Sick Buildings (part 3 of 3)

I woke with a start in brilliant sunshine, momentarily blinded by its intensity, saw shapes resolve against the glare, recognised a vaulted roof, arched windows. With a sense of real panic I realised where I was: gallery three, just outside the door. I noticed Nina sitting by the wall.
“You’re enjoying this aren’t you?” I said.
“Not at all. If I’d known you wanted to stay up here, I’d have brought you a blanket.”
I struggled to my feet, expecting the migraine punch of a headache that never came, felt surprisingly clear-headed considering what I had inhaled.
“I may not be able to visualise what it is you’re experiencing,” she continued, “But I can tell when someone is withholding something. What are you not telling me?”
I thought for a moment, considered the implications of telling her, of finally getting it all off my chest.
“There was a woman,” I said finally.
“In the forest? Can you describe her?”
“Long hair. Chameleon suit. A Construct.”
“A Construct? Character-forms are rare aren’t they? What makes you so certain she was artificial?”
“She showed me her incept mark.”
“Do you remember what she had to say?”
“She hinted… no told me outright. My presence at the Watchman Reserve was part of an experiment. The message too, a deliberate act. The tribes knew what they were doing.”
“Is that what you fear?”
“What? Isn’t that what anyone fears? That they’re being manipulated, mislead?”
Nina shook her head. I saw her expression change.
“I understand that you want her have been real, desperately so, but you must recognise that you’re walking a path here. You must open yourself to other revelations, ignore the things that occur along the wayside, see where the trail leads.”
“Show me,” I said, “Open that room and show me now. Prove to me that I’m wrong.”
She hesitated, got up to fumble with her keys, swung the door wide without ceremony, making a point perhaps, emphasizing the trap of inverted thinking that I had fallen into.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw on the other side.
The room was empty of course, could only have been. Of the arboretum, there was no sign, only items discarded in redundancy: solitary pieces of furniture, piles of unused building materials, tarpaulins, all dusted in a fine confetti of salt dust and insect wings. The room was dilapidated, the walls crumbling in places to reveal bleached slats that protruded like exposed ribs. Only the glass ceiling remained, carving up the sky into rectangles of rapidly darkening blue.
How had she done it? It had to be a mechanism, a partition perhaps, dropped to hide a portion of the room, a hugely expensive addition, but do-able, that had to be the important thing, do-able, possible. I wondered how many of the other visions and happenings at Coatl Calli had less to do with psychological nuances and more to do with the theatrical trickery.
“Do you see now?” Nina whispered. There was no arrogance in her words, no sense that she had been right all along, only a soft sadness at my disappointment.
“It was here.”
I pushed past her out onto the torus, paced the circumference of it looking for other doors, found none, realised then that Amunet, whoever she was, had proved elusive once again.

It was all too easy to succumb to despondency, to retire to my room and spend the afternoon in self-imposed isolation whilst frustration took hold. The morning had worn me down. The notion that Coatl Calli was becoming a locked cipher, a maze of shifting realities, had been leaking into me all weekend like sunlight, like particularly insidious oil, and I was at an utter loss to understand it. There was still an element of doubt. I wondered if my trust in myself was that solid. Was that optimism? Was that something to hold on to?
At 17:30 I left my room, decided to attempt a reconciliation with the house, only too aware of the ambiguities that it presented.
In my absence Nina had arranged paraffin lamps on the terraces, turned the energy steeped throughout the day in the Solar Catheters towards Hurricane Lamps and Sempahore Runs, giving the house all the appearance of an island amidst darkness, a ship that had run aground.
I made my way down to the jetty, wanting nothing more than a space in which to think. I felt the night on my face, smelled the dry river-bed odours of salt and sand, found strange shapes in the dark where the outbuildings should have been. The house had become a puzzle box, an unfamiliar conundrum conspiring with the night to mislead the eyes.
A few lights still remained among the Fossil Towns. The tribes were launching fire-lanterns. I watched as they drifted skyward, rising rapidly on paraffin burners until extinguished or lost, indistinguishable from the gradually revealing stars.
”They say the lights are employed to escort the deceased into the spirit world.”
I turned, found Freya standing behind me. She sidled over, joined me on the edge of the jetty.
“There’s an internment taking place.” She muttered, “There was word that you’d left. Dendrick is convinced that you’re a reporter from Babel, come to expose us for what we are, come to find your story amongst the Bedlamites.”
“Dendrick is a fantasist,” I said, “Besides, I thought it was bad form to discuss other guests.”
She shrugged, “There are exceptions to every rule. Did you find what you were looking for this afternoon?”
She asked the question so abruptly that an answer momentarily escaped me.
“What? No.”
“I saw you up on the roof. Nina reported a system intrusion. I assume it was you, interrogating the house grid.”
I felt the flush of embarrassment, the discomfort of a schoolboy, caught red-handed. “You were following me?”
She shook her head, “Just taking an interest. Believe me, we’ve all done it, seen something that just had to be real, refused to believe otherwise.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“That’s the condition of staying at Coatl Calli. Those things that are glimpsed can only be transitory. What matters is not the shape of the vision, but the interpretation you place upon it. A liquid will always assume the shape of its container. You don’t want to get into a state where the opposite is true, the container shaped by what is contained. You don’t want to get lost in the forest.”
I felt a frisson of exhilaration, the quiver of recognition at her words, obviously used deliberately.
“What did you say?”
“You don’t want to become shaped by what you contain.”
“Before that?”
The look on Freya’s face told me that there had been an element of premeditation in what she said, a coded reference, a trigger designed to provoke. Was she in on this? Was that the answer? There was only one person who would tell me.

