by R. Hightower
THE MAGE'S TALE
All of this was the fault of the wondrous chalice wrought by Galahad, he said to himself, in the dark, as he had said many times before. He lost himself in contemplating the uncanny complexity of line, the rich sheen of the metals, and the cunning setting of the stones. Loveliest of all was the multicolored dazzle of the gems themselves: ruby, orphischel, emerald, chalcenite, sunstone, diamante, none duplicated, all beautiful. For King David was so jealous of it, so enraptured, that he kept it in a secret room that only he could enter. At all hours of the day or night he would steal away to his chamber to regard it.
The Medievalist stopped. He began again.
It was rather like hunting for haddock’s eyes, he thought. The whole of it. The libraries, the monasteries, the dead languages, the living ones that had swallowed the dead ones whole. Thirty years of correspondence with men who were scrupulous bureaucrats and inspired scientists and much-lamented friends, every one of them, and not one of them had told him the truth, and he had not told them the truth either, and somewhere in the exchange the thing itself had gone on existing.
The King grew thin. He grew luminous. He had the look of a man receiving a long letter with very bad news in it, who cannot stop reading. When he died they found the room. They found the cup. They argued for three days about what to do with it and on the fourth day it was gone, and the man who had been guarding it was gone, and no one who knew where they had gone ever came back to say. They called it Lapis exilis. The stone of exile, it was said it fell from Lucifer’s crown during the war in heaven, everything is coming apart at once. The most beautiful thing that had ever existed, losing its stone in the dark between what had been and what was going to be-
The Medievalist called it an interest in history, the way alcoholics say they like a drink, and the intake nurse smiled, typed something harmless into the computer, and asked if he had any allergies. The first time he tried to explain it, his mouth went dry, as if the words themselves had been kept too long in the dark. He wanted to tell her about the dreams about the cup that appeared always just beyond his hand; but her badge read three letters and her eyes were already moving on. They called the place a clinic, everything was white but not the same white: bone, milk, paper, teeth. The staff moved quietly, hands folded, voices low. At night, the hallways hummed with the anesthesia of money of doors closing with a soft hydraulic sigh, screens dimming themselves, muted footsteps on padded floors. The quiet made your own thoughts sound louder, as if they’d been turned up by someone you did not trust. He wanted to tell someone, anyone. To unburden his soul. This nurse she seemed so nice and so clearly good and she was even probably a virgin and-
A great lady of Maraclea was loved by a Templar, a Lord of Sidon; but she died in her youth, and on the night of her burial, this wicked lover crept to the grave, dug up her body and violated it. Then a voice from the void bade him return in nine months time for he would find a son. He obeyed the injunction and at the appointed time he opened the grave again and found a head on the leg bones of the skeleton. The same voice bade him guard it well, for it would be the giver of all good things, and so he carried it away with him. It became his protecting genius, and he was able to defeat his enemies by merely showing them the magic head. In due course, it passed into the possession of the Order.
The Medievalist was a man who believed himself born for history: not in it, but of it. He spoke of the Grail not as a cup but as an occurrence, a shimmering event forever postponed, forever bleeding through the fabric of things. His neighbor, in the next suite, found him unbearable. The two of them met only in the great winter garden. Around them the attendants moved like acolytes, saints carrying their severed heads careful not to disturb the delicate architecture of madness that money had allowed to flourish, unexamined.
By the time they admitted him, he had learned to narrate his obsession in the cool, impersonal language of diagnosis. He spoke of “periodization” and “symbolic objects,” of “persistent intrusive images,” and the doctors nodded, reassured; here was a mania they could name and bill for. The hospital preferred to call itself a retreat. It rose out of the pine forest, all milky stone and seamless glass, discreet cameras embedded in the cornices like additional, unblinking eyes. The women at the front desk had the unmarked faces of saints or hostages. The very wealthy entrusted their damage to this place as one might consign an heirloom to restoration.
