Rip foster rides the gra.., p.11
The Moment of Truth, page 11
“I don’t have the book itself,” Victory admitted. “Just a handful of photocopies.”
“Have you seen the document?”
“Yes,” Victory said. “I’m not qualified to judge its authenticity as a historical artefact, but I am qualified to judge its subject matter. I can vouch for the quality of the illustrations, and the esoteric nature of the apparent instructions…and for the fact that whoever designed those instructions really was a plastic surgeon. If, as you say, ours really is a vocation entirely measurable by its outcomes, he must have been capable of spectacular work, whether or not he ever got a chance to produce his imagined face of Adam.”
Williams nodded thoughtfully. “That’s very interesting,” he conceded. “Which makes it even more important, don’t you think, that the book is safely delivered into expert hands, for scientific investigation of every kind? Does the man who calls himself Gwynplaine have it in his possession?”
“I believe so. I don’t know where he got it from, or how easy it will be for him to hang on to it now that he’s attracted so much attention.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“No.”
“But you have photocopies of some of the book’s pages?”
“Yes,” Victory confirmed, although he suspected that the question was fishing for more than a confirmation. Williams wanted to know what he intended to do with the photocopies—but Victory wasn’t entirely sure about that himself.
CHAPTER NINE
THE THIRD DAY: LATE EVENING
“Exactly what do you want from me, Dr. Victory?” Williams went on, when the surgeon failed to elaborate. “Am I just supposed to provide a cheap translation service?”
Victory suspected that Huw Williams had already performed the function for which Asmodeus had provided his name. He had confirmed that the script in Gwynplaine’s book was a real language, and that it really might have been associated with a cult whose history spanned the greater part of the Christian era. He had provided what little Victory already knew with as solid a foundation as anyone could. Given that Victory already had Gwynplaine’s translation of the photocopied pages, and no reason to doubt that translation, he probably had no further need of Williams, unless and until he acquired the book itself. On the other hand, there was a good deal more that Victory wanted to know about the various mysterious groups that might be after Gwynplaine’s book—and there were a lot of biscuits left in the tin.
“I needed some sensible advice,” Victory said, attempting to muster his best bedside manner. “I needed to know that the script was authentic, in order to help me decide what to do next. Thanks for that. As to the future, I think we really ought to be allies in this matter. Gwynplaine seems perfectly able to translate the text—his versions make good sense in association with the diagrams, at least—but that doesn’t mean that I won’t need your advice again—and I’m certainly prepared to pay for that advice by making duplicates of my photocopies for you.”
Williams was sitting up more attentively now. “The man calling himself Gwynplaine can translate the script, you say?” he said, sharply. “And his translations make perfect sense?”
“Apparently,” Victory confirmed.
“I had no idea that there was anyone in England able to do that,” Williams said. “He’s not English himself, I suppose? He must surely be from the Caucasus.”
Victory frowned. “He speaks very good English,” he said. “Not perfectly pronounced, by any means—but I’d assumed that was because of his deformity.”
“His deformity?” Williams echoed.
“Yes. He’s been badly burned in a fire—some time ago I think. His larynx doesn’t seem to be affected, but his lips have difficulty with sibilants and plosives. I suppose he might have an accent, but I have no idea what it is. The scarring is so extensive that I couldn’t even say with certainty what cast his features had or what color his skin was.” He stopped, seeing the expression on Williams’ face. “Do you know who he really is?” he asked.
“No,” Williams replied. “But I could make a guess as to who he might be pretending to be. The scarring is real, I suppose.”
“Definitely,” Victory said. “Asmodeus seems to know who he is—and someone who put a note under my windscreen-wiper at the hospital also claims to know. Do I take it that they may only be referring to who he’s pretending to be?”
“It seems likely,” Williams agreed. “Mystics and Millenarians are always enthusiastic to jump to conclusions, the weirder the better. Asmodeus has always seemed level-headed, apart from the silly pseudonym—if he’s a cultist, he’s certainly an erudite one—but it’s often the ones who seem most convincing who are the most deeply deluded. To get back to your earlier proposition, though, I agree with you that we ought to be allies in this. If you’ll let me see your photocopies—and the book itself, if you can get your hands on the book—I’m more than willing to share anything I discover as a result, and tell you everything I already know.”
Victory had already decided that Williams was the kind of man with whom he could deal fairly and honestly. It wasn’t just that he was a university teacher, but that he seemed a genuine scholar: a man who valued knowledge and insight over mere matters of commerce.
That was a kind of man Victory could admire, even though he wasn’t entirely sure that he qualified as one himself.
“There is a possibility that I might be able to get my hands on the book, if I play my cards right,” Victory admitted. “If and when I do, I promise you that you’ll have full access to it for as long as you need to make a thorough examination of it. At that point, I’d certainly like to share your translation, and I’d also like to consider the possibility of working up some kind of collaborative publication based on your findings and my analyses of the anatomical diagrams. You’ll understand, though, that this is a delicate matter. As you say, the man who has the book and the other people who are interested in it are probably harboring all manner of weird delusions. If I’m to deal with them successfully, it will help me to know a little more about the nature of those delusions. So tell me—who do you think Gwynplaine is pretending to be?”
