They laughed, Brisden hardest of all.
'Well, let's not let it ruin the day,' said Doctor Hellman, pushing his chair back and rising.
They all stood and I followed their lead. Each of the men stepped up and shook my hand. I was not sure if it was a good thing that I did not pass through them. 'Good night,' they said as they left.
Anotine turned to me, and said, 'Come, Cley, it's late. There is a lot to do in the morning.' We followed the men down a corridor lined with arched window openings that led to a terrace. Once there, in the moonlight, they all went off in different directions.
I followed like a shadow behind Anotine, weaving somewhat from the effects of the Rose Ear Sweet. It felt good to be outside. The air was clear and filled with the mixing scents of various night blossoms that grew everywhere from planters built directly into the architecture.
We went down a wide stairway to another level, then turned left and passed an open-air hall of columns to the right of which was a pool, perfectly still, reflecting unfamiliar constellations. She walked slowly, stopping from time to time and staring up.
The place was an unraveling mystery, a series of terraces built at all different levels with rooms and halls and courtyards of every conceivable shape connected by long and short stairways. There were fountains and sculpture at different locations. I passed dozens of entrances without doors, windows without glass. Everything was open, dark, and perfectly quiet.
'Where is everyone?' I asked, as Anotine stopped beside a fountain to watch the arc of water falling from the breast of a stone pelican.
'Everyone?' she asked.
'The rest of the people who live in all of these rooms,' I said.
'It's just the four of us you met tonight, Cley,' she said.
'No others?' I asked.
'We are fairly sure there is someone in the tower, but I've never seen him,' she said, pointing over my shoulder.
I turned around and looked up. The height of it made me take a step back, and I came near to losing my balance. It rose more than a hundred feet above the terraced village that surrounded its base. The glass dome at the top of the brick structure glowed like a lighthouse beacon.
'The Panopticon,' she said. 'The term implies that we are being watched.'
'Are we?' I asked.
'Most definitely,' she said. 'I only wonder if what is being seen makes any difference.'
She began walking and said no more to me. We climbed a last set of steps and came to a series of lighted rooms. She led me through an open portico and an arched entrance.
The smooth walls of the room were whitewashed. It was furnished with only a bed, situated in a corner beneath a window opening, a brown rug, a small table, and a chair. A hall-way led off from the middle of the left wall of the room, and at the back there was another, larger window opening.
'You may sleep on the rug if you wish' said Anotine as she turned down the spire lamps so that their light was the equivalent of a single candle.
I walked to the back of the room and sat in the chair next to the table. From the shadows, I watched as she sat on the bed and removed her shoes. When she stood and unhooked the straps of her dress, I realized that she was going to disrobe.
I coughed weakly to remind her of my presence.
She let the dress slip off her onto the floor, then turned and asked me if I had said something.
Her breasts were exposed, and I studied them closely as she leaned over to remove her underwear.
'No,' I replied, as she turned around and bent over to pick up the dress.
She tossed her garments down the hallway and turned to face me one more time. I took in her entire figure. Anotine smiled and said good night before lying down on her bed.
She slept atop the covers on her stomach with her legs apart, and the candle glow of the spire lamps dissolved the dark enough for me to see everything. I was somewhat beyond the perpendicular as I sat there staring. There were two things I repeated in my thoughts: 'Nothing is real here,' and 'Everything means something.'
I finally tore myself away from the sight of Anotine by standing and staring out the back window. With the help of the moon and the dome of the Panopticon, I was able to see out across a field that lay below the window. The grassy expanse was bounded by a wood which seemed to encircle the village as the village appeared to encircle the tower. I was exhausted, but I decided to take a walk and think through the complications of my quest. There was a moment of trepidation in which I wondered if I should ask permission of my host to go out, but I reasoned that it would be a shame to wake her. Besides, there was a limit to how far I could wander, seeing as we were on an island.
It took me the better part of an hour to traverse the maze of stairways that led to that field, but I was glad for the puzzle, hoping the concentration might clear my thoughts of Anotine's body. Finally, I ascended a long set of steps and, upon reaching the top, strode onto the grass. Although I should have been sleeping, I needed to see if Misrix's description of the island had been accurate.
