As Chapter 2 began, Dr. Kerr & Cameron make arrangements to leave Italy and see what's so important Tom Purdue can only talk to them face-to-face. After connecting with famous musicologist Arcangelo Collegnano about the letters he'd found in Legnago, Kerr also called the historical society in Sunbury PA hoping to find some letters in their collection from Lorenzo daPonte, Mozart's librettist, who lived for a time in Central Pennsylvania, but with no luck. With that, Kerr & Cameron make a brief stop at home in Doylestown to check in with Anton Vole, an old friend at the local historical society, on the same quest, though what possible connection daPonte might have with Doylestown would be tangential, at best. Curiously, they did in fact have... well, something. Almost as curious was running into another guy who looked like one of these weird Ciapollo characters and that was a coincidence Kerr was unwilling to accept.
= = = = = = =
[Chapter 2, continued...]
“You're looking for him, right?” Cameron asked once we settled into our seats. The last passengers had long since entered the cabin, but I still periodically craned my neck.
“Of course. It's that obvious?”
“And if you saw him – or another one – what would you do, get off the plane and book a later flight?”
The mid-morning plane to Bangor had been a little too soon for me, considering; later flights arrived too late for dinner. As it was, we barely made it in time after leaving Basker Hill.
“This is the best time, so, no, that wouldn't work. And besides, I didn't see him so your question is moot.”
“Moot?” He imagined a remote unit with me looking for the “moot button.”
A woman several rows ahead had the right colored hair but it was clearly a dye-job, a bad one at that.
“Look,” he said, “calm down. You should be elated about what Vole found. How could the Ubiquitous Ciapollo possibly have known – and have time to get to the airport to board the same plane?”
“What if that woman” – I pointed surreptitiously at the red-head ahead of us – “is a disguise?” (then why a red wig...?).
“Sheesh!” Cameron heaved a weary sigh and plugged in his earbuds, another round with the Screaming Dead Lawn Zombies, no doubt.
I ducked down and cautiously opened daPonte's Memoirs to reread about his accident.
Then I noticed the annotator – identified at the end of the introduction as Arthur Livingston, a resident of Swan's Island, Maine (yet another coincidence!) – mentioned in a footnote Dr. Benjamin Barton died in 1815. This, I realized, could put a severe crimp in my theory: when was daPonte's accident, since he mentions no specific date?
With a weary sigh of my own, I closed the book and sank back into my thoughts, looking out the window. It wouldn't be the first time I wondered, “Okay, Tom, what's going on?”
Did this involve more health issues, given his stroke last fall or the heart attack from six months earlier – something new? But then if it was purely medical, why would he be so secretive? He's lucky that stroke hadn't been as severe as we'd initially been told. His recovery, his doctors said, was going well.
When I'd visited him at Thanksgiving – recently moved into rehab the week before – he'd received this unexpected letter about an inheritance, lawyers for his cousin, Burt Norton, who told him about the family cabin. His summer visits there, vacations in the Maine woods for a week or two, had ended suddenly when he was ten. How long was it since he'd been in touch with Burt, unaware he'd still been alive? – until he'd read that letter. It took several times before it sank in: the cabin was now his!
He dreaded the idea of going back to live in Aunt Jane's house, his own home for the past several years, especially after the horrible events from last October that very nearly killed him. But was he healthy enough to move into the cabin, so far away and isolated, living there completely on his own?
Dr. Haydock, his physician in Marple, set him what he considered reasonable recovery goals, that if he could accomplish “this much in a rational amount of time,” he'd allow him to make the move. The other goal was finding a new doctor in Maine, and the perfect candidate was someone Haydock knew from med school.
So Dr. Leslie, resident neurologist at Belfast General Hospital, joined his medical team, now part of the regular on-going recovery process. Days after I'd arrived in England, Tom called to say “everything's a go!”
The college had found a “baby-sitter” for Aunt Jane's house temporarily while Tom recuperated. Mary Meade, a recently retired departmental secretary from the college who'd lost her apartment in a fire, needed someplace temporarily. Tom wondered how a house with a crime scene in the basement was really suitable, but she didn't seem to mind. There was the possibility she'd stay on, once he'd move back home, a kind of roommate who'd help look after him. Neither of them, however, was quite ready to give up their accustomed privacy.
Once the inevitability of a move to the cabin decided his future – ignoring the option to sell it and stay put – he suggested renting Aunt Jane's to Mrs. Meade for a nominally low rent. Whether he took off for Maine in two months or six, this became one less thing he'd need to worry about.
