New Decameron Thirty-One: Daniel Abraham (Patreon)

The Stone Poppy

by Daniel Abraham 

Gabrielle –

If you are reading this, then there is hope, if only because you have seen my name on the envelope and not cast these pages into the fire. I would not blame you if you did. I understand your anger with me, but I have not written to ask your forgiveness. I wish only to tell you my experience of what happened the last night we saw each other. Once you know that part of the story, you may withdraw your wrath or cleave closer to it, as your conscience demands. I will hold you in the same esteem regardless.

First, let me say that I did not expect to find you at that strange little inn in the old Roman road between P--- and C---, though once I saw you there in your father’s company, I was both surprised and, to my everlasting shame, quite pleased. I do not know how that little house with its dark stone walls and tiled roof the color of old blood struck you when you first saw it. I hope you felt some sense of foreboding, though I felt none myself, accustomed as I had become to it. I wonder whether your experience that night was more akin to the first time your father and I made our way to that bleak and terrible place.

Your father and I were at university together then. Two of the brightest students at B--- College. All who knew us had assumed we would fall into rivalry, but that was not the case. Almost upon the instant of our acquaintance, he and I became like brothers. More than brothers. His poetry inspired my own, and my curiosities inflamed his. As individual young men, rich with intellectual promise and the youthful zest for life, we were exceptional. Put together, we became extraordinary. It was my interest in folk medicine that first led to what we called our “fieldwork.” For days at a time, we ran truant from our professors and their lecture halls to track down reports of some hedge witch whose herbs could cure gout or fairy circles of toadstools that called forth visions of spiritual entities.

Most of these journeys brought us nothing of value besides the pleasure of our shared company. We spent long nights in the strangest corners of the countryside: a long night at a fire in the depths of the K---- woods debating the nature of light, an airless and eerie passage through a cave of glowing moss beneath the castle at L--- M----, and, to our debasement, the dark inn on the Roman road between P--- and C---.

The rumor that drew us came from a notation in the private diaries of A---- G-------, whose work I had been studying for his insights on opium dreams. At the time I found his digressions on the occult distracting and risible, though I no longer do. According to his notations, there was along that road a species of black poppy unknown in the rest of the world, the opium of which brought not the lethargy of the common drug, but a sharpening of the senses such that true and patterns within the world were revealed by it. Perhaps it was intellectual hubris that made that prospect more seductive than any mere euphoria could be, or perhaps it was the chance that we two might together share an experience that few men had ever done before.

Regardless, when we first reached the blood-roofed inn, it was after a long, unpleasant ride. I was suffering a light fever, the result of turned meat I had eaten the day before, and in the manner of young men throughout time, your father viewed me with varying measures of compassion and hilarity. And yet I recall clearly that as we made that final turn, and the inn came into view past the stony shoulder of the hill, I felt the urge to turn our horses and ride all the way back to our safe and familiar rooms. I regret even now that we did not.

The groom who came from the stables to meet us was a vastly tall man with an elongated jaw that went between freakish and oddly handsome with hardly a change of his expression. You have seen that same man, though you would not recognize him from my description. We told him of our errand, and he smiled to us quite graciously and motioned that we should enter those same carven doors that I passed through the night I met you and your father there.

The common room within changed little between those two fateful nights at the beginning and end of my association with the poppy. The tabletops of beaten copper, the motheaten tapestries against the walls, that uncanny portrait in the hall leading back to the private rooms. Even the logs in the fire were the same, as unconsumed by the flames as souls must be in hell.

And the woman, that same dark-eyed woman who you saw that night was there at the first. Across decades, her appearance never changed, though of course on the first night your father and I encountered her, we could not know that would be the case. To us, she was only an innkeeper, and the rumor we followed, still only that.

