Night falls early around Christmastime in Dreamscape. The world seems so quietly eager to go to sleep on Christmas Eve. It slips under the dark cover of snow clouds and pulls us all into soft slumber with it. And in the cold still evening, all the lights come on.
They sparkle down the streets, stringing scattered stars between the bare branches of the trees and lining the icy gutters of houses along the way to my home. I love to walk at dusk and watch the town become an unreal art display. It’s Christmas Eve. Where is everyone?
Maybe they’ve gone to sleep with the setting sun. I stand in the middle of the street gazing up into the falling snow. Far away, a bell is ringing. There’s music somewhere. And though the town seems almost deserted, I think I hear someone laughing.
Strange how it always comes back. Year after year, as I get older and change, and forget—it keeps returning. And we fall for it every time—the feeling like something wonderful is about to happen. We string the lights, ring the bells, go to bed early, because, once a year, we can’t wait for tomorrow. We keep looking ahead, counting days, even though counting days only makes us older, brings December to an end, and forces us to face a new year in the dead of winter. But we always do it anyway.
We feel the frosty wind on our faces as the earth turns. And we want it to keep turning. We know something’s coming in the morning. Something that will outlive time. Something that doesn’t depend on our fading memories to keep living in our hearts.
Christmas waits just over the curve of the horizon. It’s just another day in December. But every year, we fall for it.
Somebody said the people who walked in darkness would see a great light. And as I stand in the middle of the frozen street in Dreamscape, staring up into the snow, strange as it seems, I think I see it now.
Synopsis: Amy returns to the mountain range on her own time.
I returned to the region in summer of two-thousand six. There were several sites of archeological interest in the valley, and I didn’t have much else to do. It’s really a beautiful place in the summer. The scenery kind of made me wish I was a nature or travel photographer instead. I took some time off while I was there to hike and gave myself permission to snap some photographs recreationally, which I hadn’t done in a while.
I was making my way through a narrow winding pathway through a dark stand of conifers when something caught my eye from beyond, through the trees. At first it confused me, so I kept moving toward it. As I got closer to the edge of the trees, it appeared as a bright orange blaze, like a silent fire consuming the clearing.
The trees thinned out and I found I had reached a high slope. The air was cold and bit my face as I emerged from the shelter of the pines. I stopped and gazed in awe. Never in my life had I seen so many poppies.
To this day, no one has been able to translate the scripts we found in the caves of Mt. X. The story of the people who once lived and died there may never be told. But I’m convinced I know something of them no one else does. I met their king one night. There was a blizzard and neither of us could sleep.
I don’t know what happened to him after that. He was driven by a longing for his lost people. Maybe he went to search the world over for them, or maybe he was simply looking for a warmer place to sleep. Whatever his quest, I wish him well.
Synopsis: The next morning calls everything into question.
I wasn’t troubled when I awakened the next morning by the fire alone. I knew it had been a dream. The only thing that bothered me was the fact that the whole expedition hadn’t been a dream.
The morning broke pale and still. The winds of the previous night had changed the landscape around the lodge, heaping snow twelve feet high here, and thinning it almost to bare rock there. I hardly recognized the scenery as what we had traversed yesterday on the way back from the cave.
After breakfast we all geared up and bundled up to return to the dig. I pushed eerie memories of the night before into the back of my mind and focused on checking my photography equipment. I supposed they would want to look for more firepits in other chambers of the cave. Personally, I was more interested in the layout of the cave itself than any of the artifacts. Lyle said there might be quite a few chambers in the cave that had been blocked by ice and fallen rock. Maybe more tombs.
The trudge back to the cave was even more exhausting than it had been yesterday. We had to stop twice along the way. I slung my camera-bag over my shoulder and climbed a craggy boulder at our second stop. At the top I sat down and stared out over the bleak glaring vista of Mt. X. We were about a quarter mile above the timberline. I wondered what the mountains were like in the summer.
I heard Lyle and the guide talking below, standing a bit apart from the rest of the group. “What do you do with a six-thousand-year-old corpse, anyway?” the guide wondered.
“I don’t know a thing about mummies,” said Lyle. “I suppose we’ll need to leave it to the experts. This is…unprecedented, I’m pretty sure. Never heard of anything like it in my life.”
“I’ve always thought this mountain was a little strange,” said the guide. “I’ve seen a lot of mountains, but nothing quite like Mt. X.”
“How’s that?”
“I can’t put my finger on it.”
They resumed their trek and in about five minutes they reached the cave. Snow was drifted high around the entrance and they had to plow through it a bit before they could access the doorway again. I carefully followed Lyle down the ancient steps into the muffled silence of the cave. A lot of the openings that had allowed up some natural light yesterday had been covered with snow overnight. Brilliant lanterns supplied the need now as we ventured deeper into the caves.
The lights glared on the tarp stretched over the stone sarcophagus in the center of the chamber. I didn’t stare it at. They called me from this corner to that to take pictures as they uncovered the remains of a mosaic floor, a set of sealed stone jars, more fragments of copper bells. There was a gap between the back wall and a massive deposit of ice. They widened it with chisels and the blunted blows of icepicks and hammers. The restless beams of flashlights danced through the glacial mass.
“There’s a doorway back here,” Lyle told me stepping back out into the main chamber. “Doesn’t look like a big room, but it’s something.”
