I can hear them calling, their ghostly voices a soft and alluring murmur. They want me, I know. They are drawing me in, like a moth to the flame. Even the warm, malleable wax I stuffed in my ears does not stifle their cries. Such desperation lies beyond our mortal hearing.
“Listen to us,” they clamor beseechingly, trying to find a way in- any way in. “Listen.”
I try to close my mind to them, to shut off my heart and brain as easily as I can plug my ears. But it is of no avail. I don’t know how much longer I can last.
“Good morning, Hopkins. I appreciate you coming in early for this. Please, sit down.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jim Hopkins demurred, slowly lowering himself into the awkwardly shaped leather chair. He could feel his knees protesting as they bent; these last nine months of archeological work in Zambia had not been kind to him.
The lean man studied him from across the cluttered mahogany surface of the desk. Suddenly Jim felt self-conscious, aware that he was in desperate need of a shower, and that his dog had slept on his coat again, covering it with those fine, white hairs that were so difficult to pick out of the dark tweed. Unconsciously, he raised one hand to surreptitiously brush an unruly shock of his bleached brown hair back behind his ear; he had sorely neglected its maintenance while he was grubbing in the dirt under the hot sun, and now was fervently wishing he had had it cut before coming in this morning.
The man smiled, as though guessing his thoughts. “I do realize what an imposition it was of me to call you in on your first day back,” he apologized without sincerity, “but I have a proposition for you if you would be interested in hearing it.”
“Yessir,” Jim said automatically, the last vestiges of jet lag and culture shock still running high in his system.
“Jim, you have done wonderful work for the Ministry for the past eighteen years, especially here in the lion’s den, if you will forgive my pun. Your dedication to the Zambia affair has been impeccable; and frankly, Jim, we need more men like you. Which is why I’m giving you a promotion. Thomas Brighton from Muggle Affairs is a bright lad; we will initiate him into the Unspeakables and give him the projects you are working on now. I trust we can depend on you for further guidance? Good. You are going to join another senior associate, Frank Stilton, in his research in room seven. This will be far more dangerous work than you have done before so I want you to take a moment and think about it before you accept. Do you understand?”
Jim nodded, dazed, his thoughts whirling about his head in a confused muddle. Room seven. He’d only heard whispers of it before, no one knew for certain what was in it except for an elite squad. He could be a part of that elite squad if he chose. Promotion, what a funny, foreign word. It would mean giving up all that he had worked on; no, passing on what he had learned, that sounded better. It would be a new chance to do something worthwhile. Before I die, a treacherous little voice added. Life could be short for an Unspeakable, particularly as you climbed higher up the ladder. Could knowledge be worth it? Poor Eve, what a choice she had had to make. But in the end, he knew he would choose the same as she.
“I’ll do it.” His voice was firm with decision. Let life bring what she will, it won’t get me down.
“Good man.” The head of the Unspeakables held out his hand, on which the littlest finger was missing; and Jim grasped it tightly with his own, sealing the bargain. The contrast of his tanned and calloused hand against the ghostly pallor of his superior’s seemed strikingly ominous, and suddenly Jim wondered what other parts of himself he would be leaving behind.
I don’t know how much time is passing, whether anyone will come and look for me here. With every minute my willpower lessens. It keeps pulling me in, when the strain gets too great I lift one foot and shuffle forward, a half an inch. It relieves the pressure that builds in my mind and for a moment the noise lessons. Everything seems so easy if I only give it its way. But when I fight, it builds again, that choral harmony of voices, so many voices.
I cannot bear it; I begin to lift my foot. I cannot step backwards. It is pulling me in.
“So, you’re Hopkins,” the gravelly voice was rich with disapproval.
“I am. And you must be Stilton.” Everyone knew Frank Stilton vaguely, mostly by rumor, which would fly fast and furious throughout the department. He was the office curmudgeon, old for this line of work, and crotchety. Frank was famed for his far fetched ideas, and his love of arguing them through to the bitter end. Jim could only hope he would last longer than his last partner, who is whispered to have been kicked out in a flying rage, and left shouting he wouldn’t work with such “ an unreasonable, doddering, old man.”
Stilton pointed a gnarled finger at the small cardboard box at Jim’s feet. “Is that all you have?”
“Yes.”
He grunted, but Jim wasn’t sure if it was approval or derision. “Well pick it up then,” he commanded, breaking the silence. “We haven’t got all day.”
For a moment Jim felt resentment welling up inside of him, he was no errant boy to be ordered about; he was a senior Unspeakable, a partner, an equal. One look at Stilton’s retreating back closed his mouth, the words stillborn. He wouldn’t fight a battle he was sure to lose. He’d prove his worth in time. If he could stand it that long.
