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“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Alice didn’t think that proved it at all.
~~~
There was a table set out under a tree in front of the country house, and Henry and Richard were having scotch at it. The table was a large one, but the pair was crowded at one corner of it, as covered silver dishes were strewn about it, concentrated on the other end. The silver cloches on the dishes were buffed, unnaturally shiny other than a few deep scratches, and carelessly thrown onto the porcelain china. An extra glass of scotch sat between Henry and Richard, untouched. Richard’s own drinking glass was nearly full, his stomach lined with lead.
Richard had sat down minutes before, questions and confusion on his tongue. As Henry spoke – of the rest of them leaving to far off places and penury and debt – Richard’s unease grew further. Henry spoke quite calmly, blowing smoke rings that etched into the mahogany wood, but what he said, Richard did not like. Knotting lumps grew in his throat; the picture was still obscure, blurred with unsaid truths.
Richard himself said nothing, only staring at the flickering shadows cast by the budding leaves on the oak tree. Henry, and the rest of them, they had done something terrible, something to warrant such desperate evasion and secrecy.
As he thought through the harrowing possibilities, Richard made a stupid noise of stupefaction. Like raw meat, the circumstances were too tender to mull on. Henry sipped his scotch, an eyebrow raised and face half in shadow, staring at Richard.
“Henry,” Richard said finally, his voice strained. “What in god’s name have you all done?”
Henry leaned forward, his elbows resting on the twisted armrests. He broke eye contact for a few solemn seconds, gaze flitting across the table at the various dishes. Smiling wryly, he said, “Have some tea.”
Richard followed his gaze around the table, but there was no tea in sight. “There is no tea.”
“No, of course there isn’t, this isn’t a tea-party. Why would there be tea?”
“But then why did you say there was?” Richard said.
“Because you already knew there wasn’t.”
The horrible thing was, somehow Richard did know, his previous questions already sitting stale. There was no tea, there was no question of what they had done. Searing his doubt, Richard spoke again; but of course, his voice still came out in hardly a whisper. “You killed somebody,” he said, “didn't you?”
Henry looked at Richard for a moment in silence and then to Richard’s utter surprise he leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Good for you,” he said. “You're just as smart as I thought you were.”
The sun’s warmth waned with his jovial confession. Shadows danced more prominently against Henry’s stark features, his pale face striking in the surrounding grayness. Stray tendrils of light weeped off of his steel frames, reflecting on the silver cloches that sparkled brilliantly.
Just as quickly as it fled, the sun returned, and Henry grew serious once more. “If you knew that, why have you been covering up for us?” he said. “After all, we hadn’t confided in you.” His gaze on Richard was steady, and intense.
Light bled through the tree, with color rushing throughout the scene, and yet still, the darkness lingered, as if the sun had not come back after all.
Richard swallowed. “I don’t know,” Richard said. “Who was it? Who did you kill?”
He shrugged. “A minor thing, really, an accident. Hardly worth dwelling on.”
“Do you really believe that?” Richard said.
“Of course I do. Would you not?” Henry took another drag of his cigarette, blowing a ring of smoke that hung heavy and palpable like a curtain.
“Call death inconsequential?”
“Is it not, in this circumstance? Would Atreus see the murder of his nephews as anything other than a tragic necessity? Would Tantalus not justify his son’s death similarly?”
It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now.
“What circumstances would justify murder in your mind?”
“It was merely an accident. Heaven knows that we didn’t intend to kill the fellow,” Henry said. “It was more upsetting than you could imagine.”
“You mean that? What you say?” Richard said.
“I say what I mean.”
“That’s not the same.” Richard said, “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see.’ You might just as well say that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like.’”
Henry paused, staring intently at Richard. Wind rustled the leaves in the tree, flickering light and darkness drowning in the blue of Henry’s eyes.
“The shock seems to have gotten to you,” Henry said.
The conversation dropped, and the pair sat silent for a minute. Richard broke the silence, his voice tight. “Who did you kill?” he asked again.
Henry took a drink, seemingly considering where to begin. “Do you remember last fall, in Julian’s class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bacheia? Dionysiac frenzy?”
