Sigismund's Treat
Sigismund felt an intense rushing in his ears. The occasional streaks of light showed a blizzard of particulates floating around him. Every couple of seconds, a vast and murky bulk barrelled past him and missed him by a finger’s breadth. The inertia and the pressure of the situation began to make his panic rise rapidly, and he span around looking for any kind of landmark. Something that would tell him in which direction to swim. He spotted a smeared blob of light and instantly kicked towards it. It could be the moon, or the back light of a boat; anything that would let him breach the surface. Another thrashing heaviness of flesh raced past him and yanked him off course for a few strokes with the strength of its wake. The light was only a dozen metres away now, and he thought he could see the water growing clearer. He gave a final desperate kick and flailed his arm out in the direction of the waves.
His arm caught the lamp and knocked it clean off the bedside table, where it clattered against the wall and fell onto the carpet. Sigismund felt his consciousness being slowly dredged to the surface. He cracked his eyes open; it was either still early or an unusually gloomy morning. After restoring the lamp to its rightful place, he took stock. The bandages on his hands looked to have held, although there were still sporadic constellations of blood on the sheets. He flexed his fingers slowly outwards until the skin tugged, then reeled them back into a gradual fist. He could not feel any splinters, but he would not know for sure until he had taken off the bandages, and that was going to have to wait until tomorrow. He felt an urgent thirst for coffee.
It turned out to be just after ten o’clock. The storm clouds sluggishly made their way over the hills in the distance, leaving a milky half-light in their wake. Sigismund flicked the button on his coffee machine with a deft elbow and leaned against the countertop. Once he felt that his spirits had fully returned to him, he would go to the art room and comb over the results from last night. The fact that he had had an anxiety dream was promising: they were usually a side effect of a successful session, the disturbing toll levied on a moment’s insight. For now, he needed to get his blood sugar up. He took a thick slice of brioche from the fridge, lacquered it with butter and sat at the breakfast table with his coffee to look out over the valley. The world had woken up by now, but it had done so quietly. There were no sounds of traffic or industry from outside the window. Sigismund took a measured pull from his coffee and felt grateful for the isolation. His thoughts brought back the now-familiar tug of regret that Lotte would no longer share it with him; she had understood silence, and could inhabit it without tainting it. The mornings on which they had sat at the kitchen table, busy at some distant level with the process of breakfast but more focused on bathing in the same warm timelessness, had been some of the finest of his life.
The lock on the art room was a dense slab of metal rated for a door twice as large. Sigismund always locked the room when it was not in use, even though no one else had set foot in the house for almost a year. In a way, corralling its energy this way made him feel safer. He needed the borders between natural and primal perception to remain unassailable. The room smelled the same way it did after every session: a dense cocktail of scorched metal and bittersweet spices. He opened the window slightly, then went to the grate to kindle a fire. Once the flames had taken hold, he held the tip of a candle over the fireplace until the wick caught. He placed it into the open mouth of a toad-shaped wrought iron holder in the corner of the table. The next step was to take the wide stone bowl from the opposite corner of the table and tip its contents into the fire. The resulting tinkle and crash rang out with a surprising violence and Sigismund stood until he could see the glint of the glass blacken. The scent of roasted iron grew stronger.
Sigismund sat at the table and contemplated the objects in front of him. Nothing was now left from the previous night’s session other than the great mirror and a notepad and pen. Most of the blood had congealed on the surface of the mirror, but there was a generous spatter on the notepad as well. He used his fingernail to scratch off as much as he could from the paper until the words underneath became visible. In handwriting he recognised as a more savage version of his own, he could make out:
- BOAT
- BOW
- DARREN
- FOOT
- STEAL
and then the text warped into a jerky EEG trace that signalled that the session had ended. He steepled his fingers together under his chin and looked at the patterns in the blood on the mirror’s surface. It was important for him to be able to reconcile the patterns with the words on the pad; otherwise, the session would have been worthless. Here was the swing of the Sparrow Spirit’s hull, and here was the point of its bow. This splash to the right was Darren’s wild hair, dancing chaotically in the stiff breeze. And here was his foot, outstretched as if booting a ball over a score line. Sigismund forced himself to quell the bubble of excitement that had begun to rise in him. He sat back in the chair and sighed, grasping at his scalp. If the last word was not there, the augury would be void.
He sat forward again and squinted in concentration. The blood had dried at uneven thicknesses, bringing some of its contours into sharper relief. His gaze roved to and fro over the trails and droplets until it settled on a rough ziggurat behind the figure of Darren: a stack of banknotes, taken by the boat operator and stashed no doubt in a safe location. Sigismund breathed out at length and ground his knuckles into his eyes, wary of the fresh cuts. This was almost incontrovertible proof that his theory was correct; he would need to do one more session, and then he would feel certain enough to act. He left the fire to burn itself out, closed the window and locked the vision room’s door for another week. On his way back down the hall, he caught the eye of Lotte’s mischievous portrait, standing on the sea wall with her flowery dress billowing in the spray. He brushed his fingertips over the photo’s glass and murmured, ‘Nearly there.’
