Brutus,
Yes, I keep telling you I have nothing more for you to read, that I have reached the end of my adventure. Of course, you've seen through my lies, that I wish to quit this delusion and focus upon my present calling. I would hate to think that whatever this is could be considered my calling, and it isn't, and I'll stop after this final letter, for I have now solved the mystery.
I went to sleep with the Town's quandry burning in my brain. It could not have been the real Henry Town, for there is no historical record of Vancouver's diamond mogul having traveled east to focus on such preternatural dealings. This, among other evidence, is how I know for sure I'm making all this up.
Henry's puzzle was this: why would the light, a bulging, breathing, living light that could put visions into Miss Rand's mind, be compelled to... leak, as it were? Just a little line of light stretching to the southwest quadrant of the circle of boulders by a lake that no longer exists. If the light is all powerful and all-consuming, omniscient and substantial, surely it couldn't leak, or at least, it wouldn't be an accident. Either it consciously did such a thing, or this was a mistake, a crack in the mechanism, proof of its fallibility.
It was upon me to decide whether I would take this odd line of reasoning any further. I decided, as I lay in bed that night, to leave it off and walk away from the game within my dream, and write to you no more. If you can believe it, my sleep came quickly, and without medication. As soon as I wished away the problem, it bothered me none. I was done with this stupid sport, and I could rest up for my following day of classes and research into turn-of-the-century North American prose.
The dark of my slumber, however, was put to an end around three in the morning when I sensed an intruder within my home. I lay upon my bed, comfortably within my chamber, accustomed as I was to the buzzing of insects and stench of the bloody marsh. At first, I heard nothing. It was only the feeling of another person in my home I perceived. Part of me thought it to be delusion, and I nestled myself deeper into my comforter.
When I did this, the presence took a step. One step, thought my tired mind. Nothing to worry about. Then another step. Then a succession of loud footfalls towards my chamber, and right up to my bed. I sprung up immediately to face the presnce, but nothing was there. At this, I felt chills, my breathing was short, my heart palpitating, and I endeavoured to calm myself. This presence was surely demanding my regard.
I moved into my main living area and sat at my kitchen table, unable to return to a state of ease. If I could not rest, I would ponder the mystery I'd been given.
What was required of me to begin with, was to repaint the scene. The details were foggy at best, so I tried to focus on the details. There were anywhere between twenty and thirty robed figures on the landing above the lake. Each one stood before a sunken boulder and, one by one, splashed blood upon the central altar stone. When they concluded chanting, the light appeared. The line crept towards west, and slightly south.
I looked around for a visual model. I peered up at my clock, an oversized novelty piece from a now-defunct import outlet. I took it off the wall and placed it upon my table, with the twelve marker pointing north. In the centre of the clock's face, I placed an ornate metal tissue box from the aforementioned import store. I pulled out one tissue and rolled it in my hands until it became a line.
The approximate direction I recall would have not quite been nine on the dial. 8:57, perhaps. I squinted at the model before me. The line of tissue sprung but a small distance from the tissue box. On such a large clock, the tissue was negligible. Pfft. If this were a globe, the distance would be nothing, only a thousand or so kilometers…
That was it!
I threw on a half-decent outfit and wrapped myself in my peacoat to guard against the early-morning chill. I rushed immediately from my home to Slaughterhouse Slough. How easily I had solved the riddle! I scraped my way through the opening in the fence to go and find Henry, and caught up in my excitement, I didn't even realize...
Of course he wasn't there.
It's the fall of 2025, not the time of Henry and Miss Rand. They do not exist in my time. Perhaps their children, or childrens' children survive. But Rand and Town and surely gone. The lake is gone, wherever it went, whenever it was replaced by the filthy old slaughterhouse that plagues the ruins of a neighbourhood I've chosen to inhabit. Drat.
Crestfallen, I wandered the ruins of the old dried up lake, and abandoned meat factory. These stumps may well have once been the cherry blossoms I recall from the sweet summer, swayong above Rand and her deathly mask. These cottonwoods towering above, blackened by soot, were once vivacious and proud. It could very well be that Town created a buzz of economic frenzy, only to leave it in disrepair and rot. That could be the reason this small city is depressed, and never grew into a metropolis like Vancouver.
I located the makeshift steps, the wood that formed the stairs mostly rotten into bare splinters. I followed the path up to the boulder circle. The rocks were still there, albeit mossy and weathered since last I saw them. I sat upon the middle rock, the altar table. The cottonwood sapling that once lived there had apparently reached its height and died, but at the site of its excavated trunk, a new one had sprung up, and looked to be aging quite well.