In the next room lived a man who did not believe in anything he could not price. He knew the catalogue value of paintings and transplantable organs, of rainfall futures and antique bullets dug from battlefields. Patients referred to him as the Broker. When the Medievalist arrived, the Broker began to listen through the wall, compelled and irritated. They met first in the solarium, that biome and controlled climate: white wicker, pale citrus, the low murmur of filtered air. Group therapy, though the staff never used the word group and certainly not therapy. The others spoke of insomnia and ennui, of a vague, thick grief, but the new man talked calmly, academically about knights hallucinating in deserts, chalices disguised as common bowls, bloodlines drifting like silt through centuries of error. He was not asking for help. He was making a case. The Broker found himself answering. Not with belief, never that, but with questions of provenance: How did he know, exactly? What constituted evidence? Who authenticated a miracle, and what did that signature cost? The doctors watched the two of them with professional interest, noting the way one man’s hunger for meaning provoked in the other a kind of defensive arithmetic. In the files it would be written, later, that their symptoms intensified in tandem, as if the walls between rooms, and then between selves, had been built only for appearances.
The Nurse set the water glass on the table and paused at the door on her way out.
“Thirty birds went looking for a god, she said. They called him the Simorgh. They crossed seven valleys to find him and most of them died on the way and the ones who survived looked at the Simorgh and understood that si murgh means thirty birds. They were the thing they were looking for. They just had to lose everything to see it.”
The Medievalist’s State Sponsored Attorney introduced herself at the door. A name, a firm, two cities in the name of the firm separated by an ampersand. She sat in the chair the doctor usually occupied.
“I just need to ask you a few questions,” she said. “Standard procedure.”
He nodded.
“Can you confirm your full name for me?”
He opened his mouth.
“I am a wave of the deep,” he said. “I am seven battles. I am seven hills. I am seven stars. I am the point of a spear.”
She looked up from her legal pad.
He blinked.
She wrote it down with careful neutrality.
“Date of birth,” she said. “Current address?”
He looked at the window. The pine forest. The particular quality of light that meant mid-afternoon.
“Prior to this facility, “she said. “Your home address?
“Before this I was in Lisbon, “he said. “Before Lisbon, a monastery in the Languedoc. Before that, a dig near Montségur that did not produce what I was looking for. Before that London, briefly, and before London a long time in libraries that I have lost the precise sequence of.” She looked at her legal pad. “I mean a street address, she said. A postal code.”
He considered this. “No,” he said. “Not currently.”
She wrote something. “Do you have any identification on you? A passport, a driver’s license?”
“I have a passport,” he said. “It’s in my room.”
“Would you be able to produce it?”
“I could,” he said.” But it wouldn’t help you.”
She looked up.
“The photograph,” he said, “doesn’t look like me anymore. Not because of age. The person in that photograph had not yet been to certain places. Those places leave a mark. If the photograph had been taken afterward it would have caught it. But it wasn’t, so it didn’t, and the document describes someone I no longer am in any way that would satisfy your requirements.”
She put her pen down. She picked it up. “Do you have a bank account,” she asked. A national insurance number? Any medical records? Any–”
“I have never been ill,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Never,” he said pleasantly. “I am aware that this is difficult to verify. It is nonetheless true.”
She wrote something. She stopped writing. She said: “There is no record. Our firm has been very thorough. There is no record of you at the prior addresses you’ve given us.”
She did not finish the sentence.
He looked at his hands. “You want proof that I exist,” he said. “That I am one person in one place at one time with a consistent history that can be verified by documents that other people have made about me?”
“That is,” she said carefully, “the standard requirement.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“In the district of Acquapendente, he said, three boys were watching cattle. One of them said: let us find out how people are hung. One sat on the shoulders of another, and the third fastened a rope around the neck of the first and tied it to an oak, and a wolf came, and the two who were free ran away and left the other hanging. Afterward they found him dead and buried him. On the Sunday his father came to bring him bread.”
She had stopped writing. “Just tell me who you are.”
“I am telling you. One of the two confessed. The old man killed him with a knife and cut him up and brought away the liver and entertained the boy’s father with it at home. After dinner he told whose liver it was. Hereupon began a series of reciprocal murders between the two families and within a month thirty-six persons were killed. he said. One sentence spoken. That is all it requires. He looked at the pine forest. There is a man who prophesied his own death. Myrddin. He said he would die three ways at once—falling, drowning, impalement. He said this knowing he was the kind of man the prophecy would find. He fell from a cliff above a river and was caught on a stake at the bottom. All three simultaneously. He was the instrument of his own completion.”
