SHORT STORIES

From Vices and Versas
From Plaintiffs and Pontiffs
CAVERNOUS THOUGHTS

Every once in a while I partake of the highest of society—I was only born into the lowest stratum of that great creature, but that is achievement enough to get my foot into certain doors. I put on the regalia of my station—the trousers, belt, cuff links, top hat, tie, overcoat—and show up to the heart of their world, out in the middle of the country, far removed from the vicissitudes of an inferior way of life.
    I’m received into their mansion, where I remove a good number of my articles of clothing meant for the cold. I’m brought inside, to the parlor.
    The parlor is cavernous, with no real ending. The ceiling, too, is illusory—the sides of the upper floors are exposed, walls that must contain rooms for servants, rooms for sitting, rooms for sleeping. There has to be an end somewhere, though, because we’re inside. Maybe the illusion is due to the fact that the light only stretches so far—those upper reaches, they are obscured in darkness. The occasional wooden edge is highlighted, but that is all.
    The hosts, the proprietors of this monstrous estate, seem to be happy to have us all. How many esteemed guests are present? Well, that’s a very subjective question. No more than ten, that’s a mathematical certainty. At this very moment, we’re all listening to a man as he plays the piano—real parlor music. He clangs away, with feeling—there isn’t any sheet music here—and the low notes, they reverberate through so much space until the cavern is filled with their essence. The melody, if there is one, is contained in the erratic movements of his head as he plies his full body into musical action. It lacks for efficiency, his technique, but it makes an impression.
    These respectable societies are limited in their action—when the music is finally over, as it must be, what else will we do but talk? I’m already practicing hypothetical conversations in my head, because I need the extra preparation if I’m to perform adequately--I do believe the evening is pleasant, good sir, although it’s hard to tell without being outside. It’s possible I’ve misunderstood him, maybe he meant the present company and not the weather. Either way, I perform a meaningful gaze out of the bay window—but it’s already late in the evening, and there isn’t much to see there. Still, one gets the sense that there are trees out there, swaying—they feel somber, profound in size and somber. It’s not pleasant out there, is it. I was mistaken.
    Perhaps it would be safer to make an offhand comment about the quality of the furniture, when the time for conversation arrives--This bureau (that’s the correct term, is it not?) is exquisite. The finest craftsmanship. You’ve had it imported from Scandinavia? Of course you have. They don’t make bureaus like this anywhere else. In truth, it seems like the kind of thing that isn’t made anywhere. The wood is so dark that it absorbs any real impression I try to make of it. The chairs feel the same, wooden, the floors, wooden, the art on the wall set deep inside exaggerated moulding—it’s all wooden.
    Now that I think of it, are we in a tree? If you took the grandeur of, say, a Sequoia, and turned it inside out—well, that’s exactly what it feels like we’re inside of, doesn’t it? Like, behind every surface there is a terribly viscous sap, a river, an ocean, that although it flows doesn’t seem to go anywhere. That’s no good either. It’s halfway between insulting and abstract, and there are no good points on that spectrum. In the final analysis, I just won’t say anything about the setting.
    That leaves the people. It’s quite the eclectic selection we have, here—although certainly they are all deserving members of high society, so the variety at least has a lower limit. Allow me to make an insightful assessment of our mutual friend Margaret: she strikes me as a person that was born with an extravagant genius, but then it was shut into a basement and forced to live off of rats and the cannibalistic remains of close relatives—there’s something carnally inbred about her intelligence, as sharp as it is, something warped and unspeakable. Wouldn’t you agree?
    My God, that was horrendous—but honestly, nothing better can be said about Margaret. Let’s set her aside, then. Wadsworth? That fine gentleman? Here’s a penetrating observation for you: he does well to cover, although clearly exhibits underneath, a parasitic relation to everyone that he touches. Like a vampire of achievements, he consumes and incorporates into himself the inner lives of others, feeding off of emotion, vitality, their very happiness—if he were forced into a life of hermitage, surely he would die within an hour.
    Marcus, to my side, is a relatively unassuming man covered in scars from a red plague, suffered in his childhood. His outward modesty is only a show, though. Inside, he resembles everyone else.
    The music abruptly stops—the time for real conversation is immediately at hand, whether I’m prepared or not. Marcus turns to me, and in an affected drawl he says, “An inspiring performance, wouldn’t you say so? He’s classically trained, ever since the ripe young age of six. Are not his arpeggios wondrously articulated, his dulcet tones so marvelously sweet?”
    The music! How could I have forgotten to prepare a statement on a topic so obvious? I say, “He certainly knows how the piano works. He presses down on the keys, the inner mechanisms take that input, and sounds are produced. He seems to use whatever that process might be to his strict advantage.” Not my best work, but at the very least everything I’ve said is verifiably true.
    My interlocutor is still looking at me with a dazed expression, perhaps searching in his bowels for an appropriate response, when my dear friend takes me by the shoulder and leads me outside onto the loggia, which overlooks a vibrant darkness between alabaster arches.