I’ve no notion of how far I have come from the dais’s edge. I cannot turn my head, cannot wrench my eyes away from the gentle fluttering of the veil. The nearer I come, the more I can see the color in it, muted below the surface of time, but sill bright vibrant and alive in the mind. If only I could reach out and touch it. I know I must not, that I would surely be lost. I only wish there was a way I could record this for posterity, that my falling will not be without value.
Jim closed the book in front of him with a thump. Three weeks of mysterious research on gladiators in ancient Rome, and he had still not even glimpsed the inside of room number seven. He was tired of waiting, tired of secrets, tired of not being able to control his on life anymore. In a moment of sheer unbridled frustration, Jim let his impulse take over, throwing the book across the room. It hit the far wall with a loud smack before tumbling to the floor, its pages ruffled by the wind of its passage.
“Well…”
Jim jumped in surprise whirling to see Stilton regarding him oddly from the doorway. Oh, bloody hell, he thought. What am I going to do now? I’ve ruined everything.
Stilton cut his thoughts short. “I suppose you’re ready then, Hopkins. Come on.” And with a quick jerk of his head toward the door, he was off, leaving Jim gaping at his retreating back.
A heartbeat later a pair of footsteps, one slow and regular, the other hurrying in an undignified run which was trying very hard to be a walk, echoed down the hall. They stopped in front of a plain, black wooden door of no unusual merit or proportions. It had no identifying marks of any sort, but everyone knew it was door number seven. There was a mystery to it, impossible to explain, unattainable to copy.
“Keep your wits about you,” Stilton advised gruffly; the only notice he had paid Jim so far.
“For what?” Jim started to ask, but the door gently swung open, cutting off his question in his eagerness to see inside.
He was in a large amphitheater, Roman he guessed by the height and width of the arches. The steps went down to a raised dais at the center, and from the stillness in the room, he guessed that the acoustics had been arranged so that a pin dropped there would be heard even at the fringes of the room. In the center of the dais was a free standing arch, newer looking than the stone of the amphitheater itself, Jim estimated that it was built a good three or four hundred years later. A tattered grey veil hung in the arch, swaying gently in what Jim would have called a nonexistent breeze. It was altogether striking and puzzling, but not the least bit sinister.
“Welcome,” Stilton proclaimed with barely concealed irony, “to the Death room.”
“I beg your pardon?” Jim said, slightly nonplussed by what he thought he heard.
“The Death room, lad. We are studying Death. What else did you think all that reading was about?”
For a moment Jim’s first reaction was thinking it a bit rich to call him a lad, he was forty-three by Merlin! His second reaction was, “death?”
“Not quite, with a capital D, Death. There is a difference, death is what happens when your body ceases to function, and Death is what happens to the part of you that is you when you cease to function. Do you follow me?”
Jim’s mind boggled for a second, trying to understand before just giving up and going with the flow. He nodded the nod of the bewildered, head bobbing up and down with extreme nonchalance, hoping the world would suddenly seem less mad.
“Right,” Stilton plowed on. “You see that arch right there? You want to be careful of it, consider it a sort of doorway into Death. You might go in, but you will never come out. Keep that in mind. Happened to Bloomfield. Smart fellow, he thought he could handle the lure, and then walked right in. Which brings me to rule number two: you never work alone if you are near the veil. I don’t care why or what or how, you find a partner to watch your back. Understand?”
Jim kept nodding; it seemed the safest thing to do when Stilton was scowling at him so fiercely. There was a comfort to be found in the bobbing of his head, it was familiar, it made sense, it was a language they both seemed to understand.
“Good.”
They stood in silence for a moment, each lost in his own thoughts and memories. At last Jim’s mind began to sort through what he had been told, and curiosity overcame disbelief. “How did this get here? All of it? This place must be huge, and to just take it out of the ground… Or is it a copy?”
Stilton barked a laugh. “No, it’s real enough. From south Italy. Nasty, marshy region that. I was near eaten to death by mosquitoes before it was through. We just caught the place out of time, and brought it here. There’s an amphitheater sized hole in Italy, filled with nothing but grayness, but since such a place no longer exists there is no reason anyone will find it. Or even notice it’s gone.”
“You can just disappear a place?” Jim asked, caught between horror and incredulity.
“Did you never wonder what happened to Atlantis?”
Jim felt sure Stilton was pulling his leg. “Is that what’s in room eight, then?” He joked brightly.
“No, we keep it in the basement because it wouldn’t fit,” Stilton said so blandly that Jim half believed he was telling the truth, and couldn’t get over the unnerving feeling that it was because he quite possibly was.