She closed her legal pad.
He looked at her.
“I don’t have any papers,” he said. “But you have me. I am here. What more proof do you need?”
She sat for a long moment.
She left without looking back.
The Medievalist stared at the door for a long time.
“They do not understand what I am doing here” the Medievalist said. “They think I have come to take. That is what kings do, they come to take, and when they cannot take they burn.”
“I have not come to take Jerusalem. I received the letter at sea, in a storm off Cyprus and I laughed. The city belongs to the question. That is why everyone wants it and no one can keep it. Who does the grail serve ? Al-Kamil received me. We sat together for three days. He sent me figs and a philosopher. I sent him a mathematician. The object exists, the Holy thing. I am certain of this. The Templars knew. The Sufi masters I have corresponded with for fifteen years know, and what they know frightens them.”
“What al-Kamil would not tell me, what the Templar preceptor in Acre would not tell me, what my own astrologers will not tell me is where it is now. They will tell me what it does. They will tell me what it costs. They will not tell me where.”
“I begin to think that is the point. That the location is not information but initiation. This is an intolerable situation for an emperor.”
The man’s posture had changed, the chin lifted slightly. Not the soldier’s body he had worn at Acre.
The Medievalist blinked. Returned.
“That one is Frederick,” he said. “Frederick the Second. The wonder of the world. He got Jerusalem back without a single battle and the Pope never forgave him for it.”
The Nurse said: “Why not?”
“Because it suggested the city could be reasoned with,” the Medievalist said. “That you could sit across a table from the other side of God and find the terms. The Church found that more offensive than losing Jerusalem entirely.”
He looked at his hands.
“I have not yet lost my crown,” he said, in the voice that was not his voice, “Neither will pope nor council take it from me without a bloody war.”
His hands were no longer loose in his lap. They were lifted slightly, the hands of a man placing something on his own head.
“But I am still here. My armies are still here. My crowns are packed for a journey and I have taken one out.They could not bear that the sacred might be negotiable.That it might respond to the right question asked in the right way by someone patient enough to wait for the answer. What is the Grail? Who does it serve?”
His hands lowered.
He looked at the Nurse.
“I keep that one,” he said, “in the crown of my head.”
At night, the hallways hummed with the anesthesia of money, of doors closing with a soft hydraulic sigh, of screens dimming themselves, of muted footsteps on padded floors. The quiet made your own thoughts sound louder, as if they’d been turned up by someone you did not trust. In the room next to his lived a man who never turned off his television, only muted it. The blue flicker came through the wall, a pulse that wasn’t quite light, and in the spilling shadows the Medievalist sometimes saw shapes that weren’t there: a hand reaching, a face bending toward him, the glint of metal. The neighbor was known unofficially as the Broker. He was the kind of man who weighed others. They met during conversation hour, a circle of chairs in a room that smelled faintly of citrus and antiseptic, like a crime scene that had been carefully wiped down. No one used the word therapy.
When his turn came, the Medievalist started with dates and names, but as he spoke, his voice thinned and something raw came leaking through: the certainty that somewhere a piece of the world was missing, and if he did not find it, everything would come loose. He said, “I know it sounds crazy,” and watched their faces, hoping someone would contradict him. No one did. The Broker listened with his arms crossed, eyes half closed, as if attending to a complicated but boring pitch. Then he asked, very gently, what the man would do if he actually found it. There was a silence, the kind that seems to change the temperature of the room. The Medievalist realized he had never pictured anything beyond the search, never imagined himself holding the thing he’d ruined his life to find. The look on his face made one of the nurses shift in her chair. That night, the Broker pressed his ear to the shared wall and heard him talking to someone who wasn’t there. It was not the content that unsettled him— snatches of Latin, fragments of old prayers— but the tone: tender, apologetic, as if he were confessing to the object itself. The Broker told himself that people here were always talking to things that weren’t in the room: parents, ex-lovers, God, a younger version of themselves. Still, as he lay back in the blue wash of the television, he could not shake the feeling that something was on the other side of that wall, listening.
Brotherhood as Catechism
What is the Brotherhood?
An ancient order. A modern offshoot of the Knights Templar.
What is its purpose?
Union. Eternal union.
Through what means?
