I don't know where the previous notebook went. I have a vague suspicion that Fern hid it. Or burned it. Or maybe her dog ate it. I hear it running outside, along what's left of the street.
There was an abandoned house where my sister and I used to play when we were little, a street away. The garden was full of weeds, and all the windows were broken. There was a gnarled old mirabelle tree in the front yard, and in summer we used to gorge ourselves on the sweet fruit that fell to the ground. Everything inside the building had been taken away, except for a huge cast-iron stove that could only be removed by tearing down a wall, and rats were nesting everywhere. It was like our secret place ; since it touched the outer periphery, the border that makes anything too far from the heart of 3 Portlands disappear, almost nobody else dared to go there.
Our grandparents did not like to see us playing there, but not so much because of any danger as because we were Marleys, and, bankruptcy or not, Marleys should never stoop to playing like common children.
Year after year, we watched the periphery engulf it, stone by stone, tile by tile. Whenever you walked close enough to it, you could feel a static crackle, and it gave me goosebumps.
Then, one morning, there was no house left at all.
It was just four empty walls, my little sister told me. The people were long gone, and all their memories too. And the house had surely been very flattered to have served as our secret place in its old age.
All that was left of it now were memories in our heads, and one day those memories would disappear with us, and no one would ever know this house had existed. I thought about it at night at home, trying to fall asleep in our upstairs bedroom, staring at the ceiling, turning from side to side, unable to close my eyes.
It was nothing. It was just a house.
Just a house.
I went on another expedition in town. I got some nasty looks again because of my old clothes. I found some that belonged to my father, but they were already worn out and out of fashion in Grandpa's time. My ankles and wrists stick out like gnarled roots. I too would like to disappear into the ground.
By the early seventies, our house had almost reached the outer periphery of the town due to lack of an anchor point. The respectable neighbours had all moved to the city centre, but we were Marleys, and the Marleys made a point of keeping their family home. With no money to pay a golemancer or to have the building moved stone by stone by thaumaturgists, my father spent all his spare time making a device that could move the whole house in one go. He spent almost all the money he made out of his orders on it, but the shame that surrounded all craftsmen who lived near the periphery soon took its toll, and his order book became almost empty.
It was a simple reversal of fortune, Grandpa used to say. Those labs that had a stranglehold on the city's economy wouldn't last. People would soon tire of modern anomalous technology, and honest craftsmanship would take over once again one day. We would see who would be the first to get the better of the robots and the screens: the automaton makers or the golemancers.
Eight-year-old me said that maybe they could buy a TV, just to see if it was as good as everyone said, and my father slapped me in the face.
Late in the afternoon today, I finally found the location of the auction house that had commissioned my father to build an automaton capable of arbitrating sales; it was his last large-scale order before the beginning of the end. As this particular machine was assembled directly in the podium because of the space taken up by the spiritual animation mechanism, my father had spent a lot of time there. I didn't like the way people looked at us with contempt, dwelling on my long, tangled hair, making me feel like a lowlife.
To escape the nasty looks, sometimes my little sister and I would climb up on the roof of the hall while waiting for our father to take us home. The slate was very hot in summer and we had to be careful not to slip in winter. Once I had to catch Fern in extremis near the gutter because she had seen a blackbird and wanted to get closer to it. She was very keen to give a different name to every bird she saw. I told her that it was probably the same ones that came back several times and that she had no way of telling, and she laughed.
I went back up on the roof one last time to peel off a slate tile.
That's it, the blueprints are finally finished. I've pinned everything on the walls of the old workshop; it's the furthest point from the peripheral border, anyway, so that goes without saying.
I never went to university. I'll never understand traditional magic, or golemancy, or robotics. I'll never be able to build anything that could move the whole house or even finish what my father started, because I can't create automatons like him. But he always told me that I was good at one thing and one thing only, and that was listening to the secret language of objects. They each want to be put in a certain place, arranged in a certain way, and this desire is a more powerful bond than any physical substance. Sometimes, as a child, I would stack stones on top of each other, balancing them on their corners, or edges, or as high as I could, for hours. I could do it, because I knew they wanted to do it.
