Dr. H.H. Holmes, serial killer, 1896
It would appear that the shadow of my last novel, coming after me, is yet long indeed.
* * * * *
If I stretched I
would be rewarded with a beautiful muscular pain which must be what all cats
feel when they arch and curl their toes, but I was too lazy even to do
that. Even through the glass I could
hear the bees under full sail in the clover; the summer sun pressed warmly on
my cheek as I shifted my head a fraction into the embrace of my arm. It was a rich, lazy summer day, a day of low,
slow blood and limbs sprawling across a couch.
For the better part of a half hour I had hovered in a doze, moon-facedly
happy with life, and too lazy even to stretch a limb.
Save for the bees,
it was very quiet. Badger was laid up in
bed pretending to be an invalid after the extraction of a tooth. Mother and Father had gone off alone on
horseback. It was only Bruin and myself
this afternoon, silent and companionable, enthralled by the mellowing power of
the summer warmth in the solarium.
I do not know why
we chose the solarium. At high summer,
with the room all windows and the bulk of it facing south, it was liable to be
smothering hot. But thank God there was
a wind that day which kept the worst edge off the warmth; and anyway, Bruin was
writing and liked the best light possible.
Like a cat I preferred to be near quiet people while I napped, and the
couch in the solarium with its siren’s croon had been welcoming. I had succumbed to its embraces without
resistance.
There was a soft
rustle of paper. “Goddgofang,” said
Bruin quietly: “are you awake?”
Too lazy to
stretch, I was almost too lazy to speak.
For a few moments I stared up the curve of my arm, up the back of the
sofa into the white image of the sky out the window. “No,” I said at last.
There was a
chitter of a chair’s legs on the stone floor.
(The stones, too, helped keep the room from being unbearably warm.) “Yes, I thought so… I have been thinking,” he went on, “and would
like, perhaps, another mind to help me.”
I roused myself to
turn my head toward him. He sat in one
of those rather uncomfortable straight-backed chairs—though, I admit, I have always
been a bit free with my posture—poised lightly with one hand spread on his
papers and the other crooked, holding a pen; his head, too, was turned at me,
and there was a little thoughtful, patient smile on his face for he seemed to
anticipate my sluggish blood and was ready to fight against my desire to go
back to my cat-nap. Realizing he meant
business, I blinked, cleared my sun-dazzled eyes, and gave him my attention.
“I am listening.”
He held my eye and
did not look away. “I was speaking with
Avery the other day about my books. He
mentioned that he had just finished Scandalon
and marked to me his own surprise in the apparent disparate natures of myself
and my book. ‘One wouldn’t think it, to
look at you,’ he said—I think he meant it kindly—‘that you had such a raw
imagination.’ It puzzled me.” The puzzlement formed a darkness between his
brows—Mother’s brows, I thought of a sudden.
Odd how I had never noted that before.
“It puzzled you
that there should seem to be such a difference between yourself and your
works?” I prompted.
But he shook his
head, smiling a little shyly. “Nay, not
that. I am aware of that, and that, I
think, is only natural in the writer…
Nay, it was his underlying meaning.
Perhaps it is best displayed in his non-verbal speech. He seemed abashed. I had one of those awful moments in which my
mind ran back over all the uncomfortable scenes in the book and I had to stand
there and act as sleek and cool as a cat knowing that we were both thinking the
same thing. Yea,” Bruin suddenly laughed
a little at his own expense, “if he was abashed, I was nigh embarrassed! But most of all I wondered why he did not
understand me.”
My mind, too,
travelled back across the pages of that book.
A raw, unsettling novel: the story of a man on his merry way to heaven
only to find, when he got there, that he was in hell. Avery was the sort of fellow who saw things
in black and white—which was not bad, but the intricate patterns which black
and white could make in life sometimes went overlooked by him and, when he
found them, often mistook them for grey.
Scandalon was not the sort of
book he would have really liked. I was a
bit sorry for that, and even found myself sore on Bruin’s account.
Bruin had turned
away, back toward his manuscript, and was going on quietly as if to
himself. “I become worried by this turn
of events. Afterward I was able to think
back over my novels, each at a time, and found each subsequent story a little
harsher than the one before.”
I put out my leg
on the arm of the sofa, bending my foot until the long lean muscles in my calf
groaned with delight. “Hast only three,”
I pointed out placidly.
He looked at me
askance, and it was Mother’s face I saw.
“A’come,” he said with the closest he came to roughness, “I am trying to
explain myself.”
“I follow
you. I just do not want you to outweigh
yourself with plumage and feathering of importance. The book is a good book,” I added definitely. “So what is the trouble?”
“I am,” he replied
with emphasis. “I am. I looked at him and he looked at me, and it
was not that he thought there was such an apparent difference between myself
and my novels, but that he feared there was no
difference. I was of a sudden all the
evil and villainy of my novel—none of the goodness of it,” he marked out: “people
will forget that.”
A harsh,
involuntary smile gripped my mouth.
“They like to be mean-spirited.”
But he
shrugged. “I do not know that Avery
himself meant to be mean-spirited. It is
perhaps that age-old disconnect between the writer and the reader.” Suddenly he waved one hand. “But that is not what I am talking of.” With both hands and an angry splatter of ink
he gestured forcefully at the paper in front of him. “When I write, I write for people to see
things—ordinary things which have always been there, but which people
overlook—or do not see through overuse.
