Мэтью Перл: The Dante Chamber

“Enough of that,” Fallow snapped at Camp. Then, back to the other man: “A compromise, then, Brother Herman. Circumstances and police interest have strained our resources. A partial amount, perhaps.”

“You have one more week,” Herman replied.

“We do not need a week,” said Sibbie. “Why not give us until sunset?”

Herman fixed his eyes to her. “Very well.”

“If you require some assurance from us now, apparently I have something of value right here,” Sibbie said.

“Please, Sibbie,” Fallow whispered, trying to steer her away before she provoked Herman.

She grabbed a handful of pages from Camp’s table and pushed them hard into Herman’s chest. “Here. These gentlemen around me apparently believe in the efficacy of a profitable sensation. Payment.”

“Say!” Camp cried out, objecting to the treatment of his literary property.

“Sibbie, I beg you!” Fallow exclaimed.

Herman took the pages and tossed them into the air back at Sibbie. He stormed out without another word. Camp, against all logic, felt rather offended at the exchange, both the woman so roughly offering his work and the rogue throwing it around carelessly. Camp was almost relieved when Fallow, groping for his old dominance, ordered him to get down on the ground to collect the papers.

As Camp gathered the sheets of paper, the preacher was trying to delicately reason with the woman who gave him his orders. Camp slowed his chore in order to take in their conversation.

“Ironhead Herman’s too dangerous to cross. We must find a way to pay our debt immediately. He’ll destroy us.”

“Let him try. The debts we tend to are of another kind. He cannot stop what we are doing here. Nobody can.”

Something in her voice chilled Camp’s blood and sent his heart racing. As he crawled around collecting the last of the pages, he saw what he looked for. There were two sword-wielding guards, but neither blocked the door left open by Herman’s exit; plus, springing up from his position on his hands and knees could sufficiently surprise them.

At the right moment Camp bolted through the exit. Fallow shouted to the guards to follow, but both of the green-clad men stopped cold when Sibbie ordered that they wait.

“Brothers, I do not want that man Simon Camp to blemish our home again,” she said. “He breaks the divine order.” She then released them to the chase with the slightest nod of her head.

“We need him,” Fallow said. “We need Camp.”

She shook her head and, with a meaningful grin, replied, “Our needs have changed. Besides, a far more sublime writer is among us.”

When she returned to consciousness, Christina suspected almost at once that she had been dosed with opium — not the slight unpleasant aftertaste of it that she, like everyone, had experienced from medicine but a rush of the drug coursing and battling through her body. She now found herself in a poorly lit, cold chamber but felt a source of heat coming from somewhere. Earlier, after being carried by Gabriel onto the grounds of the sanatorium, she had been left dazed and physically sickened by Sibbie’s absolute control over the people gathered there — people Christina now realized were Sibbie’s followers, Gabriel included, in a settlement of true believers. Reverend Fallow and all the others had been doing the bidding of this mesmerizing woman all along. Christina had been shivering, her teeth chattering as the assembly stood out barefoot in the snow. Fallow began to gently escort Christina out of the cold. They were accompanied by two golden-haired guards in green robes with swords at their sides.

It was just how Dante described the angels guarding the divisions of Purgatory. I clearly discerned their blond heads, but their faces dazzled my eyes, a faculty conquered by excess.

As Fallow had led her away, she had been writhing and struggling, reaching out for Gabriel. “Darling, darling, you will be safe here,” her brother called out. Fallow brought her into a building where a hot drink awaited her — it tasted bitter but she could not resist the warmth that wrapped itself around her body. Then, the heavy odor struck her. It was familiar. Familiar from the haze that often surrounded Gabriel and Lizzie, from women and girls she had helped pull from crammed rooms off of narrow alleyways to bring into Saint Mary’s. Opium. She began spitting out what she still could. Her vision thickened, and her mind fell into a dreamy, almost peaceful state of blankness.

She came to in the cold chamber with her heart racing. At first she heard voices. A chorus of voices, ten, twenty that became one — her father. The professore.

“You failed, my bantling. You grew to try to control everything around you, but you never could control your dreams. Nor could you stop the coming of Dante against our enemies.”

She thought back to the day after the professore died, the night her mother fed all the copies she could find of the professore’s Dante treatise into the fire like fresh wood on a long winter night. Christina could see her mother’s face. In it mingled horror and relief. Christina, then twenty-three, stood behind her mother and watched the flames curl up around the covers, lick at the pages, ingest the words inside — the words that had simultaneously kept the professore alive and devoured him from the inside.

She’d noticed the stealthy movements of a figure in the next room. It was Gabriel, smuggling out as many copies of their father’s book as he could.

She shook away the professore’s voice. She felt her eyes closing but struggled hard to keep them open. The worst of her predicament was that she had been separated from Gabriel after swearing to herself she would not let him out of her sight again.

She tried to recite some of her verses to herself to clear her mind.

She groped the brick walls and felt her way through a long corridor, then another, toward the warmth. She waited until the poisons in her body lost just a little more of their power. Finally she reached a chamber where there was ample light and heat. She had to blink several times, sure that what she saw before her eyes must have been another illusion of the opium.

Spread across the table was a sumptuous, almost biblical banquet: fruits, nuts, honey, milk, wine. Nothing disappeared when she blinked.

“Darling sister.”

She jumped up, startled.

The words came out as a kind of chant.

As she turned around, her eyes landed upon Gabriel’s face. Like the food, this was no opium dream. “Oh, my dear Gabriel! Thank heavens!” Because she was so filled with joy and relief at the sight of him — and perhaps because the opium still clouded her vision — it took another moment to realize he was on the other side of two rows of iron bars.

“Gabriel, what is this place? What’s happening here?”

The chamber was separated by the bars into two extreme divisions. Her side had light and a small furnace. Gabriel’s compartment was dark and cold, except for the heat that escaped from the furnace on her side of the bars. Gabriel sat on the ground in a white robe. His eyes returned again and again to the feast. She noticed what she hadn’t observed in the carriage ride, when she had still bathed in the glow of being reunited with her brother: he didn’t look well, his usually florid face pale and drawn. The skin around his eyes was much darker than the rest of his face. She recalled something Dolly had told her at the police station. He’s refusing to eat, all the excitement of talking of his release is not good for him, I’d say.