The Bird Out of Space and Time (Part 7).

He had watched me silently from the rocking chair and then moved with imperceptible briskness to my shoulder, like the spider that suddenly bolts into motion when his hapless prey has snared itself. Nevertheless, I was indeed trapped. He'd priced the Pusey book at a fraction of its market value, so that even if I derived no pleasure from owning it, it would at least stave off my imminent poverty for close to a month when things got bad. I nodded ascent, trying not to betray too much enthusiasm. He smiled, took the book curtly out of my hand, and strode to the counter, the motion of his long, rigid joints having the character of a kick-started arthritic machinery. Seating himself, he glanced at the cover for the first time.

“Ah, this is an interesting one, yes. I haven't read it now, but the, ah, circumstances surrounding it, very interesting....”

I was starting to worry that the buffoon was wise to the book's real value.

“The mysterious circumstances surrounding the book, are you aware of them?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, extremely unusual. The author vanished, you know, off the face of the earth. He was never seen again. And the manuscript of this very book was found among his final possessions. Did you know that?”

“I didn't.”

“Yes, he had a tiny garret flat in a rather squalid lodging house. And all they found there were some books on heraldry, a hoard of peculiar trinkets and curios, and the manuscript of this book. But no Mr. Pusey, alas. So you could say that this book was his last will and testament, if you like! All his worldly goods, so speak, bequeathed to the world, or all them that might have care to read it. And there were apparently great rumours and a great intrigue surrounding the disappearance of this - ” he paused to consult the book cover “ - this Mr. Pusey. It was speculated that he'd discovered some kind of portal or door, though which he departed from all the privations and imperfections of this world, to some supernal realm outside of space and time. Not only that, mind you, but certain aficionados claim that he'd divulged the secret of finding that portal in the manuscript, albeit in the form of a code or series of riddles, such that only the most diligent and attentive reader might discover it.”

Although I hadn't intended to betray any knowledge on the subject, the dealer had snared me again.

“That's nonsense. Pusey was a failure from an industrious, well-to-do family, living in obscurity and poverty. He didn't discover any magic door – more likely he took his own life, probably dived into some lonely stretch of the Thames, and the body just never found.”

The antique dealer's face brightened, as though he had been waiting to have this discussion for some time. He had a tendency to discuss morbid subjects with a disconcerting buoyancy and giddiness, as though his mind were a dying hearth, fed by the kindling of a particular type of metaphysical horror.

“Well, now, that might be the case. Indeed, that may well be the truth of it, in the end. Isn't it possible, though, that what you're saying, and what I'm saying, might both be true? Might, in fact, essentially be the same thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, sir, the taking of one's life might in a sense be regarded as a kind of passing through a door out of time and space, might it not? And, as to the second part of the rumour, supposing that this Mr. Pusey discovered something in the course of his researches – some awful fact, if you will, about the fundamental nature of reality, the knowledge of which drove him to self-annihilation. Well, might it not be this awful fact which Pusey had coded into his book, such that the diligent reader would also discover that fact, and thus be likewise driven to self-annihilation?”

“Your idea is based on an absurd premise.”

“Which is that now, sir?”

“That there is any fact so universally appalling that anybody and everybody who learns it would immediately be driven to suicide.”

“I think that premise is defensible, sir.”

“Certainly not. The world, and the series of facts that constitute the world, affect people in a variety of different ways, according the disposition and history of the individual in question. There is no joke that everybody will find hilarious, no sunset everybody will find breath-taking, and certainly no fact so unfathomably bleak that it would render the mortal existence untenable to all who are made privy to it.”