***
It was the following evening before he removed the bandages. The new scars were bright and precise, crisscrossing older ones that had faded into raised, pale stripes. He dabbed at them with an iodine-soaked cotton ball and breathed into the sting. It had been eleven months to the day since Darren had invited them both to his lake house. A small gesture of his appreciation for Lotte’s sterling dedication to the ceaselessly reeling abacus of the company’s results. He had shown consummate grace and hospitality to them both on their arrival, welcoming them as old friends that he nonetheless wanted to impress. Sigismund remembered finally weighing up the man he had only ever known as his wife’s employer: supercharged, brittle, spiky and very socially nimble, but somehow without substance, a briar desiccated in the wind. He had tried to listen between the man’s words and dowse for his genuine passions, to no avail. When he and Lotte had retired to the guest bedroom shortly after midnight, having listened and laughed through hours of anecdotes about trading and living the rural life, he had sensed that her inner voice was scorching a trail through the surface with its need to speak. The two of them had lain naked with the bedclothes scrunched down to their waists, pinned like moths and slowly wrung out by the August heat, her fingers gently skating through his chest hair.
‘Everything alright?’
‘Sigi…if he tries to give you a present, don’t take it.’
‘Why ever not? I mean, it depends what it is, of course.’
‘No…it’s not like that.’ Her voice was a dead-weight whisper. ‘He’s been taking money from the company…a lot of money. I couldn’t prove anything for a long time but now I think I can.’
A long sigh, and an arm curled around his wife’s shoulders.
In a similarly throttled murmur: ‘Does he suspect anything?’
‘I don’t think so. He’s very discreet but I have access to all of it.’
‘Don’t make a move just yet. We shouldn’t even be talking about this right now.’
Their absurdly baroque surroundings, the dense cloth of the bed-curtains and the fruity ethyl varnish of the wainscoting, still a blackstrap filter on their vision, bore down upon them. Sigismund spent a fitful night kicking against the amber of their host’s agitprop; by the time he awoke, Lotte had already left.
***
Nothing over the course of the week felt urgent enough to merit his attention. He received a phone call on the Wednesday from the nurse at Peter’s school to say that the boy had sprained his ankle and been taken to the infirmary; this required no action on Sigismund’s part, so it left his head the instant he put the receiver down. On a trip into town the following day, he was accosted by a young man canvassing for donations who came across as genuinely concerned but could not explain how the charity was going to use the funds it collected. Perhaps this is the sort of elderly question borne of a life spent dealing with the people in charge, mused Sigismund as he walked away. There was nothing else for it: it was time for a two-step cure.
On the Friday morning, he rose early, shaved and dressed in his finest suit. It was shortly after seven when he pushed through the doors of St John the Evangelist and into the sweet, smoky half-light within. Figures in different stripes of robe were bustling about the chancel in preparation for the morning prayer and liturgy. Sigismund breathed in the denseness of the air and reflected with a small smile that he had always felt supported by this denseness, instead of crushed. He was a visitor here, an ambassador from another discipline of the soul, but held fast to œcumenism. He took a pew at the rear of the church and let his heart fill with the mixture of faith, duty and fear that drove the regulars to return. After a while, this tumult of emotion would become too loud, and he would have to step outside and steady himself against the church wall while taking deep lungfuls of air, but that was all part of the cure. Fr Andersson was making his way down the aisle towards him as quickly as his artificial hip would allow. The outstretch of a hammy, muscular hand.
‘Sigismund! Welcome back. It is wonderful to see you again. How have you been?’
‘Oh, you know, Father: there are some days when it is easy and there are some days when it is not so easy.’
‘And…you have been having a bit too many days recently when it has not been easy, and now you are here?’
Sigismund could not help but lean into the priest’s natural charm and compassion. ‘Eehhh…I think you could put it like that. In any case, it was important for me that I come here today.’
‘Well, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. Morning prayer will be underway shortly.’
‘Thank you, Father. I can’t guarantee anything: you know the sensory overloads I get sometimes. And…thank you for everything you did for Lotte. It was a beautiful service.’
‘God loves you, Sigismund. He sees your love for Lotte and blesses you for it. Try to take strength in that.’ The priest squeezed his hand one more time. Sigismund caught sight of the caul of scars and wished he had worn gloves.