“Yes,” Richard said, rather impatiently.
“Well, we decided to have one.”
Richard sat stunned. “What?” he said.
“I said we decided to have a bacchanal. It hadn’t been done for two thousand years, after all.” Henry paused.
Richard felt dreadfully puzzled. Henry’s remark seemed to have no sort of sense in it. “I don’t believe I understand.”
“The appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,” Henry said. “To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one’s moment of being. To lose one’s self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.
“It was possible,” Henry continued, “with a great deal of work, to figure out some of the sacred rituals–the hymns, the sacred objects, what to wear and do and say. More difficult was the mystery itself: how did one propel oneself into such a state, what was the catalyst?” His voice was dreamy, amused. “We tried everything. Drink, drugs, prayer, even small doses of poison. On the night of our first attempt, we simply overdrank and passed out in our chitons in the woods near here.”
Richard leaned forward. “But how does your wearing chitons and over drinking result in murder?”
Henry took a sip of his scotch, draining the glass. He reached over to a glass pitcher and poured what looked to be red wine to the top of the cup. Richard tracked his movements.
“Is there tea on the table?” Henry asked.
“No,” Richard said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“What is on the table then?”
Richard considered this a little, looking around at scattered china plates and bowls, and at the cloches that covered their contents. He then said “Food.”
“How can you be confident? The food is covered up.”
“What else would they cover?”
“Then be confident that what I attempt to tell you will explain your questions,” Henry said. Richard shifted in his seat, shame and irritation curling around his back. Henry took long, slow drinks of his wine, exhaling smoke as he waited for Richard to relax back into his seat. Finally, Richard slumped against the backrest, and Henry resumed. “At any rate,” Henry continued. “The first night nothing happened at all. So the next night, we didn’t drink as much. But there we all were, drunk and in chitons singing hymns in the middle of the night like something from a fraternity’s initiation.
“It became rather obvious that drink alone wasn’t going to do the trick. Goodness, I couldn’t tell you all the things we tried. We burned hemlock branches and breathed the fumes. I knew that Pithia had chewed laurel leaves, but that didn’t work either. We had almost nothing to go on.
“Of course,” Henry said, his eyes glazing over in fond memory. “In the end, it was all quite simple. To receive the god, in this or any other mystery, one has to be in a state of euphemia, cultic purity. Before the divine can take over, the mortal self, the dust of us, the part that decays, must be made clean as possible.”
“How is that?” Richard asked.
“Through symbolic acts. Most of them fairly universal in the Greek world. Water poured over the head. Baths, fasting.”
This was all far too much. Richard was accustomed to bouts of madness conducted by his peers, but this had gone much too far. For a moment, Richard wondered if this was all some practical joke, that the others would come running from the house laughing. He rubbed his temples, looking at the flattened grass underfoot.
“I think I need some water,” Richard mumbled.
Henry reached across the table and grabbed another pitcher – this one filled with water. He handed it to him. Richard didn’t bother to ask for a glass, guzzling the water straight from the mouth of the glass bottle. Despite the dryness creeping up his throat, and how his mouth felt like sandpaper grating together, the water tasted bitter and stuck between his gums like syrupy treacle.
Henry paused, surveying him. “Do you know,” he said, “What Julian says about the Divine Comedy?”
“No, Henry, I don’t.”
“He says that it’s incomprehensible to someone who isn’t a Christian. That if one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours. To understand how we could transcend mortality, you must approach this story not with a voyeuristic, judgmental, nor scholarly light, but rather with a like-mindedness.”
The thing was, Richard could imagine the pleasure and appeal. He could imagine the euphoria that came with the rituals, the hymns and the drinks. If the rest of them had asked Richard to join, he would have not questioned any actions further than a few fleeting, easily forgotten thoughts.
But Richard already knew the ending of the story, even if he didn’t, not really. Someone was murdered – why, or how was still unknown – but this dionysiac frenzy resulted in a death. Richard could imagine himself inhaling Hemlock and breathing in smoky fumes. But he could not imagine himself with bloody hands, standing over a body with cold, marble eyes.
“Suppose we change the subject,” Richard said. “You never have said who you killed. Or how. Why cover up the food when it will all get eaten?”
