The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

ENCHANTMENT by Elizabeth Emmett

No matter how indistinct the boundary between fantasy and science fiction, there are clearly defined areas on either side —and this story is undoubtedly “pure fantasy,” quite outside the limits of what I ordinarily call “SF” . . .

When she first saw the house, the spell of April lay upon it. Rain had changed to mist during the long drive. At journey’s end the sun was breaking through the clouds, and the house, still moist as from a morning bath, stood exposed before her, draped in green ivy.

She pulled the car to an abrupt halt. That castlelike structure had no more place in an American setting than Pan in its groves and woods; and yet, at the end of a drive through woods silent except for woodland sounds, it seemed as natural as the white spire of a Baptist church in a New England village.

While she stared, a gnarled and sourish-looking man appeared. She put the car in motion and drove to the entrance. He came forward with a gesture of hand to grizzled head. “You’ll be Miss Reed, no doubt?”

He took her bags, and she followed him into the house where she expected to spend several weeks alone, except for this caretaker and his wife. She had felt little curiosity as to what sort of place she was coming to. An old man had died, and among his assets was a library. The executor of the estate had sought a librarian with the proper credentials for cataloguing it before putting it up for sale. She had got the job.

Where she worked never mattered much. Regardless of what place she was in she would always be slightly out of place. To her, books were kinder than life. She found her acquaintances, forged her friendships among the people created by man instead of by God.

Never, however, had she worked in a castle. Small though it might seem in association with the word, it’s empty rooms might by their very silence prove distracting.

The living room was a joy forever. She could look down upon it as she worked in the book-lined gallery that swept above it on two sides. If she paused in her work, she had but to swing her chair and see, reflected in a huge mirror below, the terrace upon which the living room opened, and beyond the terrace a world occupied only by nature.

She had been there several days, making a preliminary survey of the library, before she climbed the four flights of stone steps to the tower. The person who came down was not the same person who went up.

At first she thought it was the river that worked the transformation. Seen from the tower, it might have been time, without beginning and without end, flowing from and to eternity. To watch it was like being hypnotized, surrendering the mind to the river as a swimmer might surrender the body. On and on, her mind drifted in musing such as she rarely had allowed it, because she could not afford the habit. Suddenly she became aware that at some point she had left the river and was on the verge of a strange country.

The complaint of aching feet brought her back to a realization that she had been standing an unconscionably long time. And with reality came a feeling of desolation such as Eve must have felt when looking back at the Eden from which she had been expelled.

I don’t believe opium ever wafted anyone into a greater state of happiness, she thought as she went slowly, reluctantly down the stairs.

The next day she came upon a privately printed book. Its one illustration showed a winged animal of unidentifiable species, bearing a shadowy something upon its back as it plunged through waves of mist. Its destination was Ultima Thule, a region that, as she saw as soon as she began to read, made Olympus seem little better than a county fair for the gods, and the Elysian Fields but a country club for poets. This was paradise, without God, without cherub or seraph, without recording angel to grant permit for entry. One laid the body aside as one might lay aside clothes preparatory to bathing; but she gathered that it took superhuman effort for the self, thus stripped, to breast the waves or surmount the barriers that intervened between vision and attainment.

Reluctantly she laid the book aside and resolutely she turned to work. But something tapped persistently at her mind for notice. She picked up the book and read on its cover, Ultima Thule by Thomas Wentworth Woods.

Thomas Woods was the man whose library had brought her to this place of solitude. From that high tower his eyes, too, must have watched the river which might be time flowing on to eternity. From that tower too—

She could not get her mind back to cataloguing books. She carried a chair up the four flights of stairs and placed it in front of one of the windows, deeply recessed in the thick walls of stone. She spent the morning there reading the book and thinking about it, feeling the presence of Thomas Woods, who had put such terribly beautiful visions on paper. While reading, she was tantalized by the feeling that its meaning escaped her even while it enthralled and frightened her. It represented no Faustlike deal with Satan; yet it recognized no deity beyond that of self. What self did, it did unaided, even to creating paradise. But when she laid the book aside and let her mind drift with the river, the meaning of the words became crystal clear—until something again called her back to reality.