I don’t recall precisely how we engaged her in conversation, only that she was quite willing to speak. From experience or prejudice, your father and I both believed that addressing our true ends directly would undo our ability to achieve them. For the better part of that evening, we drank the house beer – although careful to seem as though we had more than in truth we did. We joked and gossiped and drew the innkeeper into our circle. Thinking back upon it, I see we were fools. She knew from the moment we arrived what had brought us, and let us play our games of charm and subterfuge only to build our confidence. Had she presented us the box and the thing within it too soon, we would surely have sensed the danger. We convinced ourselves that we had managed something clever, and our self-congratulation numbed us.

Near midnight, your father spoke of the book which had brought us there, and the first mention of the poppy was made. As much as time has blurred the hours that led to that moment, the woman’s smile is etched upon my eyes.  

Ah you’ve heard of the bloom, then, she said. It is no legend. There is great wisdom to be found there, but it is not as you have understood it.  

When we asked what she meant, she demurred, saying only that it was easier to demonstrate than to explain. And then she drew forth a box – the same one you have seen – of red lacquer and black iron. She opened it for us, and we saw as you did the last night we met, the poppy.

You have seen it yourself, so you will understand why I thought at first it was a carving. The petals were locked closed. The thick, veined stem as rigid as steel. The bottom of the box was as you have seen it, strewn with sharp, black pebbles the size of a child’s first teeth that made a flower bed for the one, closed blossom. You did not, as I recall, touch the thing. I did. It was cold, and the texture of it smooth when stroked in one direction and rough to the point of biting in the other. If you have ever touched the skin of a shark, you would recognize the sensation.

Your father and I examined it by the dancing light of the midnight fire, and as we did, the woman stepped back into her kitchen and returned with a pigeon. I honestly can’t recall whether it was grey or buff, only that it was a common enough looking bird of the sort that was clearly destined for a pie. I did not notice the knife in the woman’s hand until she used it to open the unfortunate animal’s neck over the open box. The blood that spattered down struck the poppy, and my mind became not my own.

I have experimented with a wide variety of substances whose nature is to alter human perception. I am in no measure ashamed to have done so. I have had hallucinatory experiences that I found both moving and profound, and I tell you from the perspective of an expert that the visions produced by that dark poppy were the only ones I was ever certain did not originate from my own mind. I was swept by an intimate otherness. I say I, but in truth it was we, for your father’s mind was as present as my own as, in the moment of its mortal crisis, we became that animal.

I knew what it was to be a pigeon. That those words seem comic indicts language itself. Let me try again. I have memories, Gabrielle, of flying. I know the experience of the vast muscles of my breast hauling against the empty air with power enough to break the bonds of earth. I have looked down from vast heights without fear, calm in the knowledge that this ocean of air was my domain and held no danger for me. I have felt the magnetic field of the Earth itself like a song in my flesh, an invisible aurora made plain to me, as obvious as sunlight and more constant.  

The bird was the most common, base, and insignificant animal imaginable, and its life held wonders and miracles. Its death educated me in ways a century at university could not. 

I do not know if it was a moment later or an hour that I came to myself again in that room with its copper tables and unending fire, only that the darkness without was still absolute, your father was still with me, and the stone poppy had bloomed. Where the woman had once held the dying body of the bird, there was in her palm now a single black pebble the size of a tooth, as if the extraction of its lived experience had reduced it to a tiny bit of bright and shining coal.  

The poppy itself had opened its petals. The colors that it revealed – fleshy pink and purple and grey – you have seen yourself now. Had they not been associated with great pleasure, they would have been hideous, but already the flower’s influence and promise had altered my heart. Our hearts, I will say, for your father wore an expression of wonder and awe equal to my own. We were struck speechless, and I remember the innkeeper’s laugh as kindly, though I suspect it was not. As she put the black pebble in the box with the myriad others like it, she spoke.

The bloom can only open once in three years, she said. Come back, if you wish, in that time. If you gentlemen do not return, I will keep it for whoever else comes after you.

And as simply as that, the shape of my life was determined.