    I’m pleased to discover that he’s brought a set of pipes with him, and some tobacco. We light up, the small embers doing nothing to dispel the darkness around us. Still, I feel much better with smoke inside me, buttressing the walls of my lung.
    “That was rather a train wreck in there, wasn’t it?” he says, between draws on his pipe.
    “Not my best work,” I say, “but I don’t think it was that bad either.”
    “Your best…? Not you, my dear friend, whatever on earth you might be referring to. The music! Those decades of practice haven’t done him much good, have they? Everyone else can be as flattering as they might, but that’s the truth of the matter.”
    “I know!” I exclaim, with long embellishment. “It’s a wonder his instructor isn’t taken straight to the gallows and shot, for producing such a tragedy.”
    “Now listen, dear friend, we’ll have to go back in shortly. We can’t loiter around, it simply won’t do. But what say you that we explore a little bit? The house, the nature of the house, holds my interest more than the blathering of these idiots ever will. What do you say?”
    “Lead on,” I say, because I am a consummate follower. We empty our pipes over the balustrade, into the abyss below, and reenter the house.
    And we touch, I must say, everything. I run my hand along every facet of the wainscot down a hallway, I fondle the intermittent sconces, the portraits, the oxidized door knobs. All locked, it would seem. And my friend, he does the same—just on the opposite wall.
    We navigate, almost by accident, back to the parlor, where they are now eating delicacies off of fine plates of the Victorian style—the women plates are completely covered, from head to toe. How do they wash them? That’s an indecent question to ask, I’ve been assured. But they are clean, no doubt about that.
    While we’re here, we perform the standard pleasantries—“Why, I’ve been here the whole time,” and, “Yes, that was a great story—I didn’t know my input was required. But absolutely, a great story. Would you like to tell it again?” And when I believe no one is looking, I put in a few good strokes on, say, the thick curtains that border the large window. It’s hard to be subtle about it, though, so I’m nowhere near as thorough as my wont.
    How well my friend fits in, here! He has an excellent tailor, I must say. And the gold chain that leads to the impression of a pocket watch, intimated on his left breast, speaks volumes about his good breeding. He glides among the specters of opulence, he satisfies every conversational whim with such effortlessness that I am enraptured, as is everyone.
    But he isn’t satisfied. “We took a wrong turn,” my friend states to me in private, after we’ve performed enough. “About face, and resume.”
    We take a better corridor this time, drowned in shadows. And my incessant touching finally pays off, halfway through it—an innocuous candle, on top of an inlaid shelf, gives a startling resistance to being toppled over. When I push harder, a panel in a nearby wall opens in response.
    “There we have it!” my friend exclaims. “Some real occult things, just as I had hoped! Let’s see where it goes, old chap.”
    How could I resist? The house practically insists that you drudge through its secrets, no matter how dark they might get. The panel is difficult to pry open, perhaps from long disuse, but between the two of us we manage. Soon, we’re descending down a stone staircase into some unknown depths.
    A sound from behind us makes it known that the portal is closed. “Will we be able to get back out?” I ask, more than a hint of concern in my voice.
    “Some intrepid explorer you are, asking questions like that. Do you think spelunkers ask themselves how they’ll get back?”
    “Yes?”
    “Well, you’re wrong. Their only concern is to go deeper. And so I must insist—we go deeper.”
    It’s very dark, but a faint light ahead promises a reprieve, promises something unexpected just around the bend. It does not deceive. After another few dozen paces, we emerge into a subterranean cavern, lit by torches.
    The walls are hewn roughly from the stone, ostensibly by someone that didn’t know what they were doing. It smells dank, like there might be some festering underground pond nearby, full of algae and dead things. And the space between is filled by all sorts of untoward treasures.
    There are chests filled with wooden coins, astrolabes, strange jewelry, clocks that don’t keep time, disintegrated maps, ceramics, furniture. I take a seat, because I’m somewhat overwhelmed.
    Not so, my dear friend. He’s ecstatic with the sense of discovery. “Of course they’ve got all this down here! How old do you think it is, how long do you think they’ve been sitting on top of so much accumulated oddity? This certainly looks old.” He holds up a ball of calcified mass, which could either be jewelry or the skull of some small animal.
    He finds a tributary to the cavern, and walks down it. In a few minutes, he is back. “Come along, have a look at this.”
    Because I must, I oblige. He leads me to the darkest place I’ve yet been, although my eyes eventually adjust. And we’re standing in front of a cell, cold iron bars that are set on the near side of a small dead end. Inside, there’s something alive.
    Scattered around its cell are the bones of animals—there’s no room for doubt, this time. The flesh is still attached in places, the features are still recognizable. And the creature that is huddled in a corner, a shriveled thing with wisps of long, grey hair coming out of its scalp—“Why, that’s Margaret’s genius!” I say, my attention fully captivated. “I knew it! And to think that my diffidence kept me from bringing it up in conversation! If I would have just said it, the expression on her face would have betrayed the contents of her basement! For just once in my life, I should have just said the thing on my mind with confidence. I could have been so right!”
