What? Oh, no, no—believe me, if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it takes a considerably longer period of exposure to the Folly and its fumes for oracular madness on a Jay Expedition scale to finally manifest itself than this tour is likely to consume. No matter how long it eventually takes Stephen to get back here with those candles.
Actually, since we seem to have the time . . . and yes, those carvings really are lovely, aren’t there? There’s more ‘round the back, which we can examine further once the lights are on—
At any rate: Like most tour guides, not to mention most frustrated academics—I certainly didn’t take this job for the pay, after all—I have my own theories about what Dr. Peazant’s little experiment in enforced prophecy may have succeeded in invoking. Not so much an ancient God reborn, to my mind, as a completely new construct: The Folly itself, made phantom rather than flesh. That cloth-draped vision, expressing itself through an endless series of unwilling human visionaries.
Dr. Peazant wanted his Folly’s supplicants to become oracles themselves, answering their own unspoken questions about the past, the future, what lies beyond. Instead, he made his house into the oracle. We come and go, but it remains—and as long as we come and go quickly enough, it has no choice but to keep its own counsel.
I wonder, though. What does a prophet prevented from prophesying feel, exactly? Does it feel relief, freedom, a welcome escape from using and being used in return? Or does it feel loneliness, depression . . . the terrible pain of being left perpetually alienated from its deepest, most integral calling?
Nova Mephitium. It reminds me of the question posed to yet another ancient oracle, the Sybil at Cumae, who grew so old and shriveled that her worshipers were forced to keep her in a huge glass bottle, like a genie. And like some clever Arab giving away his last wish to the genie itself, one supplicant once used his—or her—turn to ask, on the oracle’s own behalf: ‘Sybil, what do you want?’ To which she replied, wearily:
‘I want to die.’
Thirty years, fifty years, a hundred years: You show no one anything they really want to see, tell them nothing they really want to know—nothing they can profit from, nothing good. And then, at the end of it, the ungrateful bastards leave you all alone here in the dark, in the middle of this awful smell, with nobody to even try and understand you but the man who leads gawking groups of tourists back and forth through your hollow guts a minimum of three times a day, seven times a week, fifty-two weeks a year with almost no time off for sickness, vacation or good behavior . . .
Which makes it rather one hell of a lot of time I’ve spent in here already, really. And I can’t believe, what with all the thousands of hours I’ve spent thinking about this house, Peazant’s Folly, its Mystery, one way or another—
—that I’ve never, but never, thought about that before.
Um . . .
. . . just one moment, all right? You—just stay right there, together. Close together. And I’ll be—right back.
Oh, God.
No, no, I’m fine. Just . . . over there, by the door? The door I locked behind us, and I think you all definitely saw me do it—
No, don’t turn to check—really, don’t. Really.
Well, if you feel you have to . . .
No, you’re right. You’re right. It’s gone now.
Hah.
Well, that was a nice little scare to end the tour on, wasn’t it? Things you’ll convince yourself you see in the dark . . . might be more fumes left in here than my employers have been letting on, I guess.
And where the hell is Stephen, anyway? With those—
—candles.
Fumes.
Look does anybody smell anything, aside from me? I mean—
—something worse?
Uh . . .
. . . maybe that wasn’t the best idea, all told. Maybe—I’m just going to unlock the door, and maybe we should all just—leave. Quietly, single-file, like the guidebook says. But, uh . . . quickly, too. Before Stephen decides it’s just the right time to finally show up and, um—
—Steve, is that you? You look—bigger, somehow . . .
* * *
That same figure you saw inside the Folly’s door, back bent, hands and face obscured. Turning with its draped shoulder outthrust, its shrouded hand about rising to reach, to TOUCH . . .
* * *