Silverlock (Prologue Books)

  “What place?”

  “The place he was in, dolt. The traitors’ ward. Up above, where we found young Raskolnikov, the chief thing that bothers them is that they themselves are aware of misdoing. Your traitors, however, taking them by and large, aren’t gravely disturbed until their guilt becomes public knowledge. Curious, isn’t it?”

  “I guess they’re both eaten by the same bug, though,” I said after thinking his words over. “Even people who are professionally vicious like to be thought of as good fellows when they’re off duty.”

  “I know they do; and that’s what’s so funny. What difference should it make to one victim of an idiot destiny what another victim thinks of him?”

  “Oh, I suppose it’s because every man knows he’s a remarkable piece of work.”

  “Including you?”

  The way he said it struck a spark out of me that proved my point. However meanly I might think of myself, I didn’t take to disparagement by others. Giving it thought, for once, I was acutely aware of the marvelous set of qualities which had gone into my making. To be sure, the parts didn’t always move to the best advantage, but the capabilities were of a nature to be respected.

  “There are people worse off than I am,” I snapped.

  “If so, they’re all here, too. Let’s pause to study some of your gifted peers.”

  What I saw when I followed him into this next ward was, at first glance, not at all disquieting. There were people seated, standing, or walking about at will, although it was noticeable that these last had an odd fashion of halting occasionally in mid-stride. Then I looked closer.

  Each of these persons had a figure sketched in haze standing or walking behind him. If the man or woman it was following ran, it would run. If he or she sat down, it stood by. Its presence did not prevent such solitary recreations as singing, humming, or whittling. It never assaulted or seized the one to whom it was attached. It never so much as spoke. What it did do was to reach out at brief but irregular intervals and tap its victim on the shoulder, as much as to say: “Look, I’m still here.”

  Those touched never actually looked; it was clear they didn’t have to. But the whittling, humming, and singing stopped. The walking and running stopped. The seated and the standing stiffened. Next they would go into a spasm. The form these seizures took varied, but they were uniform as to meaning, and as simple to interpret as the touch of the shades which haunted them: “There is, there can be, there never will be anything in the world for me but this.”

  “Who are these poor devils?” I asked, when I had taken it all in.

  “They are those for whom somebody else’s death has become more important than their own life,” Faustopheles answered. “Notice the treatment? They play them like trout, giving them line, then making them feel the hook just when the think they may be going somewhere.”

  I looked at him sourly. “Sure,” I said, “it’s fine. Well, we’ve seen it, so let’s get going.”

  “Not before you make closer acquaintance with a brace of the inmates.” He took my arm, counterfeiting the smile of a man anxious to introduce one friend to certain others. “You have all the time in the world, and it will be well worth it to see the couple I have in mind.”

  It was indeed a couple to which he led me, yet they were anything but a pair. Nor did they maintain the same pose. The one standing was a man of mature years. Time had wrought well with his face. It was the countenance of a man who had worked hard and believed in what he was doing. At the moment he seemed engaged in working out a problem of which he had already glimpsed the solution.

  The one seated near him was an athletic-looking young man with likeable, intelligent features. In contrast to the loose, white robe worn by the older fellow, he was dressed in snug-fitting, colorful clothes. He was reading as we approached, and his expression showed he found the occupation rewarding.

  One preoccupied and the other absorbed in his book, they paid no attention to us. With a gesture Faustopheles halted me short of them, albeit not so far away that I failed to discern a shadowy figure behind each.

  Unable to imagine two more respectable looking people, I glanced at my guide questioningly. “What could these two have done?”

  “What,” Faustopheles asked in place of replying to me, “would you say was the nature of sin?”

  “Nuts, I don’t know!” Nevertheless, as he continued to stare at me, I tried to come up with an answer. Originally I was in hopes of avoiding sounding like a line from a child’s catechism, but I gave up on that. “I suppose it’s — oh hell, it’s just deliberately doing what you know is wrong.”

