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. . . for whence,
But from the Author of all ill could Spring
So deep a malice . . . ? |
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—John Milton
Paradise Lost, Book II |
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irmly and deliberately, he inscribed the next word. Such moments as these could not long last or be remembered. Nor could such acts be done twice in a world, but were final in their enactment. Therefore, he worked as he ever did—with ruthless, cautious patience.
And with that word penned, elevators stopped in their shafts, airplanes neither rose nor fell, and a man could not even rise from bed. For it was the long-lived wish of the author that the end of the world should so begin. It pleased him to arrest all men in their movements, and not even to allow their fall, that he might all the more gloat and be known in his power.
Remembering the many years of the earth, he could not remember the name he was born with. Men once called him The Man of the Dark Word. But there had been other names, now forgotten, passed into the shades of irrecoverable memory. Of the man who had once claimed the name given him by his father, all that remained was the original desire for power; unless it was also the lust for revenge, inherited from his childhood in the world, upon what or whom was now nameless to him—an unspeakable revenge to be given not necessarily to any individual but to some object encompassed by the earth, an object that should be carried to the fire, along with the author’s own body, that none and nothing should escape it.
In order to obtain this most consummate revenge, consummate power was necessary, and empires had risen and fallen while he had procured it. Few had known as he had the scattered small layers of the world’s weakness or grasped in their hands the many threads of fortune—dangled them from such trifles as a seeming careless word, an apparently innocuous juxtaposition of images, or the inscrutable and unflagging support of a man who was doomed to fail.
Every corner of existence served him. By the transfer of a single painting into the possession of a prince, a princely son was carried to the slaughter and a tyrant brought to power. From the tyrant came unrest, chaos and collapse. At that ruin, the author entered a capital under the aegis of a barbarian conqueror, saw the rich homes ransacked and the libraries turned out for the fire. From among those ravages, he plucked a pale pink scroll, ribboned in black. Upon that scroll were written the ancient words of Marmi, who broke the foundations of the mountains. Yet though that sage broke the mountains, the scroll did not tell his secret.
Little by little, the author probed the affairs of men. He pored over endless texts, listened at the feet of purported wise men and endeavored by all means to lift the veil of absolute power.
Far and wide, he traveled, as far as the bounds of human commerce. He camped with the Bedouin, stood upon the thresholds of the best Parisian salons, held physicists in hypnotic conversation while they yielded up their knowledge and confessed their suspicions. He heard also the confessions of murderers, recorded the confused and detailed reports of morphine addicts—was himself hypnotized by a psychiatrist and murdered the doctor when it was done. He allowed political philosophers to spill their doctrines into his ear, listened long to the mad preachers of the street, and hearkened to the words of a poet who lay gasping his last words in a hospital in Baltimore.
Still he remained unsatisfied. He was not content to hear only mankind’s account of itself or its account of the world. He confronted the world itself and interrogated it with all the brutality that ingenuity can devise. He questioned the animals with his own hands, read their entrails and devoured them. For an entire year, he would be nothing but a fly, seeing all men through the many mirrors of its eyes. He threw himself into a volcano and remained there for days, reading the bones of the earth from the blood that flowed around them. He sank to the bottom of the ocean and drifted unheeding among the fish on silent currents, until he was at last drawn up by the most unfortunate vessel that ever dragged a net. All matters were his to see and he saw them. But the annihilation of the earth was not yet his.
Coming then one day to a bookstore in a sacred city whose name shall not be bloodied by this connection, he found an old man who, after careful questioning, told him of a perfect parchment come recently into his possession. He told the author that it was in fact a particularly valuable sort of vellum, not lightly to be parted with, and made from the skin of that which I shall not name. It was said by the bookseller that all things inscribed upon it were true and not be undone unless the parchment were burned. The author would have tested this but the old man demanded a high price for the pleasure of even seeing the vellum. The price was willingly paid and the author took it away with him.
He was in no doubt of the material that the vellum was made from, but he was in equally little doubt that it had never exhibited the advertised power in the dealer’s hands. The old man had remembered an ancient superstition and repeated it for the benefit of the sale. If he had truly believed it possible that the parchment had such powers, or if he had successfully employed them himself, he would not have sold the treasure at any price. The author, however, was methodical and knowledgeable. He knew all extant languages and, taking up a pen, inscribed the same line in many translations at the head of the sheet. In the smallest of letters, the words of English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and every other language or dialect of the world echoed the same declaratory statement: The man who sold me this parchment is dead.
When many days were passed and every living language was exhausted, he ran through an extensive catalogue of dead languages. One day, he nearly thought himself successful. After inscribing the words The man who sold me this parchment is dead, or their rough equivalent in Sanskrit, he heard of an accident at the bookshop. But when he investigated, he found that only a small portion of the roof had collapsed and that the old man was still alive. Afterward, he went on to secret languages, magical languages and cryptographic signs. All this was done in vain. Not even the roof fell on the bookseller’s head, and during this time the old man thrived mightily. The author did not hear of so little a problem with the bookseller as indigestion. The old man’s face beamed with robust octogenarian health.