Through death.
They met properly at last on the third night after the solarium exchange, when the Broker simply opened the connecting door that the staff had never bothered to lock— two suites, one corridor, the architecture of money always more porous than it pretended. In his roommate’s identical suite, the Broker took inventory. On the desk a sparrow suspended in formaldehyde, wings spread in permanent flight. A mouse curled into itself, as if sleeping. The sneering head of a fox. A crow’s skull, picked clean. The Medievalist was sitting on the edge of his bed in the bone-white robe, barefoot, turning an empty water glass in his hands as though it might suddenly weigh more. He did not startle when the Broker stepped through. He only looked up with the exhausted gratitude of a man who had been waiting for centuries and was finally too tired to pretend otherwise. “You came,” he said. The Broker closed the door behind him.They sat facing each other on the two low chairs by the window. Outside, the pine forest pressed against the glass like a jury. For a long minute neither spoke; the Broker catalogued the other man’s face the way he would a doubtful Caravaggio line, shadow, provenance while the Medievalist simply looked back, unafraid, eyes unfocused. Just a small, inward click, the way a lens shifts in an old camera. The Broker saw it happen. The room did not change, yet everything inside the man’s gaze did. He slipped. The air around him thickened with the smell of wet stone and horse sweat. His voice, when it came, was no longer quite his own; it was lower, accented with the rolling consonants of a language that had died before the Hôtel Étoilé was ever built. He was no longer in the suite. He was on a rain-slick hillside in 1187, the Third Crusade collapsing around him like wet parchment. A knight named Reynaud knelt in the mud, cupping a dented silver bowl that had once held wine and now held only the promise of blood.
“It was here,” he said in that borrowed voice, “the moment it bled through. I felt the handle grow warm in my gauntlet. The others thought I was praying.” His hands moved as if still armored; the Broker watched the tendons stand out like ropes. For thirty seconds the man was gone, really and truly gone, living inside a story. Then the slip released him. The Grail man blinked, returned, the modern accent sliding back into place as smoothly as a drawer closing. He smiled, small and rueful. “That one was Acre,” he said. “I keep that one in my blood.” The Broker did not laugh. He leaned forward instead, elbows on knees, the posture he used when closing on something priceless and unverifiable. “Again,” he said quietly. “Show me the next one.” The Medievalist’s eyes clouded once more. This time the room filled with the scent of scorched sugar and gunpowder. His shoulders squared into the stance of a soldier in 1916, somewhere on the Western Front, whispering to a gemstone chalice that had caught a single beam of moonlight through the trench parapet. “It was just a cup,” he murmured in a voice hoarse with gas and French cigarettes. “I drank last. I saw the faces of every king who ever failed.” His fingers traced the rim of the actual water glass. The Broker felt the slip like a change in barometric pressure; something vast and old pressing against the sealed windows of the Étoilé. Again the return: sudden, clean, the man’s shoulders sagging back into the silk robe. He looked at the Broker with something like an apology. “There are more,” he said. “I have them all. They arrive in the night. The doctors call it dissociation. I call them the Guardians.”
The next morning the Broker, who had claimed his usual chair near the window, a newspaper folded on his knee like a prop in a play he was bored of.
The Medievalist had been staring into his plastic water cup for so long the nurse had already checked twice to make sure he was all right. When she finally left, he turned the cup between his fingers and said, almost conversationally: “Chess is what saved me from losing my mind. I can just think. I can sit in this chair and be a mind on a stalk.” When he embraced Coptic Gnosticism, he had lost his few remaining friends because it was impossible to follow the direction of his thoughts, and that was exactly what he wanted. The world of dressing well, looking after one’s health— that was all behind him.
“It’s never gold, you know. That’s the first mistake everyone makes. They imagine gold because they can’t imagine anything stranger than money. He amused himself by cutting the throats of rare beasts,” he continues, “He set the palaces on fire. He rushed upon the people and cut them to pieces. This is what it means to transcend.”
"That's just a poem." The Broker did not look up. “We’re back on the Grail,” he said. “What a shock. Pawn to King 4.”
He ignored him. “If you were to see it,” he told me, “you’d be disappointed at first. It looks like nothing. A little carved thing, dull stone, the sort of cup left behind in a monastery cell. That’s how it works. It makes you underestimate it. And you can’t move there, it’s guarded by The Knight. Bishop takes is right there. You’re impossible."