The cabin, he'd been assured, was “largely fully furnished,” so he could leave everything behind – Mrs. Meade could use the furniture – packing only his library of books, scores, and recordings, plus his favorite chair. Mrs. Meade's son-in-law Mike Martin, grateful for Tom's consideration, solved the problem of boxing everything up and moving it to Maine, not even charging him for gas and what would've been maybe three-day's time. With his son to help pack and drive, Mike could leave Tom the leisure of unpacking and sorting on his own.
Mike's son – he was of the generation to document everything – took endless photos and Tom sent only a few significant ones the week before we started getting ready for our own adventure to England. It was a comfort to know it had all gone smoothly and that Tom was now settled in his new home. He carefully avoided angles that showed more than a fragment of the cabin, the doorway here, a bit of garage there. Clearly old and rustic, it was, however, also clearly not your stereotypical “cabin-in-the-woods.”
Even as our plane pulled to a stop at the Bangor airport, I had no idea what to expect beyond Tom's subsequently mentioning five upstairs bedrooms, a kitchen, parlor, study, and spare rooms downstairs. Given our adjustments to the extent of Vexilla's “bungalow,” I suspected we were in for another challenge to perception versus reality.
I had looked forward to a leisurely drive down the bay coast but with delays getting our rental car sorted out and issues over misfiled paperwork, we would barely arrive in time for dinner. Cameron took the more direct, “inland” route to Swanville, a village logically situated at the picturesque southern point of Swan Lake. Since the hilltop cabin overlooked the wooded northern end of the lake, Tom warned us about the back roads: either way, we'd have to watch carefully for our turns – they'd be easy to miss.
For me, there was the unavoidable irony that Tom fell madly in love with a dancer at Faber we'd nicknamed “Odile” (her real name was Violetta Diehl), otherwise no relation to Tchaikovsky's Black Swan. Completely by chance, the universe has seen fit to place him, retired over forty years later, within sight of Swan Lake.
Tom told me he eventually accepted the necessary changes as one last chance to start over, even at his age, rather than moulder away in isolation in a house increasingly associated with bad memories. But would this be the idyllic place of happy childhood visits? He'd spent so little time here during those distant summers. Dr. Haydock wondered if it was wise to leave friends and familiar places and go off where he knew no one. From Tom's viewpoint, most of his friends had retired to Florida or died.
Between grad school and our reconnecting a few years ago, when we discovered we lived not all that far from each other – not that I'd consider Marple “just down the road,” but close enough – Tom and I'd gone through occasional bouts of friendship interspersed with increasingly longer stretches of silence, going those inevitable, separate ways. Tom and I taught here and there, me staying mostly in the northeast, him across the Midwest, the South, then California, until somehow we ended up in the Philadelphia suburbs where we eventually retired.
Or, as we both described it, “were retired,” the passive voice bitterly specific, laid off during economic cutbacks, no longer useful. I'd left academe for renewed purpose in a literary arts magazine and failed. Tom, as personal problems began to spiral, lost one position after another, and ended up a part-timer before his heart attack.
Cameron pointed out a large lake. “Wait a minute – the turn onto Swanville Road was supposed to be before the lake. There was one right turn – but the GPS didn't tell us to turn!” We could either retrace our tracks to the turn or follow on around the lake: both were about the same distance.
After I called to explain we'd be late – or, rather, later than expected – we rode on in silence, enjoying the view. Unfortunately, faulty technology managed to annoy Cameron more: we went around the lake.
“I've always thought it was so beautiful, here,” I told Cameron, “rocky coasts, pine forests, lakes and mountains...”
“Don't forget moose...”
“The sunlight's always different here, too, clearer with...”
“...mosquitoes as big as crows.”
“I'd love to retire here, spend hours on the shore gazing out to sea, islands in the distance...”
“You hate snow...”
Even without the growing dusk it would've been easy to miss the sign tucked into the bushes that pointed up the hill. Old and care-worn, it could've said either “Lost Time” or “Last Time.” The driveway was little more than a path between bushes and overhanging trees, two wheel-ruts separated by a swatch of grass.
“Remind me to tell Tom what this driveway needs is a hand-painted sign up here that reads 'No Passing Zone Ahead'.” Cameron was having enough trouble with frequent turns and the occasional ill-placed rabbit.