“Of course,” Henry said, agreeably. He took one last drag of his cigarette and put it out, the table singeing as he did so. “Can you reach any of the dishes?” he asked.
“No.”
Henry reached over, grabbing a close platter and shoving it towards Richard’s place setting. “Open it.”
The silver cover stuck to the plate as he pried it off. Removing the cover, Richard saw snow, white yet dirty and somehow not melted despite the warmer air. It clung in a pile, snowflakes large enough that Richard could see individual branches and stems.
“It’s not food.”
“None of them are.”
“But you said they were,” Richard said.
“Did I?”
Richard thought back. He hadn’t, he supposed. “But why is there snow on a plate?”
“Because you believe.”
Richard frowned.
Henry waved his hand and continued to speak. “All of our efforts got serious once the weather turned. We began to fast longer, and a messenger visited in a dream. Reality itself was transforming around us, in some beautiful and dangerous fashion. We were being driven by a force we didn’t understand, to an ending I did not know. Finally, we came out here early on a Thursday afternoon. And it worked.”
He stood, walking further down the table and pulling back another cloche to reveal dried leaves. They were flaky, blowing away with the slightest breeze. Dirt was sprinkled throughout on the platter with worms burrowing their way through the plated earth.
“It was heart shaking.” Henry reached back towards Richard for his drink. “Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion. The moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes. Seasons passing in the wink of an eye. Entire years for all I know. Time defies birth and decay indifferently. It seemed to me then that if you only kept on good terms with time, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock. You’d only have to whisper a hint to him, and round goes the clock in a twinkling. Duality ceased to exist. It was like being a baby. I couldn’t even remember my name.”
Henry unveiled multiple platters, slightly frantically now, throwing their lids behind him onto the grass. Various random, old antiques and earthly elements laid spread out on plates and bowls. His eyes grew as he took them all in – the fire that winked out as soon as the cover had been lifted, the stopwatch that seemed to start ticking just as soon as it was revealed. The slow, methodic taps of the clock’s hands laid down into the background of the scene, off put only by the sounds of silver crashing onto the ground below and Henry’s ever steady drawl.
“The soles of my feet were cut to pieces and I couldn’t even feel it.”
The next platter Henry opened held a bowl with sloshing, dark red liquid inside. Richard feared that this was not wine.
Henry was still talking, smiling like a priest in his dark suit and aesthetic spectacles. Richard didn't hear his words, his eyes still trained on the blood in the bowl.
Henry’s voice faded back into recognition. “...There were strange puncture marks instead of teeth. Camilla said that during part of it, she believed she was a deer. And that was odd too, because the rest of us remember chasing a deer through the woods, for miles it seemed.”
This plate held a skull. It was long, with large sockets and space before the teeth. Richard flinched as the silver cloche hit the grass.
“We ran and ran and ran. Later, we figured out we had gotten over at least four barbed wire fences, though how I don’t know, and were well off Francis’ property. Seven or eight miles in the country. Charles’ and Francis’ hair was tangled with leaves and mud.”
Henry paused after that, his hand hovering over the next platter. He was nearing the other end of the table, only a few plates left.
“This is where I come to the rather unfortunate part of my story. I have only the vaguest memory of this. I heard something behind me, or someone, and I wheeled around, almost losing my balance, and swung at whatever it was. A large, indistinct yellow thing. With my closed fist, my left. Which is not my good one. I felt a terrible pain in my knuckle, and then, almost instantly, something knocked the breath right out of me. It was dark, you understand. I couldn’t really see.” His hand was shaking as he held it out. “I swung out again with my right, hard as I could, and with all my weight behind it, and this time, I heard a loud crack. And a scream. We’re not too clear on what happened after that. The moon came out from behind a cloud.
“I looked down at my hand, and saw that it was covered in blood. And… worse than blood.” He slowly took the silver off of the plate, pausing when it was halfway up. “At my feet, there was a man. It was dead. He was about forty years old, and had on a yellow shirt. A farmer.” He pulled off the rest of the cover.
On the plate, there was the yellow plaid shirt. It was coated in blood, so much so that Richard didn’t think he would be able to recognize it without Henry’s words.