How grey, flavorless, and dim my university studies seemed after that. I went to lectures, write and defended my papers, and in all ways lived the life I was expected to. It was terrible. Even those subjects which had before held the most excitement for me had turned to a kind of mental pablum for me. I had partaken of a miracle. The mundane was my prison. My only solace was your father’s company. The most essential conversation to my balance and wellbeing, I could only have with him. No one else could understand me when I spoke of my malaise, because no one else had been with me in my ecstasy. Together, we counted a thousand days and then a hundred more, moving through our studies and exams as if they were long, uncomfortable dreams from which we longed to wake. I searched out all I could of the stone poppy. There was a great deal more than I had expected, and together your father and I built a speculative history of it that encompassed three continents and five hundred years. How many of our suppositions were correct and how many nothing more than the enthusiasm of young men, I do not know.  

I have heard it said that to know a thing utterly is the same as coming to love it. Does it seem strange to say I felt spiritually closer to a dead pigeon than to most human beings? It is the truth. When we returned to the inn and the innkeeper greeted us with an elderly dog on a chain, I was afire with anticipation and even joy. Your father was as well. Do not believe, I beg you, that I was the instigator and driving force behind our investigations, no matter what your mother may have suggested. Your father and I were equal in this from the beginning. But of course, you know that for yourself now in a manner harder, I trust, to refute than my written word could ever be.

The dog was sacrificed, and it was as foreign and revelatory as the bird had been. Can you imagine what it is to experience the world through scent with primacy that you and I experience sight and sound? It is a different reality. To run on all fours, chasing a rabbit with the instinct of wolves only imperfectly constrained by domestication. The analogies to human life were rich. Yes, the animal died and was reduced to a black pebble, but its life was nearly over, and the richness it gave to my life and your father’s was immense. I love that animal still, though I was the author of its death.  

Of course we continued every three years. How could we do anything else? A mole, once. It became the central fact of our companionship, the experience that he and I alone in the world shared. A common secret is also a kind of love, and you must believe that I loved your father. Nothing of what came later can make sense to you, except if you understand that. Your father inhabited a place of intimacy and complicity in heart that no one else was capable of taking. When he married, I blessed the union, for I am a man and subject to the hungers of the flesh, as anyone would be. I looked upon your mother as the chief among his servants. I don’t mean to insult her, but only to say how I reconciled myself to her presence in his life. If I was jealous of the time and attention he gave to her, I also took comfort in the knowledge that the eldritch connection he and I shared once every three years was rarer and more precious than the animal congress of man and woman. That your mother hated me was then and remains now evidence that she agreed with my assessment. I believe her resentment of me drove them to their eventual rupture. I think you believe that too.

You, though, his daughter and only child? I hated you the moment I saw you. We were men of the world by then, our university days behind us. I had my practice, and he his position at the bank. Time changes men. Perhaps it does women as well. You will come to know that better than I. But when your mother came back from hospital with the pink and writhing monkey that was you, I saw your father transformed. There are those for whom expressions of affection are shameful and unmanly. Your father was not constrained by the opinions of others, and he doted upon you from the first. For the first time, I understood your mother’s grief. I sensed at once the connection between you two in which I could never participate. I felt the tremor of estrangement, and knew that in some vital way, I had been replaced. My secret with him was no longer paramount in his life.

I hid my enmity, I hope. You will know better than I if my role as eccentric uncle was convincing. My presence at holidays and celebrations was meant to convince both you and him of my inevitability. If there was some pathos in that, so be it. I could not imagine going to see the poppy without him, and even as you grew older, he did not fail me. Every three years, we returned, he and I, and lived our secret and expansive life away from the mundane world, and from you and you blighted mother.