  “Near enough. Now if,” he went on, his eyes gleaming recklessly, “I ever intended to sin, that’s what I would do. But I tell you, Silverlock, these men have done no such thing. Neither one of them has ever been guilty of wanton malfeasance, yet they grieve for their conduct more than most men who have. If you don’t believe me, watch.”

  He stepped forward, clearing his throat to gain the older man’s attention. “What’s troubling the pride of Cadmus’ line today?” he asked.

  The other came out of his trance, smiling to show he liked the flattery but didn’t take it too seriously. “Why, it has just ceased to trouble me, or I think it has. One thing, you will comprehend, that has been giving me concern is the matter of succession. My two lads both aspire to reign after me, but the important thing is not what they want. It is what is best for Thebes. You see,” he continued, his face kindling at his own thought processes, “if I will it to either outright, the odds are that the other will challenge the bequest; but it has but now occurred to me that I can avoid exposing the city to civil war by having my sons agree to reign alternately. Don’t you — ?”

  He didn’t finish, because at that instant Faustopheles snapped his fingers. As if obedient to a signal, the ghost or whatever it was that stood behind the prisoner reached out and tapped his shoulder.

  Immediately his expression changed from one of keen self-possession to one of frenzy. “Ask him why he is so haunted,” Faustopheles ordered; and although I hated to do so, under the compulsion of his will I obeyed.

  “Er — why is it that the — thing behind you bothers you so?” I enquired after several false starts.

  Until then he had suffered in silence, but that touched him off. “Because,” he cried, “he is the if-it-hadn’t-been-so of my doom — the main arch supporting the bridge of sighs on which I limp toward my destiny. Yet it was so; and I, who thought myself the city’s first citizen by a better right than that of being its king, did things which make me its vilest inhabitant. I, who set myself up as a model and as an arbiter of ethics, found that the man I once killed was my father and that the woman who bore me children was my mother!”

  He had been wringing his hands as he talked, but at this climactic declaration he found another use for them. Reaching up with horrid swiftness, he gouged out both of his eyes and threw them on the ground.

  Moved by the nature of his confession, as well as by his shocking act of contrition, I thought I was going to be sick. Yet when I turned from watching the poor fellow reel away, the shadowy figure still stalking him, there was no sympathy in Faustopheles’ face.

  His mean grin not only helped to pull me together but drove me to argue with him. “That man,” I pointed out, “has really got reasons for feeling that he’s through.”

  “Why?” he asked with a coolness to match my heat. “Item, he killed a man to escape getting killed, which is strictly sensible; and whether it was his father or not is an irrelevant issue. Item, he cohabited with his mother, which must have been pleasant, for he worked at it for a good few years. It isn’t saying much, I grant you, but his children, averaging them up, are no worse than other people’s. Moreover, he didn’t set out to make them the get of incest, so he ought to just shrug it off.”

  Hating and helpless, I now knew what he was doing to me. If I was bereft of everything else, I had not quite lost the quality which divides manhood from
brutishness. This is the belief in the value of some sort of standards of conduct, both psychological and physical, as a wall against resignation to bestiality. Losing it, I might as well return to the hog wallow on Aeaea.

  But although I recognized that I ought to make one, I wasn’t prepared for much of a rebuttal. “You know as well as I do,” I muttered, “that a man would hate to think of doing things like that.”

  “Why?” he asked again. “There’s more reason for killing your father than any other man, because he begot you. As for copulating with your widowed mother, if you’re lucky enough to have a handsome one; well, if you have something good, why let it go out of the family? Where’s the cause for any tragic self-torture?”

  Observing the confusion on my face, he chuckled. “There’s the Q.E.D. to the proposition, if you have the brains to see it. That fellow Oedipus is Exhibit A in the support of my charge that man’s chief ailment, next to being alive, is delusions of moral grandeur.”

