Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

The priest jumped at the sound of Etcher’s voice. It was as if he were unaware Etcher had ever been there, though Etcher was in plain sight and had always been there. “No,” the priest blurted, reluctantly putting the book on the ground and fumbling through his robes for the door’s key. He locked the door and left.

The next morning a different priest brought the book back. This priest wore the pale-blue robes of a second-level clergyman; Etcher recognized him as an assistant to the one who had been there the day before. As he unlocked the narrow door, the assistant asked Etcher to locate a file for him. When the priest disappeared inside the room Etcher, rummaging through the archives’ files, saw that the key to the room had been left in the lock.

He had no idea why he did it. He knew that if he’d been too hungover to think of it, or so sober he might have thought about it too long, he never would have done it. But now Etcher walked quickly to the door, took the key from the lock, and put it in his pocket.

When the priest in the light-blue robes came out of the room, closing the door behind him, he would have turned to lock it except that Etcher said, “Here’s your file.” The priest took the file and stood there several moments examining it. “I also pulled these, in case you need them,” Etcher said.

The priest looked up into Etcher’s monstrous blue eyes floating behind his glasses. “No, I don’t need those,” the priest said. Then he walked away, still reading the file.

It was shortly after noon when the priest returned. Frantically rushing to the door in back, he stared at the lock for a minute in disbelief. He turned to Etcher. He was pale as he said, “There was a key.”

“I’m sorry?” said Etcher.

“There was a key,” the priest repeated. He wiped his mouth with his hand. “Did you see it?”

“In the door?”

“Yes in the door,” he nearly shrieked.

“I thought you took it,” Etcher said.

“What?”

“You took it. You came out and took the key. Remember? I gave you the file?”

“I took the key?”

“And then I gave you the file.”

“Are you sure?”

“I thought so. Perhaps it fell out of your pocket.”

The priest kept wiping his mouth. He looked at the door and then at the floor around his feet as though the key might materialize. His eyes were twitching when he said, “You remember me taking the key. And putting it in my pocket.”

“I think so.”

“No,” the priest said emphatically, “you do remember it. If anyone asks, you remember I took the key and put it in my pocket. I didn’t leave it in the door. I put it in my pocket and it fell out somewhere along the way. Where nobody would find it. Where nobody would know what it was if they happened to pick it up. We’ll get another key made. We don’t have to bother anyone else about it. I took the key from the lock and put it in my pocket and you gave me the file, you remember that. If anyone should ask.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t just walk away and leave it in the door. I didn’t do that.”

“Yes. I mean no.”

An hour later a locksmith appeared to make another key for the door.

For several months Etcher kept the key hidden away, occasionally considering whether to dispose of it, not simply because it was incriminating but because he’d never really thought about opening the door to see what was behind it. Etcher wasn’t concerned with what was behind the door. It was never his reason for taking the key. He took the key simply for the taking, and he was struck afterward by how easily he’d done it, how easily he’d lied about it when the priest had returned looking for the key in panic. It was only later that he was tempted to press his luck and actually open the door; and then he was unnerved by how tempting it was, though curiosity as to what was behind the door was never a part of it. It was the act of opening he couldn’t resist, as it had been the act of taking. And as every month passed in which he expected Tedi to tell him she was pregnant and that his fate and responsibility were decided, as every month went by that he was once again reprieved by some conspiracy of biology and destiny, his own recklessness grew more irresistible until the moment came when, in the latest hours of the night, he gave in to it.

He would try to open the door, he decided. He assumed the locksmith had changed the lock anyway when he made the other key. He would try to open the door, and when it wouldn’t unlock, he could then dispose of the key, the temptation having been succumbed to and thwarted.

The locksmith, however, had not changed the lock. In the dark of the archives, the door opened.

Etcher had been right about its being a very small room, the size of a walk-in vault. There was nothing inside but the books — nearly a hundred of them, all like the one the priest had removed and the other priest had returned. The books were old and dusty, in grimy red covers that had no titles or authors’ names but were simply identified, on labels that ran along the edges of the shelves, as the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History: and at that moment Etcher almost turned from the vault and slammed the door behind him. At that moment, though he had no idea what the volumes meant, suspicion crowded subversion in his brain; instantly Etcher somehow knew that if he were to be discovered here, he’d disappear forever, that no one would ever see him again. That the breach of entering this room with these books was more than simply treason, it was heresy. He lingered long enough to pull one and then another volume down and open them. In them were listed events Etcher had never heard of. The volumes told of people no one had ever known and countries no one had ever seen. He read of lives no one had ever lived and pored over maps of places no one had ever been. Every sound of Church Central, every creak in the walls and every footstep in its distant quarters, resonated in the vault until, with dawn just over the horizon, his nerves could no longer stand it.

He was terror-stricken, some minutes later, to hurry from the archives into the lobby of Church Central only to see, there in the middle of the night, two cops.

He could tell they were cops. One was a large black man and the other a short man with red hair; they appeared tense. He was certain they had been waiting for him, tipped off by a witness in the shadows or an alarm miles away. But in fact the cops paid Etcher little attention. They just stood in the middle of the lobby as Etcher walked furtively past them. He got all the way to the door expecting them to call out after him, and it was only when they did not, it was only when he left the lobby and building and, outside, felt the cold sweat on his face and the night air in his constricted lungs, and only when he got home to find Tedi sleeping, with no fateful news on her lips, that he truly believed he’d gotten away with it. Then he couldn’t sleep. Then he wanted a drink, but after he dug his forbidden bottle out of the cupboard where he kept it, he changed his mind and put it back. He was seized by the impulse to rid himself of the key for good; outside in the middle of the night he walked around the circle’s obelisk, muttering to himself. For a long time he tried to think of where to dispose of the key, and the more he thought, the more the impulse for getting rid of it subsided, until he decided — much to his own dismay — that perhaps getting rid of it wasn’t so necessary after all.

He allowed himself then what he believed would be his last subversion: keeping the key. The fires of subversion in him were banked; he felt spent, calm.

After several days passed, however, and then a week and then two, Etcher realized nothing had changed. If the target of his subversion was his own life, nothing about the few clandestine moments he’d spent in the archives’ vault had delivered him. The moments in the vault were like a drug that had been taken and experienced and then had worn off, leaving him jangly and unsettled and blinking around him at how his circumstances had remained untransformed. And though there wasn’t any way in which stealing into the vault could transform the circumstances, an unconscious impulse insisted such an act would slowly change Etcher himself until he’d crossed the rubicon of his subversion and there was no way back. He had no idea what such a point of no return would look like. He had no idea what he would look like once he’d passed it. He clung to the notion that he would easily see this point approaching in the distance before he got there, allowing him enough time to change his mind.