There can be no belief where there is no doubt.
There cannot be something where there is no nothing. This is far from secret knowledge, as if such knowledge could change anything. This is only how it seems, and seeming is everything.
The Spectacles in the Drawer
Last year at this time, perhaps on this very day, Plomb visited me at my home.
He always seemed to know when I had returned from my habitual travelling and always appeared uninvited on my doorstep. Although this former residence of mine was pathetically run-down, Plomb seemed to regard it as a kind of castle or fortress, always gazing up at its high ceilings as if he were witnessing its wonders for the first time. That day—a dim one, I think—he did not fail to do the same. Then we settled into one of the spacious though sparsely furnished rooms of my house.
“And how were your travels?” he asked, as if only in the spirit of polite conversation. I could see by his smile—an emulation of my own, no doubt—that he was glad to be back in my house and in my company. I smiled too and stood up.
Plomb, of course, stood up along with me, almost simultaneously with my own movements.
“Shall we go then?” I said. What a pest, I thought.
Our footsteps tapped a moderate time on the hard wooden floor leading to the stairway. We ascended to the second floor, which I left almost entirely empty, and then up a narrower stairway to the third floor. Although I had led him along this route several times before, I could see from his wandering eyes that, for him, every tendrilled swirl of wallpaper, every cobweb fluttering in the corners above, every stale draft of the house composed a suspenseful prelude to our destination. At the end of the third-floor hall there was a small wooden stairway, no more than a ladder, that led to an old storeroom where I kept certain things which I collected.
It was not by any means a spacious room, and its enclosed atmosphere was thickened, as Plomb would have emphasized, by its claustrophobic arrangement of tall cabinets, ceiling-high shelves, and various trunks and crates. This is simply how things worked out over a period of time. In any case, Plomb seemed to favor this state of affairs. “Ah, the room of secret mystery,” he said. “Where all your treasures are kept, all the raw wonders cached away.”
These treasures and wonders, as Plomb called them, were, I suppose, remarkable from a certain point of view. Plomb loved to go through all the old objects and articles, gathering together a lapful of curios and settling down on the dusty sofa at the center of this room. But it was the new items, whenever I returned from one of my protracted tours, that always took precedence in Plomb’s hierarchy of wonders. Thus, I immediately brought out the double-handled dagger with the single blade of polished stone. At first sight of the ceremonial object, Plomb held out the flat palms of his hands, and I placed this exotic device upon its rightful altar. “Who could have made such a thing?” he asked, though rhetorically. He expected no answer to his questions and possibly did not really desire any. And of course I offered no more elaborate an explanation than a simple smile. But how quickly, I noticed, the magic of that first fragment of “speechless wonder,” as he would say, lost its initial surge of fascination. How fast that glistening fog, which surrounded only him, dispersed to unveil a tedious clarity. I had to move faster.
“Here,” I said, my arm searching the shadows of an open wardrobe. “This should be worn when you handle that sacrificial artifact.” And I threw the robe about his shoulders, engulfing his smallish frame with a cyclone of strange patterns and colors. He admired himself in the mirror attached inside the door of the wardrobe. “Look at the robe in the mirror,” he practically shouted. “The designs are all turned around. How much stranger, how much better.” While he stood there glaring at himself, I relieved him of the dagger before he had a chance to do something careless. This left his hands free to raise themselves up to the dust-caked ceiling of the room, and to the dark gods of his imagination.
Gripping each handle of the dagger, I suddenly elevated it above his head, where I held it poised. In a few moments he started to giggle, then fell into spasms of sardonic hilarity. He stumbled over to the old sofa and collapsed upon its soft cushions. I followed, but when I reached his prostrate form it was not the pale-blue blade that I brought down upon his chest—it was simply a book, one of many I had put before him. His peaked legs created a lectern on which he rested the huge volume, propping it securely as he began turning the stiff crackling pages. The sound seemed to absorb him as much as the sight of a language he could not even name let alone comprehend.
“The lost grimoire of the Abbot of Tine,” he giggled. “Transcribed in the language of—”
“A wild guess,” I interjected. “And a wrong one.”
“Then the forbidden Psalms of the Silent. The book without an author.”
“Without a living author, if you will recall what I told you about it. But you’re very wide of the mark.”
“Well, suppose you give me a hint,” he said with an impatience that surprised me. “Suppose—”
“But wouldn’t you prefer to guess at its wonders, Plomb?” I suggested encouragingly. Some moments of precarious silence passed.
“I suppose I would,” he finally answered, and to my relief. Then I watched him gorge his eyes on the inscrutable script of the ancient volume.
In truth, the mysteries of this Sacred Writ were among the most genuine of their kind, for it had never been my intention to dupe my disciple—as he justly thought of himself—with false secrets. But the secrets of such a book are not absolute: once they are known, they become relegated to a lesser sphere, which is that of the knower. Having lost the prestige they once enjoyed, these former secrets now function as tools in the excavation of still deeper ones which, in turn, will suffer the same corrosive fate. And this is the fate of all true secrets. Eventually the seeker may conclude—either through insight or sheer exhaustion—that this ruthless process is never-ending, that the mortification of one mystery after another has no terminus beyond that of the seeker’s own extinction. And how many still remain susceptible to the search? How many pursue it to the end of their days with undying hope of some ultimate revelation?
Better not to think in precise terms just how few the faithful are. More to the present point, it seems that Plomb was one of their infinitesimal number. And it was my intention to reduce that number by one.
The plan was simple: to feed Plomb’s hunger for mysterious sensations to the point of nausea … and beyond. The only thing to survive would be a gutful of shame and regret for a defunct passion.
As Plomb lay upon the sofa, ogling that stupid book, I moved toward a large cabinet whose several doors were composed of a tarnished metal grillwork framed by darkest wood. I opened one of these doors and exposed a number of shelves cluttered with books and odd objects. Upon one shelf, resting there as sole occupant, was a very white box.
It was no larger, as I mentally envision it, than a modest jewelry case. There were no markings on the box, except the fingerprints, or rather thumbprints, smearing its smooth white surface at its opposing edges and halfway along its length. There were no handles or embellishments of any kind; not even, at first sight, the thinnest of seams to indicate the level at which the lower part of the box met the upper part, or perhaps give away the existence of a drawer. I smiled a little at the mock intrigue of the object, then gripped it from either side, gently, and placed my thumbs precisely over the fresh thumbprints. I applied pressure with each thumb, and a shallow drawer popped open at the front of the box. As hoped, Plomb had been watching me as I went through these meaningless motions.
“What do you have there?” he asked.
“Patience, Plomb. You will see,” I answered while delicately removing two sparkling items from the drawer: one a small and silvery knife which very much resembled a razor-sharp letter opener, and the other a pair of old- fashioned wire-rimmed spectacles.
Plomb laid aside the now-boring book and sat up straight against the arm of the sofa. I sat down beside him and opened up the spectacles so that the stems were pointing toward his face. When he leaned forward, I slipped them on. “They’re only plain glass,” he said with a definite tone of disappointment. “Or a very weak prescription.” His eyes rolled about as he attempted to scrutinize what rested upon his own face. Without saying a word, I held up the little knife in front of him until he finally took notice of it. “Ahhhh,” he said, smiling.
“There’s more to it.” “Of course there is,” I said, gently twirling the steely blade before his fascinated eyes. “Now hold out your palm, just like that. Good, good. You won’t even feel this, completely harmless. Now,” I instructed him, “keep watching that tiny red trickle.