The noon hour was nearly over. Like one stealing from a liaison, she made her way down softly, carefully preventing her shoes from clicking against stone. She shrank from the thought that anyone should guess that all the morning she had been neglecting work for an excursion into what was little more than poppy-land.

That projected a thought—had Thomas Woods been an opium addict? It was disclaimed by the tart second question, Am I? After luncheon she returned to the tower to test the experiment of trying to maintain consciousness of her own practical personality while crossing the borderland between reality and nonreality.

She found that the latter state was preceded by a slow transformation of the outward sense—in somewhat the same manner as the sky, with its drifting clouds and dying splendor of sunset, seems to become the sea with islands shaping and reshaping, and colors paling or deepening as they merge. Gradually the scene she looked upon became something fascinatingly terrifying, because its beauty was like nothing she had ever seen before. Then came complete submergence of mind until brought back to earth by some disturbance, probably a manifestation of physical discomfort. And there was left memory only of ecstasy and a craving to recapture it.

One day, while in the preliminary state so carefully observed, she heard steps. Was the caretaker spying on her? Her guilty conscience had suggested that he and his wife knew that she was not spending much time in the library. The steps ceased. Had she imagined them? Probably—but she ought to be fortified with material at hand to give the appearance of working, if necessary. Next morning she summoned the caretaker.

“The light is so much better in the tower; I think I will take up some books to work on. Can you bring a table there for me?”

The air in the tower was wonderful. Its peculiar ozone struck her for the first time as she surveyed her sanctuary. Here she would work. She sat down by the table which had been placed in front of a window more highly vaulted than the others and broader at the base. It had a platformlike step in front of it.

She resolutely set to work, but she found that whenever she looked up, there was something tantalizing about the view, cut off by the deep embrasures at just a point where the scenery seemed to verge with a lovelier blue. Irresistibly she was led to the broad step. Irresistibly she mounted it. The window ledge, unlike the other, was wide enough as well as broad enough to sit on comfortably. Turned up against each wall were thickly padded mats. She tipped them down and had a cushioned seat.

She closed her eyes and, with the shallow breathing that she was always a little conscious of in the tower, drank in the ozone that brought reward exceeding that of nepenthe. She did not sleep. Yet she seemed to return to reality as from a dream and with the feeling that she had been roused therefrom by a sound. She sat erect, listening. There were steps on the stairs again slow and halting. Her first impulse was to get quickly to the table so as to seem at work if anybody came in; but all sound had ceased. She could not tell how long she sat there, looking straight at the entrance to the tower, with the feeling that she was looking right through someone standing there, while that somebody looked her over. And then she heard the steps again. Going down.

It’s the solitude, she thought. I ought to pack up and leave, return the money I have not earned and live at ease again with conscience.

But, instead of beginning straightway to transmute thought into decision, she turned her eyes toward the outside world—and almost swooned. It was like looking upon life on a different planet. Hills, vales, earth, sky and water were there. But they seemed to float in a thin transparent vapor, or to be mirrored in a lake that could be nothing but mirage. All her being tingled with ecstasy. Paradise could be no lovelier. Though there was no way by which she could reach the ethereal country, she felt as if she were the one human being to whom a glimpse of it had been vouchsafed.

But, disturbingly, a sentence from Thomas Woods’s book intruded as distinctly as if somebody had spoken it aloud. But he who sees paradise with earth-bound eyes sheds hope of future paradise, because it has been given him to know that there is no reality beyond what the mind mirrors.

So, Thomas Woods had sat in this window enclosure. What sort of man had he been? What had he looked like? She wished she knew more about him. She recalled the portrait opposite the gallery and how it drew the eye down when there, and upward when in the living room. It had impressed her, because it was the only painting in the room. Vaguely she had thought of it as something of such value that the eccentric—for everything proclaimed him that—had considered it worthy of the enhancement of solitariness. Could he have assigned a portrait of himself to such distinction?

She went downstairs to the gallery and looked across to the full-length portrait. The face was not remarkable; but the total effect of the painting was one of indestructible vitality.

She questioned the caretaker when he brought her lunch.

“That’s a portrait of Mr. Woods, I suppose,” she said.

