. . .
“Tell me the truth,” says Lucy.
She is pleading.
“Tell me the truth, human scumbag?”
But he doesn’t. He just stands there.
Finally she makes a spitting noise, an angry noise, and she leaves him there, him and his Bertram Gulley, who is quietly and glitteringly growing cold.
– 7 –
It is amazing to Tom how much that hurts him. It is a ruthless, amazing cruelty that somewhere between hating Bertram Gulley with every fiber of his being and having to be his corpse’s discoverer, he’s somehow managed to forgive and even — care about — the man.
In the face of Bertram’s dead eyes he is empty; loathing drains itself like a sieve.
There is only —
This was there, and then it is gone.
He finds himself kneeling over the corpse again, some time later. He isn’t really sure what he’s been doing. . . . Staring.
There was a fire even in Bertram Gulley. There was a thing there that was sacred.
There was a purpose, however awful, and it was flowing in him; but it does not flow in him now.
Tom tries to wake the secret fire in him, the light that danced in him once, the insight, the power, tries to cadge his mind into spitting forth the secrets to wake the dead. He presses his hand into Bertram Gulley’s shoulder, he stares at the half a human and the half a golden face, and he cries out, Rise up, Bertram Gulley!
No light takes life in the eyes of Bertram Gulley. Tom’s sudden life-wroth does not contage.
He sits back.
He is disconsolate.
. . .
After a while he calls Mr. Gulley. He tells him what’s happened. Someone comes by and picks up Bertram’s corpse.
“I won’t invite you by,” says Mr. Gulley. “For one thing, there’s a giant wolf.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But,” says Mr. Gulley, “my boy’d kill and eat me if he found out I let you starve. So tell me if you need anything. All right?”
“Kill,” says Tom, “and eat you. That’s very funny, sir.”
Mr. Gulley’s eyes shutter.
“I mean, what kind of man has to go around all the time,” says Tom, “desperately frightened that he’ll be eaten by his wriggly puppy, or by his son?”
“Just call,” says Mr. Gulley. “Anywhere Lethal. We’ll help you.”
And departs.
– 8 –
It has all roused and awakened too many memories.
He had been something great; now he is simply Tom. He had been the hope and the doom of the future. Now — he’s the milliner’s orphan, dwelling in a muck of half-finished hats.
He dwells on the awfulness of it. He is surrounded by a gloom like a great dark cloud. He rejects his friends and his own value and he goes to sit alone on some high peak in the cemetery of the hats. Ragged felt flutters all around him. The wind tosses about his hair.
He rocks in frustration.
He cries until the sky opens up to make a mush of the hats around him and add its water to his tears.
“Why?” he says.
Why can’t I wake the dead?
Where went the science? Where went the confidence? Where went the Tom that could do anything, that could handle anything, that could make rocket ships and have adventures and dream great dreams in the mortal world?
He exaggerates his past glories and he deprecates the life he’s been living since.
He rejects the idea that there were seeds of sorrow and self-loathing in the young science adventurer, or that he’s learned anything worth learning from living an ordinary life as a milliner’s adopted son.
He grasps at the stuff of the hats. He massages in it with his hands, gropes the hat cemetery one supposes, as if by kneading dead hats he could grasp the stuff of an idea, as if somewhere in the detritus of the cemetery he could find the spark that he had lost.
It is bad to become a ophidian planet-inheritor, to warm the Earth, to remove the human infestation from it; but —
“Why?” he whispers.
It is bad to seek to wake the dead, to recover what has gone naturally; but —
“Why?”
It is bad to take it on yourself, a milliner’s boy, abandoned by the renegade alchemist that had raised you, to save or kill the world, but —
He knows it. He knows it can’t be gone from him. He knows it can’t be that gone from him. He knows that on some level he must still be Tom, the science adventurer. If he were — if he were only not so scattered, so unfocused, so mortal, so bogged down by all these human emotions and human burps and hiccups and digestion and these eyes that only blink a single time. If he were only a snake again, or cold clean metal, or a hat, or some kind of living god —
If he could refine himself to a single flame —
. . .
There is lightning among the hats. It bursts a vein of drum-hats with a great repeating boom.
The wind whips at Tom Friedman. He stands and he nearly falls.
It is hurting in him. Need is choking him. Need and snot are choking him. Need and snot and the vapors of the rotting hats are choking him. He slips on the slippery slope of dead hats and comes down three feet further towards the ground. He clutches at rotten felt but the hats offer him no purchase, he is only sliding, covered in the mucilage of moist dead.
It is there with his face down among them that he sees it.