I felt the slow approach of a shadow, and turned around to see what supernatural spectre haunted me now. It was no spectre, but rather a middle-aged man wearing a Carhart and yellow suede gloves.
"Mind if I join you here?"
"I think your people have been here far longer than mine, so maybe I should ask your permission instead." I smiled, and so did he. He sat down on the other side of the altar rock.
"I was actually talking to the cottonwood," he responded jovially. "I come out here every morning. I've never seen you here."
"I just discovered the area recently," I told him.
His hair was long and white, but his face felt young. "It's a good area. This community."
"Except the bugs. And the slaughterhouse smell."
"Well, not much we can do about that. People need food. So do bugs."
"I suppose. It's just the smell of the blood. It keeps me up at night. I was taking medication for insomnia."
The man looked around. "Don't like the smell of blood?"
I grimaced. "Does anyone?"
"Blood is life," remarked the stranger. "Before the colonizers came, the people would bury bodies up in the cottonwood trees. The blood would drip down into the soil and nourish the plants. The cycle was perfect. But when the colonies spread their beliefs across the land, they taught that tree burials were barbaric, heathen. So they forbade it, like so many other customs. We suffered, and so did the land. But to this day, my DNA is a part of this land, quite literally."
Across the screen of my mind flashed the image of the robed adepts carrying their cauldrons of blood across the water's edge. Their eyes glowed in my recollections. I thought of the gothic and supernatural elements of Johnson's mythographies. I couldn't stop myself from asking,
"Do you believe twins are an evil omen?"
The stranger's eyes lit up, as though I was a child asking his father to read him a favourite bedtime story. "Are you a twin?"
"No," I answered. "But I feel like I have a twin out there somewhere."
"In another place?" he asked.
"No, in another time," I responded.
He laughed deeply. "Well, I'd tell you to give your thoughts to the medicine man so he could wander into the woods and reflect upon it... but your culture has no medicine men. You have only doctors, and they don't really know anything, they just experiment. Data without wisdom can never be knowledge."
The man got up and paced beyond the cottonwood, in the direction of 8:57. "Well, I need to be moving on. If you run into your twin, tell him not to make any trouble. Napi gets angry when us little ants try to ruin his handiwork."
With that, the man continued down the path. I saw little need to remain, and I walked away in the opposite direction. I descended the stairs and left the marsh. I hung my coat on a hook affixed to the inside of my bedroom door and faded into sleep before I could change into houseclothes. Life followed routine over the coming weeks, until my solution to the puzzle I'd solved no longer even occurred to me. I forgot about the man at the boulders, and even the silly dream of the woman in the light, the robed figures, and the man with the mystery.
I wouldn't have recalled any of this, or even written to you, Brutus, if it weren't for what followed next.
When the world wants you, it shakes you into the circumstances of its own chthonic providence. I rose early to take my TR7 into the shop for the third time this month. Seemed like a worthy ride when I bought it, but its troubles had multiplied until it flat-out broke down right in front of the marsh.
The October sunrise was dewy and scented with sweet smoke and grimy muck. Intermingled with the marsh rot was that unmistakeable perfume. I abandoned my vehicle and walked in a sleepy daze towards the source of the sweet smell. I approached the fence of Slaughterhouse Slough. It didn't strike me as strange that the chickenwire fence was now the entrance to the park I had first wandered into months ago.
There sat Miss Rand, the skeletal woman in the wide-brimmed hat, on the bench where we'd met that first time. She was missing the features of a skeleton, but she was sickly gaunt by this point, dwarfed in substance by her crooked shadow. The solution rushed back to me, the riddle I'd solved for Town.
"Rand, so nice to see you. Is your companion around?"
She apprehensively lifted her head and fixated on my eyes. Her lips were drowsy as they parted to speak. "No, no he isn't."
"Okay," I replied. "I don't know when I'll get another chance to visit, so perhaps you can pass a message along for me."
Her head was tilted down, but her gaze was trained upon my forehead. "Yes," she said slowly. "What would you have me tell him?"
The way she measured her words, I didn't even know if it was appropriate to speak with her. "Just..." I thought about how to put it. "Just tell him that the light is tracing its path. The first point was the house on Bute and Nelson. From there, the line reaches to this place. I suspect that the more the light is recreated in other locations, the longer the line will become."