I joined them exploring the new room. Firepits, markings on the walls, the remains of a torch of some kind—this day would be filled with my usual fare. There was some comfort in that. Maye we would even find some bones if we kept looking. It was so much easier to analyze skeletal remains than what was lying out there in the sarcophagus.
It was almost time for lunch break when I returned to the main chamber. The sun had broken through the clouds outside and light filtered through the ice and snow where the rock split and cracked to let it in.
“A lot of new data from this little trip,” I said, coming up beside Lyle and replacing my lens-cap. “I didn’t know these people even existed.”
“Yeah. This should trigger quite a bit of follow-up study.” He reached down and lifted the edge of the tarp over the sarcophagus. He glanced up at me. “I want to check and be sure the elements aren’t getting to it,” he said.
I nodded. Once again, I prepared to view the content of the ancient coffin as he gathered the cover back. And once again, neither of us were prepared for what we saw.
It was empty.
I don’t remember what I did in the time following our shocking discovery. For all I know, I might have simply stood there in the middle of the chaos and panic, staring at the empty box. They questioned each other. They accused the locals. They once again tried to deduce how they could have been hoaxed. It hadn’t been a real body. Someone must have opened the coffin before they got there. Other things that made even less sense.
The rest of the day went on like this. We completely ruled out the possibility of anyone stealing the corpse. We were the only people up here and no one would have gone to all that trouble to do something that might destroy the most extraordinary discovery of the century, which we all would have been credited for. No animal could possibly have dragged it off into the snow overnight. No one had seen so much as a bird the whole time we were there, and there was zero evidence of the tarp having been tampered with.
“Six thousand years, and the body dissolves into thin air overnight. A rotten shame,” said Lyle as we stood near the fire-ring warming our frozen fingers with mugs of coffee.
Neither of us spoke for a while. We had said everything. Everyone had said everything several times and now everyone was quiet. They had gone off to study what remained of our extraordinary finds. They were off in the corners of the lodge classifying the fragments of things—things the mountain people had brought the boy king. Bone flutes, copper bells, jars…pretty things. But what were they truly worth, in the end?
“So,” said Lyle. “Here’s the story: mass hallucination. Altitude sickness. How’s that sound?”
“No good. I’ve got pictures,” I snarled.
“Go ahead and keep that to yourself. We’re going to glean a lot from this expedition. It’s a pretty fair dig, isn’t it? Who’s the wiser? The tomb was empty when we found it. What’s there to explain? Maybe the boy-king was a legend after all. You and I know what you and I know.”
He didn’t know the half of it. I still haven’t told him.
I had been photographing sites for years. I had been to a lot of places and seen a lot of strange things. You’re bound to encounter strange things when you make it your life’s work to pry into the buried chambers of the past. But the voice of a child in the silence startled me because there were no children at the lodge while we were staying there. And I had thought I was alone.
He was standing across the fire from me, gazing levelly through the soft amber light. Once I pulled myself away from the eyes my attention flew to the circlet glimmering on his forehead. My vision adjusted so I could see him more clearly and the impossible became unmistakable. The little king had left his bed.
Strange in retrospect, I didn’t freak out as much as you would think. The first reaction I noticed was a profound sadness that crept up from deep inside me. What did it mean to a child to be undead, uncorrupted, and abandoned in an icy cave on a high mountainside? Poor lonely little boy. Poor forgotten waif. He couldn’t sleep.
Finally, my rationality returned and I shook my head, getting up, turning away with every intention of ignoring the apparition and going back to my room for the night. But as I made my way out of the ring of rustic couches around the roaring fire, I felt someone close behind me and whirled on him.
“Leave me alone,” I snapped.
Tears glowed in his huge dark eyes as he backed away from me. “Are you going to leave too?” he asked in a voice broken with anticipation of the answer.
I shook my head, trying to reply, but my voice didn’t come. I stood frozen in speechless horror as the childish ghoul remained a few paces from me, shivering in the cold, eyes running with ancient tears but continuously gazing up at me. His beautiful face pleaded with me. He wasn’t a deceptive devil of ashes and ice, he was a troubled child. Had he come out before to haunt the mountain climbers and the people who stayed in this lodge? Had anyone ever acknowledged him?
“Go back where you came from. I don’t talk to dead people,” I said, still hoping to awaken myself from this dream.
His breath hitched. “Dead?”
He didn’t know. At that, my resolve crumbled. I reached out for him. “No. I didn’t mean that, honey. Come here.”
He lowered his head, sending flashes of firelight from the stone on his brow, and glanced, uncertain, at my hand. Then he came toward me and I gently pulled him in. His head wasn’t even as high as my chest. I wondered how old he was. The small body was warm and surprisingly solid under the robes he wore, and his hair was thick and soft, but wet with melted snow.
“Did you walk all the way from…?” I didn’t go on. Instead I led him to the couch and invited him to sit beside me in the warmth of the fire. He pulled up his feet, curling into a ball and leaning against me, gazing with still-watery eyes into the dancing flames. “You want to tell me a few things?” I asked.
“What things?”
“I don’t know. Maybe why you can’t sleep?”
He blinked and laid his head on my shoulder. “I don’t like the dreams.”
“What dreams?”
“I dream about my people. They come into the cave and they go away again. They pretend they don’t see me. They act like they don’t know who I am. I miss them. They don’t come anymore.”