It is there that he understands it.
For a confused moment when he sees the blackness of piled hats it is like a shadow passing over his future; it is like a void opening to consume his head; his vision opens not into the hat pressed against his eyes but onto a dizzying immensity.
He is suffocating on it.
. . .
He is breathing through thick fabric, and of air redolent with the vapors of the hats. His chest heaves, rises and falls, but he takes in no air. He is struggling for breath like he is struggling for what is lost. His limbs begin to hum inside them, his vision prickles with the sparkling that is suffocation. He sucks it into him, airlessness like a great lump of starless night in his chest and in his thoughts; it is his body and not his mind that parses the situation first, that understands it, that overcomes him with its own cravings and drags him up onto hands and knees and hacks out a little more than a mouthful of dead hat.
. . .
Stars spin around the lump in his thoughts. They weave into great chains; they adhere; they sparkle.
Chaotic, unformed sensations pour in rivers along his arms and legs. His eyes flutter. He fills his abdomen with breath and locks it, holding it in against the heaving of his lungs. Growing through the chest of him like a black and branching tree —
He is still disoriented; forgive the synaesthesia of it —
He feels an idea.
. . .
It flowers in his mind. It pushes against the back of his eyes. He grapples with it. He struggles against it, scrabbling against the cemetery and the air around him, until the strenuous darkness resolves into a concept. The thoughts align into words. He speaks them, like the golden tracery of the stars around that lump of dark:
“I will make a lens.”
. . .
He is laughing now. It is heaving through him, that darkness that grew and opened in his lungs and through his chest has turned to mirth like base metal refining into gold. He is laughing as if the humor was a physical substance in him, as if he were choking on it and spitting it out. He is sifting through the hats again but now it is to connect with them, now he is fishing in them, holding them up, lifting them high like a roguish child.
“From this,” he says. “From this! I will make a lens!”
. . .
His pupils are vastly dilated. He is not sane. He has been breathing the vapors of the hats, and grief, and his own frustration. He is in dream-wroth now, in coherence-hunger, like a scientist obsessed with a half-glimpsed equation, a snake that is trying to fold itself into being, a poet sifting through their words. He is caught up in an avarice for sense; and finds it.
That is the trick of it. He has seen a true thing. He has chased the patterns of it, and found the edge of something magical.
He is a lens, and he shall make a lens; he shall refine himself through his own perceptions; take the thing in him that sees the world, turn it back on itself, see itself through itself, and onwards until the ending of the world; he will dream of dreams, and he will take his dreams and he will wear them like a hat.
He has seen something like what the old Tom might have seen.
He hunts the lowlands and the highlands of the hats.
. . .
It is bad to cut the heart from a bearskin hat. They are sacred! But he does it. He takes the core of it, turns it inside out, lets something — intangible, almost, like the sensibilities of a bear — rattle out to fill his hand.
It is bad to divide the peaches from the pears of a Carmen Miranda hat.
That hat will suffer forever, Tom!
Oh, Tom Friedman! It is bad!
Does he do this awful thing? report
. . .
He scours the graveyard. He takes the felt. He takes the fruit. But most of all he catches hold of the hat cemetery’s soul. He drags it in all its fierce reluctant unholiness towards incarnation. He bends it down, and he makes an enemy of it; or, well, more of a hat, really.
A . . . a something.
A lump of awkward black felt, covered all in the mucilage of dead hats; a rotten, filthy head-lump, to go atop his peak, to make squeamish those who look at him and slick up his lanky hair.
But around it, though —
Around it, spiraling, twining, pressing in against the darkness of it: a flicker of argent flame.
. . .
Tom staggers out of the hat cemetery like some awful warlock, or at least, cosplayer warlock; he wears ordinary clothes, for the most part, but they are tattered and covered in the threads and remnants of dead hats; he resembles a grave-robber with that layer of filth upon him, and atop him is an extraordinary thing.
What does it do for him?
Nothing.
No. Not nothing. Not quite. It does . . . a bit.
It is scarcely enough to refine him. It is a lump of dead hat-flesh. It is no work of genius, only the passing dream-wroth of a mediocre milliner — but it is not without some power.
He can feel it tuning him.
He closes his eyes and the weight of it on his temples, the spiral of power around it, the presence of death, the death of hats — he can feel his thoughts responding to it. It is tuning him. It is refining him, only a little, but it is refining him.
Where his thoughts flow in harmony with the science adventurer, the hat embellishes them; where he falls into discord with himself and his childhood dreams, the hat suffocates and drowns his mind.
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