The abrupt and flustered surge of congregation arriving five minutes before morning prayers gave Sigismund the ideal opportunity to dissolve into the crowd. He gently elbowed his way out of the front door and into the morning freshness. By some stroke of fortune, he had found a parking space no more than thirty seconds’ walk from the church. He felt a faint but visceral chill at the emptiness of the roads so early in the morning. The road out of the city quickly opened up to a windswept and serpentine track through the moors, rising to keep pace with the sun. When the landscape switched from ragged grassland to an eruption of raw boulders bursting through the turf, he pulled off the road and retrieved his wax jacket from the boot. The wind whipping around the rocks chilled his skin and bled through his thin city shoes. This, too, was part of the cure.
Sigismund walked until he found a broad, slanted slab of granite caked with a stubble of moss. It was freezing to the touch, so he pulled the hood of his jacket up over his head before lying down. The sensations of his body twisting and bending into all the contours of the granite felt as unnatural as ever, but he breathed into the discomfort and concentrated on the fullness buzzing in his head. Once he had abandoned himself to his stringless puppet posture, his mind lanced itself and slowly began to drain, seeping all the anger and stress and confusion of the previous week out over the rocks and the scrubland. He began to feel lighter with every passing breath; his fingertips tingled, and he was buffeted by a wave of heat and dizziness. He smiled at the feeling, close to drunkenness, that told him that his heart was being cauterised. In half an hour’s time, he would drag himself exhausted off the rock and stumble back to his car, where he would melt into three hours’ blissful sleep, ready to rub his neck and stretch upon awakening until his back muscles sang. It was time for the next session.
***
He removed the freezer bag filled with an intestinal lattice of mushrooms and splashed with jagged clots of other tinctures just before going to bed. It melted into potency during the night and greeted him with silent, threatening vibrations as he came down to make his coffee the next morning. He would have no food today, other than the contents of the pouch. His initial, cocky experiments with the ritual had proven that dirtying his body’s perception by bloating it with grease and sugars would not only smear the visions, but also hone the pain. He took his morning coffee and cradled it in his great baseball glove of an armchair looking out over the valley below. He breathed heavily, in and out, feeling the thrash of memories growing gradually louder, until he tossed the cup to the side and went to lie down on the balcony. It was not time yet.
As the day progressed, Sigismund’s vision grew muddier and his head began to pound. Knowing that the ritual lay ahead of him stirred his thoughts almost as powerfully as the sacred ingredients themselves. He found himself having to use one piece of furniture after another as crutches to get across the room. His head span violently. Each successive carapace of anticipation that hardened around his mind crushed and funnelled his thoughts back to his most primal memories, when he had found the most epic adventures in running around his great-grandfather’s farm until his shins were scuffed and his outfit was stained with chocolate and drool and snot. He could still feel the abrupt gutting as his great-grandfather had staggered out of his shed, with hours of animal drinking and a chorus that would terrify the dead under his belt, shredded asunder by his own fingernails. The leathery, ragged man had stood there, shirtless and gleaming with blood, with a stare to stop time in his eyes, mumbling Sigismund’s entire life story through the froth on his lips. His memory had hardened like kidney stones in each cell of Sigismund’s body, plotting the canopy of his life’s path and twisting him like a sapling. It was nearly time.
He made his way through the kitchen, where he set a pot of water on to boil. Another dozen jerky steps took him to the office and to the computer that let him open Lotte’s finest, most glorious portrait, soon to be hammered out in varnished and vivid colour. Sigismund snatched at the printout and forced himself to feel the hollowness and the anger and the love. This was his wife, churned back into life, feverish with a thirst for stolen years and shrieking at the nights at his bedside of which she had been robbed. The photo’s weight threatened to pull it from his fingers. It was time.
Sigismund let the tea steep until it was a deep mauve and had a petroleum shimmer on the surface. It was just cool enough that he could drain the mug in one draught. He unlocked the vision room and placed Lotte’s portrait in the silver clasp clamped to the edge of the table. His hearing was becoming deadened. With a single, long match, he lit a candle, a slender catkin of incense and Lotte’s photograph, letting the heat and smoke of their combustion intermingle. He heaved open the drawer of the cabinet containing a series of square plates of glass, stacked vertically like vinyl records, and gingerly withdrew one. The height of the drop was crucial. Leaning his thighs against the edge of the table as a landmark in the increasingly smoky room, he held the pane in both hands. He raised it to shoulder height in front of him, letting it fall and shatter into the great lichen-green quartzite bowl.
The buckshot of glass fragments spilled over onto the tablecloth and onto the corners of the mirror itself. There was nothing left of the pane save a jumbled skeleton of irregular blades. It was into this skeleton that Sigismund now plunged his hands. The pain of the initial cuts felt more of a concept, an idea, than a signal of alarm, under the combined influence of the meditation and the medicine. Sigismund felt the ballast of his mortality drop into the infinite ocean below and soared upwards towards emptiness, silence and clarity. He let the first drops of blood fall onto the mirror.