“Well, now, you make a good point there, indeed, a good argument! But I've given some thought to this, you see. This old shop is rather quiet now, and I have lots of time to think while the old clocks tick tock. I have to entertain myself, you see, because nobody would ever play a radio in an antique shop. Have you ever heard the radio playing in an antique shop? No, it’s an unwritten rule of the profession that our premises must be as silent and sombre as a mortuary, as though the old items were laid out to their final rest, so to speak. So I've nothing to listen to most days, except the old clocks tick tock and my own thoughts, such as they are, and to pass long stretches I've often given my thoughts over to somewhat abstruse philosophical questions, such as the very one under current consideration: is it possible that there could be some fact or discovery pertaining the nature of ultimate reality, so utterly dreadful in its ramifications, that it would drive all men who learned it to certain self-annihilation? And, indeed, the first objection I've considered to the existence of such a fact is the very point you raise: the variability of human disposition and taste, such that some will enjoy getting stung by a nettle, or the taste of Brussels sprouts, against the better judgement of the majority.”

“However, consider this: the more something pertains to the ultimate core of reality, the greater the degree of homogeneity we encounter in the human response to it. Certainly, people can have this or that response to a book, a film, politician, dessert, or a new humanitarian cause. But these things, I would say, do not pertain to ultimate reality; they are the grit and the castles we have built in our little sandbox of language and culture to hide from ultimate reality. We can afford a variability of response to these things, because they are, in the end, matters of aesthetic taste and rhetorical plumage – negotiable shapes which we can mould and re-make in the grit and the sand. But the closer something comes to essential reality, I say, the less variable our response to it. Consider aging and death – yes, some put on a braver face than others, and some will eke from the manifold indignities of the corporeal process a certain kind of poetic grandeur, or gallows wit if that fails, but most of us, I think, are uniform in our response to aging and death. Think you of the palaver of a Sartre or Heidegger, and how a group of young men might while away hours in furious disagreement as to the virtue of one brand of philosophical cant as against another. But only saunter by a voluptuous and desirable woman, and the differences between those young men wash away in the undulant tide of her flesh.”

“But these things – desire, aging, and death – are only manifestations, minor quirks, if you will, of ultimate reality. They universalize us to the degree that we cannot quite avoid them, or neutralize their power over us with the shapes we mould in the sandbox. Our bodies are, I would say, little pieces of the grammar of ultimate reality, slotting together and parting away by punctuation and ellipsis, so as they must according to rules which ultimately elude us. But if our responses became more homogeneous by virtue of this grammar alone, how much then the same person would we all become, were we put face to face with the speaker of that grammar, the source of all our pains and pleasures, and the immensities through which their echoes weave and vanish, like peddles cast to a bottomless well?”

Although I had no greater desire at this point than to extricate myself from the company of this garrulous and disagreeable codger, I had to concede a certain rhetorical flair to his peculiarly elaborate patter.

“Now you can probably tell, sir, that I’m no scholar. I only had as much schooling when I was young as kept me out of the way until I was able to start earning. But I’ve always had my curiosity about the nature of things. Well, not quite always. In hindsight, I think that curiosity came over me only after a specific experience I had when was about twenty-seven odd. A peculiar experience I had, sir, with a certain tree. I was still living at home then, up on one those narrow housing estates that are all cobbled together on St. Michael’s Terrace, near the gasworks. But I worked in the old Hobbs Lane brewery on the quays then, before that fire that some said was started by “Dozy” Davy and the “Michelin Man” gutted the place in ’84. And every evening I walked back to the Terrace down Percy Road. Do you know Percy Road? A narrow street, very old, grand houses, very wealthy. Well, not awful wealthy, but affluent, if you know what I mean.”

“Right as you come on to Percy Road there are two bars on the corner of the t-junction, and every evening their terraces were full of young men in suits and well-dressed women. I was a little envious, I suppose, of people that had jobs you'd dress up for, and the leisure and purse to be enjoying a drink on the evening of a school night. But there was also this tree, on the left side of Percy Road, which always commanded my attention in some peculiar way. I couldn't tell you what kind of tree it was, to be honest, only that it was very tall, planted right on the edge of the footpath, and leaning in a slant towards the higher storeys of the houses.”