They’re dead! All his people are dead. How long has it been? How long has he been dreaming of them coming to his grave to mourn him as dead? But I didn’t ask him. Instead I asked him what any good archeologist would have asked. “What were your people like?”
He was quiet for a moment. “They made flutes from bones and played beautiful music. They were strong and built houses in the sides of the mountain and walls along the crests of the hills. They tamed the sheep and horses and planted banks of poppies just for the joy of seeing them bloom.
“And they wanted a king. They choose me to lead them. Everyone was pleased with me, and everyone knew my voice in a crowd. They loved to hear me laugh and would come and stay with me for hours just to listen to the things I told them.
“But after a while, they seemed unhappy. They stopped talking to me and talked only to each other. The men started talking about other places, and how their leaders were different. And they decided they didn’t want me to lead them anymore.”
He fell quiet and I sat thinking, trying to imagine the thriving civilization that must have been on this saddleback thousands of years ago. The poppies, the music, the horses—it was all gone now. Nothing remained but drifted snow, and the buried ruins in the mountainside. But why?
“Well,” I said at last. “Maybe they thought it would be better to have a leader who wasn’t a child.”
“I’m not a child.”
And that was when I realized he wasn’t.
He wrapped his arms around his knees and scowled at the fire. “But that was one of the things they said. They wanted a man to rule them. They wanted a king who would be wise and mighty. But years passed—many years, and I never became what they wanted. Other places they had seen had men leading them with war machines and gold and concubines. Other places they had seen had many kings in the time when they only had one. But what they wanted more than anything else was a king they could put in the ground and venerate as a man gone away. They wanted to have a treasury of dead kings. Like the other places.”
I couldn’t process all he was saying. But I kept gathering it like my files of photographs. I could analyze it later. “So, what did they do?”
For a long time, he didn’t answer. The wind moaned around the lodge and sang like a ghost in the chimney. Finally, he drew a small sobbing breath. “They put me in the cave and they told me I was dead.”
“They made you stay in the cave?”
He nodded. He rubbed his wrist across his eyes and ducked his head, unable to go on for a while. Then he took a deep breath. “They came now and then. They burned herbs and resin and carved things on the walls, but they didn’t talk to me. They didn’t even look at me. And they never stayed for very long. Sometimes they would leave me things. Bone flutes and copper bells and jars full of flowers—pretty things. But I really just wanted them to stay.” Then he looked up at me. “Are you going to leave too?”
I smoothed my hand through his long wavy hair and wrapped my arm around him. He settled against my shoulder again. “Not tonight,” I said.
So, they had always had a boy king. The same king for years—decades? Centuries? How long had he lingered in the form of a child, leading the people in the saddleback of Mt. X? How long did it take for them to become discontented with him, in his staunch unwillingness to change, to age, to die, to decay like the other kings they had seen? When had they abandoned him in the cave and when had the last of his people come to pay homage at his tomb? I didn’t ask him. He was tired. I let him sleep.
Synopsis: Amy and Lyle go over the pictures from the day’s work. A restless night follows.
“Man, that’s about enough to knock me out,” said Lyle, pulling off his heavy knit cap as we staggered into the lodge at long last. None of us could really claim to be mountaineers. People who probably could had reassured us that nothing between the site and the lodge was particularly rugged. It was more rugged than any of us.
The lodge was a sprawling building with walls like a fortress. Constructed partially from native rock and partially from massive timber, it had withstood the worst Mt. X could conjure. Yet, standing in the fire room at its heart, I could still hear the wind wailing and roaring through the saddleback. A fine grit of ice crystals raced out of the dark and dashed against the heavy glass in the windows. I untangled my musty scarf from my wet hair and unzipped my coat while Lyle conversed with our guide. The guide was a wind-burned St. Bernard of a man with a restless shock of red hair and bright blue eyes shrunken by perpetual snow-blindness. He was close-mouthed about the boy king. He only knew as much as we did.
I was waiting for my turn with Lyle. The rest of the team broke up and migrated out to their designated places in the lodge for the night. Lyle and I had developed some rapport early on this trip. I reminded him of his sister back in Edinburgh. He was the information hub for the expedition. I’ve always liked information, especially when the inexplicable happens. Surely, Lyle had a theory.
He bid the guide goodnight and turned to me. He could see the questions in my face, and now that the exertion of the hike had worn off, he seemed ready to talk about the day’s findings. “Got the photographs?”
“Do you want to review them?” I asked, repositioning the strap of my camera bag on my shoulder.
He pulled back the wet sleeve of his coat and scowled at his watch. “We’ve got time to take a look over them.”
Good. Then we can get the whole thing out in the open. I returned to my room to change into dry clothes and pick up my laptop. It was a small room with a bed that creaked like a nest of racoons and a tiny window, plastered with snow. I emptied my camera, pocketing the memory card and leaving the battery to charge. The cold drained it fast. Lyle said to meet back in the fire-room. I grabbed my laptop and went back out.
He was waiting for me at a table by the wall, surrounded by stapled stacks of paper and a glowing e-reader. He cleared a spot for my laptop and I joined him. As I opened the laptop I glanced toward the windows. “How bad is the storm?”