One day, a long time ago, I asked my father if he could help me build a perfect little model of our house - he never had time to help me, of course. Just like he never had time to finish the device that would move the whole house. However, that day he warned me against the idea of "perfection", because if the house had a soul, a genius loci, and it found my model more to his liking, it would hide in it instead of our home, and that would be irreversible.
I then asked him if it was possible to build something that would create a call, a desire intense enough to capture something more powerful - could you steal the soul of a forest? of a city? of people?
That day too, he had slapped me in the face. But nowadays, he's no longer here to do so.
You see, some things want to be placed a certain way, and others want to be put together. They need a home, or a friend, or a hand to hold. Sometimes when a grave is opened to be emptied when a plot has expired, one or two objects are found perfectly intact inside, and everyone calls it a miracle - in reality, they were exactly where they were supposed to be, by accident. And sometimes, like a pebble feels compelled to fall to the ground, they don't even want to be there, but feel irresistibly forced to be somewhere.
Exactly like the genius loci of 3 Portlands.
It is coiled in the heart of the city like a hermit crab in its shell, but instead of looking for a more suitable one, he pushes the whole city around it. Toward the periphery.
Toward nothingness.
And if I can build it another shell, a vessel, an avatar, a perfect allegory of what makes 3 Portlands 3 Portlands, that is able to pull it out of the physical city like dead skin from chapped lips and trap it forever, it will all be over. Finally.
The problem now is going to be to finish putting everything together, material-wise. I can't make anything, because a genius loci feels these things. No, I'll have to keep using existing objects without modifying them, objects full of history and soul, until their assembly reaches the critical stage and the genius is forced to migrate there, by space-spiritual capillarity. I need to focus on the real 3 Portlands, the one of old, the one my little sister and I knew. Not this bastardized and mutilated technomagic parody that has emerged during the current century. No. I need the real face of the city, and I'm going to rip it from its skull.
And the house will finally stop moving. And everything can go back to the way it was.
At least, that's what I hope. So much of the real 3 Portlands has already been swallowed up by the Outside that I feel like I'm building a sand castle to stop the tide. But I'm very patient, my shovel is solid, and I have plenty of sand.
I finally found something satisfactory to start assembling the spine of the whole structure, segment by segment. I sacrificed what was left of the old swing set in front of where the neighbors' old house across the street used to be. Fern and I would spend hours playing on it - sometimes we'd swing backwards and look up at the colorful sky and pretend it was an ocean and if we let go of the chains, we'd fall into it.
One time Grandma was pushing me on the swing, back when she could still walk, and she thought I was heavier than usual. I told her that my pockets were full of pebbles because I had picked some up on a path I liked. She replied that I deserved the name my parents gave me, so I asked her what it meant. She laughed, and explained that 'Ælfstan' was an old way of saying 'magic stone', and that I was her little pebble.
Later, I thought about the ricochets people made with pebbles, and I had the impression that she saw me as a small object in her pocket, which she hoped would go very far.
Two days ago, I stole one of the chairs from a university theater where Fern had dragged me once to listen to a lecture. There is high quality old leather on the back and the wood has that polish that you can only feel on one that has been handled by hundreds of fingers over centuries. No varnish, no sanding in the world could achieve such a result. Pieces of souls are embedded between the veins of the material. Sand between rocks at the bottom of a stream. It will be perfect for a part of the frame. I wonder if it will be necessary to steal anything else there? But I still have time. Only the wall closest to the outer periphery has been absorbed, and that's only progressing three feet a year.
Even with almost no modification of each object, the assembly is long, tedious, and terribly complex. Some objects cling to each other like ticks to a deer, others desperately repel each other, and I have to change and adapt my blueprints constantly because it is impossible to predict the personality of each item. I have never had so many calluses on my hands.
In thought, I take refuge in the street of old. I look up as I ride my memory bike home in the evening, and there is light at Grandma's window. Moths flutter by and land on it. It's still her house, she's still alive, and the bike's rusty brakes squeak on the path that leads me back to her. No photograph compares to the almost unbearable reality of memories. Oh, we were already living in general disgrace, but that shame was alive and warm, one in which we could still take refuge as a hobo takes refuge in a holey cape, feeling at home there.