He turned about, his face transfixed with astonishment that then gave way to sullenness. “Are you trying a joke on me?” he asked.

“A joke? Why should I?”

He gave her a long, curious look. “Do you mean to say you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

He did not answer that. “No, it’s not the master,” he said and went out.

She worked in the library the rest of the day. One of my few days of honest work, she thought; for she extended her labors so far into the evening that the late beginning was made up for. She lingered on, even after she had reached a point of tiredness that made meticulous work impossible. She sought a book to read, but was conscious of eyestrain and dared not ignore it. Yet she still did not want to go to bed. Her first reaction to the bedroom had been recoil from the impression of a cell—as if one were supposed to atone in a room of austerity for the sensuous pleasure afforded by other rooms. The feeling had retreated in the succession of nights; but now it advanced again, and she thought of the thick stone walls as of a tomb. The smallness of the room, the pale light which the deeply recessed window admitted during day, the starkly bright electric light that seemed to strive to push back walls that pressed in upon the narrow bed and strictly necessary furniture, gave her a feeling that when she closed the door she was shutting herself forever away from life.

Nevertheless she went along the gallery to her room. She switched on the light and undressed; but in spite of mental fatigue, her mind was restless. She put on a dressing gown and turned back to the gallery. A pale radiance flowed over it, drifting upward from the big room below, which was so clearly, though softly, illuminated that every chair, table and everything at floor level stood out as distinctly as in daytime. And still the light poured in through the French windows that opened upon the terrace. With the light on, she had not noticed that the moon was rising; and now, with moonlight flooding the room below, she felt as if floating on a silvery sea from which she had just risen. Higher and brighter the light rose. Looking across the gallery, she saw the portrait, transfigured until the ordinarily good-looking face seemed of unearthly beauty.

Almost in the same breath came gladness that she was wearing the rose-colored gown—more becoming than any of her dresses—and a thud of pain that he could not see her and would not notice her if he could. She could not bear the ache of the ifs that pushed between them—if he could arise from the dead, if she could discard ten years and match youth with youth, if he could come down from the frame, if she could be transformed into an Isolde, in place of a person that no one looked at twice, provided the disfigured side of her face was turned away.

She was tired. The moonlight had grown too bright and too cold. She went back to her bedroom, turned off the light, threw the rose-colored gown across a chair and got into bed. Here the moonlight was reduced. It gave a sense of warmth where it stretched across the rose-colored gown. A lethargy settled over her, and she felt herself sinking into a great emptiness.

She awoke shaking, drenched with a strange, sweet terror. There was light still in the room, but of a faintly opalescent tinge that merged with shadows, so that everything was indistinct. Some sickly thought about a waning moon entered her mind, but a line of Turgenev washed it away, “In the garden the nightingale was singing his last song before the dawn.” Listen.... Yes, a bird was singing, but not a nightingale. Dawn had emerged, wan and weak, from the womb of night.

Would she ever dare to sleep again? For in her sleep she had been ravished, in all the various meanings of that word. All her ifs had been bowled over like tenpins by a bowl from the hand of a crack player. The dead had risen. The young man had descended from the frame. Like a strip-teaser, she had tossed off the years one by one until she lay clothed only in the soft flesh of a few years past twenty. He had looked at her and had found her desirable.

She could feel a flush spread over the whole surface of her body. For a moment or two she lay relaxed with memory; but another fit of shivering seized her. She roused to a sense that the room was icy.

I’m sick. Let’s face it. I’m a sick woman. It’s the solitude. I’ve never been alone like this before. But truth interrupted to say that there had always been a sense of somebody close at hand. Closer in every way than the caretaker and his wife—too close, maybe. And though once she would have smiled at the implication of that, she now shivered again and sighed.

Resolutely she got up. She would make some toast and coffee and get to work again. She would work without stint until she could conscientiously say that she had earned money already received and then she would resign.

Braced by the coffee, she started for the galley; but on impulse, wrapped in the cloak that the morning chill made necessary, she decided to take a stroll on the terrace, which would probably be warmer than the house.