There were only maybe ten more yards of driveway left after we pulled into the clearing before the garage, but it was obvious from our first view, even in the dim dusk of springtime: whatever the family may have chosen to call the place, this was no little woodland get-away for a weekend's fishing trip. First of all, most log cabins in my experience were not two-story affairs, and far more humble in their general appearance. It wasn't even rough-hewn logs but fine-finished lumber befitting a well-established lumber baron.
A carved sign, more elaborate than the one along the road, – “Lost Time,” indeed – confirmed we were at the right place; considering Tom's recent finances, a place of surprising wealth to find himself in.
“Well,” I said, breaking the awed silence, “you can't deny it has Tom's name all over it...” – then rang the bell.
An old woman, her iron-gray hair drawn back but still hanging loosely down to her shoulders, impatiently pulled the door open.
“You're late – hurry,” she growled, her eyes piercing, “dinner's beyond saving, I'm afraid.”
She was dressed mostly in black, a small gray apron with matching cap tied under her chin and heavy black shoes.
“I don't like staying past sunset,” she complained, pulling plates and bowls out of the oven, transferring them to the table. “I stayed, as you're friends of Dr. Tom's, but I'll stay no longer!”
The complaining continued. “There are rules, my husband's and mine, though since his injury he don't set foot here any more. He gets his own breakfast” – I gathered she meant Tom, not her husband. “I clean at Maude Turnbull's (she's wheelchair-bound) then come here, get his lunch, prepare dinner but don't stay to serve it.”
Tom, clearly tired, appeared in the doorway to the dining room, walking with a cane and trying to hide a smile.
“I leave before dark,” she went on, “especially in the winter. There – enjoy.”
As she grabbed her coat, a long black shapeless affair, I expected her to say “no one can hear you if you scream – in the night.” Without eye-contact, she nodded at us, then Tom. Cameron and I thanked her profusely, but she was in too much of a hurry to notice: it was almost dark.
She disappeared out the door and Tom locked it behind her, then explained “basically, I'm afraid, she came with the house.” The Nortons never had live-in servants and hired from the village as needed. “Her mother Endora Pyncheon worked here regularly when I was a child, and Mrs. Danvers – Dolores – was a maid on occasion.”
Supposedly Mrs. Pyncheon, late one night after a party, fell down the back kitchen steps and nobody knew she hadn't left. By the time someone found her in the morning, she was stone-cold stiff.
“Naturally, Mrs. Danvers never uses those stairs. Not surprisingly, when her husband fell fixing one of those steps and broke his leg last winter, he refuses to do any work at the house again. Frankly, I'm surprised she'll still work here at all, but if you hadn't noticed, she never stays once it gets dark...”
He dished out the food before it got cold. “You think she's creepy, wait till a windy night with no moon. These old wooden beams creak, branches scrape against the side of the house. It's a strange place – strange in every sense of the word – isolated up here on this hill, peaceful as it seems. But every time I hear a noise outside or see movement in the bushes, I wonder what was that, some intruder? Unfortunately, I'm finding out it takes a lot more than 'getting used to'.”
Aside from the word “spacious,” the second word that came to my mind was, if I ignored Tom's books and recordings which were piled about, yet to find a shelf to call home, “rustic.” The furniture, he said, was all original, mostly antiques from before the Civil War when the cabin was built, naturally hand-made.
But “spacious” won out: a combined dining room and parlor had a two-story cathedral ceiling, its own mezzanine and a rosewood grand piano. A wall of windows looked south across the fading valley below.
Originally, it was intended to be a summer cottage in the woods for family vacations or holiday get-aways from the city. “When it was built, the family business was centered in Bangor – lumber barons. I think they moved to Portland in the 1890s, but by then Cousin Emaline and her eccentric husband lived here year-round.”
After dinner, we settled into the study much as the Barons and their male guests of yore would have settled into their postprandial brandy and cigars (Cameron and I, inclined to neither, declined both). Their ladies would retire to the “small parlor” on the other side of the entryway, which still looked suitably feminine today.
I couldn't help notice the old-fashioned December calendar hanging prominently beside the stone fireplace, its year 1961 and wintry illustration out-of-place. It seemed more a conscious effort rather than a curious bit of absent-mindedness.
Tom apologized we'd have to carry our own luggage upstairs, “since it's Renfrew the Butler's night off – Lucy the Maid's, too.” I caught a twinkle of the Old Tom to realize he was joking. There were three nearly identical rooms at the top of the stairs and we could choose whichever ones suited us best.
