By James C. Clar
The young woman sat before the tall mirror of her dressing table, turning her head slightly to coax a stubborn lock of hair into place. The mirror itself was older than the house’s present inhabitants, perhaps older even than the house’s present form. The building had once been something in the early medieval period, but she couldn’t quite remember what. That fact had been mentioned repeatedly by the estate agents with a tone of mild romance, as if cloisters or castles were merely decorative curiosities rather than the fossilized residue of lives once lived with passion and patient conviction.
Her father, whose profession required both patience and ceremony, was an important diplomat. Even now he was downstairs supervising the final arrangements for the evening’s reception. Ambassadors, visiting scholars, and numerous dignitaries whose titles she had been required to memorize were expected. The rooms below were already filling with light, voices, and the anticipatory movement of servants freighting trays of champagne glasses and dinnerware.
She dreaded it. Not that there was anything especially disagreeable about the guests themselves. It was just that such evenings possessed a peculiar elasticity. Conversations repeated themselves with minor variations, laughter arrived at predictable intervals, and the hours lengthened in a way that made the end of the night feel perpetually postponed.
“Now, Celia,” her father had spoken to her just yesterday, “It won’t be all that bad. It will be over before you know it. Besides, you do understand that in my line of work such functions are, well, the price of doing business. I need you at your best, darling, I know that I can count on you.”
For several months another circumstance had reinforced her reluctance to leave the quiet of her room. On certain evenings, always when seated precisely as she sat now, she had glimpsed, in the mirror’s depths, something that was not quite her room. The impression never lasted more than a moment: a dark wooden desk and tall shelves crowded with manuscripts, books and bundles of parchment. Once she thought she perceived the pale movement of a hand across a page, though she later convinced herself that it was nothing more than the shifting reflection of the lamp.
Naturally she had dismissed these episodes as tricks of the light or fatigue. “At your age, my dear,” her mother had declared, “it’s not unusual to be overwrought.”
The sounds, however, were more difficult to explain away.
They occurred irregularly, most often when the house was otherwise quiet. A faint disturbance somewhere within the walls. Her parents had assumed mice and summoned exterminators. The men inspected the paneling, the attic, the old stone foundations left from the structure’s construction centuries ago. They found nothing, no nests, no droppings, no entryways.
Still, the sounds persisted. Tonight, in fact, they were especially noticeable.
She paused with a hairpin between her fingers and listened. The noise was delicate but persistent, a dry, intermittent motion somewhere beyond the plaster. It seemed neither quite random nor entirely regular. After a moment, she shook her head in bewilderment rather than fear and resumed arranging her hair.
The mirror reflected only the ordinary contents of her room: the dressing table, the pale wall behind her, the lamp casting its soft and obedient circle of light. And yet she continued to look at it… perhaps a moment longer than necessary.
***
Brother Alphaeus sat at his desk in the cold scriptorium completely absorbed in his work. He was translating the text of a treatise on time written by an Arab scholar over a century ago. Preserving even the work of infidels was, after all, part of his sacred duty ad majorem Dei gloriam. Despite the numerous and often pernicious errors of such authors, there was still much that could be learned from heathen scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers. If nothing else, the light of Truth shone even more brightly when compared to the dark shadows cast by such falsehoods.
Not everyone in the monastery shared Alphaeus’ opinion. Some argued that works such as the one which now occupied his attention should be suppressed, even destroyed. The Arab author’s thesis was, to many, intolerable. He proposed that because God is eternal, time cannot properly exist. Our perception of succession, of before and after, was therefore not merely subjective but illusory. It was, in short, a defect of the fallen mind, a symptom of humanity’s inability to submit wholly to God’s will, to the divine simultaneity in which all moments already exist.
Alphaeus was not certain what to make of this proposition. It seemed at once impious and strangely austere, like one of those abstruse geometrical demonstrations which begin in absurdity and end in inevitability. Still, the abbot—whose learning was reputed to extend even into Greek and Hebrew—had ordered the manuscript preserved. Books, the abbot had once remarked, are arguments conducted across the centuries, and the Church has never feared arguments… especially those she has already won.
