Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

Christina grabbed a plate of food and tried to push bits through to him. The rows of bars were arranged in such a way that nothing from one side could reach the other.

Gabriel shook his head at her attempts. “This food shall not be for me.”

“What did you say?” Christina asked, horrified, barely able to push her voice past a whisper.

“This food,” he repeated, “shall not be for me.”

It was a line from Purgatory — a voice Dante hears on the terrace of the Gluttonous. The penultimate level of Mount Purgatory, where the thirsty and famished shades suffer as they observe delicious food just out of reach.

It was happening again.

Purgatory reborn in 1870.

This time, Gabriel was the so-called shade, the repenting soul. Gabriel would be the one to die.

Her mind was spinning. “You stopped eating days ago. You knew this was coming.”

Gabriel turned away.

She could not let him bury himself in silence, to yield to physical weakness and hopelessness — she needed him fighting, and she needed to know more in order to help him. Her body trembling with frustration, Christina had an idea. As the words of Dante’s canto flooded her thoughts, she knew all at once how to provoke him to say more. She recited the words spoken by Dante when coming upon a shade in the region of the Gluttonous:

“‘O Soul, who seems to desire to talk with me, speak so that I may hear, with your words content you and me.’”

He slowly turned back to her.

“You stopped eating days ago,” she repeated.

Gabriel hummed his agreement under his breath. “Of course.”

Christina’s mind was suddenly sharper, and she thought about where she was when she first made her vow to find Gabriel. Saint Mary’s, the woman’s penitentiary in Highgate. Penitentiary . It was not enough for the women who came there to stop participating in their world of the night, it was not enough to reform themselves. It was a penitentiary — they had to be penitent , to demonstrate and display it in order to earn their change.

Christina next thought about Lillian Brenner, the singer impaled with her eyes sewn shut, overheard talking about wine by witnesses who thought her words indicated she was a drunkard. In the second terrace of Purgatory, the shades being cleansed of Envy hear the voice of the Virgin Mary imploring Jesus Christ to turn water into wine at a wedding that had none. Mary’s action was the opposite of envy because it ensured happiness in other people. Brenner’s words about wine were part of the design, the experience. Gibson, running to his death, called out to Christina and Browning, I hope you do not think me rude . It was not merely a morbid example of the art patron’s usual obtuse eccentricity. When Dante encounters the Slothful on the fourth terrace, now driven to extreme zeal in their movements, they cry out: “We cannot linger, and your pardon I pray, if you take our penance for discourtesy.” Gibson, Brenner, Gabriel, surely Morton and Loring, too, performed their own parts in their deaths.

“Those were not murders. Morton, Brenner, Gibson, Loring. They knew... they all knew what was happening to them. You knew. This is a suicide club.”

“Those who know justice are blessed.”

“You prepared for this; you stopped eating in order to stage this purgation of the Gluttonous. Why?”

Gabriel pushed himself to his feet. “Sibbie found that each of us possessed a sin that had to be purged more than any other, just as the shades who travel through Dante’s Purgatory — just as Dante himself, who knows he is most beset by pride. Me? I always took more than I needed in life — food, wine, women, opium — I loved, yes. I loved excessively. We all saw where it led. It had to come to an end. My child taken away from us, then Lizzie herself gone. Even then, I could not stop, could I? I was greedy still, this time for my art.”

“Your art?”

“I had Lizzie’s grave torn up to get my precious pages back. A moment of gluttony like no other. Ever since, I was on the path to this. For the first time in history, we have believed in our modern world that we can transgress without consequence and without punishment, as long as not many people see — here, on these sacred grounds, we change that. Sibbie led us to that. To serve as a witness is the first step.”

“What do you mean ‘a witness’?”

“You’re witnessing this next step toward Paradise, this purgation, Christina, just as I witnessed past ones.”

“That’s why you were at those places? At the deaths of Morton and Brenner. You were there to be a witness, as was Loring — then you were at Loring’s. Sibbie, she was there, too, wasn’t she?”

Sibbie had been at Loring’s death, of course. Before that, there were the unidentified women at Morton’s and Brenner’s deaths, a blonde and a brunette they had never located: both were Sibbie as she had begun to alter her appearance to avoid any outside interference.

Gabriel’s notation on his sketch of the terrace of gluttony, with the faceless shade suffering. CR — need your help . He had needed her as witness to this, as planned out by Sibbie. The suffering shade in the drawing was him .

“You don’t realize all that has happened,” Christina said. “She and Fallow have been dosing you with drugs to control all of you.”

Gabriel’s eyes were glassy. A moment later, he wobbled, then fell back to the ground.

“Gabriel!” Receiving no response, she tried: “Dante!”

His eyes were shut tightly.

Glancing around for some way out, the comforts of her compartment increasingly appeared as a mirage of safety. There was food, light, heat, but no windows, no doors. Running back through the winding corridor she came in, she slammed her body against a locked door made of iron, weakening herself even more. Through the keyhole she cried out.

The Honorable Mr. Jasper Morton, member of Parliament, had been thunderstruck some months ago to learn, through family documents hidden long before, that he was born before his parents were wed, and that they had traveled out of the country in order to conceal the fact. Here he was: a man who had publicly argued for many decades that he possessed a birthright to the Bristol seat because his father had held it; who had beaten back attempts to add another seat to the House of Commons for Bristol using the same logic, in order to maintain his monopoly on constituents’ gratitude and favor. If his father had been sufficient to protect Bristol’s interests, he was sufficient. Here he was: a man who stoked the fiercest reactions against the Irish Fenians and with fanfare pushed for expansion of military power into other lands, and he himself was, in a sense, born a foreigner. Now even though Morton continued to stand for election and win his seat, he was lost; everything he had always prided himself on felt like it became mere... pride.

His wife badgered him to tell her why he suddenly had such a short temper and prolonged bouts of melancholy. He tried to explain, told her about what he’d discovered in the blasted family papers, but he was an orator, not a speaker; he never managed to express to her what it all really felt like to him.

What Morton felt was immense shame and dishonor. These feelings consumed him, and nothing he did rid himself of them. He began to partake in a clandestine pastime he had only ever heard about, one that took place in the deepest recesses of London midnights, in fireless rooms reached through dark corridors, where in exchange for generous payment, female strangers would whip and beat him with a paddle as he cried. In these perverse, awful, wondrous sessions, the shame would grow and be exorcised at the same time.