"How weird," Rand said, almost mockingly. "You speak of the light as though it were sentient."
I could tell she was in distress. I walked over and sat beside her on the bench. "Why did you tell me not to come?"
Her breath was low and slow. "It hardly matters now," she answered. "You're here. Do as you wish. I knew Henry would draw you into all this. What I saw in the light, it was everything, all at once. Along with knowing many things, I'm also feeling. Feeling everything. So yes, it was a bit much, and I didn't want you to join us here. Especially after everything you said. To think that we are involved in the ruin, enslavement and death of the people of this nation. I thought you might talk me out of it."
"Talk you out of what?"
"I told you I wanted to see New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam. The light showed me a path."
"At what expense? Judging by your current state of health, you won't live long enough to see those places."
"In the light, I am immaculate. I am more than healed. I am immortal. At first I only perceived the darkness, for that was what was inside of me. I'm becoming much happier now. I'm healing." Miss rand wheezed out a terrible cough.
I waited for her to finish. "And what is that doing to your body?"
"My body is nothing. It's an old leather bag full of rotted meat. It would be absurd to preserve such a frail vessel, when such miraculous things exist beyond this dim world."
Though she made a good point, I couldn't abide her line of thinking. If it were me, I would quit the moment it was having an effect on my body.
"Why don't you come with me?" she offered. "I'd really like to know what happened when two people enter the light together. You remember the light. It showed you the most marvellous visions. It was a dream, but it felt more than a dream, didn't it? It felt real, didn't it?"
"It was real, Miss Rand. This is the dream." I'd even shocked myself with what I'd said. The truth escaped far too quickly for me to shove it back into my mouth.
"That's exactly how I feel." My hands rested on my legs. She put her hand, that skeletal hand, onto mine and looked directly into my eyes. "So you understand why I would throw away this dream, this nightmare of an existence, to live in the light. Imagine you could show me your lightworld, or I could show you mine. Imagine I could escape this dreadful life and visit the beautiful world you've described."
The world I've taken for granted. The world I left to be in this turn-of-the-century fantasy. I'd take her from this beautiful lakeside park full of sakura trees, and a life of affluence with limitless promise. I'd bring her to a blood-soaked marsh full of insects. I'd show her my broken-down car and low-end property in a disappointing city. I'd take her to my second-rate University. I'd introduce her to my anxiety, my depression, my world without friends, without love, on a planet that's dying from the industrialism and genocide that's barely sprouted in her world. "That doesn't seem like a good idea. Think of what could go wrong."
She shook her head gently. "The first time I went into the light, I was thinking of what could go wrong. I was hoping it would go wrong. Now I see how right it is. It's more right than anything I've ever done. Town gets his empire. I get to enjoy the greatest experience in existence. Nobody loses. Do as you will, but I think you should consider what I've offered."
I looked toward the makeshift stairs at the end of the path. "The light is there right now?"
"No, I'd need Town to arrange his followers. But don't take too much time to consider my proposal. When we're done here, we'll be heading south."
I nodded, pulled my hand from under hers, and rose to my feet. I walked toward the gate with my mind made up that I would under no circumstance enter the light with Miss Rand. I had done what was expected of me. I had given Town his answer. I was done. Perhaps the information would aid his travels with the light. I had no plans to relocate, so there was no reason to even consider the proposal.
And this, Brutus, was where I concluded my time with this odd fantasy. I called the local tow to remove my TR7, and take it once more to the mechanic on the north side. Luckily, parts for a 1980 are not too hard to locate. My mechanic shuttled me to the University, where I had time in between classes to write this to you. I sit here now in my humble D-wing office, wrapped in my peacoat and scarf, finishing this letter before I go home to reflect on everything.
Brutus, I'm not doing so well. Before all of this happened, I had purpose. I had a plan. I knew where I was going in life. I was optimistic. Now that I fall into my routine, I'm starting to think like Miss Rand. I'm starting to think that escaping this world might be the only joy in it.
I commune now with her, that she would think the same thing on her side of the prison of existence, as I would on mine. This is more than just greener grass. Whatever that light is, it's compelling beyond belief. Brutus, if you could escape the banality of existence, and the only cost were your health, your sanity, and perhaps your life, would you think it was worth it?
I'm fond of hypothetical questions Brutus, this you know. Please don't reply. I'll be fine. Especially now that I've chosen not to enter the light. I have essays to mark all next week. You have a site to run. It's been worthwhile corresponding with you these last few months.
Good bye.
Professor Weller Mayburn.
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