Even now, seeing the end, I cannot but look back at those times with awe and joy. I know things now that few humans have ever known, and those only through the gift of the stone poppy. I, as a wolf, have felt the cold winter wind as I ran with my pack through the December forest. As a hart I have fled, and felt the joy in fleeing. I know the weirdly diminished mind of the spider, and even with human eyes I can read the implications in the structure of webs. Of all the marvels of nature that humankind has taken the measure, of all the innovations of science and technology, no one else has taken in the conscious experience of another being. We are so alone, all of us. The universe of our will ends at our skin, and we live and die in a cell of solitary confinement. Only not us. We didn’t. Every three years, we slipped the bonds of flesh, and grew wise.

I understood intellectually that our knowledge grew out of death, but even now I cannot fault us for that. How many more million animals have been slaughtered in scientific laboratories, vivisected in university halls, and butchered in kitchens for less wisdom and pleasure than your father and I took from a mere handful? Our vice, if such it was, let us know and revere the animals we killed in a way that leaves a beefsteak or a fox stole more clearly an abomination.

It was hubris on your mother’s part to believe she could have any role in a life like ours, but she insisted on inserting herself into our conversations. It was impossible. Your father and I shared a context allowed only to us two. We could speak in a kind of shorthand, evoking the peculiar cognitive styles of bird and beast and fish. Your mother was an educated woman, and the ability your father and I had to understand one another frustrated her, and her frustration announced itself in rage.

You will know better than I how the final rupture between them came. Your mother had done all she could to remove me from the family home even before this. I understood from that alone how precarious his domestic life had become. And yes, I did what I could to widen the split. You know that now.  

It was shortly before your thirteenth birthday that your father and I came together in amity at the inn for the last time. He was tired and easily made cross. I had arrived several days earlier and spent a few long nights at the inn, thinking that my scheme would require some effort of persuasion. In the event, the innkeeper was only too ready to support my ideas. It was as if she had known from the start where our work would lead us. Looking back, I have no doubt that she did.

I doubt you saw it. You were his child, and children accept that their parents have deeper, broader, more mysterious lives than their own as a matter of course. But to have that same sense of a partner and husband infuriated her. But perhaps I am being insensitive. I should not do that. Her rage was only a measure of her grief.  

There was escalation, you see. It was not only that each iteration of the stone flower’s blooming brought us new experience, but also that the nature of those experiences built on each other to make each successive one deeper and more significant. It was my aim to drink deeper than we had before, and in so doing salt the wound that his marriage had become. Writing this now, it sounds petty. I didn’t experience it that way at the time. I believed that the miracle of our friendship, based as it was around the miracle of the stone poppy, was unique and precious. Sacrificing it to a only somewhat happy marriage of the sort that exist in profusion everywhere was a travesty. I saw no evil in doing what I did, and as you are aware, what I did was murder.

The long-chinned groom was our sacrifice because he was convenient. I feel I should express my regret here. Say something about how I was blinded by my hubris or some such, but there is no room for that kind of insincerity between us now. I barely knew Dorian – for that proved to be his name – before the innkeeper brought him to look down at the poppy that night. And I know and love him now better than anyone in his life ever did. As soon as his blood fell onto those dark petals, the whole experience of his life flooded me and your father both. What can I tell of Dorian’s life. I remember the day he left his father’s house to enlist as a solider. I could sing you the song with which his mother lulled him to sleep. I know the scent of his lovers, and the deep-driving hunger for laudanum that consumed his final years. We lived his life in a moment and knew him better than anyone but God. And yes, when he was gone, reduced to a black chit no larger than that first pigeon’s had been, we loved him.

We celebrated Dorian, we mourned him, we broke into his rooms and wore his clothes, and we danced. We were drunk on him. It was beautiful. How strange that our glorious bacchanal should have led to our division. I can still barely believe it.

Your mother left him, as you know, not long after that, as I had hoped and known she would. That she would take you with her as she departed went without saying. I never once expected anything else. I was astonished that it took your father by surprise. I had imagined a return to some version of our student life, his and mine. We would rededicate ourselves to the mysteries to which our talents had made us heir. I looked forward to long journies around the globe, discovering new wonders and secrets. To me, an extraordinary life was opened before us, and an escape from the common and mundane.