“What it was about this particular tree that was so arresting I cannot adequately define. Trees are in general an incongruous sight on a city street, if you give some thought to it. The natural and built environments, many have argued, reflect two fundamentally different orders of being, the natural world being characterized by a fecund, irregular complexity, and the built environment, in contrast, by a tendency towards geometric simplicity of form. So a tree in the midst of a city street represents, I would say, the juxtaposition of two different orders of material existence, in the same way that a traffic light planted in the midst of wild meadowland would strike us as peculiar.”

“But this one, I think, felt particularly out of place, as though it had stood in splendid natural isolation, and the city, with all its concrete and stone and bustle, had simply encircled it to its very roots, but never vanquished it, nor altered its essential connection to the soil and the primordial earth. As though – and I know this to be only my fancy – Percy Road and the city were simply an event which had grown up and would pass away while the tree remained, magnificent, unperturbed, and indifferent.”

“One day, these vague intimations which I felt in relation to the Percy Road tree cohered to form what I would call an epiphany. It was an evening in May, and the first sunshine of a dour, gloomy year, with everything giddy and astir and rushing back into bloom. But I was in a mood that day such that the buoyancy of the weather only made me feel more aggrieved with my lot in this world. My troubles then were typical of young men, I suppose – the feeling, as it were, that the world were something I could see, but never quite enter fully into. Well, I was sore oppressed that day, and the envy I felt towards the carefree and fortunate revellers at the terraces all the greater, the more undignified. But then I took in the full picture, so to speak: the intersection of the two streets, the happy folk milling about at either side, and in the middle, curving a little to the left, the great tree. And in an instant, I had the most peculiar presentiment that the tree was the only thing in the picture that was actually real. It felt as though everything else – the houses, cars, people – were an illusion, an insubstantial image projected over the true world, and the tree alone, like a sore thumb, belonged to the underlying, solid reality.”

“Well, this presentiment put me in such a funk that I stopped in my tracks, and tried to figure out the source of such an impression. And it downed on me slowly that it had something to do with time – with how the human world, because of its awareness of time, was defined by and rooted in the temporal, in a way which the natural world was not. The movement and speech of the revellers appeared suddenly exaggerated and comical to me, as though speeded up. They – we – lived in an instant, and the awareness of that goes through us all like electricity, making us dance skittishly about, and perform such a febrile, frantic pantomime, as though it were actually real, and not simply such roles as children adopt in a game before rain or dinner calls them back inside. Even the houses, I thought, some a hundred or more years old, betrayed that uniquely human awareness of time, the energetic panic of it, followed by its exhausted pathos and humiliation.”

“Now, the tree, in contrast, appeared to me to partake in some fashion of the eternal rather than the temporal. Though it too had grown and would decay, it did so without panic or compulsion, without motion or discontent – its immobility and unperturbed mode of being perfectly attuned to the undifferentiated purity of the eternal, and the slight stirring of its boughs in the breeze like the lazy respirations of some god marking whole ages of human time in their falling away. It was a strange sensation that I felt in those few moments, and perhaps a little eerie and frightening, but it took me out of my present discontents, out of the whole stream of my identity in fact, while the May sun beat down on the junction.”

“Such things, of course, are fleeting, but the notion that the world which I took for granted might in some sense be unreal or illusory stayed with me. I come, as I said, from the Terrace, and such notions are not given much credence there. Over the years, I would occasionally have experiences similar to that engendered by the Percy Road tree – certain places, particularly near parks or bodies of water, certain conjurations of light, ivy-covered redbrick buildings, discovered streets or estates that give you the feeling you are no longer in your own familiar city – those things instilled in me a peculiar contemplative trance, where I began to have memories that belonged to strangers, intimations of the whole stream of separate identities, like diving into other minds for an instant, such that I occasionally felt as though I were not myself at all but everybody who would ever exist, and a great pall of dread and loneliness and nothingness with that realization, as though I lay beneath a thousand tombs, nourishing the soil of a thousand acres that would be visited only by the hollow reed of my own ghost, stirring the grasses and the foliage to a deeper gradation of the silence. And I thought for many years, sir, that it was some foible or malady of my brain that put these thoughts into my head, and I fretted about this in silence.”

