Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

Curiosity #1039: Illuminated manuscript, 180 x 125 mm, circa 1390, titled The Book of the Saints. Illuminated by The Master of Death — possibly Pierre Remiet .

Pru has welcomed them as warmly as she knows how. She has made the tea herself and served it in the green and garnet parlor, and Inge has had to stifle a laugh — drinking tea with this old-fashioned matron in a button-neck frock dating back probably to the gay nineties, while strains of fractured jazz spill out of the radio, the orchestra tuning up. Fragments of the past lined up in great cabinets along the wall. Set seems oblivious to the incongruity — though, Inge is quickly discovering, Set seems oblivious to almost anything his strange family does. He seems to think the strangeness is in himself instead. Inge is not sure how they have managed this, his family, but she thinks it is a mean trick.

And here the real strangeness stands now, in Cedric. He stands beside Pru, holds half of a beautiful ivory mask. He wears a necklace of bone. He carries a knife of flint. One of the cabinets is open, its contents spilled onto the parlor rug. Arrowheads and beads and bowstrings. On meeting Inge, he shakes his head sadly and quotes Dante, “These have no hope of death. . mercy and justice disdain them.” So, she thinks, Set’s living brother is mad.

Set looks to Pru, shocked, and she shrugs. He’s been here for months, she says, but I didn’t want to tell you. How could I?

But what about the expedition? Point Hope? Set stares at Cedric, a dark sort of fear frothing up in his hollow place.

Look around you, boy, says Cedric. The city is everywhere — we are uncovering it now, always, forever digging it up. We are always digging up the dead.

Oh, there is no city, sighs Pru. There never was. You should have known that. She fingers the buttons on her collar with an unsteady hand. And you should never have brought her into it, she says, and nods at Inge.

Cedric grins at Set, an empty chasm-yawn more grimace than pleasure. Oliver, he says, now he wanted to collect you, that’s why he didn’t mind what we’d made you. It was only I who suffered, only I who knew what you’d become. He sinks into a chair, seems to shrink into his own skin. You were Oliver’s curiosity, he says, but you were always my ghost.

Inge stares at Cedric. Stop telling him insane things, she says. If he’s empty inside it’s your fault, not his.

Don’t you think I don’t know that? asks Cedric. He takes off the mask, dashes it to the floor. I’ve lived every day with that guilt. You can’t come back, not truly. There’s always a price to be paid by someone. I’m paying for it now.

Set gently pushes Inge aside. Cedric watches them both, Set with a look on his face that he’s never seen before, something so open, so willing, that he finds it almost obscene. And the girl — wearing a worshipful gaze like a commedia mask, as frankly and sadly smitten as Pierrot. Something in Cedric springs up in rage, as if he were looking at an abomination he’d created — something so wrong with the fabric of the world that it has to be ripped out. His fault, after all. He couldn’t find a dead city; he couldn’t find a way back from death. Only one way to fix it now.

Cedric raises the flint knife. Set sees it coming, has always seen it coming, ever since the swimming pool he’s seen it, even when he tries not to. And now his brother stabs, rather theatrically, toward him. A gesture, perhaps, but still dangerous. Set twists away but not quite fast enough to avoid a slashed hand. There is a lot of blood, on the carpets, on the wallpaper, on his tan suit. There is blood on Inge’s pale cheek. No one speaks. Pru grabs for the knife, but Cedric drops it, already drained of whatever momentary frenzy has possessed him. Yes sir, that’s my baby, the radio warbles. No sir, I don’t mean maybe . The clock clicks loudly over the hearth. Even now, time refuses to stand still. Pru kneels next to Cedric, and Inge wonders what on earth Set ever thought she could do for him here. What this place could ever do besides draw life out of a person? This dark house, dead for years? It reminds her so much of her own childhood home, of memories and mourning and halls where the dead stalk the living. It, too, is full of rot.

Set is crying, and she looks for something to bandage his hand. He shakes his head, and there is nothing ghostly about him now, a mess of earthly blood and tears.

He tried before, he tells Inge. He doesn’t know quite what to say, really. What do you say about someone who’s saved and destroyed you, over and over again? How do you appease them? How do you live with yourself?

Cedric is quite mad, says Inge. We need to go, Set. We need to leave this place.

This place, says Set. It was Oliver’s, too. He stops then, just for a moment. Stops breathing, stops moving, stops his heart. Oliver’s. Still there is Oliver here, in the cabinets, the carpets, the stuffed owls and lyres and the lonely fireplace, unlit since he went down to Hades. Set’s eyes close. He can almost see it, Oliver’s shade in the darkness below, waiting for him. Waiting for his understanding.

Then Set thaws, grabs her hand. Come on, he says, drags her up the little round staircase to his childhood bedroom. There is something he needs to find.

As a small boy, Set wanted to be like Oliver, gentlest of all his siblings. So he started creating his own cabinet, making his own collections. Rocks, sticks, bird feathers, newspaper ads, kazoos and other plastic toys and trinkets, old coins, jacks, ribbons, smooth stones for skipping: he wrapped them each in rags and carefully stuffed them inside of labeled shoeboxes. He had shoeboxes, too, full of intangibles — these, he would have told you, came directly from his head and needed only the reminder of a physical space for storage. Empty boxes lined his bedroom floor, labeled “Clouds” and “Deserts” and “Dreams” inked in neat rounded letters. His siblings gently mocked the empty boxes, all but Oliver. When Oliver saw them, he smiled and said, Where is the one for spirits?

Now Set digs through the wardrobe, pulling out box after box and scattering leaves and rocks and animal bits across the floor.

Set, says Inge. You’re bleeding all over. What are you doing ?

Something I have to find, he says, and dumps out a box labeled “Stamps,” another labeled “Butterflies.” Bright paper-thin wing parts flutter to the floor. Where is it? Finally he fishes out a box with a different script, smooth and elegant and spelling “Spirits” on the side. Here, he says. He lifts the lid and then his face falls, his shoulders fall, he sits, childhood trinkets sprinkled over the floor like some kind of failed spell. Inge seizes the opportunity to steal a shirt from the wardrobe. She winds it round his bloody hand while he stares into the empty shoebox. She asks what he was expecting to find.

I don’t know, he says. Something of Oliver. A message. Something left behind.

Inge wipes the blood from his arm, rolls up his soaking sleeve gently. She has never seen him look so human, so present. She thinks of the burning manor in Larne, of the flames reflected in the face of her father. We all leave something behind, she says.

Downstairs, Cedric is slumped on the rug, staring, surrounded by ruins. Pru has both skinny arms around him. Set loves and hates them both so much in this moment. Inge wonders wildly if Set will disappear when he crosses the threshold, turn to air or salt or sand. Are they all mad here, or is there magic after all?

What was it Constance said? No flying back to the past? Not for Cedric, not for him, not for Inge, not for Pru, not for poor dead Oliver. No second chances.