The Broker did not look up. “We’re back on the Grail,” he said. “What a shock.” He closed his eyes, as if reading an image on the inside of his skull.
“The rim is chipped,” he went on. “Three places, very regular. Not accidents. Deliberate weaknesses. It looks like the stone has… absorbed something. Like it’s been listening.”
“Listening to what?” the Broker asked.
“Whatever people pour into it,” he said. “Words, mostly. Begging. Bargains.” He tipped the clinic cup so the light ran along its edge. “The outside is scratched, but not into scenes, nothing noble. Just marks. Hands trying to say what it is and failing. A cross here, a stray word, a spiral. Like graffiti around a well,” the Broker said. “That’s risk management.”
The Medievalist smiled, small and sharp. “The base,” he said, “is slightly too small. So when it’s standing on a table you can’t forget it’s there. Some part of your brain is always watching, waiting for it to tip. It’s a trick old objects learn: how to keep you paying attention. The ones that matter, anyway.”
The Broker watched him. “You talk like you’ve held it.”
“That’s the confusing part,” the Medievalist said quietly. “I know I have. But when I reach for the memory, it slips. Sometimes it’s a cup on a table in a stone room. Sometimes it’s just a circle of light where it ought to be, and everyone is pretending they see something. Sometimes it’s nothing at all, and I’m the only one acting as if there was ever an object there.”
“That would be consistent with psychosis,” the Broker said. “Shared or otherwise.”
“Of course,” the Medievalist agreed pleasantly. “That’s the beauty of it. I’ve seen something that doesn’t want to be remembered properly.”
He turned the cup again. The thin plastic creaked.
“What do you remember?” the Broker asked.
He frowned slightly, concentrating. “Texture,” he said. “The surface under my fingers, like river rock kept too long in a warm mouth. The weight…it should have been nothing, given the size, but it pulled on my arm. But it doesn’t want the wrong person…”
“The wrong person being you,” the Broker said.
“Oh, no” he shook his head. “That’s the worst part. I had the absolute conviction that it belonged to someone else.”
“Don’t drag me into this,” the Broker said. It came out more sharply than intended.
“Too late,” the Mediavaist said. “You were in my file before you were in this room.”
The Broker’s expression didn’t change, but his fingers squeezed the folded newspaper hard enough to crease it. “So,” he said, “according to you, you saw the cup, you forgot everything about it?
“That’s one reading,” the Medievalst said. He sounded almost indulgent. “Another is that I saw it, and that the forgetting is part of the mechanism.”
“Maybe that’s all the Grail is,” he said.
The Broker folded the newspaper edge-to-edge, aligning the corners with obsessive care.
“Tell the part you always avoid,” the Medievalist said. “About where you were. Who took you there.”
The Broker's jaw tightened.
“You see the problem,” the Mediavalist said lightly. “I can’t tell whether the missing piece is my mind or the object.”
“Or the story,” the Broker said.
The smile returned, soft and cruel. “And that brings us to you.”
The Medievalist set the plastic cup down on the low glass table, balancing it on its narrow base so that it wobbled if you so much as breathed on it.
“Because once you accept that an object like that might exist,” he said, “someone has to manage what it does to people. Buy it, sell it, hide it, trade on the rumor. You’ve met that kind of man, haven’t you, Broker? The ones who think they can own the echo?”
“In fact” he said, almost cheerfully, “I happen to be sharing a solarium with one.”
The Medievalist's head dropped slightly, the way it did before the slips. The Broker had learned to watch for it the way you watch for the moment before a wave breaks. Something gathering, a quality of pressure.
Lamp oil and cypress and the particular sweetness of a city that has been burning for days and has passed through horror into a kind of terrible normalcy.
His voice, when it came, was dry and precise. The voice and posture of a man at a desk.
“I have observed,” the Medievalist said, in the voice that was not his voice, “that those who follow this cult, the Christian cult, have a peculiar relationship with suffering. They do not merely accept it. They require it. A faith that cannot point to its martyrs is, for them, no faith at all. This is what separates them from the philosophers, who seek to understand the world, and from the priests, who seek to manage it. These people seek to be consumed by it.”