Quickly, Jim introduced a new topic, hoping the answers would be a good deal less unsettling. “So the arch and veil act as a sort of door, you said. What does it look like when you push aside the veil?”
“You forgot rule number one,” Stilton reminded him. “No one touches the veil. No one who has pushed it aside can tell us what lies beyond on account of the fact that they pass on. You touch the veil, you go through the veil. It is a simple equation.”
“What is it? How did it get here?” Jim breathed in fear and awe of such a substance. This was much bigger than any magic he’d worked on before, even in the Zambian ruins which were potent, and blazing with the stuff.
“That’s the kicker, we don’t know. But,” Stilton went on, excitement creeping into his voice, “I have made a few theories about the fact. You know how our world and the muggle world feel so separate? It’s almost as though they are two identical worlds lying right on top of one another, only ours has magic and theirs doesn’t. Well, now let’s add another world into the equation. Just like ours and the muggle world, only this one is Death, see? When people go, they simply pass from one world into the other. A transitional state. That even explains how ghosts can stay; they just got lost on their way to Death so the spirit remained instead of passing.”
“But do you have any proof?” Jim asked reasonably, although the longer he mulled over the theory the more rational it seemed to be.
“Not as such, but if you look at some of the ancients, you will find theories surprisingly similar to mine so I’m not the only one to have had the idea,” Stilton rationed warming to his subject. “Take Plato for instance. He had the view of dualism, of those two separate realms yet the same world. We live in the empirical world. Everything is physical, approximated. Substance cannot achieve the same perfection we achieve in thought. But instead there is another realm, a realm of forms where everything exists in perfection. This is the realm of the soul, Death for us, where the basic concept of human thinking, survives in immortality.”
“Ah, but,” Jim countered, “Didn’t Aristotle refute such ideas by saying that the body and the soul were not separate, and therefore could not exist in the world of the forms? I believe he also called your world of forms useless, as you could only understand it after death; so what would be the point of life if perfection was only known after.”
“Aristotle was the last man to know everything,” Stilton granted with withering scorn, “but he was not the first to understand nothing. Besides, Plato was not the only one. Look at Descartes, he too found mind and body dualism, even with all that doubting gibberish. And don’t even begin with religion. Every last one of them has at least a heaven or a hell. According to them we could have millions of overlapping worlds. I’m only asking you to believe in one.”
“All right,” Jim acquiesced. “So the veil is a gateway to your other realm. That still doesn’t explain what it is or why it’s here.”
“That’s true it doesn’t. You get that in theory number two. I believe the gateway is in the amphitheater because this is one of the places where the thin fabric of reality separating the two worlds I just told you about got thinner. An amphitheater such as this would have seen a lot of death, and that sort of a thing leave a mark. You can feel it, at battlegrounds, in graveyards, especially in prisons. There is something about that magnitude of human suffering which abrades at the very cloth between the realms. This is a place where it got so thin, it tore.”
“That’s impossible!”
“There are more things in heaven and hell than are found in your philosophy, Horatio. Or something like that,” Stilton chided. “Look at the veil. You cannot tell me you have seen such a fabric before, one that stirs even when no wind is present. That is what is impossible, this is merely improbable.” He smiled mirthlessly. “Have you ever been to the Tower?”
“Yes, once I took my niece when she was visiting from Wales.”
“And how did you feel when you were there?”
“I don’t know,” Jim began in confusion, running a hand through his hair as he tried to remember. “There were so many tourists, everything just felt false, fake.”
“But in the dungeons and torture chambers,” Stilton pressed.
“I felt eerie, I suppose, remembering what had happened there. Subdued. And perhaps a little respectful for the dead. But I most certainly didn’t see any damn fool pieces of cloth flapping around.”
“Of course you wouldn’t, not yet. Time simply hasn’t worn it that thin there yet. But here, murder, suffering, and pain for hundreds of years, and very little cheer to mend it. Can you see why Death would claim this place for its own?”
“I suppose you are now going to tell me that the veil is actually the jagged remains of the cloth of reality which you believe separates the world?” Jim couldn’t keep a hint of sarcasm from his voice. He’d never had a conversation which was madder than this.
Stilton beamed at him like a prize pupil. “I knew you were a fast learner.”
The arch is in front of me. If I grip it tight enough, perhaps I can pull myself away; perhaps I still have a chance to save myself from falling. I take a step, then another. I am here. The stone is cool and slick under my fingers, seamlessly joined from one to the next. Even the runes which I had studied before in such detail grant no purchase for my roving fingertips.
There is nothing I can do but give in to despair. One more step, and I will be swallowed into the voices, lost in the madness of their wild cries. Would my voice too, join that multitude? Or is this last wave of sound my funeral dirge?
“I’m calling it a day. You coming, Hopkins?”