“Charles also has a memory of struggling with something. And every time you talk to Francis, he remembers something different. But nonetheless, his neck was broken. His brains were all over his face.”
Henry reached for another cover – this the largest of the plates. Richard stood, fearing what was hidden underneath.
“Wait!”
He wasn’t quick enough.
There was a head on the plate.
Richard sunk back into his chair, his eyes wide as he stared in horror at the mashed face. His brains were indeed all over, with his skull concaved inwards. “Why do you have his head?” he asked incredulously.
“I don’t,” Henry said. “Not really, anyways.” He slowly lowered the cloche back on the plate, closing off the head from view.
“I don’t think-”
“Then you really shouldn’t talk,” snapped Henry.
Richard bristled. “You have the man’s head on a platter! You have his shirt, still covered in blood. What, did you leave him naked and headless, lying on the cold, hard ground?”
Henry sighed, walking back to his seat. He slumped back into his chair, taking off his glasses and cleaning them with his white, cotton shirt. Slowly putting them back on, he looked at Richard over the frames, his eyes cold and hard. “We were all in a daze. It is a terribly confusing thing to be brought to the brink of mortality, to the edge of time itself. We existed apart from ourselves, as whole and as separate as the branches are split from a tree. Conscious and unconscious, we existed between states. More than that, however,” Henry continued. “It is a terribly confusing thing to come back from that. To slip back between the spaces in the void and the nothingness into these vibrant, overwhelming mudanities.” Henry took a drink of wine. “I think sometimes the void slips through. Like diabolical magic, it can’t help but twist reality.”
He took another long drink, draining the glass. “The head isn’t real. The snow is, interestingly enough, as is the hair.”
“Hair?” Richard interjected.
“Camilla’s hair was soaked in blood. It was dark and matted, and it framed her face like a bad box dye job.”
Richard paled at the implications. “Chunks of Camilla’s hair are on this table?” His stomach twisted at the thought.
Henry didn’t answer. “We thought reality was slipping because of the murder. After all, murder is pollution. The murderer defiles everything he comes into contact with. And the only way to purify blood is through blood. So we let a pig bleed on us. After that, we thought we were okay, even if we haven’t been able to stomach pork since.”
Richard sat in stunned silence.
“And then this table appeared, with all of its grisly dishes and haunting omens. And a rabbit came hopping by,” Henry said. “He made a mess of things. Prying the lids apart, bounding across the table and pushing everything to the ground. It was dreadful, really. Had many a question too.”
“A rabbit?”
“Yes, white, and with a funny suit. He was muttering to himself, such inane things. I fear the rabbit will come along again, running his mouth. He kept blathering about heads and time. I don't know if I can take it again.”
“What do you mean?” Richard said.
“I mean what I say.” Henry reached over the table, to the untouched glass of scotch sitting between them. He swirled the golden liquid, his lips upturned in a sneer-like smile. He looked at Richard’s shocked expression. “There is no tea on this table, but there is a head. There is a deer skull and pig’s guts. What’s to say a bunny’s foot won’t join them?”
Richard was aware his mouth was gaping open, dumb like a fish. He was aware his eyes were too wide, flickering between Henry’s face and the few covered dishes. He watched as Henry raised the scotch to his mouth, taking a slow long sip.
Richard took a sip of his own scotch. He thought about the bacchanal, the insane events he would have surely joined in on, if only he had been invited. Who’s to say that if he was included, he wouldn’t be just as complacent in the murder.
He thought of the blood in the bowl, the dirty snow, and god forbid, the head. His own head felt light, as if someone had attached a balloon to his neck. After all, if Henry asked him, wouldn’t he kill a bunny? That hardly seemed large, in the grand scheme of things.
“What’s to say,” Richard murmured against his glass. “What’s to say indeed.”
There was a table set out under a tree in front of the country house, and Henry and Richard were having scotch at it. Dishes were thrown about, mostly uncovered save for a few. Silver cloches sat on the grass surrounding the table, dinged and dented. There were empty glasses and pitchers between the two. Richard’s own drinking glass was nearly empty now, and yet, his stomach was still lined with lead.