The rising sun told that the day would be warm—one of those days when a haze hung over the river, one of those days when she loved to sit and dream, or feel, because it was a feeling of reality into which she slipped, shaking off a world of which she had no part.

Resolutely she squared her shoulders and went in. But when she came to her desk in the gallery, she decided that it was not yet light enough to work. She might as well go up to the tower until the day was full-born.

The tower was shadowy. But day breaking over the river would be all the more impressive with a twilight gloom at her back. And then she felt the blood chill. She reached a chair by the table, sat down and lowered her head to her knees, trying at the same time to raise her eyes sufficiently to keep the window in view.

If he made one move toward her, she would scream; and once started, she believed she never would stop. When the faintness had passed and slowly she straightened, there was nobody in the room. She thought the daylight advanced with unusual rapidity. Light streamed through the window, giving it a borrowed effect of stained glass. Though she could see that the window seat was unoccupied, she had but to close her eyes to see him clearly again. A gnomelike man with a slit lip, with face seamed and pitted, with nose awry, with eyes that— Gradually she saw only the eyes and, seeing them, felt that she had seen all the sorrows of the world. Compassion streamed over her, agonizing regret that, by the look of horror, fear and abhorrence, she had added her bit to his weight of sorrow. Her own misfortune, her cheek stained with an ugly birthmark, told her something of what it must be like to be condemned to go through life like that, to know that women turned away in revulsion, that children probably hid from him in fright, that even men...

The caretaker must have seen him. How else could he have got in? But when she spoke to him about it, he said no, of course not. No one had entered, unless he came through the French door she had left unlocked.

“Unless he slipped through the keyhole!” she said with nerve-racked asperity. “How could he have got through the door without my seeing him, and up to the tower ahead of me?”

But when he asked, with a skeptical look, what sort of man he was, she found herself tongue-tied. She could not bear to say, “The most repulsive-looking man in the world.” When he said something about the tower’s being dim at so early an hour, she agreed and turned away.

By noon she was wondering if she really had seen anyone. If not, she was definitely ill—not only because she was having hallucinations but because her mind could create such a fearful one. At that thought she felt the eyes reproach her and was torn with longing to assuage the wound.

She kept away from the tower all day, though desire to go there, to recapture the old trancelike rapture, rasped her nerves like the craving for dope.

As she surveyed the work she had done, she saw that through some intense driving power she had accomplished in half a day what would ordinarily have taken a day and a half. Her love of the work took possession of her again. She stretched back in her chair and closed her eyes, conscious for the first time that she was tired. She could see, could feel the river flowing by.

Bits of imagery from half-forgotten poems drifted through her mind; bits that conveyed only feebly the sense of the marvelous transformation that took shape as she looked out, letting her gaze project itself farther and farther toward infinity. She jerked out of an uncomfortable sleep; coming back to reality with the fretfulness of a child.

It was the caretaker’s wife, with an embarrassed and worried look upon her face. “Do you mind if I speak a bit that’s in my mind, Miss Reed?”

“Of course not. What’s worrying you?”

“You, if you don’t mind my saying so. I’ll wager you weigh fifteen pounds less than the day you came. You haven’t seen a human being to speak to except Sam and me. It’s not good to stick to work as you do.”

Mrs. Brown was worried about her—about anything more than her thinness? Had she been doing queer things?

“If I were you I’d change over to the inn for the nights. Lord, nothing would tempt me to sleep up here all by myself. I’d have bats in my belfry if I so much as tried it.”

She took a deep breath. Fresh air seemed to flow over her. She had not faced the thought of night because she lacked the courage, but knew that when the time comes, a person can usually face what can’t be avoided. But to be free of nights here while reveling in the days!

“I like the idea of the inn. I’ll admit that the bedroom is somewhat damp and chilly.” There, she had got by that nicely. Both of them relaxed. “Do you suppose I can get a room at such short notice?”

“At this time of the year, yes. Shall I telephone?”

“If you will be so kind.”

She awoke from a night of dreamless sleep, with a sense of buoyancy that made her smile at thought of sickness. Thin, yes. Maybe if she had both breakfast and dinner at the inn she’d plump up a bit. Even though she had no desire to make acquaintances, yet eating in the company of others might give food a more savory taste.