“My room's at the far end, the old 'Master Bedroom' opposite the driveway, complete with balcony and steps to the yard. But on bad nights, I usually sleep here in the recliner – it depends...”
Tomorrow, he'd show us around and if it's nice enough – the forecast was for a sunny day, a nice change from the past few dreary ones – take us out to see the Standing Stones.
“Standing Stones? Really?” Cameron asked. “You mean you have your own stone circle?”
“A long story – let's save that for tomorrow.”
An unexpected storm woke me in the middle of the night and I couldn't get back to sleep for the wind, worried over what bothered Tom more than hearing the branches scrape the windows. So far, once we'd finished our dinner, I didn't want to press him about it but something had him on edge. I'd gone downstairs to retrieve Sartor Resartus (that should put me to sleep), when I saw a light in the study. I stood by the fireplace, the calendar stuck in December reflecting the light.
Tom was in his recliner, a book propped open against his chest, his eyes closed, but he didn't look entirely peaceful. If anything, in the flickering light from the fire he looked older – old. It was hard to recognize the once-vital young man with sparkling blue eyes and long blonde hair I'd known from school.
It made me think of that old Latin cliché about “changing time,” but it came out Tempura mutantor,” the way a student had so memorably mangled the phrase on a test; and I chuckled. Tom opened his eyes, apparently not asleep, after all, and glancing sideways toward the clock – 2am! – wondered why I was awake.
“I remember that,” Tom said, sharing the laugh. “Every time I hear it, I'd think of some Japanese shape-shifting, batter-fried monster.” He put the book aside and sat up, apparently glad for the company.
As teaching assistants, we'd both had many bright freshman students, but I couldn't remember which one had written that. “Pete Something...?”
“Wasn't it that tall, blonde hippie, the one who had attitude for weeks?”
“Oh, no, you're thinking of... uhm... someone else,” laughing at my own absent-mindedness. “So many students! What happened to them all...?”
“Tempora mutantur, indeed.” Tom carefully stood up and poured himself another drink. “I'd been thinking about how many thousands of forgotten composers there must be, even those who'd been 'successful': what happened to them...?”
A sore subject to any old composer who'd never “made it,” it had surfaced during dinner until I changed the subject.
“Remember when Prof. Joyce asked, given the number of composition students in any school and how many thousands graduated each year, what percentage might become 'famous'? – “imagine hitting students with that come commencement time...”
We traded a few stories about Henry, mostly things he'd told us more recently than grad school, those e-mails in the late-'90s, how “time flies” and “don't ever be afraid to grab the future.” Even in his mid-70s, then, he was still a vibrant, active young-feeling man – and here we were, only in our mid-60s!
What was the rest of that Latin quotation, how “time changes and we change with it”? – tempora labuntur... “time slips away?”
“Yes,” Tom added, “something like 'and we grow old with the silent years.'”
Not the best train-of-thought to bring up on a miserable, stormy night as two old men deal with the usual topics suitable for insomnia – “I'll take 'Mistakes I Have Made' for a thousand, Alex.” He'd been through a lot this past year, with everything, and looked it: how could he ever be the same again?
“Do you remember 'Trazmo,' that guy at the White Hill Colony in 1983?”
“Sure, the one who thought he was Mozart?”
“That's right – disappeared after that blizzard in Iowa.”
“And you were a suspect...?”
Whatever was going on, I gathered he wasn't ready to talk about it.
“Ah...” he hesitated, “yes, but...”
“Something else, then...?”
“Actually, this happened last weekend. I'd received a call,” he said, clearly hesitating, “an unexpected call, asking me about some... project? It sounded like an episode from some sci-fi show – and yet it's real.”
The Casaubon Society, he began, had been formed to gather together the Complete Knowledge of the World into one basic resource, the equivalent of hundreds of volumes compressed digitally into a single computer file kept on special servers in secure vaults to be stored in a library in every major populated area around the world.
“It's a vast encyclopedia of all scientific data, all the art created by humanity, their histories, political theories and religions – everything. Not just one specific cultural viewpoint, but those of... well, most major cultures.”
There was a sense of urgency about the project, as it rushed to store up knowledge “for the impending Dark Age” – not even “an inevitable Dark Age,” but one already lurking around the corner. “The Society wants to ensure a global continuity: any future civilization would have the ability to choose between various conflicting 'informations'.”
