Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

And then fading, grunting voices: “Where did you — uhng — learn to gut like that?”

“I…uhng… fish ,” explained the other man.

Then silence.

And then darkness, as Alice Trimmers sank into merciful unconsciousness.

ermit me, kind reader, to turn the clock back to a time preceding the massacre on the Northern Ridge — only a few minutes, if you will indulge me — so that you may know what was being said and done in other places when those tragic shots were fired. Let us begin with Newman Trimmers, who stood within the attic room looking down at a man lying asleep upon a pallet on the floor. The man had kept him up for most of the previous night with shouts and groans and troubled thrashings in his sleep. Yet Newman wasn’t angry with him. Didn’t Newman have such nights as this one himself? Indeed, all of the eight men and one boy who shared this room had been plagued with nightmares of equally terrifying intensity. The dark dreams came, in part, in remembrance of their time in the Outland (for each of the men, save one, had been there and had seen things there of a haunting nature). The dark dreams also came from the fact of their secret imprisonment at the top of an insane asylum — each of these “Limbo Returnees,” long thought dead and gone by most — a veritable gathering of ghosts.

“Does he still nap?” asked George Muntle in regard to the sleeping man, putting a hand upon the shoulder of the boy.

Newman looked up into the eyes of the enquirer and nodded.

Vincent Muntle’s brother George bore a similarity to his younger brother only in the eyes, which were dark blue and shaded by thick brows. Where Vincent was bluff and hardy and a bit rounded in those places where musculature had softened, George was rail-thin and possessed of a rather cadaverous aspect that shewed not only in the hollowness of his ocular orbits, but also in the concave cheeks and the narrow, withered neck. Perhaps it was the fact that George had lived all of the last twenty-five years of his life in this sunless attic room, which had drained the life and sinew from him, for his brother had always thought him robust.

Newman was the most recent addition to this special isolated fraternity and its youngest member. The men took an instant liking to him; it had been a very long time since most of them had seen a child, although Newman preferred not to be thought a child and tried whensoever possible to acquit himself in the blustering, stouthearted ways of men. Sometimes Professor Chivery, during his most confused moments, would mistake Newman for a youthful Harry Scadger, whom he had tutored when Harry was the same age as Newman. And Newman would never correct him, for there were things that Newman learnt from the professor when playing to the old man’s faulty memory that were good to know: games and tricks with numbers and mathematical theorems that could be put to practical application. Chivery was especially fond of explaining why a circle could not be squared, basing his staunch belief that this ancient geometric conundrum was insoluble on the fact that pi was a transcendental number. He was alone in this regard, most mathematical scholars of the Dell, and the great arithmeticians who taught them through the Ensyke , believing it only a matter of time before quadrature of the circle could be taken to proof.

Chivery was alone in another respect; he had been placed with the Limbo Returnees, though he was not one. The reason could hardly be discerned, though some of Newman’s attic-mates wondered if his obsessitor diagnosis made him perfect company for the Outland-obsessed Returnees.

“Newman, why do you stare at him so?” asked one of the men. He was a lean, spindle-limbed man with a long, scraggly beard and his name was Quilp. Christopher Quilp had lived for many years in this cock-loft, though not so long as George, and had spent a goodly number of those years of occupancy whittling little soldiers from blocks of wood. The soldier he presently held in his hand — very nearly finished but for the buttons and pockets of its uniform — was soon to be added to the company of a veritable miniature battalion of other such whittled soldiers. It was not a hard look that he gave Newman, for Mr. Quilp was quite fond of the boy, and enjoyed playing “Waterloo” with him upon the floor during those times in which Newman would allow the young child within him to come out for a bit of a juvenile frolic.

“I have noticed a pattern about the professor,” said Newman, happy to explain his sudden interest in Chivery’s repose.“I’ve noticed first that when he has had a hard night and is crying and calling out in his slumber, his restless state continues when he rises in the morning.”

“Yes, that is where we get the term ‘restless,’ boy — from getting no rest.” This from a man named Bolo who was quick with a quip. He yawned and then closed his eyes again upon his pillow in a corner of the room. Although the men were pale-skinned from having been separated for so long from the browning rays of the sun — the windows of the attic room having been boarded up and then plastered over many years ago — Bolo’s epidermis was without any colour whatsoever, so that one need not look too close to see the trails of all the veins in his face and neck and arms.

“Newman was making a point, Bolo,” chastised George Muntle.“Finish your point, Newman.”

“I was going to say what else I have found in the pattern. After the turbulent sleep, the professor seems very different the next day — and sometimes he even begins to make sense.”

George thought for a moment. “Newman is right. There are such moments, as we all well know, and they do tend to follow a night of troubled sleep. It is as if the man’s brain in repose is attempting to repair itself. I have played chess with him on such days, for he is quite sharp and coherent then. By the bye, Quilp, whittle me a new rook, for there is one that has lost nearly all of its crenellation. Formerly I had thought Chivery wholly healed during such amazing periods. But they do not last. He inevitably lapses back into his wonted state of lunacy.”

“Alas and alack,” said Bolo, cracking the joints in his thumbs.

George smiled. “But perhaps this will be one of those days in which I shall be in for a good game of chess.”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Muntle, I’m not quite up for chess,” said the professor, raising his head to rest it upon the shelf of his palm. “For there is far more important business that we must attend to to-day.”

The professor rose to put himself into the Hindoo sitting position and to address not only George, but Newman and his other attic companions, at least two of whom greeted this temporary state of sanity and coherence on the part of the professor with commendatory applause.

“My sleep was troubled last night by dreams of what is soon to come and by the fact that I am helpless to do anything about it.”

“Yes, we know the dreams well, Professor,” said George. “It is the Noah story, is it not? That there is to be a great flood and all will perish save a ridiculous number of animal pairs that could not possibly fit themselves into the ark unless it be the size of France.”

The Professor nodded. “That story, Muntle, or at least the way I told it, was wholly symbolistic.”

“So what, then, does the flood represent?” asked Bolo in a loud voice from the other end of the long room.

“Why, it represents what it actually is. In true fact, I am fearful that a flood is soon to wash all over this entire valley.”