The trees were almost perfectly straight, and the entire forest seemed so strategically laid out in a crisscrossing, geometric pattern, I was sure it must have been planted. Leaves fell around me in great numbers as I kept to a crude path that snaked through the shadows. I walked quickly, thinking that each one of the trees, even the leaves, could be a symbolic representation of one of Below's grand schemes. But when I touched the rough bark and smelled the sap, I could only think of them as devoid of anything but reality.
'Cley,' said a voice from within the dark outline of a tree.
I turned quickly, half-expecting to see the Mayor again. 'Who's there?' I said.
Nunnly, the engineer of useless machines, stepped forward so that his lean face and frame emerged from the shadows.
'Out for a walk?' he asked.
'Yes,' I said, unsure if I was supposed to be on my own.
'You are curious about the edge of the island, no doubt,' he said.
'I am,' I told him.
'How did you hear of it?' he asked.
'I can't recall.'
'Follow me, Cley,' he said, and started off ahead of me.
'You are lucky that you are Anotine's specimen and not Brisden's,' he said. 'The last one that old gasser had, he literally talked into a coma. We had to send the poor fellow back and request another one. By the time we took him to the chair in the parlor, he was extraordinarily dull, as if Brisden's babble had eaten his wits. Anotine, on the other hand, will do anything for her specimens.'
'She already has,' I said.
'That's the spirit,' he said.
We walked a few more paces, then Nunnly held up his arm, preventing me from going on.
'Do you hear it?' he asked.
Behind him, I could hear a strong wind and beneath that a very distant sound of waves.
I nodded.
'Don't get too close to the edge' he said. 'It's very dangerous now.' Then he lifted his hand and let me continue.
I walked up a small hill, and when I reached the top, I found myself staring out over the end of the island. There was a fallen tree next to me, which I leaned against as I tried to encompass the entirety of nothingness beneath us. Far below, through the trails of passing clouds, I could see the liquid-mercury ocean, shining a distant silver where the moon and the tower's brightness touched its surface. I felt a great rush of my blood as I stood there staring and wondered how glorious the fall would be from that height.
'Look down there,' said Nunnly, who, I just then noticed, had stepped up and was standing next to me. He was pointing to the very outline of the island.
'What is it?' I asked, searching for his meaning.
'The edge of the island,' he said. 'Brisden discovered a few weeks ago that it is slowly disintegrating. Close your eyes and listen carefully.'
I did as he said and tried to listen at a point between the wind and the far-off waves. 'I think I hear it,' I said.
'Now, look again,' he instructed.
Concentrating my sight on a jutting root just at the rim, I noticed, the way one might notice, with the proper focus, the hour hand of a clock moving, that it was almost imperceptibly diminishing in thickness. It seemed to come apart into tiny crumbs that did not fall but instead crackled into nothing.
'Is that bad?' I asked.
'Well,' said Nunnly, tapping a cigarette against the back of his wrist and leaning almost elegantly against the fallen tree, 'when you are on a disintegrating island, a mile above a sea of liquid mercury, I would consider that cause for a modicum of concern.'
'Do any of you know why it is happening?' I asked.
'No,' he said, striking a match, 'but Anotine has calculated that in a matter of a few weeks or so, we will have to worry about it while we are falling.'
'How long have you been here for?' I asked.
'Forever, it seems,' he said. 'We were all hired some time ago by a fellow none of us had actually met by the name of Drachton Below. Everything was done through correspondence which offered handsome payment for us to come here and do research in our particular fields. Since we have arrived, we haven't seen him. We keep working in good faith, but, my god, I wouldn't mind leaving at this point.'
'Where are you from?' I asked.
'I tell you, my head is so full of designs for machinery, I can hardly think of it. I vaguely recall having had a family before I arrived here, but I can no longer see their faces. That's why I come out into the wood at night, to try to remember. I experience all of the loneliness and loss, but for whom or what remains a mystery. I am beginning to wonder if I ever really knew.'
We left the edge of the island and walked back through the trees toward the village. Nunnly asked me about my own life and how I had been chosen to serve as a specimen. I told him I had been chosen for my good looks.
'You too,' he said, and laughed. 'You'll be interested to know that Doctor Hellman believes that neither we nor the island exists. Everything to him is dreams.'