Jim glanced up from the paper he was studying and gave a startled look at the clock. “That time already is it? I think I’d rather finish this page first, but it shouldn’t take much longer.” Absentmindedly he nibbled for a moment on the end of his quill. “You go on,” he decided at last. “I’ll lock up here when I’m done.”
“You won’t be going back in…” Stilton pressed.
Jim cut him off. “Nah, I’ve got what I need right here.”
“All right. See you tomorrow then.” And as usual, he was gone without a backward glance.
“Tomorrow,” Jim started before realizing there wasn’t much point. Sighing, he returned to his papers. Page nine lay in front of him now, the rubbings of the runes on the arch fuzzy on the charcoal coated paper. The arrow shaped one that was Tiwaz; justice, and victory, and faith. Now, let’s see, it looked like a stick drawing of a fish balancing on its tail. That was, um… Othala, yeah, ancestry and family. That left just one more, the simple sideways v; that overgrown less than sign. Jim stared at it in puzzlement. He knew of no rune like that, it must have transferred wrong. Perhaps it was carved over a fault in the stone. Carefully, he lay the paper back down on his desk. He hated quitting now, when there was only one translation left on the page, but Stilton had left.
Why not go look, a treacherous voice in the back of his head asked. Why not just nip down and take a quick peek. Nothing has harmed you there yet; moreover you wouldn’t be long and know better than to touch the veil. Besides, he had to know; just a quick look to confirm, and then he’d be back in the office, safe and sound.
Grabbing paper and charcoal for another rubbing; Jim trotted down the hallway and stopped before the plain, black door. Whispering a quick prayer, he opened the door and stepped inside.
There was always a strange feeling in the room. Something unworldly, something eternal. It seemed stronger than ever without Stilton’s gruff presence to temper it. More sinister. Or perhaps merely more alien.
You are overreacting, Jim scolded himself. The room is just as it ever was.
Carefully, he picked his way down to the base of the amphitheater, concentrating only on the steady slap of his feet against the stone. At the foot of the dais, he paused, pulling out the soft wax Stilton always insisted they wear. Softening it with the heat of his fingers, Jim rolled each piece into a small ball before efficiently plugging up his ears. The resulting silence was always stifling, and the warm wax gave an odd and ticklish sensation. Still, Jim was resigned to it, if not used to it by now.
Climbing onto the dais, he studied the arch, looking for the rune pattern, trying to gauge where he had left off. The veil waved, teasingly, and as it billowed out, a murmur of voices seemed to float out with it. Jim shook his head, then felt his ears to ensure the wax had not fallen out. It had not. The voices came again, louder this time, and Jim found himself straining to hear them, he needed to understand what they were saying. The paper fell from his hand, as he took the first step toward the arch.
My foot rises for the last step, I cannot stop it, cannot turn back now. I am falling, falling forward into the voices, into the madness when a grip like steel encircles my wrist. It pulls me back, away from the veil, and as much as I want to go with it, the voices are calling me on and I cannot resist. They are too loud in my mind; I fight.
“Hopkins,” a voice bellows in my ear. “Snap out of it, lad. Listen to me, not to them. Do you understand?”
For a moment my scattered thoughts connect and that familiar voice drowns out all others. I nod, words sticking in my throat as he continued, calming me like a nervous horse.
“Come on, lad. Away with me, now. It’s not your time, Hopkins. It’s not your time.” Both the voice and iron grip on my biceps draw me away, one stumbling step at a time until I am at the edge of the dais once more. Still rigid with fear of what almost came to pass, I jump down to the hard floor, anxious only to get away. The voices have stopped, but I am cautious about pulling the wax from my ears, none the less. Silence, still beautiful silence.
I turn to Stilton, wondering what apology I can make, what thanks I can give which will be adequate. “I needed a new copy of one of the runes,” I say lamely. “I couldn’t figure one out, and I didn’t want to wait.” I drop my head in shame.
For once, Stilton is silent. I wonder if I am about to be thrown out like the last assistant. I certainly deserve it for trying something so stupid.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” he says at last, in his gruff way.
I smile faintly. “Everyone always forgets the last part of that saying,” I complain. “But satisfaction brought it back.” He gives another of his barks of laughter, and I know that I am forgiven.
“And what was it then?” he asks, his eyes twinkling. “It better have been good for all of that effort.”
“Kenaz, knowledge, and wisdom.”
“Aye,” he says at last, “that certainly is something you can stand to learn.”
Side by side, we walk out of the chamber, locking the door tight behind us. Somewhere in the room there is a gust of air, a murmur in the silence, and an unmarked piece of paper blows through the arch and disappears beyond the ragged veil with a sigh of satisfaction.