“I might have put that a little strongly,” Williams admitted. “Perhaps it would be safer to say that there are two possible assumptions about his identity, each of which is likely to appeal to certain of his rivals.”
“Which are?”
“Some of them will take him for Cain. Others will take him for the Devil.”
Victory cursed himself for his own astonishment at this bald statement. Given that Gwynplaine seemed sincerely to believe that the story of Eden was literally true, and that the face of Adam might be recreated by plastic surgery, why should he—or others sharing his beliefs—not also believe in the literal existence of Cain and the Devil? Even so, it seemed ridiculous to heap absurdities up in this manner.
When he had reasserted full control of his boggling mind, Victory contrived a cool and casual tone in order to say: “And why should they think that?”
“It’s a rather complicated story,” Williams said, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. “Have you the time?”
Victory looked at his own watch. It was nearly midnight, and he knew that he needed a solid night’s sleep, but he wasn’t about to leave now. “Yes,” he said.
“Well then, have you ever heard of the Visionary Martyrs?”
Victory was about to say no when he remembered that he had. Rachel Rosenfeld had mentioned them, presumably having heard of them from her mysterious patient. “Yes,” he said. “Just the name though—bracketed with the Sons of Job.”
“They usually are, although they seem to have been rivals as well as fellow travelers. They’re allegedly ancient sects, which each seem to have had their own notions of the Eden myth.”
“Allegedly?”
“The historical evidence is slight, and a great deal of speculation has been founded on a few scraps of papyrus dug up in the vicinity of the Dead Sea. There’s been a lot of activity in the area ever since the original Dead Sea scrolls turned up, but the later additions to the stock are even more fragmentary and much more enigmatic. The names were conferred upon the sects by their supposed discoverers, of course, and borrowed by their reinventors—we have no idea what they called themselves. The so-called Visionary Martyrs are secondary references in documents seemingly written by the so-called Sons of Job, so they may have been purely hypothetical—and it’s always dangerous to deduce a group’s beliefs from material penned by their rivals, who regard them as heretics, although the history books would be a great deal shorter if we disregarded all evidence of that kind.
“If the original sects were more than some ancient scribe’s flight of fancy, they flourished in the first centuries B.C. and A.D., around the time when a good deal of Jewish apocalyptic literature was recorded. So far as the historical record in concerned, they appear to have died out in the same period—but rumours of their continued existence have sprung up in recent years. By now, the rumours have given birth to a kind of fact, in that lifestyle fantasists have actually adopted the names that scholars invented and refabricated their supposed beliefs and ambitions, following in the hallowed footsteps of nineteenth-century Rosicrucians and twentieth-century Knights Templar.”
“What did the Visionary Martyrs—or their modern counterparts—believe?”
“That’s not entirely clear, in either case. The main attraction of lifestyle fantasies of this stripe is that people can make them up more or less as they please. I haven’t had the privilege of seeing the original fragments, and Aramaic’s not one of my languages in any case, but from what I can gather from sources I trust as far as any, the Visionary Martyrs were said by the Sons of Job to believe, as they did themselves, that Adam was immortal, having been created in God’s image in more than mere appearance. Although his immortality wasn’t hereditary, strictly speaking—and its residue was further watered down in subsequent generations—both groups appear to have believed that Cain was gifted with longevity too. Where the Sons of Job parted ideological company with the Visionary Martyrs was in the matter of Cain’s destined role in events leading up to and following the reproduction of the face of Adam.
“Both sects appear to have believed that Cain, like Adam, was disfigured as a result of the Fall, and that both became accursed wanderers. The Visionary Martyrs seem to have believed that the two of them remained at odds with one another as well as with God, but the Sons of Job believed that Cain was repentant, and would play a significant role in repairing the damage done by the Fall—and that he would be recognizable when he came to do that, by virtue of his badly burnt face.
“It’s been theorized—although the evidence is weak and untrustworthy—that the Visionary Martyrs were among the earliest converts to Christianity, but that they adopted a notion of the meaning and significance of Christ’s sacrifice that was markedly different from the Roman Church and its descendants. Both sects seemed to have believed that the redemption of humankind would depend on some kind of symbolic redemption of the eternal Adam, involving the healing of his disfigurement and consequent revelation to the world. The Visionary Martyrs are said to have associated that process with the conclusive damnation of his adversary, the not-quite-eternal Cain.”
“But the Sons of Job didn’t believe that?” Victory inferred.