The street ceased to be a street when the strange crackle of oblivion began to devour it, and even the shame became cold, once the well of contempt of the others dried up. We should leave, Fern begged me yesterday. There is nothing left here. Only death remains.
But as long as death remains, nothing has been forgotten yet.
My expedition to the old lighthouse didn't deliver the pieces I was hoping for - sometimes when I try to listen to their language, it's not the objects I expected that speak. And oh, the seagull bones lodged between the rocks spoke so loudly, and there were so many of them. They spoke of the waves, and they spoke of revenge. My bag rattled like a music box on the way home.
When I got home, my sister's stupid dog barked at me and tried to bite my bare ankles, as if it had the audacity to think I was a stranger in my own home. Then Fern saw the seagull bones, and she started screaming.
What I'm creating in the old workshop, she told me, is not 3 Portlands, or even a fantasized allegorical version of 3 Portlands. It's something that never existed outside of my own head, it's something I built artificially on the foundations of legends with the bones of memories, and you can't bring back something that never existed anywhere but in a head. And she refuses, she screamed, to spend the rest of her life imprisoned amidst old pieces of wood, cobwebs, and bone debris. I told her okay, fine, go away since that's what you believe, and she dropped onto Grandma's velvet chair, a cloud of dust and moth scales rising all around her.
She sat there watching me silently inventory the gull bones, instinctively sorting the ones that wanted to join my creation and putting them aside. After a long moment, she asked me if this was really what I wanted to do with my life. If I didn't want to live for myself, to become someone. I told her that I didn't need to become someone since I was already a Marley, and that I was doing what I was meant to do since I was born. She stared at me, completely lost. As if I had a life of my own. As if I ever had a choice.
She walked out without saying anything, taking her damn dog with her.
I just found this notebook inside a dusty pot. I'm sure it's another one of Fern's tricks. Or one of mine? Or maybe it wanted to hide there, like those objects that attract each other spiritually in the genius's vessel. We used to put bouquets of dried flowers in this place. Now the pot is tarnished, there's a dead beetle at the bottom, and it's covered in spider webs. If only they would do their job… There is a bug somewhere in the workshop. I don't know where it is, exactly, but sometimes I hear it landing on one of the diagrams hanging on the wall, with a sound similar to a drop falling into a sink. It's just as maddening.
The air is filled with particles dancing in the golden light, the one that still manages to filter through the spaces between the blueprints on the windows. Sometimes I become absorbed in their contemplation for several minutes. I find it hard to concentrate.
I heard there were no real haunted houses. Only houses where so much has happened that they take on their own identity, and sometimes, they love you. And sometimes, they hate you. Maybe I've loved this house so much that it's starting to hate me.
I don't know if the house itself has a genius, as my father suspected. If it does, I have to be very careful not to capture it instead of the town one, because I'll have no way to get it out of the vessel, and no second chance.
It's just four walls full of junk, Fern told me. And she told me I could just go to another house, and even bring all the junk there, if I wanted to, and that it's all meaningless now. I replied it wouldn't be the Marleys' house anymore, and when she insisted, I asked her what she would feel like if I took everything inside her dog and put it in another dog. She slapped me. She really doesn't understand anything.
The storeroom at the old theater had all kinds of usable stuff, but I chose a piece of the old curtain, the one from when we still went to watch plays with the grandparents. We never went back when they started using robots from Prometheus Labs as stagehands, but deep down I know it was because we no longer had any money.
I cut the curtain into long strips, and they wrap perfectly around the railing I took from the grand hotel, like muscles around a skeletal leg. When you venture far enough into this art, the boundary between the animate and the inanimate becomes permeable, and all you have to do is reach through and touch the marrow of reality.
In the end, I have always been one more object in this city, in this house. But an object can do a lot of damage, when thrown hard enough.
Watch your magic pebble, Grandma, watch it closely, watch it bounce again and again to the surface, before disappearing and taking all the water with it instead of sinking.
