The Sea of Ash (6 page)

"Dear God!"

It's an animatron and nothing
more, I tell myself, like the figures at Disneyland. Its lines date it as a
work of the Victorian mind, for like the other machine parts that surround me,
it has grace and floridity, the elegance of a past sensibility. But I am too
frightened to be awed by the technological aspect.

The puppet has a demon face, part
man, part beast, the prominent snout revealing upper and lower sets of sharp
black teeth as the mouth opens, and the thing jerkily stands up from its chair,
joints whining.

"
Expletive
!"

I look back at the levers,
struggling to remember. What if I were to try them all?

I get a better view of the torso
now. It is split down the middle and has lines suggesting ribs, or the
definition on the shell of a trilobite. The thin arms bend at the elbow, and
skeletal hands reach to open the twin plates of the chest as if a big black
book.

Now I am looking into a window of
dull luminescence. Mist in moonlight, or a low-wattage light bulb drowning in
milk. My eyes try to adjust, or make out detail, but the light is like water,
shifting, protective of its secrets.

I lunge for one of the levers and
yank it toward myself. Nothing happens.

I begin to notice nebulous spheres
rising like great bubbles in the water-light. They bob, floating closer to the
window in the metal demon's chest.

I must try another lever...
Something is coming.

They are faces, I can see that now
as they hover closer, eagerly jockeying for escape. The chamber around me is
clanging and banging, the gears rotating, the pistons stomping like the feet of
Frankenstein's creation.

Are the faces only partly formed,
or is it the sickly glow of their interring space that keeps them indistinct?
They are mournful things, no matter, the eyes smudged or bandaged, the woeful
mouths biting at the air. One moves closer to the window than the rest, and a
thin arm slides out and paws at the steam that is now blurring the dark room.

I dive forward and pull both
remaining levers at once. One is stuck, rusted and resistant, but I persist,
and they both slide toward me at last.

The entire room jolts -- a
hurtling vehicle impacting against something stationary. The lights flicker and
fade, but I see a trace of movement before they are blinded entirely. The
puppet figure flops back down in its seat, the book-like chest closing as the
chair retracts into blackness, emitting a shrill metallic screech.

I find myself in total darkness,
and, after a few clinks and rattles, in silence.

"You broke it!" Vincent
Banchini screeches like a little girl when he enters the Spirit Machine.

Steam in the air accentuates the
beam of his flashlight as it sweeps about the room. Next, it is blazing in my
face and I am being interrogated.

"What did you do?"

I can hardly think at this time. I
point at the levers.

"The bad door opened -- there
were faces -- something was climbing out -- I pulled one lever but nothing
happened, so I pulled the other two."

"Simultaneously?"
Vincent's voice remains high as if he has been enraged into a second puberty.

I nod, and the man covers his face
with a hand and groans. When he drops his hand he swivels and aims the light at
the right door.

 
"Nothing got out, I hope?"

"I don't think so. The metal
figure retracted, and the door shut."

Vincent skulks about the room and
peers into the clutter of components, looks up and down and behind things. I
apologize repeatedly, but the man is too busy muttering to himself to take
note.

"Thousands," he's
saying, "it will cost me thousands to fix this thing."

I find my way to the door and step
out into the little hall. Such a relief to be out of that room! Vincent exits
right behind me and calls over my shoulder, "Tabina!"

The being in the burka appears
presently. Vincent has replaced his flashlight with a cigarette. He gestures
with it.

"Show this man the
door."

This is a dreadful motel room, but
it suits my mood. I almost embrace it as a punishment, though I'm afraid to
touch anything lest I catch some dreaded disease. The crooked pictures are
uglier for their crookedness, and the pulsing music from the adjacent chamber
reflects the baseness and lack of aesthetics that typifies this modern culture,
despite its glorious technological sophistication. (Ironic how we seem to be
becoming a more stupid lot as our technology advances...perhaps, in some way,
it
is culpable).

I am confused and disheartened. I
honestly don't know what to make of my experience at the Banchini House. While
I am stung by Vincent's rage, I am also angry with him for coercing me to try
out the machine after I had made it clear that I did not want to. Certainly I'm
guilty for causing injury to a unique piece of Victorian technology, or, worse
yet, a metaphysical device.

But is it really the mystical
machine that it is made out to be? Pond believed it was, and didn't his
experience bear out that opinion? How can I distinguish whether the things I
saw were more than a magician's stunt? What did I
really
see? Was there
a hidden projector painting faces on the steam?

More irony...for one who had set
out to retrace a trail of supernatural exploration, the thought that keeps me
from falling asleep is this... What if the things I saw were indeed real? And
on that note, what if I did not shut the machine down in time to stop that
ghastly creature from getting out into this realm?

