Little, Big

Call Them Doors

“Paracelsus is of the opinion,”- Dr. Bramble told the theosophists, “that the universe is crowded with powers, spirits, who are not quite immaterial—whatever that means or meant, perhaps made of some finer, less tangible stuff than the ordinary world. They fill up the air and the water and so on; they surround us on every side, so that at our every movement” —he moved his long-fingered hand gently in the air, causing turmoil amid his pipesmoke—“we displace thousands.”

She sat by the door, just out of the light of a red-shaded lamp, bored or nervous or both; her cheek was in her palm and the lamp lit the dark down of her arms and turned it blond. Her eyes were deep and feral, and she had a single eyebrow—that is, it extended without a break across her nose, unplucked and thick. She didn’t look at him, or when she did didn’t see him.

“Nereids, dryads, sylphs, and salamanders is how Paracelsus divides them,” Dr. Bramble said. “That is to say (as we would express it) mermaids, elves, fairies, and goblins or imps. One class of spirit for each of the four elements—mermaids for the water, elves for the earth, fairies for the air, goblins for the fire. It is thus that we derive the common name for all such beings—‘elementals.’ Very regular and neat. Paracelsus had an orderly mind. It is not, however, true, based as it is on the common error—the old, the great error that underlies the whole history of our science—that there are these four elements, earth, air, fire, water, out of which the world is made. We know now of course that there are some ninety elements, and that the old four are not among them.”

There was a stirring at this among the more radical or Rosicrucian wing of the assembly, who still set great store by the Four, and Dr. Bramble, who desperately needed this appearance to be a success, gulped water from a goblet beside him, cleared his throat, and tried to march on to the more sensational or revelatory parts of his lecture. “The question is really,” he said “why, if the ‘elementals’ are not several kinds of being but only one, which I believe, why they manifest themselves in such various forms. That they do manifest themselves, ladies and gentlemen, is no longer open to doubt.” He looked meaningfully at his daughter, and many there did also; it was her experiences, after all, that lent Dr. Bramble’s notions what weight they had. She smiled, faintly, and seemed to contract beneath their gaze. “Now,” he said. “Collating the various experiences, both those told of in myth and fable and those more recent ones verifiable by investigation, we find that these elementals, while separable into two basic characters, can be any of several different sizes and (as we might put it) densities.

“The two distinct characters—the ethereal, beautiful, and elevated character on the one hand, and the impish, earthy, gnomelike character on the other, is in fact a sexual distinction. The sexes among these beings are much more distinct than among men.

“The differences observed in size is another matter. What are the differences? In their sylphlike or pixie manifestation they appear no bigger than a large insect, or a hummingbird; they are said to inhabit the woods, they are associated with flowers. Droll tales are spun of their spears of locust-thorns and their chariots made of nutshells drawn by dragonflies, and so on. In other instances, they appear to be a foot to three feet in height, wingless, fully-formed little men and women of more human habits. And there are fairy maidens who capture the hearts of, and can apparently lie with, humans, and who are the size of human maidens. And there are fairy warriors on great steeds, banshees and pookahs and ogres who are huge, larger by far than men.

“What is the explanation for this?

“The explanation is that the world inhabited by these beings is not the world we inhabit. It is another world entirely, and it is enclosed within this one; it is in a sense a universal retreating mirror image of this one, with a peculiar geography I can only describe as infundibular.” He paused for effect. “I mean by this that the other world is composed of a series of concentric rings, which as one penetrates deeper into the other world, grow larger. The further in you go, the bigger it gets. Each perimeter of this series of concentricities encloses a larger world within, until, at the center point, it is infinite. Or at least very very large.” He drank water again. As always when he began to explain it all, it began to leak away from him; the perfect clarity of it, the just-seizable perfect paradox of it, which sometimes rang like a hell within him, was so difficult— maybe, oh Lord, impossible—to express. The unmoved faces before him waited. “We men, you see, inhabit what is in fact the vastest outermost circle of the converse infundibulum which is the other world. Paracelsus is right: our every movement is accompanied by these beings, but we fail to perceive them not because they are intangible but because, out here, they are too small to be seen!

“Around the inner perimeter of this circle which is our daily world are many, many ways—call them doors— by which we can enter the next smaller, that is larger, circle of their world. Here the inhabitants appear the size of ghost-birds or errant candle-flames. This is our most common experience of them, because it is only through this first perimeter that most people ever pass, if at all. The next-innermost perimeter is smaller, and thus has fewer doors; it is therefore less likely anyone would step through by chance. There, the inhabitants will appear fairy- children or Little People, a manifestation correspondingly less often observed. And so on further within: the vast, inner circles where they grow to full size are so tiny that we step completely over them, constantly, in our daily lives, without knowing we do so, and never enter there at all—though it may be that in the old heroic age, access there was easier, and so we have the many tales of deeds done there. And lastly, the vastest circle, the infinity, the center point—Faery, ladies and gentlemen, where the heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea beyond sea and there is no end to possibility—why that circle is so tiny it has no door at all.”

He sat, spent. “Now.” He put his dead pipe between his teeth. “Before I proceed to certain evidences, certain demonstrations, mathematical and topographical” —he patted a messy pile of papers and place-marked books beside him—“you should know that there are individuals to whom it is given to be able to penetrate at will, or nearly, the small worlds I have discussed. If you require firsthand evidence of the general propositions I have laid down, my daughter Miss Violet Bramble…”

The company, murmuring (it was this they had come for), turned toward where Violet sat in the light of the red-shaded lamp.

The girl was gone.

No End to Possibility

It was Drinkwater who found her, huddled on the landing of the stairs that led up from the Society’s rooms to a lawyer’s office on the next floor. She didn’t stir as he climbed toward her, only her eyes moved, searching him. When he moved to light the gas above her, she touched his shin: “Don’t.”

“Are you ill?”

“No.”

“Afraid?”

She didn’t answer. He sat down beside her and took her hand. “Now, my child,” he said paternally, hut felt a thrill as though some current ran through her hand to his. “They don’t want to hurt you, you know, they won’t badger you…”

“I am not,” she said slowly, “a circus show.”

“No.” How old could she be, to have to live so—fifteen, sixteen? Closer to her now, he could see that she was weeping softly; big tears formed in the dark pools of her eyes, trembled at the thick lashes, and tumbled one by one down her cheek.

“I feel so sorry for him, He hates to do this to me and yet he does it. It’s because we’re desperate.” She said it quite simply, as though she had said “It’s because we’re English.” She hadn’t released his hand; perhaps she hadn’t noticed it.

“Let me help.” That had sprung to his lips, but he felt any choice about her was anyway beyond him; the two years of vain struggle that lay between the twilight he saw her in the apple tree and now seemed to shrivel into a mote and blow away. He must protect her; he would take her away, somewhere safe, somewhere… She would say nothing further, and he could not; he knew that his well-built life, masoned and furnished over forty careful