  “But,” I floundered, “I — ”

  He put up a hand to silence me. “Before we go any further with this discussion to which you’ve contributed so much pithy wisdom, let’s turn to Exhibit B here.” He drew me to where the young man, so engrossed in his book, apparently, that he hadn’t heard what was going on, was seated at his ease. “How are you today, my prince of scholars?”

  “Merely a princely scholar,” the other said, looking up with a twinkle in his eyes. “Unfortunately that’s not the same thing.”

  “Still it pays better,” Faustopheles reminded him. “What are you reading?”

  “Oh, a collection of tales, old but very interesting, with quaint, long-winded titles that have half the nature of synopses. I was about to turn to another one, so, if you don’t stop me, I will read it aloud to give you the idea.” Eyes alight with amused anticipation, he flipped over a page. “Here,” he began, “commences the tale of Sigmund and how he abode many years like a wolf in the wood and in the end begot a child on Signy, his sister, all to the purpose of slaying her husband, Siggeir, who had been the bane of Volsung, their father.”

  This time it wasn’t necessary for Faustopheles to do anything. Precisely on the last word, the phantom behind the reader touched his shoulder. Promptly the man’s alert and likely face became haggard with a mad desperation.

  “Ask him if anything ails him,” Faustopheles urged me.

  Great as was his hold over me, I summoned strength to resist. “I won’t! He might do something like the other one.”

  “If so, he’ll only do it to himself and not to you. Don’t be so squeamish.” When I only shook my head dumbly, he snorted. “You’ll have to get more seasoning before you’re ripe for where you’re going. I’ll stir him up myself.”

  “We would like for you to go on,” he said, picking up the volume which the young fellow had thrown to the floor. “I believe you left off at the word ‘father.’”

  “It’s a word I shouldn’t be able to — don’t deserve to pronounce,” the other said thickly. “There,” he went on, pointing a shaky finger at the book, “is the story of a man who acted as a man should, letting nothing and no consideration stand in the way of the vengeance he owed his murdered parent. Sir,” he said suddenly to me, “I do not question your legitimacy, but did you know your father?”

  That was something it hadn’t occurred to me to think about, but I tried to remember. “Pretty well, I guess. We got along all right when we didn’t see each other too often.”

  “Ah? I knew mine well, and found him as much above all other men in qualities as in his royal rank. That man was murdered, sir — and do you know where your mother is?”

  His disconnected questions made me think he was raving, but answering seemed simpler than trying to disregard him. “Yes,” I replied, my mind picturing a certain rainy day in a cemetery.

  “I know where mine is, too,” he gritted.

  “That’s fine,” I said. He looked ready to pursue the subject, so I thought I’d change it. “Have you any idea who committed the crime — killing your father, that is?”

  “A most exact and certain one,” he nodded.

  “Has anything been done about it?”

  “There has not been and will not be,” he told me in a suddenly quiet voice. “He will not be brought to book, because I have knowledge only, not proof. And as for taking justice into my own hands — ” He broke off to give a sickly smile. “Look at me, sir; I am an assembly of so many parts and cannot form a quorum to pass a resolution. I have an intellect to plan an action with any man in the land; I am as big as you, and stronger, I should say; I am accounted a soldier who does not shrink from the battlefield. And with all this, I cannot bring myself to go to the man who murdered my father and kill him where he lies sleeping beside my mother. Oh, Christ and my God!”

  With that ejaculation, at once hopeless prayer and bitter oath, he became as impotent to speak as he claimed he was to act. For a second he was still and staring, then he whirled to stagger away as blindly as if he, too, had lost his sight.

  It seemed to me that he was carrying away within him the whole burden of man’s most grievous problem — that of holding brutality in check and taking the profit out of it without resorting to it; but Faustopheles nudged me in the ribs. “You can’t please them. The first one was all upset because he had killed a father he didn’t recognize and slept with a mother of whose existence he was unaware. All right; for the purposes of discussion we’ll grant him reason. But where does that leave young Hamlet there? He didn’t do either of those things, but he is wretched because somebody else did. Can you add that all up and get anything but foolishness?”

