamber, and was it possible that there was really some underground lake here? I worried that this might actually be a theater of my imagination, shifting and changeable, one scene replacing the next in liquid fantasy.

“Tell me why you call yourself Fetches,” I said.

“It’s an old story,” said the shorter. “We don’t know its source—probably from Rome. Mr. Day likes all that bygone lore.”

“You shouldn’t tell her our story,” said the taller Fetch. “It’s meant only for us. A woman can’t understand it.”

“The missus will understand,” said the shorter. “Mr. Day says she will. And anyway, she isn’t so much like a woman, is she? Just look at her.” He cleared his throat. “The story goes that every one of us humans has a double down in the pits of Hell. So Hell is full of people who look just like those you see on the streets of London. The rich bankers have doublers, and the poor flower ladies have doublers. Little boys and little girls have doublers that grow old down in Hell just as those little boys and girls grow old here in London. And these doublers, they’re called Fetches because when it’s your time—when your final hour has struck—your doubler comes up from Hell to
fetch
you. The last thing that you see is yourself standing in the doorway of your sickroom or crouching above you where you’ve fallen in the street.”

“That’s wretched,” I said.

“We claim to be our own doublers,” continued the shorter Fetch. “We’re no longer the people that live above, you see?”

“Yes,” I said. “Children of Hell. That’s quite clear.”

W
hen we emerged from the false trees, I found not a lake but a shallow limpid pool surrounded by clusters of stones. The clouds above were made from the same battens of dark fabric, hanging low in the sky over the pool. And there, by the silvery water, was a man seated in a cane chair. Ariston Day was not precisely what I’d expected—not degenerate. His face was clean-shaven, and he wore a gentleman’s damask tie the color of coral with a silver tack. His arms and legs were lank, and his dark hair hung about his long face like an open curtain. I could see no part of the Irish peasant in him, nor did he appear to be the deranged messiah of a cult. He looked rather like some vestige of the previous century—a feudal lord ensconced in his stronghold. The bones of his cheeks were aristocratic and angular, and the more I studied his face, the more it seemed that it might be a mask made from a substance other than flesh. I wondered if it was possible that Day himself might be a piece of theater—a painted facade.

Day was caught up in a reverie, staring toward the bottom of the silvery pool, as tendrilous shadows cast from a lamp behind the trees caressed him. When the taller boy announced our arrival, Ariston Day glanced at us with a certain ease, and he made what was meant to be a brief, casual smile, but movement caused the mask to momentarily crack, and his mouth took on a look of malignancy. The way
his lips shifted over his teeth made me feel as though I should run back into the forest.

“Jane Silverlake,” he said, standing and offering his hand. “My humble welcome. I’m glad you finally decided to join me.”

I’d removed my gloves and did not offer my own hand in return, knowing the transference would occur and not wanting this creature to experience any part of it. “I’m not sure I had a choice,” I said. “You were persistent.”

“There are always choices,” Day said, dismissing his Fetches with a flutter of his hand. “So many choices, really. That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Won’t you join me?” He indicated the chair next to his. I did so, glancing out across the odd pool. Its water reflected the lantern light that filled the subterranean chamber. There was a stale scent here, the smell of a place that had no traffic with the outside world. Day lifted a worn leather portfolio that had been leaning against the side of his chair and carefully placed it in his lap. I wondered if he meant to show me something. “I’m sure you’d like to delve into business right away,” he said. “I’ve heard you’re a matter-of-fact sort.”

“The play you were putting on here,” I said. “May I ask you to explain it?”

He ran his too-dark tongue over his teeth. I did my best to pull my gaze from his mouth and look into his eyes. “I know it appears irregular,” he said, “but honestly it made for an enlightening evening, an evening that would have been entirely positive had not poor Nathan gone missing.”

“What was the play meant to be?” I asked, knowing the answer well enough but wanting to hear his explanation. I studied the trees, the animals, and the moon as he spoke. They seemed to quake in my presence.

“
The Royal Hunt,
” he said. “My boys worked on the trees for weeks, and they tell me it’s difficult to get the color of the bark just right. Do these look right to you?”

I didn’t answer, as the color of his trees was the last thing on my mind.

“All of England was once covered by such trees,” he said. “Clearings were sacred because they were rare. And the hunt, well, there has always been a hunt—a gathering of men who track a beast—be it mythical like the unicorn or somewhat more common, like a fox, or, in our case, a stag.”

In my mind’s eye, I saw the stag from my vision racing through the forest, pursued by the Red Goddess. She appeared to float through the trees, darting this way and that, finally catching the animal by its throat.

“The hunt was a hallowed act, the stag a sort of divinity,” Day said. “To kill the stag was to enact a scene from the greatest of all human myths—the death of a god. And as we know, the god must die to bring about a new era on earth.”