“Years later, when my brother Morris and I were running this shop, I started to read books of philosophy, and I learned that the notion that everyday reality was an illusion – far from being an anomaly cooked up by some curdling of my brain matter – was in fact almost a commonplace among the learned, such that it seemed as though everyone who had ever given serious consideration to the nature of reality had arrived at some variation of the basic thesis that it was a counterfeit or mirage. Look to yon Hindoo sage of the antique Indies – he long ago proclaimed all things fair and foul but a veil of fantasy, and by thus reasoning does he display feats of contorted posture as could only be attained by regarding all cramps and palsies as afflict the body as but the minor threads of a tapestry of universal falsehood. Look to yon Plato, who saw all things as the etiolated shadows cast off by Perfect Forms, such that our world be like a ravaged face whose former beauty might yet be dimly read between the lines and creases. Or yon Parmenides, who reasoned that there was in fact but one single existing thing, such that anybody who counted more on his fingers had fallen into gross error. Or the Holy Roman Church, for whom this life and this world is but a paltry and backward hinterland to the Kingdom of God and the Life Eternal in the Hereafter. Did not Kant argue that we know things only such as our sensations make them appear to us, and what they are in actuality must remain forever a veritable mystery? Just so had Paul saith unto the Corinthians, that we see things here as through a glass darkly. Even today’s priestly caste, yon scientist, who prides himself as the supreme man of practical reality, saith that all this solid, variegated world which our senses perceive is but shoals of minuscule and maddening tadpoles swimming in seas of mathematical probability. ”

I could only gape at the dealer by this point, troubled by the paranoiac intimation which strikes many of us when we encounter the mad in public, that their monologues are somehow bizarrely synchronized replies to the train of our own private thoughts, if not our very thoughts themselves, spilling unceremoniously out into the world like a fold of flab through a loosened fabric.

“Well, what conclusion might one draw from all this? That – whether the supposition of the world’s unreality be a true intimation of the nature of things, or the product of a curdling of brain matter general throughout the species – men have, in all times and all places, resolved that that which they see directly is misleading, and thus sought to look through the world of appearances, and gaze directly upon ultimate reality, whether by contemplation, piety, or squinting into microscopes. Now, to bring us back to our initial theme, supposing this Pusey were consumed by that ambition – by this burning desire to pierce the veil, to see through the world – and further that he addressed himself to this task in a direct fashion, by looking very intently at things. He was, as I understand it, an inveterate street-walker, who always carried himself with an air of contemplative distraction. What else might he have been doing then, but trying to fix the world before him, as an object of contemplation, so that he could to see through it?”

“Let us imagine that his efforts slowly bore fruit over the years. First, the world began to soften around its edges. Its contents become liquid where previously they had been solid, and begin to flow into one another. The world becomes like its reflection on a body of water: protean, all straight lives curved, everything which was solid and fixed now undulant, everything which was rooted now cast off in a slow dance as the surface on which it rests stirs in its ceaseless interior motion. And he feels surely the beginning of a rapture, the sense of the imminence of his goal, the stirring of anticipatory bliss the lover feels as the object of their desire becomes, even if only notionally, attainable.”

“In time, the image of the world loses all its original contours – instead of the reflection on a watery surface, the motion of the surface has transformed it into a dancing figure of total abstraction – and each time Pusey goes into his trance, he travels further away from the everyday world. Thus, the nearer he attains to his goal, and the deeper his rapture grows, the more he is an isolated failure, an eccentric or madmen, in the world without.”

“One day, the world can persist no longer, even as an abstraction, and vanishes altogether. And now in turn, Pusey begins to see all those other things which mystics and philosophers have glimpsed beyond the veil: the Perfect Forms, the Unmoved Mover, the Pure White Light, mandalas and monads, mathematical tadpole swarms, they all pass before his eyes as in a parade, and each is revealed, like the world before them, to be an illusion, and like the world before them, they too collapse into abstraction and vanish away. And now, after a long period in a pure, milky void, a new picture begins to cohere, and Pusey knows that he has unwrapped the final Russian doll, pierced the last veil, and is presently to see ultimate reality, to know the final, unmediated truth which underlies all human illusions.”