The notebook was enclosed in the rib cage of one of the stuffed animals I emptied the other day. It has been so long since the last time I wrote in it. The pencil is heavy and the notebook feels dead between my hands. For a moment, earlier, I was afraid it would bite me. Dead animals still have teeth. Walls have ears and doors have eyes. Objects are sincere. Only living things lie. And the man you know betrays you. You ask where your hair is when you wake up. And I don't know. Hell, I don't know. I think it's in the cables that connect the parts of the left arm because the shroud I tore the other day didn't have conductive enough strands. I think I got it from one of the tombs I emptied in the outer periphery, the one with the headless statue. Wrapped in the shroud, there was only a pierced stone and a bird's skull, nestled in the fabric like a heart in a human. The lichens on the statue were the same as those on the walls of the conservatory. Only lichens that have been bathed in magic can form this kind of pattern. Everything is connected here, don't you see? Everything is connected together like tapestry threads. I say that and you say I'm the spider in the middle, and when I stopped talking to you I was sitting under the stairs, where I used to hide whenever I got slapped, where my dad could never find me. And the wall crackles. It crackles so hard I can feel it under my tongue.
Can a house suffer? Can an object suffer?
The left arm works now and each piece slides like the frogs between my fingers back when I was playing in the stream as a child. My little sister would come over and put a flower crown on my head and laugh, and I would throw that in the stream, because crowns were girl things and I had to look like a man like my dad, and then she would cry. I feel like I'm doing the same thing today. But hair is like flowers on a hill, it always grows back. I can't grow a house back. I can only live in this vile shame waiting to see the light again, or salvation, or revenge. When you are at the bottom of an abyss and surrounded by death and decay, you take whatever comes, whether it's a torch, a knife, or a rope. All three can save you or kill you, but my god, you're going to grab them. You're going to grab them so hard your hands will be embedded with them. I've embedded the mosaic fragments from Prometheus Square into the third face that is slowly taking shape. I think I'll use the broken stained glass I stole from the Seelie church for the eyes. If the genius of the town is trapped in this body, I might as well give it the most beautiful window to the outside world, right?
I cut myself on the broken glass and wiped the blood on the wood I plan to use for the right arm, in a spot that wasn't as polished as the rest. It gulped it like a drunk who fell into a barrel. My head is spinning. I need a slightly domed piece to hinge the neck, but if I carve an artificial one, the trap won't be fatal to the genius. But everything will soon be perfect. Yes, everything will be perfect.
I can't reuse a fragment of banister of the City Hall stairs, I almost got caught last time, and I can't afford it. Not so close. I can feel it, I can feel the genius of the city weakening day after day, it's bubbling under its skin of stone and wood, and it hears the call of my creation. Soon it will not be able to ignore it, and it will embed itself in the vessel in turn. But I need this flat, domed piece. Almost triangular.
Fern spends all her time outside now, she doesn't even want to hear about the house or me anymore. 3 Portlands is huge, yet her desire to explore it is almost cramped because she already knows every corner - so she lingers more in the newer, less familiar parts. The whole city is her home, she says, and it doesn't matter to her if it continues to evolve, for good or ill. The city is like people, she says. It changes. It changes all the time, and some things have to disappear to make room for others. But this house is not just a house, this house is the Marleys, and they can't disappear. It is something that is more than one person, more than many persons, and much more than me, and it is fading into nothingness, Fern, it is fading into nothingness, and I am fading with it. Bit by bit.
Does she know what happened to her dog? Does she suspect something?
Are long-loved objects people? Do isolated people become objects?
I need this piece. Without it, the third head can't swivel.
people people are objects people are objects people are objects PEOPLE ARE. OBJECTS OBJECTS OBJECTS OBJECTS PEOPLE ARE OBJECTS
OBJECTS IT HURTS SO FUCKING MUCH PEOPLE ARE OBJECTS
can an object suffer
can an object suffer Fern can an object still walk
i wasn't using this knee that much
the third head swivels so well now
she came back with some food and i wanted to show her the vessel but she saw my leg and went outside to throw up
what she brought was a dish from one of the restaurants near memorial park the corn was delicious with the sauce
we used to go there in the park when we were little we used to fly kites made by dad and the colors of the sky would mix in and it's yet another thing that the big nothing from outside will devour
the periphery has eaten the foot of the stairs and i can no longer access the second floor even if i walk sideways i can't it's over, our childhood's room was up there Fern, we used to lie on the carpets when there were still there and since we didn't have tv we read adventure novels and the patterns of the carpets became a geography of rivers and mountains and we got lost in them
you would blow dust up my nose and laugh and i thought everything would be eternal but carpets and creaking floors and rooms and even children return to nothingness in the end like the memories of an old man approaching death
it's like grandpa near the end, he used to forget everything too, i would hold his hand and he would ask me who i was, and then he would confuse me with dad and he would tell me that at least i had a good marriage, and if i wept he didn't understand why because he was talking about happy things
but in his head i had already ceased to exist
we spend our lives stuffing our heads full of memories and then we should lose them all at the end little by little?
