Bone Pattern

A Lead- September 25, 2014

I am still working my way through Tainted Violets.  Today, I went and sat in the basement again with August and Gwendolyn.  He sat at his desk, paging through volumes stacked next to him, writing in a ledger, and rising frequently to pick his adoptive daughter up from the rug to talk to her.  I was allowed to sit in a chair at the edge of the rug she played on and tickle her with my sock feet.  But soon, as I fell into the book again, I forgot she was there.  

The book is strange, still.  A dream rising from richly patterned earth.  It is less an instructional text than poem to pull you into a certain headspace.  A long, and sprawling meditation.  The kind of thing that you fall into and do not rise from until hours have passed and a baby is pulling on your toes.  It will not tell you how to do things.  It will do things do you.

But, the point is, it still refers to other works.  Tainted Violets is not the only work of its kind, nor is it the first.  August says it is actually a minor text, beginning to be eclipsed by newer efforts of its type.  It refers to someone called Ashley Numinous.  A pseudonym, clearly, but enought to ask about.  They wrote a book, well, a pamphlet called Shroud.  August says it is harder to find even than Tainted Violets.  But it sounded familiar.  It seemed to me that I had seen something similar.  

I almost ran home to find it.

It was in the stack of letters that I had plundered from Fisher's hole.  The letters that I have been posting here.  It was such a slim little volume, I didn't realize it was in there when I swept them up.  I noticed it later, of course, when I was sorting through and trying to figure out what all I had.  A soft cover volume, bound with black ribbon.  It's only about twenty pages long.  Inside the front cover is a pencil sketch.  It shows a pattern all too familiar too me.  My eyes fell upon it, and then through it into memory.  It shows the design of the bones in the hollow earth beneath Fisher's hoard.

I saw that drawing and the bones rose in my mind.  Came up to the surface like a corpse bobbing to the surface of a lake.  Once more I was pinned by the empty gaze at the center of the winding bones.  I closed my eyes and the pattern writhed over the insides of my eyelids, bones wrapping themselves around each other.  The pattern in my mind commenced a stuttering waltz in my mind.  An empty space within my mind opened and something focused itself on me.  I can feel it watching even now.

When I opened my eyes, night had fallen.  My mouth was dry and my head ached.  Hours have slipped away from me, unnoticed while I watched the empty eye and it watched me.

I had almost forgotten that gaping hollow in the earth.  I mean, I thought about it, but I didn't dwell upon the image.  I was thinking about Fisher himself, and his perfect sleeping face, about Wayland and the places he might show me.  Or even about the Weaver, and the long gash across her body.  I want to know what Fisher did, of course, but I thought to look at rumor and history.  I thought to find my answer in Tainted Violets.  I still hope to find it in Shroud.  

But I thought it would consist of words on a page.  Of dry instructions with a clear objective.  Like a DIY project on the internet.  

I didn't realize it would consist of something that will reach out and claim me.

Shroud sits in my lap as I type this.  Closed.  I pressed hard on the spine when I closed it, creasing it into place again.  My mouth is still dry.  I have not even begun to read yet.

In a moment, I will open the book again and I will turn past the inside cover and its pencil echo of the bones beneath the street.  I will gather my courage and I will read.  Fisher must have read this book, to do what he did.  It must give me some sort of an answer.

I am prepared.