“Bad enough that the locals admit it’s a storm. It won’t clear up until tomorrow afternoon. That will set us back a little. But what have we got?” He moved his chair over to see the screen better. I opened the camera card.
We skipped through some general pictures of the site and moved on. He spent a while analyzing the steps we uncovered leading down into the cave the day before. He had opinions on how they were constructed, but couldn’t decide if they dated from before or after the tomb was built. They had completely uncovered the steps and were making their way into the tomb before anyone noticed the characters carved into the stone over the door. I saw them first. They were simple, angular and runic. They had found similar characters on a slab of basalt under a lake in the valley. No one had been able to translate it, and it seemed unrelated to any other finds in the area. This would be the first time we discovered a similar script.
Someone dug up a handful of pottery just inside the door, ashes here, ashes there, fragments of a bone flute and what might have been tubular bells. Then there were the markings that first tipped off the locals that this might be the tomb of a boy king. They outlined the ghostly nearly-destroyed figure of a child with a star on his forehead.
There were dozens of careful shots of the worn-down writing scratched on the walls. It looked different from the runes. More modern, perhaps. But still, there was no way to translate it. If only we could understand what was written on the mausoleum itself. Maybe it would explain a great deal.
We spent some time staring at the sheepskin with the crest painted on it. Little remained of the pigment. There were shadowy stains where we could guess it once created images and designs. We identified traces of red and blackish pigment and a grimy yellow that Lyle said had once been green. About a quarter of the crest was still visible. It was a wreath of foliage with a star hanging over it. I could make out the faded outline of a bird, or some winged creature in the middle of the wreath. It took about five minutes for Lyle to see it. He might have been stalling.
I clicked to the next image and it hit me deep in the chest like an electric pulse again. There was the child sleeping in his crypt. “He’s so perfect.” It was all I could think to say yet. I glanced sideways at Lyle. He gazed mutely into the screen.
“If the bog mummies could see this.” He sat back in his chair and rubbed his fingers together. “The construction methods on the crypt date from the bronze age. We haven’t got much reference for the script, but it’s safe to say with the changes we see in it that this tomb was in existence and possibly a pilgrimage for these people for a long time. It sure would be nice if we could translate some of it. What do you suppose they had to say about this kid?”
We moved on. No one seemed to have much to say about this kid anymore. But I would have liked to know what we all were thinking when we settled into our rooms that night.
As for me, my mind refused to stop. At about one a.m. something occurred to me. What if this society had only ever had one boy king? Supposing in some tender early time in the establishment of their civilization, somehow this child became their adored ruler? At his tragic premature passing, his people had embalmed him through some infallible method, lost to science. In that mountainside tomb, they continued to pay tribute to a dead king—their eternal ceremonial monarch, and the boy-king of legend.
A strange move for a budding civilization, but maybe a lucky one, in the end. A dead king had no reason to go to war, and no lust for conquest. Sometimes the best thing these little civilizations could do was keep to themselves.
At around two, the wind was howling unbelievably loud and the little heater in my room was barely sufficient to fight the chill of Mt. X. I decided to get up and seek out that huge central open fireplace that heated the lodge like a lurking volcano. Surely, I wasn’t the only one struggling to sleep through this wind.
The fireplace room was wonderfully warm, but deserted. So, I contented myself with the company of some hot chocolate and sank into the corner of one of the semicircular couches ringing the fire. The heat was already making me sleepier than I had been in my bed, and I propped my feet on the edge of the fire ring. The wind moaned outside in the dark and I thought of the cave in the mountainside, with the cuneiform writing and the bone flute fragments…and the ashes.
And a child’s voice woke me saying, “I can’t sleep.”
Synopsis: A photographer working on an archaeological site uncovers a mysterious tomb.
They had found the tomb of a boy king. Almost all cultures have a legend of a boy king at some point, like the lady warrior, or the prophet bard. The most notable thing about this lost mountain people was that they always had a boy king. Or so tradition said. What became of these monarchs when they grew up, no one knew.
We waited until winter. It had been a summertime avalanche that uncovered the site. Everyone was familiar with the seasonal rhythm of the mountains. We wanted things to be a bit more stable before we ventured up to the saddleback of Mt. X to excavate. I couldn’t blame the local people for not recognizing the momentum of their discovery. I didn’t either—not until I had spent my whole flight reading through the stack of reports on the ancient people who lived and died in that mountain range six-thousand years ago.
The walls of ice and rock stifled the roar of the wind. I huddled in the shelter of the glacial battlements the avalanche had partially broken down. Fiddling with my camera on my knee, I watched the slow progress of chisels on the ancient seal of the royal mausoleum. I had photographed so many sites before, but I never had the sophistication it took to see the profundity in faded clay beads and shards of pottery. Skeletal remains were only marginally more interesting. I never did understand what was so sacred about ancient fire-pits. Ashes, of all things, seemed to astound archeologists the most.
But here I was again, stiff as a corpse frozen where I perched on the icy boulders, watching, waiting for my turn to step in and record the findings. I pulled my dripping braid out of the multilayered collar of my coat, the color of winter-kill, and matted with ice from the climb. Just then, a heavy strip of rust-eaten metal cracked and fell away from the seam of the coffin. A brief silence hung in the cave and then everyone moved forward to get a grip on the edge of the lid. I stood, slipping the strap on the camera around my neck and approaching.