The night had changed irrevocably now, become spiced with secret knowledge, laced with promises and treaties that I feared would never be held to.
I took the stairs up to the galleries one at a time, pausing every second step to listen, to hear the house shifting, the galleries keening, to hear mechanisms sliding into place perhaps, whole configurations changing, heard nothing and then something – a soft shoe shuffle, a listing galleon groan, a lexicon of ancient timbers that called me as surely as someone calling my name aloud.
There could be no slowness now, no holding back, only a headlong rush for that room, to find the arboretum, to find Amunet before Nina, Freya, who knew how many others, snatched her away again.
The door was locked, fearfully solid in its frame. One kick was all it took to splinter the lock, to send the door flying wide. Somewhere below, I heard an alarm begin its shrill whine.
The room had changed again. Trees crowded the darkness, sensuous in their movements. I found her there, waiting, dressed in robes this time, with all the appearance of a priest, the acolyte that I had initially taken her for. Something in her countenance told me that this would be our final meeting, the concluding act of our little drama.
“Why? I said, was all I could say.
“It was the only way.” For her part she looked genuinely apologetic. Was it the moonlight, or was that a tear in her eye, a glint that looked set to overflow?
”You represent a rogue faction.” I said.
“An interested faction, working against them, working to spoil their plans, to ruin them utterly.”
“Plans? What plans? Who’s?” What she said was like a drug, an addiction, every hint leaving only a craving for more. “Who are you working for?”
“That I cannot say.”
I couldn’t help but notice the ambiguity.
“Can’t or won’t.”
“I am conversant in some ways, ignorant in others.” She said, “Every word spoken is a move against. This is not the time to name names, only a time to realise that an engagement has begun.”
I heard footsteps on the stairs then, getting closer every second, knew that there was little time remaining, that this was what it came down to, with much more still to discover and so little hope of it resolving.
“What would you have me do?” I said.
“Promise me one thing.”
“Anything. Just name it.”
“Promise me that you’ll remember, that you’ll keep the message fresh, that you’ll not close your eyes, not even for a second.”
“Of course,’ I nodded, but it was impossible not to, impossible not to focus on that perfect, too perfect, face; not to glance beyond at the blades of moonlight stabbing the trees, at the shadows advancing with bayonets drawn, impossible not to realise that my eyes were now heavier than ever, that there were two forests at Coatl Calli, one within and one even further within, contained like a stone within a peach, a part of the whole, only now revealing its full extent, only now allowing some sort of understanding.

I woke on the terrace, the burning, pink light of morning casting the momentary illusion that there was water out on the pan, an ocean, unfathomed and indistinct, the burden of drought upon the desert suddenly lifted.
I saw Nina, wrapped against the morning chill, her eyes hidden behind U.V glasses, two pools of silver.
“You’ve been out for several hours.” She said.
“The garden,” I muttered, “the woman.”
I felt the tug of something personal that could never be clawed back, the secret anguish of loss and regret.
“A dream.” She said, “One of the good ones. Why people are drawn here, the promise of revelation, the anticipation of more.”
I said nothing, hoped to savour instead the remnants that were already too much like embers in the dark, intangible and fragmentary, took pleasure from those fragments that I could remember clearly, the aspect of the message that had revealed itself, worked itself out like a splinter of bone, like a barb, no longer able to be contained.
“There’s a breakfast in the main plaza.” She continued, “You should come. There are people to meet.”
I nodded, made a sign that I would follow shortly, raised myself from the chair, turned towards the pan, thought I saw it then: the flicker of something I half recognised, a vestigial after-image that waited for the simplicity of a glance, for the carelessness of an indolent gaze, knew that it would remain indistinct, took that as my parting gift.