“And he sees the slate grey sky of a cold desert, and beneath it a great wasteland of parched black soil stretches into infinity on all sides, an empty, uniform desolation with no beginning nor end, and no demarcation of one part of it from any other, a landscape through which one might walk for all eternity and maintain for all that time the same relationship with the horizon, and the same prospect ever before and behind. But as his vision of the wasteland becomes clearer, he sees that it is populated with objects that traverse its infinity, rising and falling, rising and falling, making the whole plane like a black ocean of steady undulation.”

“What are they?”

“Well, sir, they are jack-in-the-boxes.”

“What?”

“Jack-in-the-boxes, sir. The alleged child’s toy composed of a box, from whence a sinister clown figure abruptly springs, so as to engender comedic shock, with the box sometimes disguised in the shape of the universally beloved and soothing music box, so as to intensify the discordant shock of the clown’s emergence.”

“No, I mean, I know what jack-in-the-boxes are, but…..how did they get there? Who made them?”

“Well, sir, since you ask that question, I see you haven’t understood aright. The jack-in-the-boxes were always there, and nobody made them. They are, so to speak, the necessary being from whence all merely contingent being derives. The malice of the jack-in-the-box implied the necessity for a dupe, for a conscious being to be taken in by the pleasant appearance of the box, and thus startled by the clown. The universe is engendered only so that its sentient beings are lead through all their delusions of grand, noble, or tragic things, back to the ultimate mockery and blind malignancy of leering clowns emerging infinitely out of their boxes...”

“But how can clowns and children's toys predate the existence of matter itself?”

“Well, sir, one might well ask where such things come from in the first place, no? We are surrounded by notional things – creatures, entities, and convoluted notions themselves – such as have no apparent physical existence, and I'd like to know where they come form. Perhaps these notional things came before us, and gave birth to us as we have done to adding machines? The very first man who donned the motley apparel of the clown must have had some prior inkling of what a clown was – and his audience likewise – otherwise, they surely would have had him locked up or dunked in a pond, and the practise never taken off. And, sir, the origins of the jack-in-the-box itself are shrouded in mystery. Some say it were the rector John Schorne, that pious healer and terror to the gout and the common sinner, who inspired the conceit when he incarcerated yon devil in his boot for a time. Well, I would say that Schorne were far too recent, and the jack has been a slumbering in some box since yon Pandora, at the very least.”

“But I make apology for the long-windedness of my discourse; I meant only to provide an hypothetical example of a truth so terrible that it's discovery would drive all men to self-annihilation, and I would make boast that I have done just that, for though there are some who might have a partiality for infinite grey wastelands, and others for row upon upon row of leering, exultantly evil jack-in-the-boxes, there wasn't any borned yet as would rejoice in the combination of the two constituting the ultimate, underlying reality.”

I handed him the money.

“Well, that's certainly very interesting, but I really need to be getting along..”

“Indeed, sir, and my apologies again. You know I must say I'm actually rather glad to have rid of this book. Oh, I'm sure it's all superstitious nonsense, but I've a fear that I would have read it sooner or later, and mayhap then vanished out of sight myself. I don't want to disappear, you see. It's just that at my age, you wind up with very little to look forward to – very little, sir, in the line of new experiences and novelties on the horizon. Well, what I look forward to most of all now is my funeral. I cannot wait to see what sort of weather I get for the big day, who comes along to squint at me in yon box, what the priest says, and so forth.”

It seemed that he was to detain me with one further lunacy.

“Eh, don't you think that.....your funeral might be the one thing which you almost certainly won't get to see?”

He smiled cannily.