Wheezing and muttering to each other, the team raised the massive stone lid and shuffled to the side to set it down on the floor of the cave. I had expected to see a second lid revealed by the first—perhaps gold-plated and ornamented with an idealized death-mask. Instead there was a curtain of sheepskin, painted with some manner of crest.
I raised the camera, adjusting lens and flash-bulb as the rest of the team congregated again around the tomb. The nail heads crumbled away as they lifted the edge of the hide onto a sheet of plexiglass. Others freed it from the opposite side as they slid the sheet under it. Bits of leather flaked off and cracked even with their tedious caution. Slowly they lowered a second sheet to cover it, flattening the warped and brittle material between the sheets of glass. With the same extreme care, they lifted the hide from the opening of the coffin and I stepped in again, camera at the ready.
What appeared to me in the echoing hollow of the coffin chilled my blood deeper than the mountain wind could bite.
With the seal dated almost four-thousand years back, nothing could have made less sense than what we all saw that late afternoon in January of Two-thousand Five. But no one remembers any differently than I do, and I’ll never forget.
He was the most beautiful child I had ever seen—eight or nine years old by my estimation—with markedly fine and regal facial features, almost resembling a young woman more than a boy. The hair that some reverent hands had arranged over his shoulders was lush and black, curling and glossy with the oil of life and health. His soft pearlescent skin filled out his face and smooth white hands, but death’s grim veil aged him beyond his living years. My fingers were ridged on my camera, but I leaned closer to observe the delicate tinge of mauve along the lines of the tremendously long lashes, and the hint of rose in the lips. He was dressed in a long white robe and an ornate silver circlet held a brilliant jewel in the center of his high forehead.
The first comment I heard from the team was, “It’s a hoax,” another claimed it was not a body at all, but a glass figure to represent him, perhaps containing the bones. But it was the body. And by the end of the discourse, we all believed it was the body—somehow flawlessly preserved under the strange conditions of the mountainside tomb.
“We certainly can’t move it,” Lyle was saying into his radio. “We’re going to find a way to seal the tomb back up until we can get some chemical analysts up here. We need to try to keep the conditions steady. It would be a shame, after four-thousand years—”
“We’re not going to be able to replace the seal until we can get some plaster shipped up here. That could take a day or two,” someone said behind me.
“We’ll see what happens then. It least it’s not going to get above fifteen degrees for the next couple of days.”
Should they replace the lid? The lid was fragile, and without the seal, did little good. They stretched a tarp over the opening and staked it down. For the rest of the evening, we hovered over the lid, “photograph this, Amy.” “We need a picture of that.” Patterns and pictograms, nonsense in cuneiform. That child in the mausoleum Lyle leaned his back against looked like he had died minutes ago, but if we scoured the binder full of reports and collected images, perhaps we could identify the approximate era when this script was written.
Dusk fell. We packed up and trudged back down the slope to the lodge. It was a bit of a hike to the saddleback. We probably shouldn’t have stayed out so long. Along the way the team discussed other digs, other times we’ve ventured into dangerous extreme places in the name of history and anthropology. They talked about the scripts we had found and theorized about their origins. But mostly, they talked about ashes.
No one talked about the remains.
All the while I kept slowing and lagging behind the others. Sometimes I stopped altogether and looked back at the bleak face behind us. I kept feeling like we had unthinkingly left something behind. But we couldn’t have. We were quite thorough clearing our equipment away. We left nothing but the tarp.
Synopsis: Late one night, the breakthrough finally comes.
For the next few days, the house was very quiet.
They rarely saw the mute during that time. Occasionally, Falke would glance out the window and see him for a moment in the back garden. But the moment he looked away, he would vanish like a ghost. One night, vary late, he found him in the kitchen, staring into the glowing flames of the stove, perfectly still and unresponsive to anything in the present moment.
Neither did he have tantrums anymore. He didn’t kick a single doorframe or knock so much as a paperweight off Metzdorff’s desk. Falke became almost panic-stricken several times when he couldn’t find the patient anywhere he looked. The house was large and easy to hide in for one who knew it well, but Falke was so concerned about the state of Camille’s silent mind that his dramatic imagination carried him away quickly. In spite of this, he fought with Metzdorff only once over the decision to deny Camille his thread. From then on, he was silent as Camille on the matter. Metzdorff insisted that the patient was no longer distressed, and had probably forgotten the whole episode.
Then, two weeks later, something very strange happened. Metzdorff and Falke had spent the evening reading in the study. It grew dark outside, and a gusty wind wuthered around the Gothic peaks of the Metzdorff estate. As Falke sat, half reading, half listening to the unnerving rattling and whistling at the windows, the door opened and Camille was there. Both doctors looked up at him. He hadn’t willingly been in the same room with them since they burned the last of the thread. He entered and quietly went to sit by the window–the window with the jackdaw in it—and then, he was still.
The doctors slowly went back to their reading. A heavy sigh of wind trailed off into quiet for a minute and there was another sound from outside. In a tree near the window there was a nightingale. It huddled against the dripping branch in the cold, dark wind, and sung its clear chirping call into the inky night. It sung again and again, the soft voice echoing out into the stifling wind. Falke looked up from his book, scowling pensively. “Do they often sing on nights this stormy?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Nightingales.”