I don’t believe it was so much the shock of Reynard winding up in hell
instead of heaven that got to Avery. I
think it was Reynard himself. I think it
was the upending of his virtues. For
some time Reynard comes across as an admirable gentleman. I found myself at turns watching him display
virtues that I wish to possess. Then
when we get to heaven—hell, that is, in this instance—it is like that ending
passage of The Inferno in which the
world is suddenly thrown over on its ear—quand’
io mi volsi, tu passasti ‘l punto al qual si traggon d’ogne parte i pesi—and
everything you thought turns out to be quite the opposite of what it was. I think that shocks people: to see their
virtues turned into vices. And I think
it shocks people who know me to know I think about these things.”
I shifted my head
so that I could watch my foot idly moving, stirred by thought. In the long silence I heard the bees and,
presently, the scrape of a hoe in a garden.
I reflected again that, unlike Badger, who was like me in
forthrightness—and so, for that matter, rather like Mother—Bruin had inherited
Father’s knack of saying many things and nothing at all, and hiding what he
really meant behind his words. Over
fifteen years of practice I had learned to pick apart my brother’s words and
uproot what he meant. Sleepily
stretching, I gently cursed his lack of glibness.
“You mean that you
have to play the blackguard, and they do not like it.”
There was a
momentary silence. “Yes. I suppose that is what I mean.”
I turned my head
on my arm. “But, by the stars, man,” I
said roughishly, “that is what makes you so fine a writer! ‘One would not think it to look at you’—by
which he means, you’re a delicate-looking whelp and you smile like butter. But you have fangs in your mouth and you’re
not afraid of biting down on the black-tasting aspects of life. How else could you write our enemies so
well—which are ourselves—if you did not think like a villain? I ask you!” I finished, thrusting a hand out
at him.
“Nay, then—I, too,
hear you,” he said patiently, not looking at me.
I sighed. “Then may I go back to sleep?”
“That sleep which
you were not in?”
“Yes. That sleep.”
He put his elbow
upon the tabletop and laid his jaw in his palm, looking away from me toward the
southern meads. The swimming light made
a crown of gold around his young head. The little fiend! I thought tenderly—and
was not sure why I thought it.
“None so easy,” he
said at length. “I know that, to craft a
good villain, one must ‘play the blackguard,’ as you put it. At times it is…wildly pleasant. Exultant, in a way. Whether that is the thrill of making
something well or the latent evil in one’s blood, I do not know. Perhaps that is why the question nags at
me. I know I do well what I do. I just wish people would not look from my
books to me in that manner. Truly,” he
added, coming round with a suddenness unlike him, snatching, in the act, a book
from the table and flinging it at me, “villainy runs in our veins!”
I caught the book
and stumbled to a sitting position. It
was an old book, yellowed and unruled, and full of Mother’s hand. I read a few passages and looked up,
suspicious.
“This is Mother’s
diary.”
“Yes, I know. She let me borrow it for research.”
I shut it again
with as little quickness as I could for I did not want Bruin to know that I
would rather not read those old accounts.
I had lost my comfortable position and began rooting around in the
cushions trying to find it, all the while taking the time to think.
He pre-empted
me. “Do not think,” he said, “that I
have some enormous psychosis which, Cervantes-like, drives me to imagine
unreasonable and untenable suppositions.
I am sound. It is only that I
wish they knew that.” He laughed a little, softly. “I do not want a leper’s bells…”
“Tush, sirrah!” I
said. He was really beginning to
frighten me. I abandoned my attempts to be comfortable. “The proof is in the
pudding. Yea, Scandalon itself is the best test of your mettle. How could you, being mad, write such a clear
distinction between goodness and villainy?
That is your strength,” I pushed, “that is your keenness. You see perhaps more clearly than others and
are you to blame that your natural instinct prompts you to write the dichotomy? Did God, in his infinite wisdom, look into
the thoughts of his own mind and see the beautiful starkness that lies between
himself and all that is evil—and did he not subsequently write as such? How great the villainy—how great the
conqueror! That is what you do, Bruin. That is what you write.” I dropped back off the lip of the sofa,
breathing a little heavily. “And that is
why books like Scandalon are perhaps
so dismal: you know how to dream the nightmares that the wicked ones endure.”
He seemed
unwilling to be overwon by me. For some
time he sat quietly, moving only his left foot a little, turning it on the
point of his boot as a dancer might, his unseeing eye roving over the lines of
his manuscript. I could see that I had
not adequately addressed his concerns, but how could I account for the peevish
insinuations of a handful of readers when it was plain from the text that the
author was standing on both feet?
“It is not our
fault,” I pointed out flatly, “that people are stupid.”
This produced a
momentary flash of laughter from him and set his mood in a better temper. “You are right.”
“Of course I am
right,” I said, snapping up four fingers.
“Now put your face into a better shape before I knock the horse out of
it and get back to your villainizing.
Nay—” I heard a door crash shut
in the wind and twisted toward the peristyle.
“Speak of the devil, the reprobates have returned.”
In a flurry of
sunlight and wind, jerking a little forward, for the solarium door always
caught a bit on a lip of stone, Mother pushed in, flushed and
disreputable-looking. It seemed the only
cool thing about her was her faintly supercilious brow and the press of her
mouth which always gave one the impression that she was trying not to laugh.
“There you are,”
she said in her warm, husky voice.
I emerged from the
couch—the stone flags were deliciously cool underfoot—and stepped around an
avalanche of ornamental pillows, bending down as she turned her cheek to accept
my kiss. “Your hair is a mess,
Mama. Did you have a good time?”
The sharp laughter
stabbed at me from the corner-glance of her eyes. “You’re impertinent. How is Badger?”
I turned back on
Bruin, at a sudden loss, and likewise his gaze met mine.
The poor beggar
had not occurred to us.