“That is indeed the opinion must would venture on the subject, sir, but I happen to have some insider information which gives me every hope that I will see my own funeral, as sure as I'm seeing you now, looking at me as though I had two heads. Well, in fact, I had two heads once, after a fashion. I mentioned earlier that I used to run this business with my brother Morris. It was Morris, actually, who got the lease on this place – he won it in a game of cards with Ronnie Sullivan that went on for three days and three nights in the granny flat over Fagan's Drapery, while wives, childers, and assorted crones took turns mounting the stairs to try to rouse them from their collective lunacy with a wailing of entreaties and imprecations. They talked about that game of cards for years in the Terrace. Putting up the lease of a property on one hand, would you believe it? People lived shorter and wider in those days, if you know what I mean. Nobody worried about their health until they were dying, and they didn't really worry too much about it then because it was too late anyway.”

“Well, my brother Morris wasn't just my brother – we were identicals. Now, there are many popular notions regarding the uncanniness of identical twins which I can tell you from experience are spurious. For example, it's often held that one twin must be the good one, and the other the bad – well, I would say that most twins, like most people, are good some of the time, bad some of the time, and indifferent for most of it. Now, on the other hand, it's commonly believed that that the bond between identical twins is of a close, psychical nature, such that the twins are privy to knowledge about one another which confounds everyday notions of time, space, and the locality and interiority of the mental faculty. Well, I can tell you, sir, this queer supposition is entirely true. When I was a young child, I began to experience what I called “flashes.” The flashes were a queer thing. I would be doing any old thing, you know, walking home from the butchers, playing conkers with bigger lads, or taking a pinch of snuff with some bold lads behind the old concrete outhouse, when suddenly, just for the briefest instant, I would be seeing something else entirely. One second, I would be looking down a certain street, and the next thing, I would see a pair of feet bobbing at the bottom of a bath. Or I would be talking to somebody indoors, and the next thing, I'd be looking at a woman's backside sauntering down some nearby street! The sound of where I was would persist, but it was like, for a couple of seconds, I was seeing through somebody else's eyes. It were a strange thing, for example, to be entirely stationary, and yet to have one visual field in motion, as though one's eyes were a cinema screen.”

“Well, these flashes persisted intermittently as I grew up, and puzzled me greatly. It seemed to me that if one were to see things, they should be of a fantastical or bizarre nature, like row upon upon row of seaside chalets on the dark side of the moon, or perambulators scuttling around on spider's legs while mothers encased in tortoise shells tried vainly to catch after them – weird things such as that. But my flashes were of the most banal nature, and all took place in locations which were instantly recognisable to me. It as though as though I were going mad in a tiresomely ordinary fashion – a double blow to my pride.”

“One day, I was sitting on the couch reading an adventure of Torrace Manning, the Spy with the X-Ray Eyes, when suddenly the panel which I reading – in which Torrace was eyeing Esther St Claire, and saying “DON'T ASK HOW I KNOW, ESTHER, BUT MONDRAGOON IS ON HIS WAY UP THE STAIRS AS WE SPEAK – WITH SALINGER'S MANSCRIPT IN ONE-HAND AND A PISTOL IN THE OTHER” - vanished, and I saw my own face looking back at me from the bathroom mirror. So I ran up and went a banging on the bathroom door, and sure enough, Morris opens it and goes: “By Christ, I thought you were MONDRAGOON coming up with the stairs with his revolver!” Well, the mystery was solved. Morris, as it transpired, had also been having the flashes, and when we compared notes, it was readily apparent at our mental wires were crossed at brief, sporadic intervals such that we would see through the other's eyes for little fleeting moments here and there. And this was a very special thing, a secret bond between us, ever after. Oh, we had our rows and so forth, but there was always that thing between us – that our minds were interconnected, directly, without words - that they were, even if only for little flashes, not alone, not burrowed up inside the skull and needing stuttering words to try to dredge them out. When we were apart, we were always together in a sense, and when we were together, we'd have little jokes and knowing comments about the flashes. Women's hindquarters were the most frequent thing I'd see in the flashes, because Morris was a fierce divil who believed as an article of faith that a woman's legs and backside in ambulatory motion was the only thing on earth that justified the ways of God to man! He had a skill, sir, such that he would allow his shoelace to become untied, so as to crouch down at precisely the opportune moment to get an eyeful! The Gentleman's Periscope, he called it!”