Paul Rafferty said Nathan had played the stag, and I tried to imagine my old friend in a pair of stag’s horns and a pelt. I wondered what enlightenment Nathan thought he might derive from such an act. “And who killed the stag that night?” I asked.

Day chuckled. “Killed the stag? Why, no one killed the stag, my dear Jane. The hunt was theater. We only play at death.” He paused. “Perhaps we should talk about the reason I’ve brought you here.”

“The note you sent with Alexander Hartford indicates you think I’ve done something.” I paused here, anxious but still composed enough to bait him. “It seems more likely that it’s
you
who’ve done something. I’ve read of your previous misadventures.”

He leaned forward, causing his chair to creak. He was no longer a feudal lord; he was an animal, leering at me. This attentive, clever creature was the Ariston Day I feared. “You are aware of the qualities that make you of interest, dear Jane. And you are aware of what you’ve done. Don’t play at naïveté. You showed your colors to Corydon Ulster. Why not show them to me as well? Mr. Ulster approached you at my behest, after all. Fetches rarely act of their own accord.”

“You sent him to harm me?” I asked.

“To
test
you. I wanted to verify the claims made by Nathan Ashe.”

“I assure you that Corydon Ulster wanted to do more than test me, Mr. Day,” I said, grimly.

Day leaned back in his chair and relaxed, as if we were taking part in an utterly cordial conversation. “Be honest with me, Jane. You know where Nathan Ashe has gone. In fact, it was
you
who put him there.”

I felt a sudden pressure in the air, as if the entire Temple of the Lamb above us might come crashing down. How much information could Day possibly have? “I don’t know what you mean,” I said finally. I was not going to fall into his trap.

“You put Nathan Ashe in the Empyrean, Jane Silverlake.”

Hearing the name of that secret place on his lips made my heart skip. “I did no such thing,” I said, yet even as I spoke, I pictured myself pressing my mouth against the fissure in the field of shale and pleading for help.

“You banished Nathan because your emotions got the best of you,” Day said.

I was quiet, having never imagined Ariston Day would bring me into his awful cave to talk about my heart.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nathan’s disappearance was only the beginning. Soon we’ll all be reunited.”

“What do you mean?”

“Occult philosophers have long conjectured that the entire natural world is but an expression of the spiritual,” Day said. “But you, Miss Silverlake, you alone sense souls in the unnatural objects produced in our terrible factories. You alone see souls in industry. And you believe there is something perverse in this. Don’t you? That’s why you wear flowers—to prove you are still a woman. To prove you are not an
unnatural
.” He gestured to the feverfew tied at my wrist. “But with your relationship to objects, Miss Silverlake, you can help us transcend this pitiful existence. Help us reach what Nathan called the Empyrean—and what I know is the final Paradise. It has been sealed off since creation’s dawn. We need to break that seal, expose civilization to its cure.”

“You’re talking nonsense,” I said.

“Am I? I think rather this is why you’ve come here, Jane. Because
I can help you understand. You’ve heard of the new science—called archaeology?”

“I’ve read of it.”

“Then you may know one of its primary tenets—the concept of ‘stratification.’ A geologic time scale has been posited by our own English archaeologists working in Egypt and Greece as a way of comprehending the progression of the ages. The earth is made up of layers, and to dig into those layers is to move backward through time. Stratum lay one on top of the next, and the deeper we dig the further back we go.”

“Did you bring me here for a lesson in the applied sciences?” I asked.

“Humor me a bit longer, Jane. Imagine a form of
spiritual
archaeology. If instead of digging into earth’s layers, we could dig into the invisible layers of pneuma, digging all the way to the
bedrock
.”

The bedrock was where Nathan wanted to live. To live upon the rock, away from the shifting soil.

Day looked at me with a kind of threatening adoration. “Until Nathan described your abilities, I believed spiritual archaeology would be impossible to achieve. I merely fiddled about with the manipulation of dreams through ancient versions of theater.”

“Mr. Day, I don’t know what Nathan told you, but I’m not what you think. I am especially not a tool for so-called ‘spiritual archaeology.’ ”

“I didn’t believe him either and then Nathan showed me something that was very dear to him. Something that he’d brought back from Malta.”

At first, I thought Day might be talking about the ape’s finger, but then he lifted the leather portfolio from his lap. When he opened it and took out an unbound sheaf of yellowed pages written in Italian, I knew almost immediately what I was looking at.

“
You
have the writings of Theodore de Baras?” I asked.

“So you know of these papers already?” Day said.

“I’ve read Nathan’s journal,” I replied, realizing the appearance of
the papers had caused me to drop my defenses. I was telling Day too much, and this was precisely the reaction he wanted.

“I intercepted these pages, Jane,” he said, carefully. “I’m sorry I didn’t let Nathan show them to you, but I had to be sure all the pieces fit before I decided how to proceed.”