Flying to Nowhere: A Tale Read Free Page A

understand how the stairs could continue for so long, or where they might lead. His left shoulder ached, as did the muscles of his shins and the front of his thighs. At times his right shoulder brushed against the circular containing wall of the stairway, and he knew that the descent was narrowing. It was also now less cool and the air less easy to breathe, the pleasant cellary mustiness succeeded by a rank metallic stench. But the stairs went on.
    And then there had come into the Abbot’s mind a vague image. It was less a mental embodiment of any ascertainable shape than a substantial, though imprecise, formulation of a sudden unwillingness to precipitate himself further down that winding stone flight. He knew that he might put the image from his mind. He knew very well that in his automatic downward motion assisted by gravity and the concentration of darkness, he might ignore the image, refuse to yield to it.
    But there was something about the image that compelled him to yield. And he had yielded, succumbing to a sudden terror that brought out the hairs on his neck and beard and rooted him to the stone above the interminable stairway, his head spinning.
    On his way up he counted three thousand and eighty-seven steps before he reached his study door.
    This was the reason for his strained shoulder and his difficulty in getting to sleep. But curiously enough, having remembered the reason, the Abbot became drowsy again in contemplation of the unending stairs, and this time the troubling alertness of his fatigued muscles found an appropriate object in his own memory: thus he fell asleep dreaming not of the troublesome visitation of Vane but ofhis descent of the stairs that morning. In the dream it became hot, as though the stones had been lifted from a fire to warm a bed. And in his dream, hot as he was and totally gripped by fear as he passed the three-, the four-, the five-thousandth step, in his willed dream this time the Abbot did not stop.

4
    During the following day, Vane covered many sheets of paper in his forthright unhurried hand. Bells rang at the appointed hour for the divine offices, but Vane, who had attended matins after rising, and shaving his finely-sculpted chin as best he could in tepid water, ignored all calls to devotion and kept at his work. At midday he was brought two wooden bowls, one containing ewe’s milk with bread crumbled in it and the other boiled plantains. He ate some of this food without enthusiasm, while reading over the accounts he had made of the morning’s interviews. Flies buzzed in the pane of the one small window through which the sun streamed between the thick stone walls.
    Working in the relative coolness of his room all day, Vane did not suffer from the unusual heat. He noticed, though, that most of the novices who came to answer his questions were exhausted and listless. They spoke briefly and without interest, saying no more than was necessary to respond to his interrogation with a dutiful politeness and the appearance of honesty.
    In the afternoon he was visited by the Manciple, a lay brother of unpleasing appearance who said least of all. He had a squat heavy head, with dark eyebrows and patches of unshaven bristle on his jowls. He appeared to have almost no neck and kept his face entirely and fixedly on Vane’s, grinning hideously in what appeared to be an equal measure of stupidity and guile. To some questions he simply nodded or assented, when a statement of fact or choice of alternatives had in fact been required of him. At one point he ignored a question altogether and, glancing at the half-eaten bowls over which the flies now crawled in close abandon, asked if there was not some kind of food which Vane particularly craved and which might perhaps be obtained for him? Was he used to meat? They did not have much meat on the island, but every effort would be made to make their distinguished guest comfortable. He had only to give the word.
    Vane muttered some reply, put down