The dealer laughed and slapped his thigh as this recollection of his twin's incorrigible piehawking.

“And the years went by, he used to complain to me that whenever he got flashes they were always of dull books, of yon Plato and so forth. Anyway, one day, Morris was standing at the Long Corner, talking to Michael Hobart and the Michelin Man, and he had a stroke. He was dead, sir, on arrival at the hospital. The Lord giveth and He taketh away, or so they say. I would say He might be less generous in the giving, or less capricious in the taking away, but such is not my place to say. Though we were so intertwined, I had no premonition or awareness of what had happened to Morris, until they came and told me in the shop. I couldn't believe them – I thought they were speaking in a foreign language, or just some figurines from a dream. And I was in such a shock and a panic that I couldn't even look at Morris to make the identification. I was down at the mortuary with my friend Peter and some guards and other fellas, but I kept getting feint and shaky, and eventually the guard puts me lying down and gets me to close my eyes, and he says: “Yes, it's him”, and that's how they made the identification. So I didn't actually get to see Morris until he was laid out for the removal, and I'll take this to my own grave, sir. I walked up towards the coffin, in that hushed little room, and I had the trepidations and fear, but I knew I had to look at him and say goodbye, so I kept going. And I got to the coffin, sir, and looked into it, and would you believe I saw the last person on earth I was expecting to see: myself!”

“You mean you saw your brother?”

“No, sir, I mean precisely what I said: I saw myself.”

“But he was identical to you...”

“Yes, but what I mean to say is that when I looked down, I didn't see yon fellow below in the coffin with his eyes closed, but rather I saw a fellow with his eyes open, squinting like a badger, looking down at me from above: it was myself I saw, sir, through Morris's eyes, looking down at himself!”

“I think that the stress...you became disorientated...”

“No, sir, not at all. It was the last of our flashes, clear as day. I looked up at my myself, looking down at myself, with the look of timid fear and shock on my face, and I said to myself: “My god, this is what I look like. This is what I have looked like all along.” And then the flash faded, sir, and my face became Morris's, down below in the coffin, eyes shut tight and not a stir on him.”

We fell silent then for a few seconds, and I heard the swing of the grandfather pendulum and the other clocks ticking, and ticking, the hushed flow of the river and of distant traffic, and in my imagination these sounds, and our voices before them, tickled the leaves of trees scattered across the city like tiny fingers striking piano keys.

“Have you had any flashes since?”

“I've seen things, sir, yes. But I can no longer be certain whether they are flashes from Morris, or just stirring of my own imagination, remembrances of dreams, and so forth.”

His face darkened palpably for an instant, and then resumed its former buoyancy.

“Well, sir, here is your Pusey. It has been a pleasure indeed, and if you'd permit me a parting piece of advice, I would say to thee that, when reading on this book, if you do begin to have some intimation of an awful fact hidden craftily in the prose, or even the mapping of the way to yon Door to the supernal realm outside of space and time, I would say, sir, simply put the book away, and cease reading on it! Mayhap the world of buttocks and brambles and Brussels sprouts and briers be the ultimate reality, after all, and all such contrary notions as the philosophers and sages avow are only a kind of mist or spume cast off by the churning turbulence of their brains; a misty spume, sir, wherein one might lose oneself and never find shore again; such is perhaps the true danger of such allegedly cursed books, sir, and the reality underlying the tales of disappearance that surround them.”

He eyed me in a peculiar and disquieting manner as he spoke, a look both conspiratorial and accusatory, like a kind of nod of recognition between two old war criminals which chance had reunited by a butcher's counter.  

Continued shortly.