Eventually, the necessary language was discovered. It was the work of a linguist, a man who wrote novels in his spare time. In these novels was depicted a fantasy-world of high color and ornamentation. The tales were so delicately constructed that their embellishments included fragments of speech in a fictitious language, invented by the linguist himself and described in detail in a separate treatise. The author came upon the treatise by happenstance and employed its words on the vellum with a feeling more of despair than hope. On the following morning, the bookseller was found dead of a heart attack. And on the same evening, the linguist was also found dead.
In what way that strange and unreal language was invented, the author never knew. After waiting so long for the power that the parchment promised, he did not dare let the linguist live long enough to question him on the subject. Moreover, he convinced himself that the invention of the language was accidental or that many fictitious languages might have served if only he had known the necessary principle of their construction. He did not suspect that there existed any deeper and more subtle power than he had known in his long centuries on the earth. He certainly never suspected that a mere linguist could have been favored by a darker and more prevalent force than that taught to the author by the demons who gave him his ageless, nearly immortal life.
The parchment soon showed its worth. In testing its range, he induced a noble statesman to embarrass himself before a prominent gathering. He deprived the residents of a neighborhood of their reason for one day, in order that they might destroy their homes. He set fire to a stadium, threw down a satellite, and introduced a new disease to the ocean.
When so much was done and he was assured of his irresistible will, he sat to think of what he should do to the world and how it should find its end.
As I have said, he desired revenge. But upon whom or what that revenge should be enacted was beyond the recall of his memory. He knew hatred, the memory of having been beaten and put to shame. He knew a sensation like having been thrown down before the faces of angels. He bore the shadow of a memory cast over his days like the faint remembrance of some robbery or cheat. But to say of what he might have been robbed or by whom cheated, he could not answer. Only he turned his palsied vision to the window and accused the gaping sky.
All power necessary for revenge was his, but such revenge must be had upon all the world before he died with it. Then to take revenge on all things, he must know the purposes of all things and thwart them. All creatures that live are bound to living and perpetuating. Those, he determined, must die and see their deaths paraded before their living eyes, see themselves broken down bit by bit in slow decay. The very earth must know itself broken into fragments, disjointed from its orbit and scattered. And—if he had only known the words to write—he would have frozen each object of the world to its moment of ruin, and fixed it forever to immutable horror. But each thing occurred as it was written down, and he did not know how to kill the world forever without stranding himself in that same calamity. Perhaps, with less eagerness to destroy, he might have journeyed the universe to find a new home, where his days were not bleared with the corpse of his enemy. Or perhaps he would have found an enemy in all things and prepared for all worlds the same disaster.
Then, as I have told, the time came to inscribe the world’s death. His hand was slow and exquisite to the tale. There was time and length of vellum to interrupt the torture of the earth with insults and harangues, to record an unnamed disgust never meant to find posterity, unless other worlds possessed life and he had written This parchment is indestructible. As it was, all that remains of his enmity was recorded in the observations of men, the drafts of his maledictions in notebooks and the stern impression of his words driven through the vellum to the blotter as his fury increased.
We may suppose that he enjoyed his afternoon, while airplanes were stopped in their aerial tracks and men stayed trapped in their motions, half risen from bed. On that day, he produced a spectacle to put all men in a unified and equal suffering. Nor were they spared by the thought of their solidarity in Hell, but all were made to see all others as the cause of horror and hate them for it. A woman saw men wreck their love upon their lusts, and a son saw his hopes shattered by his mother’s wants. The very infant was goaded by abandonment, to assure the author that no enemy would escape, however cloaked his form in innocence.
All terrors were given to all, and every object was sick at heart. The best hopes of men were exhumed and betrayed in effigy. The world was tortured man by man, stone by stone; and even every thought was alone, accused by each that followed after.
In time, the author paused, seeing no more to be done. His gall was spent in clouds of sulphur, and the wind was dead with it. The sun was nearly black with the murder of the light; and not even a blade of grass dreamed to grow again. Light and life remained scarcely to animate his hand and eye before the page.
The last torment was yet undone. The stroke to kill the world was well in hand, but he thought to let it hope awhile again and die with its final thwarted thought.
So he wrote: Let the world be free and men rise as before.
It was done. A man rose from bed with the reflections of remembered horror still standing in his eyes like cataracts. An elevator continued on its ordinary course while its shaft echoed with the screams of passengers. And all motions went their way, but with prior thoughts and actions interrupted by terrified remembrance. So also the planes went their way, in sound mechanical service but prey to the operation of disordered men. It is scarcely a surprise that some of these did not return to safe landing but crashed in panic to the ground, where many innocent people lost their lives together with one man who was unequivocally guilty. His home was burned and he also was destroyed. Hardly any article escaped the fire of jet fuel but, through strange caprice of chance, a few notebooks and a blotter impressed with layered lines of writing. Such few scraps as those, together with the remembered observations of men, are all that truly substantiate this account, if posterity will believe it. |
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