Metzdorf turned a page. “They’ll sing whenever another nightingale’s near enough to hear them, I suppose.” Falke sat listening to the bird out in the darkness, having forgotten the book on his lap. After several minutes, the nightingale stopped singing, or perhaps flew into the woods nearby for better shelter, and more company. Leastwise, the wind was the only sound again. Falke looked toward the window and his eyes settled on Camille.
Camille was gazing up into the blackness of the sky. His eyes were wide and searching. A tension had come into his face that Falke had never seen before. The young doctor rose. “Camille, are you alright?” As he spoke, a tear plummeted downthe mute’s cheek, and he hid his face. Quickly, Falke came to him and gripped his shoulder. “What’s the matter?” Suddenly, the tragedy of it all seized him. Perhaps…Camille really couldn’t tell them. They would never know. Whatever made him suffer assailed him in his own world, in isolation and silence, somewhere too far away for the rest of humanity to hear him scream.
Metzdorff now rose from his seat and stood scowling across the room, holding his book by the cover, forgotten. Then, very quietly, Camille started to cry vocally. That voice had been unheard for at least two decades. The two doctors stood for some time, paralyzed and thunderstruck. At last, Camille lifted his head again, staring once more out at the thrashing night. He sighed…and half a minute passed.
Then, Falke said, “What’s wrong, Camille? What is it?”
The wind died. Camille breathed heavily or a few minutes, staring out the window. He swallowed once, blinking liquidly. “The string,” he breathed.
Falke almost choked on his breath. “You want more thread? Is that it?”
Camille swallowed, nodding slightly.
Falke’s eyes, enormously earnest, went to Metzdorf. “By all means!” the German burst out. “Give the man his string!” He seized Falke’s shoulder. “Falke–”
“I’ll go tonight. I don’t mind walking in the rain.”
“No, don’t go all the way to town, go to the neighbors. If they’re asleep wake them up. Tell them I sent you—and we’ve got to have thread.”
When morning came, the sky was still, and overcast.The light came softly, and expectantly, through the windows. The doctors came down the stairway together, cordial for the first time since they had cleared away the webs. Falke reached out his hand and stopped Metzdorf halfway down and they stood gazing at the room below. It was shrouded in Camille’s webs. The newborn sunlight filtered through weavings of gold and red and royal blue that decorated the windows, and a half-rosette of black and silver radiated from the banister. The doctors wandered through the gallery in silence, staring.
Then there was a foot step behind them. They turned back. There stood Camille, a new spool of fawn-colored thread in his hand. He led them to the door and opened it to the misty morning. They followed him outside. For a moment, he stared at the grove of whispering willows, reviewing the distances between them. Then he leapt off the porch and ran out to them, anchoring his thread. He started to spin.
They watched him for nearly an hour. At last he finished, thrilled and exulting in his work. He drifted back to the porch where they stood, still frozen where they had been when he started. As he went into the house he turned back to face them. He looked from one to the other, and then his eyes settled on Metzdorf. He smiled and closed the door behind him.
“Do you suppose he’ll ever speak again?” asked Falke, at length.
“Who knows?”
Falke laughed to himself and started down the porch steps, going out to the willows. Metzdorf glanced back at the door, and then stared after him. Then his eyes re-focused to a ghostly orb of spider-silk, rippling gently, and shimmering with tiny globes of dew. He sighed. “Very strange.”
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.
Synopsis: The two doctors clash over the patient’s strange behavior.
Camille glanced back at the doctors, and Falke tried to catch his eyes, smiling. “Seems the housekeeper didn’t bring her sewing-box to Portugal.” Camille closed the box and sat down in an armchair near the window. He opened his hand and looked down at the spool of thread he had for some reason taken from the box. For a while he stared at it, meditatively unwinding and re-winding several inches if string. After a long time, he rose and returned the spool to the box.
The next morning Metzdorff and his young college breakfasted on coffee and cigars. There wasn’t word between them until Falke slumped back into his armchair and said,“You know, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him at all.” Metzdorff looked over at him as he gazed out the window into the still morning. “He simply lives in a different realm and doesn’t care to mingle with anyone else. I believe he’s silent by choice.”
“Dr. Falke,” said Metzdorf, “there are silent men in this world, but surely you know that living one’s entire life refusing to communicate with other people is a symptom of a disease.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with him,” he burst out.
The German sighed. “He doesn’t speak.”
The discussion ended.
For a while there was nothing but the whispering sound of the willow branches against the window. Falke’s clear, dark eyes roved for a minute, and then settled on the jackdaw on the windowsill. He rose from his chair, scowling, and approached it as if it might fly away. “What is it, Falke?” he heard Metzdorf ask behind him. Shifting his cigar to his left hand, he reached down and ran his index finger along the thread that was wound around the bird’s bill. From there the string trailed downward through the air and over to where it connected by another loop to the mahogany stand of a globe several feet away. The thread doubled back from there and returned to the jackdaw, then back to the globe, and later on in the process it interwove with itself, looking every bit like an enormous triangle section of an orb web.
The two psychiatrists scowled at the thread. “It must be Camille’s work,” said Falke. “I watched him discovering the thread last night.” There was a long silence and Falke walked around the web, viewing it from different perspectives. “Did the doctors at the asylum mention anything like this?”
“No,” said Metzdorff. “Very strange.”
Falke rose from his crouched position and his scowl lightened. “Yes. Very curious.”