Again she settled down to work, punishing her mind with mental arithmetic, which it hated, whenever it teased for just one look from the tower, just one glimpse of paradise. Not until five o’clock, she said firmly.

It was in the middle of the afternoon that she came across the gray notebook, in a large book on the bottom shelf—a dingy book with an unprepossessing title. Its leaves had been hollowed out. There were thin-papered letters under the notebook. She glanced at them first. Her instinctive disquiet at reading what the first line revealed to be love letters eased as she proceeded. They were so lyrical, so intense, so impassioned, they became at once associated with the loves that have become public property.

Her dream came vividly back to her and, putting a hand over the birthmark, she let the same sweet terror it had produced sweep over her again. But the letters puzzled her. Though clearly both sides of a correspondence, all were in the same handwriting—a script in which each letter was as perfect as if typewritten, and so small that, without that perfection, it would have been almost undecipherable.

The notebook was in the same handwriting; and that was so small and at times so cryptographic, through abbreviations, that reading it was as if one with a smattering of a foreign language were trying to translate it. It seemed to be a random jotting down of notes. She saw a familiar sentence, “He who has seen paradise with earth-bound eyes.” That verified the book as Thomas Woods’s—probably the notes from which he had put his book together.

But a few pages beyond she came upon, “Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires. Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires. Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires.” Over and over the phrase was repeated down the length of two pages, the final phrase sputtering out in a spatter of blots, as if the writer had reached the end of endurance.

A magnifying glass was needed for the fine writing. Instead of going up to the tower when her day’s work was over, she would drive into town and buy a glass.

The glass showed that the book was a repository for flashing thoughts, a writer’s net to catch each stirring fancy. She found other bits from Ultima Thule. She came across a description of her—of their—paradise that made her tremble. She recognized it even from the first line, “Across the river....” His imagery produced that same sense of shallow breathing that a long stay in the tower produced—the same sense of expectancy of being about to take off from the earth.

A few pages beyond, she came across the first personal record, “I have engaged Vernon to paint my portrait.”

So! It was his portrait. The caretaker had lied. But why?

I haven’t quite decided what I want, except that everything about it must reflect strength, vitality, wholeness—like the god which man has created in his own image and which the inhuman mover of the universe must regard with sardonic glee.

What did he mean? A portrait without warts or blemishes? Evidently he had found a compliant painter. She had no scorn for such vanity when she remembered that if necessity called for her photograph, she turned the good side of her face toward the camera.

She could not bear to put the book down even when finished. It had enmeshed her in the same spell that the tower had cast upon her—even more, for with the book she had looked upon the land of fulfilled desires in company with one who had not merely looked, but had entered into a kingdom that stretched to whatever point of ravishing beauty the imagination could conceive. And his imagination had seemed to approach the infinite.

She was glad, a few days later, that will power had continued to prevail and keep her at work. Sticking to long hours, and with an almost superhuman energy, she had made up for considerable of her previous sloth when the executor of the estate appeared. But he had come, she learned, only to fulfill the obligation that a quarterly visit should be made to see that all the necessary things were being done for preservation of the place.

“What is to be done with it eventually?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing!”

“Nothing beyond keeping it in repairs and seeing that there are competent caretakers. He established a trust fund for that and to cover the taxes. Everything is to be kept exactly as he left it—except the library. The proceeds from the sale of that are to be added to the fund.”

A swiftly born desire was expressed aloud, “I wonder— if there’s no great urge for hurry—could I change the contract? Could we settle upon a price for the complete job and let me take my time doing it?”

“But wouldn’t that mean prolonging your stay here?”

“Would that matter? To anyone but the caretakers? I don’t think Mrs. Brown would mind. I am getting two meals at the inn and have only sandwiches for lunch, which I can get myself.”

“That’s all right. But aren’t you dreadfully lonely here? I should think you would be glad to get away from it.”

“I love it. There’s no place where I’d rather be.”

“Mr. Woods once said something like that—and added, ‘Now and hereafter.’ He occasionally said fanciful things like that, though he had a wonderfully acute mind.”

“Did Mr. Woods spend much of his life here?”

“Most of it. All of the last half of his life.”

