Part: 3/4 read part one
Wordcount: 1,332
Synopsis: Dr. Metzdorff reaches a breaking point and tries to bring an end to the webspinning experiment.
Falke didn’t see Camille until late that night. He must have either gone outside or retreated into some far corner of the house and hidden. After an entire day quite alone in the house, Falke retired to Metzdorf’s study to pursue some of the non-academic reading he had discovered in there the other evening. He dragged an armchair up so he could cross his feet on the desk and slouched down into it, opening a novel he wondered if Metzdorf had actually read. As he got started, he heard the sound of someone shifting in the room. When he looked up, Camille was there.
The mute stood leaning on the wall between the mahogany doorframe and the soaring bookcases. His hands hung limply at his sides and his still eyes gazed through the ornate Turkish ceiling panels. Falke stared at him for a while and then smiled, shaking his head and going back to his reading. He read through three pages before bothering to look up again. Camille hadn’t moved. He clapped the book shut. Camille jerked. “Posing for your portrait? I’ve never been good with paint.” He put the book down and took his feet off the desk. “Posing for your death-mask, are you?”
Falke got up and stood next to him. Camille looked at him the same way one might look at a drifting cloud or a passing train. Falke patted his shoulder. “Are you feeling alright? You look very tired. Maybe you ought to go to sleep.” Camille looked away and leaned his head against the bookcase. Dr. Falke pressed his lips together and scowled. He ran his hand down Camille’s sleeve and sighed, looking down at the floor. Then he walked over to the desk and opened a drawer, taking something out. He returned to Camille and snapped his fingers in front of his face.
Camille glanced at him, seemingly somewhat invaded, but his eyes focused on Falke’s other hand as he lifted it up. “Or maybe this would help?” It was a spool of thread.
Camille took the string and walked away. Dr. Falke leaned out the door and watched him going off down the hallway until he turned a corner and was out of sight. He smiled.
The next morning dawned dark and Eugene Falke awakened late without the restrictions of Metzdorf’s schedule. He phlegmatically went about dressing and boiling water for coffee, not expecting to see Camille, but keeping an eye out for any webs that might have appeared overnight, nonetheless. He sat down to coffee and mentally remarked on the heavy rain flattening the lawn outside. Then suddenly, he saw someone out there running to-and-fro among the willows. He set down his cup and leaned toward the window, staring in earnest. It was Camille. He got up and rushed out onto the doorstep.
“Camille!” he called. “Camille? What are you doing out here?” Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to let the doctor distract him from it. He kept dodging to and fro between the trees. Falke ran out through the rain. “What are you doing?” he demanded. Camille’s bright eyes darted back at him from behind his drenched, disheveled locks and their gazes met directly for an instant. “Spinning?” Falke asked. He had the spool in his hand, and was stringing thread back and forth between the trees. He ran back and started weaving another line back through the framework he had started. He had established what looked exactly like the support threads of an orb web. For a quarter of an hour, Falke stood and watched the weaver’s progress under the pouring rain. He had become so incredibly dexterous in his craft, that it took him no longer to complete the web.
Camille watched the end of the thread dangle from somewhere near the center of his web. Falke stood on the other side of the great circle, staring. He looked up from the rain-beaded strings and started. Camille was trying to find his gaze. “Camille, what is this?” Falke asked. The patient didn’t answer but he came to him eyeing his creation with an artist’s discrimination. He stopped a pace away from Falke, and looked at him again. Then he looked down at the empty spool in his hand. He met the young doctor’s eyes for the third time in the past minute, and gave him the spool. For a moment they were still. Finally,Camille turned and walked toward the house. Falke watched him go in, playing with the spool between his fingers. A smile broke over his face.
“I didn’t leave you with instructions because I didn’t think it was necessary, Eugene. I thought you would know that I wouldn’t tolerate any more of this–”
“But it’s fantastic, Doctor, what’s happened!” Falke leapt up from his seat. “Camille is perhaps for the first time in his life trying to contact our world. He’s reaching for it, with the help of a lot of string and an admittedly strange talent. And you absolutely must watch him. If only you would take an interest in what he does. Can’t you at least pretend?”
Metzdorff rubbed his creased forehead in dismay. “This isn’t what we want. You can’t feed the man’s obsessive mania. Can’t you see he has to speak?”
“Why?”
“Falke, don’t be a fool. You know you can’t survive in the world at large weaving strings in every door and window. You can’t disturb the world with nonsense and expect them to appreciate it somehow. Either we teach him to speak of he dies in an asylum, in Paris or elsewhere.”
“I’ll take him in. He can’t be isolated from the world he’s trying so hard–in his own mysterious way–to speak to. Send him back to the asylum and he’ll never resurface. We can’t do that. Don’t you see?”
“I see abnormal absurd behavioral handicaps that might someday be eliminated if I had the cooperation of my fellow doctors. You’re as bad as the rest of them, Falke. You have your own way of mocking my attempts. Now come. We have to take down all this string and destroy it. We can’t allow Camille to touch another spool until his madness has subsided.” He got up and went to the doorway into the wing which was shrouded by a beautiful web of silver thread, rendering it impassible. He took a handful of the thread and tore it down. “Unless you’d rather go back to Paris today. In which case, I’ll gladly pay your way.”
Falke sighed, and went upstairs to get a pair of scissors. For the rest of the afternoon, the two doctors went about their work without further discussion. Each had sunken deeply into his own mind. Falke was still mutely arguing with Metzdorff’s authoritative decision, still wishing, with every tangled wad of string he threw into the fire, that the older doctor would stop for a moment to observe the earnest care invested into each supposedly meaningless turn and loop in the thread.
He gritted his teeth and snipped the last line of thread hanging from a high window-frame. Gathering the ratted mass off the floor, he turned and looked up to see Camille standing there, staring down at the remains of his creation. His eyes were heavy and motionless. Falke shrugged, guilt-stricken. “I’m sorry, Camille. Doctor’s orders.”
He went downstairs and into the kitchen where he tossed the string, like last year’s bird’s nest, into the old wood stove. When he turned around, Metzdorff was coming in with a final handful. “I think that’s all. He’s used every last spool in the house. I’ll have to be sure to get Gertrude some more before she comes back.”
As he shut the stove there was a creak from the floorboards in the doorway. They looked up and saw Camille gazing at the flames through the grill-work on the door of the stove. He didn’t look at either of the men before he turned and wandered off.