The web may have only been of passing interest if it had been an isolated event. Yet, as the time progressed, more and more such creations appeared in various corners of the house. One morning, Falke emerged from his room to find Camille in the hall, running thread to and fro between a table and the splintering window frame. Falke stood leaning on the doorframe, watching him. Camille didn’t glance at him once. He kept weaving. “This hallway is going to be impassible, little spider,” said Falke. “You’ll have to start taking these down, or we’ll be trapped in this house.”
Camille’s eyes flitted back to him for a second, but he didn’t stop. After about five more minutes, he cut the thread between his teeth, and went downstairs. Falke stood silently gazing at the web. He was able to duck under it and go the the other side. This was the largest yet. Metzdoff appeared beside him. He shook his head in dismay.The two went downstairs without comment.
Day after day, Falke watched the patient spinning his webs. He spoke to him all the while, asking him questions, teasing him about his unusual hobby. The webs began to fill the house: on the stairway rails and banisters, in the corners of the study, all across windows, and the tops of doorways. They strung between walls, furniture, and woodwork. Falke studied each one as they appeared. What he found to be the strangest part was that the only room that still didn’t contain one was Camille’s room. In fact, the more Metzdorff and Falke trafficed an area, the more Camille spun webs of thread there. As doorways became ever more the sites of knew weavings, moving about in the house, as Falke had been warning the spinner, became quite difficult.
“I’m going to be as mad as anyone in the Paris asylum if this doesn’t subside,” said Metzdorff, tapping his fingers on his coffee cup. “I didn’t think he would keep doing it for so long.”
“Perhaps we’re already mad,” said Falke, laughing. “All along, we’ve mistaken a spider for a man.”
“You don’t suppose it would upset him if we were to take a few of them down?” suggested Metzdorff.
“You might try it. It might be interesting to see if it does. But really, I think things are progressing quite favorably at the time. It might not be good to disrupt the situation.”
“How do you mean? What’s gotten better?”
“At least now we have positive symptoms. The webs—they’re easier to study than the words he doesn’t say.”
Metzdorf sighed. “Maybe you’re right, but the webs only confuse me. What do you think about them?”
Falke smiled, staring at the spiraling funnel-web between two bookcases across the room. “I’m only speculating just now. But I think they mean something.”
“Mean something?”
“Just wait. We’ll see what else he does.”
Time passed, and one day Falke observed that there had been no new webs lately. “I hid the thread from him,” said Metzdorf. Falke raised his eyebrows. “I can’t stand it anymore, Eugene. I had to do it. They do something to me, psychologically.”
“What will he do?”
“I don’t know. I almost hope he’ll forget about the whole ridiculous obsession entirely. Listen, I want you to help me clear away these awful things.”
Falke looked around the cobwebby parlor. “But, Metzdorf–”
“They’re driving me mad.”
For a while, the circumstances at the Metzdorf house seemed to ameliorate, but time progressed, and Falke sensed something else was afoot. There was a problem with Camille. He wandered through the house, pacing, and sighing and knocking things down with obvious intention. His condition worsened every day and it was easy to see that he was going into a black humor. Falke didn’t tell Metzdorf, but both silently knew it was because he couldn’t find the thread.
In five days, the last remnants of Camille’s webs were cleared from the house. By this time, the patient didn’t eat or sleep. Neither did Metzdorf. Camille had upset an entire table at three in the morning like an angry poltergeist, rousting the German doctor from his room after his first hour of rest all night. At dawn Metzdorf set out on a weekend trip to a neighboring city. He left Falke alone to manage Camille’s ever-intensifying fits of melancholy.
The front door closed, and Falke stood alone in the parlor. Rain tapped at the blurred window panes, and the light glowed dim and gray from outside. Falke sighed. He turned and looked up at the balcony at the top of the stairs. “Camille?” he called. “Camille?”
Synopsis: Two doctors in the 1800’s meet to discuss what to do about a mysterious patient who refuses to speak.
The cobblestone dissolved into mud half a mile from the city limits, and the carriage horse was soon pastern-deep in fast-flowing water. It yanked at the reins, cantering blindly into the splattering wind. At last it staggered to a halt, snorting at the rain running ceaselessly down its face. The carriage door flew open, smacking back against the vehicle in the clawing grip of the wind. A man sprung out into the rain and shouted thanks back at the coachman, who didn’t respond, and the storm-shy horse lost no time in turning back toward the city.
A ways off the road and up the hill stood a three-story Gothic Revival house, peering through the cloudy branches of rustling silver willows. Too tempest-tossed to search for a path to the door, the visitor cut across the sodden lawn, zigzagging around standing water, and tripping over live branches that the storm had ripped from the willows. He jumped over the steps, plastered himself against the door to escape the torrents, and started raking his fingers through his thick dark hair, trying to correct some of the storm’s damage before entering.
The door opened before he knocked, and someone dragged him through it. “Falke! I didn’t expect you in this storm.” The other man closed the door behind him.
“Then why were you waiting at the door?”
“I saw the carriage, who else could it be?” said the owner of the house, a man whose superior intelligence was perhaps too clear in his face. “I really wouldn’t have recognized you if I hadn’t known you were coming. It’s funny to think a person like you would ever grow into a man.”