“And his family?”

“He had none. His mother died when he was born, and his father a good many years ago. He was the only child.”

“Didn’t he ever marry?”

“Good grief! No!”

He stared at her with the same sort of astonishment that the caretaker had shown when she asked about the portrait. She asked about it again. “That’s a portrait of him when young, isn’t it?”

His mouth fell open. It seemed a long time before he spoke again. “Do you mean to say that you didn’t know about him?”

“Why should I?” She sounded snappish. “I never heard of him until I was engaged to catalogue the library. What was there about him that I should have heard?”

“He was—well, frankly, in olden days he would have been thought a monster.” He lowered his voice as if it were a subject not to be broached aloud. “He was frightful to look upon.”

“With a slit lip?”

“Why, yes. I thought you said—”

“Did he look like a little old gnome?”

“No. Well—er, yes, I suppose you might say he did in the final years. All of his hair came out, and he wasted away. But in his younger days his shoulders were massive —which made it all the worse in a way.”

“In what way?”

“By way of emphasizing his deformity. His legs—they stopped at the knees. His feet were where his kneecaps should have been.”

With a blanched face she almost shouted, “How can God do such cruel inhuman things?”

“I know. I always felt that way when I saw him.” He turned toward the portrait. “He nearly drove the artist wild about that. I don’t know just what he had in mind.”

“But I do. He commissioned the making of a shell appropriate for his personality.” The phrases came back to her, Nobody will recognize it as me, but nobody ever sees the real me. “What a hell on earth!” she said, choking on the words.

“It was, of course. And he had seventy-two years of it. And yet, although I never could bear to look directly at him—he had beautiful eyes, by the way, if you could forget the rest for a minute—yes, though I was uncomfortable in his presence, when I was out of it I felt a pygmy. Partly because I knew his mind was much better than mine. But also because his words carried over in memory; and he had the most moving voice I’ve ever heard. Well, stay on and do the work as you like. It might be some recompense to him if he could know that someone had the same feeling about the place that he had.”

She did not stir until the sound of a moving car faded into nothingness. Then, breathless with eagerness, she climbed the four flights of steps to the tower. It made no difference who shared it with her—the youth of the portrait or- the gnome of her hallucination. She even liked to think that the latter was beside her, that the sorrows of the world ceased to be reflected in his eyes as they led the way, while hers followed, to the land of fulfilled desires.

About the author:

(I pass this on, as I got it, after reading the story—JM)

Elizabeth Emmett was born in Rhode Island, in a Victorian home newly built by her English immigrant father. She came into a world made brilliant by the fall colors of New England’s flowering: 1883 was a year after Emerson and Longfellow died; nine years before Whitman and Whittier would follow; the heyday of William James, and the last decade of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Among the treasures of her past. Miss Emmett appears to value equally her mother’s Mayflower descent and her father’s English edition, three-volume, illustrated Shakespeare which, she says, “I still enjoy reading from more than any other copies.”

Miss Emmett submitted her first story to a magazine at the age of thirteen. Fifteen years later in 1911, she made her first sale, “for $35. Twenty-five, really, because the agent took ten as a minimum fee...” Since then, she has written and sold magazine verse, light articles, humor, history, a few short stories, and novels (“The Land He Loved,” “Secret in a Snuffbox”).

“Having always been deaf—or ‘hard of hearing’—” she writes with characteristic distaste for inaccuracy (in the name of euphemism or anything else), “I learned that whatever happiness I had must come from myself, books, garden, etc....” Modern medical technology makes the statement seem quaint; modern mores would likely supply “less a-social” refuges than books and garden.

The eventual hearing aid came (unfortunately?) “too late to get me into any part of social life, but there’s plenty at home to keep me both busy and interested. I do all the work, inside and out...” including mowing the lawn “with considerable cussing,” chasing rabbits and wood-chucks out of the garden which is “now going back to the wild state... I walk to the library and post office about twice a week, though old legs are beginning to rebel. And I loved walking as much as Thoreau did. Once in a great while I go on some short trip with a friend or relative. It was a trip to the ‘castle’ built by the actor William Gillette, in Connecticut, that started ‘Enchantment.’...”