Мэтью Перл: The Dante Chamber

The feather, in a sense, had come from Mount Purgatory.

She rushed up a set of crumbling stone stairs, finding no access to the compartment that held Gabriel below. Instead, she found herself outside just as more explosions and fires started. Christina heard voices from somewhere nearby.

“Here! Over here!” she cried.

“Christina?” the voice bellowed — a rousing and wonderful voice vibrating in the air.

Browning was cresting the hill between them when they met.

“Gabriel is trapped. He’s in an awful state, Mr. Browning, please help!”

Though there had not been an explosive detonated in the carpenter’s shop that held Gabriel, flames from the nearest structure spread to its perimeter.

Browning signaled for Branagan and the other men, who trudged as fast as they could through the deep snow. Christina tried to keep up, but she felt weakened down to her bones from her captivity and the lingering effects of the opiates. She dropped into the snow. Browning looked back at her, but she gestured to him to continue to Gabriel.

Browning and the other men disappeared over the hill. Christina, shivering to the bone, strained to stand up and fell again. A hand came into her view to offer help. It was Sibbie’s.

Christina hesitated before accepting.

“I am overjoyed, dear sister, that you were witness to a purification. To your brother’s.”

“The feather.”

“Feather?”

“You left it for me to find. You tested me. You knew I would pray, that I would kneel when I did. You knew I would see it where you placed it.”

“The shades of Purgatory each learn that only through prayer does the Divine Will move us forward,” Sibbie replied. “Here we learn to live by devotion just as you do. You are one of the pure ones. Oh, I know more about you through Gabriel than you might imagine, Sister Christina. By praying, you found salvation.”

“The feather. In one of Dante’s dreams during Purgatory , a golden-feathered eagle lifts him up and carries him, and when he wakes he has moved closer to the mountaintop.”

“What was it you thought about as you looked upon Lillian Brenner’s face?”

The deadhouse. Christina had kept her gaze away from the other onlookers, rushing away in tears and nearly colliding with... Flashes of faces returned to her. One of them was Sibbie.

Even with all she now knew about Sibbie, Christina could not stop herself from finding her voice and words persuasive and commanding. She answered without wanting to. “I thought about her eyes, thought that one of them seemed to be opening , to burst its wires open, to watch and judge us as we were watching and judging her.”

Sibbie rested her other hand on Christina’s shoulder. “You have come closer to the mountaintop, too. After so long, we reach the final purgation, that which will save all those who enter it, and all those who learn about what happened here today. Look. Isn’t it beautiful, isn’t it magnificent? The reflection in the snow and in the sky, as though the whole world is aflame. You’ve been part of this all along.”

“You knew Gabriel would bring me?”

“No. I knew you would come for him.”

Christina studied her, her sparkling blue eyes and her unruly hair illuminated by the fiery spectacle surrounding them. She thought of the women over the years — Lizzie especially, though she wasn’t the first or last — whom Gabriel believed would bring him into harmony with some order of the spiritual world through their beauty and mystery. This woman awakened similar desires but promised vastly more, an ecstatic absorption into literature, art, life, death, salvation.

“You have continued your father’s labors of discovering the way to Beatrice. Had you thought you escaped it? Think of your poetry. Think of the power of ‘Goblin Market’ over readers that you try so hard to run from.”

“That was a fairy tale. I meant nothing profound by it.”

“Tales of goblin men appearing to innocents, allegory of sinful consumption. Devotional verses showing the way to God. Don’t you see what you’ve been writing about your whole life? Temptation, weakness, deliverance, your poetry was always about death more than life. You, too, were preparing humanity for what was to come, for what we enact here. Dear sister, they dared expect you to grow up to be a wife, to bring a man ale every night and lace his boots every morning. Instead you have lived your life with trepidation, self-recrimination and doubt, self-sacrifice, penitence, demanding the righteous path for you and for the world around you. Your life has been a purgatory.”

Behind them, flames swallowed the structure that held Gabriel. Christina gasped, a tear dropping down her cheek.

“I know you mourn him now,” Sibbie said, without any discernible emotion or change in her demeanor. “But remember that our people, Gabriel perhaps most of all, have waited for this day, which has been prophesied to come to all of us. Prophesied by your father’s discoveries that Dante would overturn all we think is safe. Think of Gabriel’s sad memories and pain: gone like a mist, like trying to pick up water in our hands. The rest of our brothers and sisters are gathered now and you are needed, as well.”

“If all who are here today perish, if I perish, who will tell your story in order to convince others?”

“ Because we perish, dear sister, the story will be told again and again; nothing will be able to stop it. Death — as Dante comprehended — is the only story that nobody can resist. The finale of a writer with your talents and stature will inspire thousands of creators around the world to understand and convey what has happened to us.”

Christina threw one more glance at the flaming ruins where she and Gabriel had been imprisoned, then nodded, as if to say, Take me .

Sibbie embraced her, her grip warm and generous.

Christina allowed Sibbie to lead her. As they walked — strolled, really, considering the magisterial pace set by Sibbie — Christina studied the destruction. They passed by the crumbling structures of the sanatorium to the grand chapel, ornamented with Gabriel’s vivid depictions of the purgatorial deaths.

A group of approximately two dozen white-robed followers huddled together in the middle of the space. Sibbie raised her arms. Her followers trembled and shivered, bowing down to her. At either side, two of the settlement’s guardians held out their swords, making clear nobody would leave. Flames ate at the sides of what had once been a massive machine shop, and the ceiling began to crumble down in pieces.

They were there for one last mission. They were there to die.

Sibbie made a sweeping gesture toward Christina. “She has come to us, brothers and sisters, to redeem our world! Removed from pride, from envy, from wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony. And now, from lust for anything outside of God. Nothing will come between us and our final cleansing! Join with us, Sister Christina!”

Sibbie slipped off her robe, and the followers did the same.

Christina, standing stock-still, studied the naked men and women huddled like sheep in a storm. She saw in their faces the split between fear of Sibbie and fear of their own demises. Then, a burning section of the ceiling crashed down on one of the armed guardians there to enforce Sibbie’s will. He was crushed. Christina’s eyes darted to the other guardian — his state of mind would be decisive for what she would do next.

Seeing that Christina was not coming any closer, Sibbie’s face distorted with betrayal.

“These flames are God’s art. Do not try to thwart this,” Sibbie said.

“This way to survive,” Christina called, her voice ringing out as clear as a bell. “The east path is clear of obstruction, and the police are outside and will help you! You’ll save no one by dying today!”