***
The drive to the head office officially took forty-five minutes. Sigismund brandished his hungriest form of aggressive driving and made it there in thirty. He had to shake his head vigorously several time en route to wipe away the image that had formed on the mirror the previous night. Packing his pilot’s bag had been a perfectly calm experience; the anger had burned its way through his system completely by now, leaving a fertile path for new life to grow. He watched the other cars weaving aimlessly around each other and felt like the only human being left on Earth going in any sort of conscious direction. If other people had any purpose to their lives, his own purpose was purer and more balanced. He parked right in front of the office and his hands were completely still.
Darren was mesmerised by something on his computer screen, his fingers squashed into his temples. His reaction to the jangle of the door’s bell was offset by a little over a second. Then, he jumped up to straightness in his chair so rapidly that it twinged a muscle between his ribs. His martial rigidity sagged when he saw Sigismund standing in the doorway to his office.
‘Oh! Sig…um…Dr Bjarnesen! I’m sorry; I wasn’t expecting you. Please, come in. I just want to say again how sorry I am about –’
Sigismund silenced him with a raise of his hand and a benevolent smile. He strode into the office, placed the pilot’s bag down beside the customer chair in front of the desk and tended his hand to Darren. ‘Please, Darren…how many times must I ask you to call me Sigismund?’
The two shook hands, a wrinkle of pain flashing across the younger man’s face at his visitor’s strength. ‘I wanted to come here in person today to tell you that I have formally asked the police to close their investigation into Lotte’s death. I told them that an accident can happen to anybody. I do not want what happened to have any consequences for your business. You have built something admirable here, and it should be allowed to continue.’ He sat in the chair, opened the pilot’s case and began rummaging through the papers inside.
‘Thank you…Sigismund.’ Darren crumpled back into his chair, tilting his head back and groaning softly. ‘I know how terrible a time it must have been for you. I relive the scene almost every day, in my thoughts, and can’t help wondering if there was something I could have done differently. Something that would have meant Lotte could-’
His breath caught and he jerked slightly as the dart from Sigismund’s gun hit him in the upper thigh.
‘Fish are amazing creatures, aren’t they, Darren? Remember that photo you were so keen to show us of the pike you’d caught from the lake, as thick as a sailor’s forearm and spoiling for a fight? You probably don’t get many of them in your lake, but porcupinefish are their own miracles of nature as well. They do look a little gormless and they were never going to be family favourites at the petting zoo, but they can look after themselves.’ Sigismund gave a small chuckle and replaced the dart gun in his bag. He sighed deeply. Darren felt as though an immense citrus juicer had been clamped around his chest and was beginning to squeeze.
‘You have founded a business, here, but you have made it your business to steal from people. Lotte found the traces you tried so feverishly to cover. She was smarter than you; of course, she was smarter than so many people. She knew, at the end, that you were onto her, but she underestimated your cruelty and your greed. I know you tampered with the seams on her life jacket when you took her out on the lake. I know you planted your foot in the small of her back at the deepest point in the water, so that the surroundings could wash away the evidence.’
‘What the hell are you talking about, you lunatic?’ Darren barked out the words in a wrestle against his rapidly closing throat, digging his fingernails into the green leather of his desk.
‘Oh, I know, I know.’ Sigismund smiled and brushed aside the thought with a regal wave of his hand. ‘Due process is to gather evidence, approach the competent judicial authorities and wait for them to bring a prosecution, after which you may or may not be found guilty and sentenced to a penalty that the law deems appropriate. But do you know what, Darren? I have always had a particular allergy to red tape. Lotte hated it, too. Our truth was evidence enough for us. Now, I have my own methods for finding the truth. They would not stand the rigour of due process, but then, they do not need to.’
Darren had turned a highly pressurised shade of red and was staring at Sigismund in mute fury. He tried to funnel every drop of energy in his body into yelling at the lanky, pointlessly well-dressed stranger, but his face was collapsing into a drowned sack of flesh that was deaf to any command.
Sigismund rose to his feet and brushed down his waistcoat ceremonially. ‘I’ll leave you now, Darren. Think of it this way: you’re going into the same death that you gave Lotte, except from air rather than water. It’s supposed to be a peaceful way to go, but I no longer have the strength or the patience to skin you alive.’
He took the pilot’s case and walked back to his car, humming the melody to a spiritual that he and Lotte had heard in the first concert they had attended together. He had proceeded to sing, hum, whistle and yell the melody for the following two weeks, until she had dissolved into a hilarious fury and pelted him with every ingredient in the kitchen. He smiled as he cranked the ignition.