one by one?
it's so unfair
like the roof tiles that are caught one by one in the crackling of the periphery and let dead leaves and moths fall into the living room on the first floor
it's all falling like snow
his head was full of moths
we lose our memories one by one and it is all our life which is erased and when the last one finally disappears there is nobody left inside the person
there is nothing left but a shameful object that we get rid of in a box and that we put in the ground to never see it again
like an empty house like a cage from which the birds have fled
but i'm almost done Fern
i'm almost done
she made me a bandage and went back to the outside world
she is everywhere outside and i am nowhere inside
i stuffed all the moths' wings into a canvas bag from the market in piot-chan square, it used to have eternal thyme in it, i think, the canvas has the same smell as grandma's drawers, where her clothes were. they are still beating inside. now it serves as the main lung of the second head, it was missing one and it was missing a link to that market. that's why the genius still hasn't given in. the fly i want to catch is a three-headed golden eagle but this web has taken me so many years. its bones will crack like dead wood. its blood will varnish the woodwork. its feathers will decorate my walls. the walls of my house, of our house Fern.
i think i need a long, curved piece to complete the rib cage but i can barely walk and even the dust vibrates around my fingers and showers me in moth scales
hell there is so little left of this house i am going to run out of rooms and all that is left, the little that is left, it is crackling, it is all crackling so loud, so loud
my chest hurts and my fingernails almost sparkle from being so close to the peripheral border and i can't change the bandage by myself but i have to finish, i have to finish
i'm a snail trapped by the cold in its shell and retreating further and further there's so little left of the house so little left so little left almost nothing almost dead and so little left of me too
but spring is coming
spring is coming and it will be terrifying
it will be terrifying
there is a pebble in my shoe and it keeps rolling around in there even when i try to take it out and tap on the heel and i don't know why it obsesses me more than anything else
theres is a pebble in my memory and it keeps rolling around in there and tomorrow, tomorrow it will still be there
i wish i could get it out
i can't do it anymore
ælfstans are objects
if there is nothing else left, that is where you should get the supplies
i hope this file is sharp enough
at least adam had god to help him back then
i don't know how long I stayed on the floor but when i woke up there was a film of dust on my eyelids and the hole in my chest was covered in moths
i can't tell the dried blood flakes from the scales, it's like sawdust, it's like fragments of dead leaves
but i have the last piece now and that was all that was missing
that was all
it moved
it's inside
that's it
something went into the vessel that's it
i have the genius i have the city i have the house and i have us Fern i have us i have what's left of us
and everything is going to stop now and home is going to be home again
it was supposed to stop
the genius's new vessel slowly came out of the workshop and sat outside, but nothing stopped
i measured it
the house keeps sinking into the periphery
there's so little of it left. yet i have the genius trapped. i have it
but nothing is stopping
i limped closer to the city with my crutch and it is still the same
i don't understand
everything seems normal everything goes on as before in this kind of parody of what the city was
i think my bandage is infected and people are afraid of me
they are afraid of me
(afraid of a crippled pebble?)
i don't understand
i checked, and the house itself didn't have a soul that could have fit in there instead
nothing is missing
nothing
yet there is something in there
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY SORRY I'M SORRY I
I'M SORRY
SO
I AM SO
SORRY
I AM
an object an object an object an empty pot without wilted flowers a shard of bone a pebble
i am a pebble
not even a pebble
i am nothing
a piece of shit
do people become something else when they are thrown away
when some piece of shit exploits them and breaks them
and abandons them in a ditch
like objects
i am sorry
fern
DrJohannes