His hands were flat on his knees. His eyes were open but not present.
“I was in the gardens the night he used them,” the voice continued. “Nero. You must understand that the word does not capture what he was. He was a performance in search of an audience, and Rome was the audience, and when Rome would not watch willingly he found other means. The gardens were lit that night with what I can only describe as not firelight though fire was its source. The grail is a stone from the Crown of Lucifer, cast as a star to the Earth below— stone of stones.”
The Broker did not move.
He was watching himself watch them. The Romans.
A pause. The lamp oil smell intensified then faded.
“The Christians called it martyrdom,” the voice said. “The man at the edge making notes while Rome burned.”
The Medievalist blinked. Returned. His shoulders settled back into the silk robe. He looked at the Broker with that small rueful smile.
“That one is Porphyry,” he said. “I keep that one in my chest.”
The Broker said nothing for a long moment.
Then he said: "You've never seen it. You've read too many books. Let me tell you once and for all what it is really like.”
THE BROKER'S TALE
I have always been impulsive. I’ve tried with varying levels of success to temper it, but I’m impulsive. It wasn’t even about the money, it was something I actually enjoyed doing. The knife edge. Will I get caught or will I walk? How much can I get away with? Can I throw my phone out the window? Can I throw that punch? My actions now aren’t moral exactly but they’re a way to channel that impulsivity, that pride. I loved it, I lived for stealing. What I wanted more than anything was to move through life free, invisible. But this is earth, not paradise, so I acted out of desperation to feel alive, like my days were worth anything and like I had any power. So, let me tell you why I stopped.
It wasn’t because I was arrested or even because I feared that I would be. I didn’t have a change of heart, meet a girl or clean up my act. I just decided I don’t want to know what people have behind closed doors any more. Not ever again. It is said thievery is a debt of the soul, that every theft in Heaven is a debt in Hell. I don’t want to know what anyone covets or collects ever again.
I stole art from private collectors. I kept a close eye on auctions, studied when pieces changed hands. Whenever I could I took a piece that was in transit or storage. Sometimes it wasn’t even discovered missing for months. It was a victimless crime, a write off, but sometimes I lifted from people’s homes— from penthouses and mansions, and it was during just such a job that my life changed.
I met with my broker, Vaughn, one night. He was an old artist from Germany with a ton of rich friends, many of whom were less than ethical about how they got that way. Over the years he had helped me find buyers for the pieces I stole— wealthy collector friends of his. He called me with a tip. One of his friends, Lindsey Coltsworth, had seemed to be away from home for an extended time, maybe out of town for a gallery show in Berlin. He said he realized he hadn’t heard from her in some time so he drove by her house. It was always unchanged each night— no cars out front, no signs of life.
“She doesn’t know about our arrangement, does she?”
“No, of course not,” he said, “and her collection is impressive. Lots of German Expressionism. Someone said she even has an Alfred Kubin. Lindsey’s a space case . The place is probably wired with a security system that’s 20 years out of date, it’s a perfect hit. Do some casing, see how it looks,” he told me. He gave me an address and I went over to where Lindsey lived. It was a huge Tudor with a sizable garden, expensive landscaping. It was just like Vaughn said it would be, no interior lights, dark and quiet. I sat for a while waiting for a sign of life. The drapes hung motionless. The following night I went back and the place was exactly the same. I gave it a final look over and after assessing my surroundings. I slipped on a ski mask and went inside the yard. The yard itself was beautiful, with an array of plants and trees, but there were signs of neglect— leaves piled on the driveway, bushes grown thorny and unmanaged.
There was an outdated security system near the front door. Pay dirt. Just like Vaughn said. I spent a few minutes trying to parse the layout of the house. The fridge and pantry were empty, no keys or recent mail laying out. I was tempted to do the job that night. I pulled the window closed behind me. I waited to see if anyone appeared. No one did.
My breath quickened— casement windows on the ground floor, notoriously easy to break into. I left the same way I came in and went back to my car watching to see if I triggered anything, but no lights came on, no cops showed up, no security guard. It did seem like the perfect job but I was uneasy. It was an awful lot of valuables to leave vulnerable like that. Maybe it was insurance fraud and Vaughan didn’t want to say for some reason. Maybe this was a set up, could the Feds be on to him? I couldn’t afford to think like that. If this job paid it would pay major, and I was not going to walk away so why pretend I was? If it went bad I would deal with that when the time comes. My intuition told me it would pay.