“Cain had a very different, and more constructive, part to play in their worldview. In their version of the story, Adam’s counterpart was Job, whose tribulations were deemed to be emblematic of a second phase in the Fall—and whose patient endurance won a kind of stay of execution for the human race, although we still stand in need of a conclusive redemption. Like the Visionary Martyrs, the sect was allegedly Christianized, but they too seem to have believed that Jesus’ return and the Day of Judgment can’t take place unless and until Adam’s true face is recovered and revealed. As well as the initiatory involvement of Cain, their apocalypse apparently features a symbolic reunion of Adam with his wife—a sort of mystical marriage. Some scholarly fantasists, not unnaturally, have seized on that notion as the ultimate origin of the Rosicrucian fantasy.”
“So Eve is supposed to have been immortal too?”
“Apparently not. The Sons of Job seem to have considered Eve as an unfortunate afterthought. They thought—and their modern counterparts seem to like the idea—that the fall might be undone if Adam could be reunited with his first wife, Lilith.”
“I thought Lilith was supposed to be the wife of Asmodeus, the demon king.”
“That was after her removal from Eden, supposedly. The Sons of Job probably never believed it. The Jews had eliminated demons from their official cosmogonic scheme long before the first century B.C., and the Sons of Job seem to have had tendencies towards Sadducism—the denial of all spiritual beings except Jehovah. In their view, Lilith was simply another human being, although one created immortal, like Adam. Eve, on the other hand, was made from Adam’s rib, and not immortal at all.”
“Is it possible that our friend Asmodeus chose his pseudonym because it linked him to Lilith rather than because it identified him as a demon of anger and lust?” Victory asked
“Of course it is. When I asked him, though, he said that he and Lilith were divorced.
“He said the same thing to me,” Victory admitted. “Where does the Devil fit into the scheme, then?”
“The Visionary Martyrs and the Sons of Job both remained outside the Roman Church, so far as history can tell,” Williams said, “but the Roman Church wasn’t entirely unaffected by their ideas. There are rumored to be factions within it sympathetic to the notion that Adam’s face might be recreated, with apocalyptic consequences. In their thinking, however, the Visionary Martyrs’ version of Cain is replaced as the eternal adversary by the rebel angel Lucifer—which is to say, the Devil.”
“If Gwynplaine wants to recreate the face of Adam,” Victory observed. “That fits with the Sons of Job’s idea of Cain, but it can’t be squared with the idea that he might be the Visionary Martyrs’ Cain, or the Roman Church’s Devil, can it?”
“Maybe not,” Williams conceded. “I suspect, though, that the Romanists might take the view that what the Devil would actually attempt to do is to incarnate the Antichrist: an apparent angel, whose true purpose is to lead humankind to damnation rather than salvation. The Visionary Martyrs might well think along the same lines, perhaps taking the view that Cain might be trying to reproduce his own face instead of Adam’s, for some equally nefarious purpose.”
Victory considered these speculations for a moment, unashamedly taking the last remaining biscuit from the tin. “If Gwynplaine is pretending to be Cain, then, he must belong to the Sons of Job? Not that’s he’s faking his scars—they’re definitely real.”
“Lifestyle fantasists move in mysterious ways,” was Williams’ answer to that. “Yes, the probability is that your Gwynplaine is with the Sons of Job—or, at least, that he’s trying to endear himself to that faction. Would you like something else to eat?”
“No, that’s all right, thanks. We still haven’t got to the comprachicos. Presumably, they’re supposed to have been offshoots of one or other of these sects?”
Williams shook his head. “Not according to the historical evidence. We have no trace of the comprachicos’ existence for at least four centuries after the last trace of the Sons of Job and their apparent rivals. It’s possible that what’s happened so often in the last hundred years—various sets of lifestyle fantasists adopting long-dead creeds and modelling themselves on their long-extinct followers—is by no means a new phenomenon. If the founders of the comprachicos heard rumors of one or both of the earlier sects, they might have decided to revive their presumed dogmas and take an active role in trying to bring about the promised day of judgment. If the surviving documents can be trusted, the fascination some of them developed with the idea of reproducing the face of the disfigured Adam was a late addition to the cult’s ideology, but that might be an illusion. The people who claimed that it had been the company’s purpose all along might have been telling the truth.”
“But if Adam is supposed to have been immortal, what have the children they bought to do with the project of recreating his face? Wouldn’t they have to find Adam himself?”
Williams shrugged his shoulders. “I can only hypothesize that the comprachicos believed, or came to believe, that Adam’s immortality was more a matter of the immortality of his bloodline than the survival of his actual body. The idea might be that, in order to redeem humankind, it’s necessary to recreate Adam in one of his descendants—that a child descended from Adam, to whom Adam’s appearance could be restored, would actually become Adam as he grew into adulthood. That’s pure speculation, though.”
Victory paused for consideration again. So far as he could tell, everything Williams had told him was speculation, and most of it was far from pure. On the other hand, the academic was at least prepared to admit that his fascination was founded on shifting sand.
“The recreation of the face is only part of the process, then,” the surgeon said, slowly. “According to the Visionary Martyrs and their analogues in the Church, there still has to be a final reckoning with Cain or the Devil—and according to the Sons of Job, he still has to marry Lilith.”
