Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

The caretaker must have seen him. How else could he have got in? But when she spoke to him about it, he said no, of course not. No one had entered, unless he came through the French door she had left unlocked.

“Unless he slipped through the keyhole!” she said with nerve-racked asperity. “How could he have got through the door without my seeing him, and up to the tower ahead of me?”

But when he asked, with a skeptical look, what sort of man he was, she found herself tongue-tied. She could not bear to say, “The most repulsive-looking man in the world.” When he said something about the tower’s being dim at so early an hour, she agreed and turned away.

By noon she was wondering if she really had seen anyone. If not, she was definitely ill—not only because she was having hallucinations but because her mind could create such a fearful one. At that thought she felt the eyes reproach her and was torn with longing to assuage the wound.

She kept away from the tower all day, though desire to go there, to recapture the old trancelike rapture, rasped her nerves like the craving for dope.

As she surveyed the work she had done, she saw that through some intense driving power she had accomplished in half a day what would ordinarily have taken a day and a half. Her love of the work took possession of her again. She stretched back in her chair and closed her eyes, conscious for the first time that she was tired. She could see, could feel the river flowing by.

Bits of imagery from half-forgotten poems drifted through her mind; bits that conveyed only feebly the sense of the marvelous transformation that took shape as she looked out, letting her gaze project itself farther and farther toward infinity. She jerked out of an uncomfortable sleep; coming back to reality with the fretfulness of a child.

It was the caretaker’s wife, with an embarrassed and worried look upon her face. “Do you mind if I speak a bit that’s in my mind, Miss Reed?”

“Of course not. What’s worrying you?”

“You, if you don’t mind my saying so. I’ll wager you weigh fifteen pounds less than the day you came. You haven’t seen a human being to speak to except Sam and me. It’s not good to stick to work as you do.”

Mrs. Brown was worried about her—about anything more than her thinness? Had she been doing queer things?

“If I were you I’d change over to the inn for the nights. Lord, nothing would tempt me to sleep up here all by myself. I’d have bats in my belfry if I so much as tried it.”

She took a deep breath. Fresh air seemed to flow over her. She had not faced the thought of night because she lacked the courage, but knew that when the time comes, a person can usually face what can’t be avoided. But to be free of nights here while reveling in the days!

“I like the idea of the inn. I’ll admit that the bedroom is somewhat damp and chilly.” There, she had got by that nicely. Both of them relaxed. “Do you suppose I can get a room at such short notice?”

“At this time of the year, yes. Shall I telephone?”

“If you will be so kind.”

She awoke from a night of dreamless sleep, with a sense of buoyancy that made her smile at thought of sickness. Thin, yes. Maybe if she had both breakfast and dinner at the inn she’d plump up a bit. Even though she had no desire to make acquaintances, yet eating in the company of others might give food a more savory taste.

Again she settled down to work, punishing her mind with mental arithmetic, which it hated, whenever it teased for just one look from the tower, just one glimpse of paradise. Not until five o’clock, she said firmly.

It was in the middle of the afternoon that she came across the gray notebook, in a large book on the bottom shelf—a dingy book with an unprepossessing title. Its leaves had been hollowed out. There were thin-papered letters under the notebook. She glanced at them first. Her instinctive disquiet at reading what the first line revealed to be love letters eased as she proceeded. They were so lyrical, so intense, so impassioned, they became at once associated with the loves that have become public property.

Her dream came vividly back to her and, putting a hand over the birthmark, she let the same sweet terror it had produced sweep over her again. But the letters puzzled her. Though clearly both sides of a correspondence, all were in the same handwriting—a script in which each letter was as perfect as if typewritten, and so small that, without that perfection, it would have been almost undecipherable.

The notebook was in the same handwriting; and that was so small and at times so cryptographic, through abbreviations, that reading it was as if one with a smattering of a foreign language were trying to translate it. It seemed to be a random jotting down of notes. She saw a familiar sentence, “He who has seen paradise with earth-bound eyes.” That verified the book as Thomas Woods’s—probably the notes from which he had put his book together.

But a few pages beyond she came upon, “Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires. Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires. Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires.” Over and over the phrase was repeated down the length of two pages, the final phrase sputtering out in a spatter of blots, as if the writer had reached the end of endurance.

A magnifying glass was needed for the fine writing. Instead of going up to the tower when her day’s work was over, she would drive into town and buy a glass.

The glass showed that the book was a repository for flashing thoughts, a writer’s net to catch each stirring fancy. She found other bits from Ultima Thule. She came across a description of her—of their—paradise that made her tremble. She recognized it even from the first line, “Across the river....” His imagery produced that same sense of shallow breathing that a long stay in the tower produced—the same sense of expectancy of being about to take off from the earth.

A few pages beyond, she came across the first personal record, “I have engaged Vernon to paint my portrait.”

So! It was his portrait. The caretaker had lied. But why?

I haven’t quite decided what I want, except that everything about it must reflect strength, vitality, wholeness—like the god which man has created in his own image and which the inhuman mover of the universe must regard with sardonic glee.

What did he mean? A portrait without warts or blemishes? Evidently he had found a compliant painter. She had no scorn for such vanity when she remembered that if necessity called for her photograph, she turned the good side of her face toward the camera.

She could not bear to put the book down even when finished. It had enmeshed her in the same spell that the tower had cast upon her—even more, for with the book she had looked upon the land of fulfilled desires in company with one who had not merely looked, but had entered into a kingdom that stretched to whatever point of ravishing beauty the imagination could conceive. And his imagination had seemed to approach the infinite.

She was glad, a few days later, that will power had continued to prevail and keep her at work. Sticking to long hours, and with an almost superhuman energy, she had made up for considerable of her previous sloth when the executor of the estate appeared. But he had come, she learned, only to fulfill the obligation that a quarterly visit should be made to see that all the necessary things were being done for preservation of the place.

“What is to be done with it eventually?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing!”

“Nothing beyond keeping it in repairs and seeing that there are competent caretakers. He established a trust fund for that and to cover the taxes. Everything is to be kept exactly as he left it—except the library. The proceeds from the sale of that are to be added to the fund.”