    The sound of my regret startles it—it finds a darker corner to crawl into, and stares out with bulbous eyes—all that’s visible of it is their reflection.
    “Such a sinister thing,” I continue. “If you let it out, it would kill us both. Don’t let it out, please. I don’t want to die here.”
    Margaret’s shade isn’t the only frightful existence down here. I get the vague impression that I can sense Wadsworth’s leech down here, although I cannot see it—it is hidden in the shadows, or behind the walls, watching our every move and waiting for us to let our guard down so it can feed off our souls. I find myself constantly turning in circles, since I don’t want to turn my back to any one thing.
    Lesser ghosts are here, the ephemeral Marcus, insubstantial Maryanne, but they pale in comparison to the other terrors, to the very real thing in the cell and the very ominous thing behind the walls.
    These must be the truths under every high society, under every refined taste and sublimated etiquette. They might be buried, and buried deep, but that does not prevent them from existing. And we’ve gone to the heart of it, for what?
    Did I really want to know more about these people? Did I really want to be right, and have my darkest suspicions verified? I don’t think so, I think I would rather have remained in ignorance. That’s why I live alone, and don’t keep my own company. My house is along a bright street, where the sun touches the eaves every day and halfway into the night. I would never live in a place like this and I don’t like the kind of truths that it contains. My friend, though, he keeps searching.
    In the end, though, he cannot find a way out. We spend days down here. All the while he grows more despondent—he starts to blend in very well with the antiques, resigned to a useless existence in obscurity. I grow in the opposite direction—I become more and more active, I struggle harder and harder with what appears to be my fate. There’s a lot of bookshelves in one of the caves, filled with fragile books. I remove them one by one, and scan their contents. Books about things that don’t matter anymore, but I keep looking.
    And eventually, one of the books I try to pick up provides resistance, just as the candlestick did before. I pull harder, and sure enough another passage exposes itself. I yell, “I knew it! I knew that a book would be the key! I just had to keep looking!”
    And just like that, my friend’s reverie is broken. It’s as if he never left, as if he was leading the charge all along. “Well done, lad,” he condescends. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?” Entirely without my assistance he pushes the new door open, and plunges inward.
    It goes down. Once again I complain. “I was wrong. This goes down, and I don’t think that deeper is the proper solution here. Surely you agree?”
    “This is your last warning,” he says. “I won’t have any more of your naysaying.”
    My naysaying? Should I remind him that his soul was the one that almost snuffed itself out, just moments ago, until I breathed new life into it? I want to, but I won’t. I just want to be agreeable and to resolve this whole thing.
    The same transition happens as before—as we descend it gets darker, then inexplicably brighter. But at the end, this time, is not stone. It is wood, dark wood, of the same identity as the house so far above. In fact, I realize with a sinking feeling that will never resurface, it must be the house above. We emerge into a familiar corridor, and a short journey brings us back into the parlor, where the music has changed.
    The music isn’t the only thing different—ponderous, reserved. The people have changed. They’re all so very old—Margaret’s hair has all gone completely white, Wadsworth is stooped and arthritic, slouched in a high-backed settee where he doesn’t move. Marcus doesn’t seem to be there at all—although there’s what appears to be a coffin to one side of the grand room, and I feel like I can guess its contents. God rest his soul.
    “Could… I… interest… you,” Margaret creaks, a hollow, wooden sound, “in some… cheesecake?” In her hands reside several of the porcelain dishes, which her feeble shaking causes to clatter together. There’s no cheesecake to be seen.
    My friend speaks for us. “I think, my dear Margaret, that we might be on our way. The night is very much advanced, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, and we’ve a long way to travel back to our own homes. You understand, don’t you?”
    The parchment of her skin shudders, disturbed by some ill wind. “Why, yes… I understand.”
    “Good, good.”
    In the foyer, he shakes the dust and mothballs from our overcoats, and hands me mine. From there he excuses us once again from the party—“It’s been a wonderful time, everybody. Thank you very much”—and then we’re out the door, travelling along the flagstone path that leads under the trees and out of the property of that enormous manor.
    He says, in the last moments before we part to take our separate ways home, “It’s amazing how the niceties age you, isn’t it? The frivolity, the fettering. Humans aren’t meant to live like that—they need adventure, new things, fresh perspectives—I’m very glad you went with me, down those narrow corridors. I know I said some harsh things in there, but I didn’t mean them. You’re a first-rate companion, no matter what I might say to the contrary.”
    I thank him—there isn’t much else to say. And he steps up into his carriage, his coachman already prepared to take him away.
    “Goodbye!” he yells back at me, over the creaking of the wooden tires and the pattering of his horses.
    Now I’m alone, the darkness looming all around me. How did I get here? And—is it somewhere I really wanted to be?