The next day I rented a box truck and put my kit in the back. I arrived at around 2 am, jammed the house’s wifi signal and got to work on one of the windows. Once inside I pulled one of the paintings from the wall and looked to see if there was a trigger alarm. It was clear. I made a sweep of the area. I thought I heard a distant clatter. I stood stock-still, my eyes on the doorway. I pulled another drawing from the wall. I saw what looked like a chalice on the other side of the room. It appeared to be made of gemstones fashioned to look as if they were spewing upward, like a volcanic eruption. It was multicolored but mostly deep reds greens and purples in irregular shapes. It almost looked like an open flame, and it cast a strange light onto the wall and ceiling. It reminded me of a manta ray at night on the floor of the ocean, something beautiful and miraculous. It was almost like an optical illusion. There was something so tantalizing about it that it took my breath. Without thinking I rushed over and picked it up.
It was so heavy, deceptively heavy. I heard a sound from upstairs like a huge animal scrambling around on all fours, something heaving itself around, crawling uncoordinated. My pulse was racing. I made a quick line to the back door when I was interrupted by a woman in the upstairs doorway. It was Lindsey. Her eyes looked glassy and unfocused. She leaned into the doorframe with a slightly amused smile on her face. I froze when I saw her. I was expecting her to yell or pull out a gun or something, but she only stared with that absent look. Maybe she had had some kind of mental break. Vaughn had said she was strange, but she was dressed nicely with her hair in a complicated updo and makeup neatly applied to her eyes and lips. She looked as she always did. She just... wasn’t doing anything to stop me. I could see if she seemed scared but she was looking right at me and she seemed almost pleased. Maybe this was a set up. I rushed out the door and onto the lawn. If she wasn’t going to stop me then I was going to leave. This was by far the closest call I had ever had. I expected the cops to be waiting when I got home but no one was there. I dropped the rental van off and thought about what to do next. I didn’t know what just happened or how I had walked out of there. If it was a setup should I let on or pass the pieces on to him anyway. Normally, I’d call Vaughn but I had no idea if I could trust him. It didn’t make sense— tipping me off then having her there when I showed up.
Could they have intended something else that didn’t go to plan? I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and a quick call. I saw the Cup in my bag as I reached for my phone. The bag was inside the closet, the door was open enough to let in some sunlight. It was the first time I had seen it in full daylight. It looked practically iridescent. I was transfixed. The light reflected and refracted through the shards creating a stunning pattern of prismatic light that moved throughout the room in a polychromatic display, swirling across the walls and ceiling just from the small ray of sunlight hitting it. The light thrown off was whirling even though the light touching it was motionless. I was so captivated I forgot why I even came into the room. My burner phone started to ring, snapping me back to reality. It was Vaughn. He was his usual self, all business.
I tried to tell him something had happened at Lindsey’s but he cut me off: “Just tell me when I get there,” he said. When I hung up I cracked a beer on the patio and stood smoking. As I drank it I kept thinking about the cup, feeling pulled toward the bedroom with an intensity that felt abnormal, wanting to get just one more look at it. All I really wanted to do for the rest of the day was to stare at it. The doorbell rang, breaking my trance. I let Vaughn in. He was eager to see what I’d made out with, what condition all the pieces were in. I tried to interrupt. “Something happened there,” I said. He walked into my room and immediately noticed the cup sticking out of my duffle bag. He had a look of wonder on his face.
“What is that ?” He asked, not taking his eyes off it.
“I don’t know, I just grabbed it. Look, we need to talk about what happened at Lindsey’s.”
“Whose work is this?” he asked, circling the bag “ It’s incredible. It’s… psychedelic. How much do you want for it?”
“Are you listening to me? She was there. Lindsey saw me.”
“Oh.” He said, his eyes still on the cup. “Well, you got out. Did she say anything?”
“No, she didn’t. Don’t you think that’s odd?”
“Odd?”
“You really didn’t know she’d be there—” but his attention was already back on the cup.