“It seems we’ve all declined, Dr. Metzdorff. I notice you answer your own door now.” The Frenchman glanced around the vacant parlor. There was a pause and the rain tried to penetrate the window panes. Falke’s dark eyes flitted to Metzdorff’s.
“The valet left,” said the German.“So did the housekeeper, though she claims it’s just a little family holiday in Portugal. She’ll be back in June.” Metzdorff sighed, and stroked his mustache, gazing around the parlor in his turn. “I’ll admit, he is unnerving. I’ve never harbored such a stranger in my house in my whole life. As you might imagine, we know nothing about him—how old he is, where he was born, who his parents are, if he has any living relatives…they call him Camille, but we really don’t know his name.”
“Have you tried to speak to him?” asked Falke.
“At every opportunity…the first few days he was here. All the time he spent in that Parisian asylum being treated like a mindless imbecile couldn’t have helped, I daresay.” He paused. “Truly fascinating…it seems that he hasn’t a notion that he even could speak—or is expected to. Not only doesn’t he speak, but he clearly has no use for written language or even the most common ability to understand postures or facial expression, let alone utilize them himself. And yet…he appears to have otherwise, a perfectly developed mind.” Metzdorff’s green eyes lifted away from the younger man’s gaze. “There’s the ghost now.” Falke turned around.
Standing on the stairs was something that was more believably a figure in a painting than a living human. He was tall, but of a fragile build, with a cold alabaster complexion and empty, harrowing, blue eyes. Yet, he looked nothing like a madman. He was dressed rather extravagantly, and stood like an aristocrat’s portrait. His shoulder-length red hair was impeccably groomed and combed off to one side. His hand, like a white spider, half-veiled in lace, rested on the ebony rail, inanimate.
“He doesn’t look any more deranged than the usual Parisian coxcomb,” said Falke in a low tone. Metzdorff shook his head. He stepped toward the stairs.
“Camille, I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Eugene Falke, from Paris. We were colleges back in ‘fourteen, when I was completing my doctorate, and he was beginning his. He’ll be staying with us for a few days.” Camille came to the bottom of the steps and passed the doctors without pausing or even looking at them. They turned and watched him as he passed through the parlor like a wisp of smoke in a draft. He disappeared through a side door and that was all that Falke saw of him until that night.
When dusk fell, the two psychiatrists discussed the case in full. Meztdorff closed the door of his study and walked to his desk.
“They found Camille in the summer of eighteen-ten. Someone had dropped him off at an orphanage without giving any information on his identity or background. He should certainly have been old enough to talk by then, but he wouldn’t say a word. When this continued they had a doctor examine him, thinking perhaps he was deaf and mute. But the doctor found there to be nothing wrong with his hearing or his vocal apparatus. A year later, it became clear that his behavior was decidedly abnormal, and they took him to an asylum in Paris, where he lived until a month ago, when I took him out of it.”
“Did they try to get him to speak in the asylum?” asked Falke, sitting down and eyeing a stuffed jackdaw on the windowsill across the room.
“They worked as best they could with him for the first year, but after that, no one tried. In spite of his seemingly complete inability to communicate, Camille exhibited no other unusual behavior or disability. He was capable of living just as independently as a healthy person, if not more so.” Metzdorff opened a cigar box and handed one to Falke. “When I came to Paris, I was the first in over twelve years to speak to him. I told them that I was intent on correcting his problem, but they wouldn’t take it seriously. The French are so determined to outright mock everything–not you, of course.” Falke nodded. “I had no choice but to take him back to Germany if I wanted to continue my work in peace. But now that we’re here…” the German sighed and scowled at the floor. “It’s so hard to keep working when there’s no change from one day to the next. He doesn’t even look at me when I try to get his attention, unless I startle him. I can’t imagine spending a whole year talking to him like they did. It’s like talking to a man a world away.”
There was a long pause. “You know, Dr. Metzdorff, the Parisians could be right. He may never speak,” said Falke. His dark eyes sparked brightly. “But you did the right thing to take him out of the asylum. I’m already convinced that he’s not insane.”
At that moment, the bolt in the door jingled and Camille entered the study. He closed the door behind him and stood for a moment with his back against it, staring around at the towering shelves of leather-bound nonsense that fortified the room. “What are you doing here?” asked Metzdorff to no effect. Camille wandered over to the window and sat down beside the jackdaw. “He rarely comes in here. He doesn’t like to be around me, it seems.”
“Maybe he likes me,” said Falke. “Camille,” he called. The patient stared out the window at the deepening dusk. “Camille,” he snapped his fingers. “Camille! Psstt!” He scowled and set his cigar down on an ash-tray. He picked up a heavy book and held it over the floor, then let it drop, flatly. Camille started and looked to see what had happened. As Falke attempted to catch his eyes, he turned back to the window.
“I’ve gotten no further,” said Metzdorff. He took a book off his desk and set to reading it in silence.
After a while, Camille rose from his place at the window and began wandering around the room. Falke watched him as he came across a box on one of the bookshelves. He flicked the latch and opened it. The silent blue eyes studied the contents for a while. Though Falke couldn’t see, from his vantage-point, it seemed that the box had several compartments and interior drawers. The mute paused for a moment, gazing into a compartment he had just opened. Then he lifted something out into the lamplight. Falke leaned forward and squinted to see what it was. It was a spool of black thread.