Yet as Alphaeus labored over the text, he felt an increasingly peculiar sensation: that the treatise was not merely being copied but at the same time being completed by the very act of translation. The Arab author had written in a style both elliptical and recursive. Certain propositions referred to others not yet written; certain examples seemed to presuppose glosses which existed only in marginal spaces yet to be filled. More disquieting still, the text occasionally addressed its future readers directly.
Brother Alphaeus would have been the first to admit that Arabic was not his best language. He therefore worked slowly, methodically, and with the reverent patience of one who knows that an error of a single letter may distort an entire argument. His quill advanced like a pilgrim: hesitant, deliberate, yet persistent and with a stolid fixation of purpose. He paused only to warm his fingers or prepare more ink.
And so, he copied.
Alphaeus’ labors stretched from days into weeks. It struck his fancy to imagine that, outside the walls of the scriptorium, empires were shifting their frontiers, dynasties were rising and falling, and lands that had never heard the name of Christ flourished briefly then disappeared. He assumed it even probable that new sciences were being studied in the universities and that languages he would have once deemed barbarous had evolved into literature. Still, the monk continued his patient work, bent over vellum pages whose whiteness seemed both immense and inexhaustible.
Alphaeus’ reveries occasionally prompted him to question whether the author’s thesis might be less blasphemous than it first appeared. If time were indeed illusory, then in fact (not just in fancy) the centuries beyond the monastery walls could no more disturb his labor than dreams disturb a sleeper who has not yet awakened.
At long last the manuscript reached its conclusion, or what appeared to be its conclusion. The final paragraph ended with a curious observation: that the proof of time’s unreality would inevitably be completed by a reader who discovered, too late, that the act of reading had always already taken place.
Alphaeus hesitated over the final line. The Arabic verb was ambiguous. It might mean to finish, but it might equally denote to awaken.
After a moment’s reflection he rendered the phrase into Latin as faithfully as he could. Then he placed the last flourish upon the last letter of the last page.
With that, Alphaeus set the pen aside and wiped his fingers on a cloth. He attempted to rise by bracing himself with his hands on his desk. The surface seemed odd somehow, as though it were no longer entirely solid. Its edges seemed to dissolve the way ink does when diluted with water.
As he regained his balance and looked up, the monk would have sworn that he caught a fleeting image of a woman in strange dress seated in front of a mirror. She was fixing her hair. In addition to being bewildered, the monk was now also embarrassed. Living a cloistered existence as he did, it was seldom indeed that he ever saw a woman let alone one engaged in such an intimate activity. He was certain that he was blushing.
With some difficulty, Alphaeus sat down again.
I’ve been working too hard, he said to himself. I’ll see if brother herbalist might have something to restore my constitution. And perhaps it’s time for confession as well!
***
Celia rose from the dressing table.
Downstairs the first guests had obviously arrived. Voices drifted upward through the huge house. She heard fragments of greetings, laughter, and the uncertain notes of someone absently striking the keys of the piano.
For a moment she remained standing beside the mirror, as though considering whether she had forgotten something. The room appeared entirely ordinary. Yet she had the curious impression that the certain faint disturbance she had grown accustomed to hearing had stopped. If asked, she could not have said precisely when. Finally, she extinguished the lamp, stepped into the corridor, and closed the door behind her.
Descending the staircase, she reflected yet again that the evening ahead would almost certainly feel very long… very long indeed. Perhaps even longer than any evening properly ought to be. One could even imagine, she thought with mild apprehension, that such a night might never quite end. Or, even worse, that it had already taken place and she were reliving it again. Either way, and with the dutiful resignation of a faithful daughter, she joined the festivities with a smile.
James C. Clar is a writer and retired teacher who divides his time between the wilds of Upstate New York and the gentler climes of Honolulu, Hawaii. Most recently, his work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, Antipodean-SF, 365-Tomorrows and The Blotter Magazine. His latest Honolulu noir story featuring hardboiled P.I., Eddie O’Brien, can be found as an editor’s choice selection in Freedom Fiction Journal.