“I’m serious, name your price. It’s not often you see such a powerful piece of art. There’s something beyond about it. It’s not only beautiful, it’s making a statement about the limits of perception…”
I cut him off. “Just take it. I don’t want it here.” I could tell he was barely listening to me. He took the cup and left, paying me a retainer for the drawings, the rest to be paid on the sale of the items, and a huge payment for the cup. Usually I would be thrilled but I just felt unsettled. There was something inexplicable about that cup. I was unsettled by Vaughn’s reaction to it, how enamored he was with it. But when I first saw it, I was captivated, too. Staring at it and declaring I needed it. I finally crashed for a few hours on the couch and when I woke I tried to see what I could find out about the cup, maybe find who had made it. But it was all dead ends. There was no signature on the piece. I found a few possible candidates but nothing really seemed to really resemble the cup. It wasn’t modern, exactly. I decided to see if there was any news about Lindsey. For a job of that magnitude it wasn’t unusual for it to be in the news and I saw no reason why she wouldn’t report it. I set an alert for Lindsey Coltsworth in case it should pop up later. I went out to blow some cash and have some drinks and when I made it back I decided to call Vaughn to see if he had heard anything from Lindsey. He answered after five rings. He sounded more distracted and less concerned than I was expecting.
“Any takers for the pieces?” I asked.
“No, none yet,” he said. His voice sounded oddly absent. “I didn’t really talk to anyone today.”
“What do you mean you didn’t talk to anyone? What have you been doing?"
He was silent for a long time. “Watching it. You know it looks different in every position it is in, even in different rooms. Did you know that?”
“Okay Vaughn. I think you need to relax. That cup, I think something is wrong with it—”
But he just carried on speaking. “You can’t believe the things that it has shown to me.”
“What do you mean ‘the things it has shown’ to you?”
“It’s like it is trying to show me something,” he said.
“Please, just stop.” I said, feeling myself losing control. “I shouldn’t have taken it, do you understand? We shouldn’t have it. I think it’s making you hallucinate or something.”
I waited for his reply but none came. I hung up but something was wrong. He had never once acted like that in all the time I had known him. I had a persistent sense that nothing was right at all. Even my own actions weren’t right. I closed my eyes, eager for the day to be over. As I dreamt, images of the cup drifted in front of my eyes. I sprung out of bed in a panic. I tried to will away those variegated patterns when I noticed a notification on my phone. It was an email stating that there was a hit on the alert I set up for Lindsey. She was mentioned in the press. But it wasn’t for the robbery. It was because she had been found dead. The paper stated that it was too early to determine a cause of death and that the body was badly decomposed. Badly decomposed? I had just seen her less than 48 hours ago. I felt dread rising in my chest. I called Vaughn. “Lindsey is dead,” I said. It didn’t seem like he knew what I was talking about.
“Lindsey?” He said. “ That can’t be. I just saw her."
Reasoning with him on the phone was getting nowhere. It was like talking to someone on drugs. “Stay where you are,” I told him. “I’m coming over."
“Okay,” he said. “ You’ll be able to see her, too.”
As I drove I was in a panic. What if the cops knew Lindsey had been robbed? How could I prove I had nothing to do with her death? And what about Vaughn, what would he even say if he were to be questioned? If she was dead, then who did I see in the house? I retrieved the spare key at Vaughn’s and let myself in. He had all of the curtains drawn and had even draped heavy quilts over some of the windows. He had all of the furniture cleared out of the living room and the cup was on a black pedestal. He had placed desk lamps, halogen lamps and even LED strips around it. The lights cut through the cup at every angle and patterned the room in a jarring spectrum from floor to ceiling. It was shockingly beautiful. The colors began to warp and blend together. It felt as if it was distorting the space around me. It was transmitting the light. Transforming it. Using it to create something.
“Do you see it now?” came a voice from behind my shoulder. The lights were converging into what looked like a figure. In an intense bolt of terror I ripped one of the blankets down and threw it over the cup. The walls stopped oscillating. Vaughn too had changed. He was no longer standing. His form was crumpled against the wall. He lay in a puddle of dried blood. I struggled to comprehend what was happening.
With shaking hands, I pulled the blanket off the cup. And Vaughn was back standing behind me. Very much alive.
****