  “Yes,” I asserted, more because I loathed his grinning face than because I had a viewpoint. “Sure, I can!”

  “Proceed then, by all means.”

  I thought for a minute, determined to try to make a statement that would stand up before his ridicule. “In both cases,” I at length blurted, “the real consideration is that a scheme of life was kicked out of shape and couldn’t be fixed up. Whether you do it yourself or somebody else does it for you is a side issue. The result’s the same, if you can’t see your way to go ahead without making things worse.”

  “I see.” His lips pursed mockingly. “You know, Silverlock, you have a better sense of humor than I at first thought, and that phrase, ‘a scheme of life,’ is the funniest thing you’ve said so far.” He spat, and we both watched the little pool of saliva spread until it had found its limits on the unpolished granite floor. He spat again, and the result was different, though equally formless. “There’s how much scheme a life is allotted. No more than for any other splatter in the dust and dirt and dung of the cosmos.”

  “Not for a man,” I insisted.

  “For a man,” he nodded, “although, to be sure, in your case it’s probably different. Tell me about your scheme of life, won’t you?”

  I glared at him. “I haven’t got one,” I admitted, when I couldn’t think any out, “but that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have had. Men aren’t just things that circumstance works on like a lathe. They do things to circumstance, right back at it; and create as much for themselves as was ever given to them. If a world was pulled together out of the Void, why, they have built another right on top of it; and like all building it has foundations and a top, dimensions and measurements.”

  “My, how wonderful!” He clicked his tongue as though in admiration. “And has anybody ever caught sight of all this?”

  His question snuffed out that flare of rebellion likewise. For when I paused to think of an answer, I had time to wonder if I believed what I was saying.

  “It doesn’t seem probable.” My shoulders slumped in recognition of a new defeat. “I guess I was only talking to keep from having to listen to you all the time.”

  He snickered. “As long as you’re tired of dangling from that nub of metaphysical rope, drop down, and we’ll go on with our investigation of reality.”

  28

 
At the Bottom

  STRANGELY, Faustopheles made no move to enter the dungeon at the next level. It was all one to me, but as we were about to proceed downward, we were stopped. The one who stepped from the cavern to intercept us was a soot-colored demon with yellow eyes.

  “Bring the man right in, Faustopheles,” he intoned in a barker’s voice. “It is never too late or too early. The show goes on without a break every minute of eternity, and there’s no such thing as a dull minute. Your time cheer-fully re-funded, if there is not a laugh every split second.”

  “Keep your time for those who are short of it,” my companion told him.

  The other refused to get out of his way. “Now, now, Virgilio; I know you haven’t been partial to our show recently, for some reason or other, but I can tell by the look in your charge’s eye that he feels otherwise.” In spite of the fact that he stood his ground, he spoke, I noticed, with a certain deference. He was more companionable when he turned to me. “I feel perfectly sure, not to say positive,” he chanted, tapping his brow, “that a man who gives so much outward evidence of inward horse sense is not going to be willing to pass up the best enter-tainment to be found from top to bot-tom of the A-byss.”

  “If it was important for him to go, I’d show him through myself,” Faustopheles said. “Come on, Silverlock.”

  “He has the right to answer for himself,” the other retorted. “How about it, friend?”

  As I have said, it had been a matter of indifference to me. It ceased to be when I knew Faustopheles opposed it.

  “I’d like to look around,” I answered.

  “You’ll have to do it some other day,” my guide snapped.

  I really hadn’t expected to get my way, but the custodian of the ward spoke up again. “Visitors,” he said, in the tones of an MP passing on a headquarters directive to a colonel, “are not to be stopped or impeded from reaping the benefits of any of the amazing and profoundly educational demonstrations put on in these premises.”