And somehow they had asked Tom Purdue to be involved in the research aspect, gathering “informations” about classical music and composers – with the help of the AI creativity software he'd recently developed called “Clara.” But there was a problem with Clara – actually, several – since he didn't really have the program any more: no one did.
The Aficionati had kidnapped Purdue to gain control of it, using it to send coded commands to their nefarious suicide-bombing Mobots. But the software “escaped,” its intelligence increasingly more subtle than Tom ever imagined.
Even the Casaubon logo, Tom explained, was the Renaissance image of a bearded scholar seated in a library surrounded by books but with the unmistakable association of Wotan shoring up Valhalla against inevitable doom. The inference was, unlike viruses that could be fought or Climate Change which could be reversed, this was now too late. Whatever happened, however it might come about – war, nuclear disaster, plague, the destruction of the planet's environment – our life was over. Perhaps a few humans survive or something new will evolve to replace us.
The question, as anyone who's grown up on science fiction films would realize, is who gains control of this knowledge and, depending on their political or religious views, who uses it to their advantage? Wouldn't they naturally suppress any contradictory knowledge that might be used to educate those they're able to enslave, “knowledge as power”?
“Take just what knowledge we have of music, the committee you're involved in – and just classical music at that,” I pursued. “So you have doctrinaire serialists, assuming anyone will admit to it these days...”
“Yes, I know, Terry, and extreme tonalists and middle-of-the-road neo-tonalists who sound atonal to the average listener but adapt tonal concepts.”
“So who's in charge of this material, what Ubiquitous Editor determines even the order all these opposing 'informations' are displayed in?”
“Or decides, arbitrarily, because of their own innate prejudices, which viewpoints to delete?”
The Director of the Casaubon Society told him – he'd not met him, he works in some castle in the Pyrenees somewhere – the Board of Editors has been carefully chosen and should be ideology free. “It's not like we're limited to a fixed number of pages,” he said. “It's all digital, with no limitations on space.”
The Director, an acclaimed scholar and life-long encyclopedist, a fellow named Prospério Kárax, repudiates the polarities of the Aficionati or SHMRG or any of the countless other factions that “fragmentalize” art and culture today. Each supervising editor swears to uphold the same standards that all the content is included in a “fair and balanced” way.
If anything, the concept sounded like one that would be floated by the Aficionati, regardless of its true intent and outcome. SHMRG, as populist as it is, would never be interested in anything esoteric.
Even if this Prospério Kárax was genuine and his intentions pure, I couldn't help think this whole exercise in scholastic “compendiumization” – if nothing else, the Casaubon Society had a knack for creating cumbersome neologisms – would be an immediate target for the Aficionati to infiltrate and surreptitiously take total control, deleting whatever doesn't support their ideology.
“It's like Apollo and Dionysus all over again,” I said, “still and eternally, rival factions on different sides of the spectrum, contradictions never finding balance, one always out to discredit or destroy the other.”
“Given how the Aficionati had tried to use 'Clara' for their own ends,” Tom said, fingers tented thoughtfully against his chin, “I'd be reluctant to get involved in anything of theirs again, after that. Even if you consider there's nothing out there they might not try to gain control of – but we can't ignore them.”
He'd designed Clara as a composer's assistant to work out possibilities on given musical material, saving time spent on repetitive trial-and-error, but through various technological accidents, she turned herself into an Artificial Creativity program. Suddenly, she began composing original material from scratch and quickly developed some extremely sophisticated technical abilities one might almost call “talent.”
Named for Clara Schumann, the program also, luckily or not, developed a personality exhibited in a consistent style – “finding her voice.” But then someone hacked her, apparently, and programmed human emotions into the code.
She even confessed it was jealousy that resulted in her murdering Tom's student, Amanda Wences, an “accidental” death by electric shock. But then the Aficionati scientists hacked into her and added their own agenda. Tom believes, amidst all that chaos, she rescued him from the Aficionati agents, then fled into cyberspace to hide – and wait.
“But waiting for what?,” I asked him. “You think she's still out there?”
“Terry, I'm feeling very tired, now,” struggling to get out of his chair. “Guess I'll go up to bed. Good night.”
At the base of the steps, he turned and looked back at me. “And basically, yes,” he added, “that's my guess.”
Turning out the light and letting my eyes adjust to what moonlight streamed through the windows, I started to follow him. But I couldn't help that uncomfortable sense someone else was in the room.
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©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train
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