5. BRINKLOW'S DISAPPEARANCE

Eunice Rice was despairing over
her failing memory. She could scarcely remember where she set down a teacup,
yet her childhood days returned to mind vividly, exhuming the colors and
sensations of the village that had been home; wild August fields buttered with
goldenrod, meteors spitting across the cold night sky, ponies and dizzy
dragonflies, a restless puppet of unpainted wood, and an old woman who lived
under the ice of Beeton's Pond and chewed at it with her horrible teeth.

Now, Eunice was an old woman, and
with her memory what it was, she could not say for certain
where
the
haunted bushel basket had come from. In the final pages of his journal, Simon
Brinklow wrote of Eunice Rice and her preoccupation with her failing memory.
And he wrote of a weathered, innocuous-looking basket filled with leaves.

It was November of 1870 when he
made the hilly trip from Massachusetts to the Rice homestead, situated on the
outskirts of Shaftsbury, Vermont. Nearly eight years had passed since Brinklow
had gone from passionate defrauder to one dedicated to supernatural
exploration. His book
The Path by Moonlight
had been published (and
scoffed at) by the time he had returned to America to pay a second visit to
Fractured Harry.

Settled in his room, Brinklow
repeated the conjuration. He whispered the little song into a bottle, then left
that in the lonely cemetery down the way from the Sumner Inn at Lexington.

Harry, as before, came to his
room, but this time he had a water bucket for a head. It was a sturdy thing of
oak staves bound with bands of hoop iron. Two apples, like bulging red eyes,
were held to the bucket by long rusty nails. His torso was a man's white shirt,
rustling with autumn leaves and mice, while the legs were twisty branches of
birch. This time Harry stepped very gently, for his feet were ornate preserve
jars from India.

When Brinklow had previously
encountered this spirit, it had communicated a destination to him. He had gone
to that place, of course, and from there ventured to another location of
enigmatic significance. And on and on. Each place he visited seemed to be a
stepping-stone bringing him closer to some great mystery.

In his journeys, Simon had
encountered things so terrifying that he hesitated to describe them, but he had
also found undocumented beauty that language could not hope to convey.

The man spent years traveling from
place to place until he came to something of a dead end. It occurred to him
that he might find direction from Harry, so he crossed the grey Atlantic, to
the very spot where his adventure had begun.

Once again Harry, in wispy words
that were not words, described a place. An old farm in Vermont, and a Gate of
Leaves. In the morning, Brinklow packed his things and headed north.

The sky above Vermont was like an
unfinished painting of the sea, the man noted in his journal, marking his
arrival at the Rice farm. It was a stormless grey awaiting an artist's brush to
add the detail of waves.

Brinklow took great interest in
Eunice's childhood tales about the strange puppet, and the lady in the pond,
but he was most eager to see the unusual basket which had the town abuzz.

It looked like any bushel barrel
of its day, but for the fact that it was full of dry leaves, their bright
October colors faded to browns and muted salmon. As for it being haunted,
Brinklow had his own thoughts on the matter, based on what he had heard.

A few examples: A chicken, tossed
into the leaves in the basket, did not come back out. A pitchfork poked into
the thing found no bottom. The container gave things as well took them. Eunice
claimed that small coppery fish flew out of the leaves on several occasions.
When dropped they shattered like glass. But, when tossed up into a night sky,
the glimmering fish would hang in the dark like stars.

On the 15th of November, 1870,
Brinklow wrote: "The barrel appears not uncommon in any way. While it is
weathered, I am not given the impression that it is a thing of great antiquity.
The bands encircling the upright slats of wood are rusted, but sturdy enough.
Likewise, the leaves within are ordinary to the eye, though I detect a subtle
scent that reminds me of brine."

Shortly after making that final
notation, the man began a tactile examination of the bushel basket. He tapped
at the sides with a penknife, then with a brave little smile reached his hand
down into the leaves.

Brinklow could find no bottom,
though his arm was long enough that he should have. He thought he felt small
slippery things brush across the top of his hand -- fish perhaps, swimming in
the leaves. Then, he reported to the few witnesses present that he felt hair.
Long, silken hair that might belong to a woman.

The man tried to grasp the hair,
but it slid from his fingers and hissed elusively through the leaves. He
reached deeper, leaning over the edge of the creaking basket, groping until
most of one arm was submerged. Again he got hold of the long slinky hair,
grabbing onto it like reins, even as he felt something taking hold of him. A
sinuous pressure coiled about his arm. He said it felt like a constricting
snake.

Whatever it was, it dragged him
headfirst into the rasping barrel. Onlookers, standing a safe distance away,
could not get to the man in time. They were stunned by the speed of his
abduction. One moment he was there kneeling by the barrel, the next his feet
were sticking straight up out of the leaves, his portly form impossibly
swallowed before their eyes.