I see now that I misunderstood his grief at being parted from you, his daughter. In my defense, I do not remember my tone being so sarcastic or dismissive, or my words being as cruel. But perhaps they were. I did take some credit for the dissolution of his marriage, which I saw then and see now as a an act of kindness toward him. I freed him from his shackles, and naively assumed his gratitude at the freedom.  

I thought that his anger with me would pass, and that once he had regained his footing we could continue, but he cut me from his life. My letters went unanswered. When I came calling, his door was resolutely shut. I did everything I could to bring him back himself. Too late, I understand how those imprecations became a kind of torture to him, reminders of what he had lost.

When I went, that night, to the inn, know that I did not expect him, much less you. He had absented himself from our ritual after the night of Dorian’s passing, and I had consigned myself to forging on without him.  

Should I speak to you of the sacrifice I made without him? The one missed blossoming that I performed alone? It was an old woman I had found in poor house and brought with me. Her name was Annika, and her life was as immediate to me as Dorian’s had been, only everything about that night was lessened by not being shared. When your father was with me, we could speak and discuss and revel together. Without him, all I experienced was insubstantial and transient as an hallucination. Everything was less without him.

And so, to see him, and to see you by his side was glorious. I misunderstood. Believe me or doubt, I am telling the truth. When I saw you at his side, your eyes complicated by confusion and distress, I believed he had brought you as our sacrifice. I believed that like Abraham leading Isaac, he had brought his child as proof of his loyalty and his love. And I was touched. As much as my sacrifice of Dorian towered over the death of the brute animals before him, so your blooming would have surpassed all that we had done. I saw apology in the gesture, and I was filled with the purest love and joy. Laugh at me, Gabrielle. I was a fool.

The innkeeper brought out the box, exposed the dark bud in its bed of tiny black teeth, and I still dwelt within my error. It was only when we gathered round and he put his hand to your shoulder that I saw the truth. So small a gesture, but it carried so much. His tenderness to you and his reassurance that all the mystery would soon make sense reframed everything. I saw the sagging of his pocket where he carried the pistol which I then took from him.

I acted in the passion of rage and fear for my life. I cannot imagine how it must have been for you, who did not have the benefit of my education in bloomings. To be thrown into the overwhelming experience unwarned, and for it to be the lived experience of the man closest to you that initiated you into these dark wonders must have driven you more than a bit mad. For that, I apologize. But in your grief and your hatred of me, find, I beg you, room for a bit of sympathy. In those moments, I lost my dearest friend twice over: in the present to his death, and in the past to my disillusion.

Even now, I barely recognize the version of myself I saw through your father’s eyes. The Mephistophelean pretentions and elitist preenings that degraded his opinion of me, he never commented on, and I never guessed at. Your mother’s role as a lifeline, drawing him away from the riptide of our investigations. The siren song of his curiosity, as damning as the drunkard’s bottle, from which he tried to escape. The purity of his love for his child. The rage at himself for having, through his work with me, injured your childhood. I knew none of it until that moment. In that room, above those flesh-pink petals, I knew my most intimate and lifelong friend for the only time, and it desolated me.

You will know better than I how you wrestled the gun from my stunned fingers. I was unaware until the report as you shot the inn keeper. I have only the briefest recollection of the weird and nacreous light which spilled from that wound, for I was fleeing already. The last time I saw you, you were on horseback, the box containing the stone poppy in your arm, and the inn was afire behind you. You were screaming. I hope in the long years since then you have found a way to stop.

I sought you, as you know. For almost three decades, I have searched for it and for you. You have eluded me at every turn, until now, when I am too ill to travel, I have found your address. And so I, who have no right to ask anything of you, put these pages into your hands, and beg. Bring the box to me. I have little time remaining. The cancer is already far advanced, but I will hold on, if I can, until you arrive. Give me to the poppy as an act of mercy or of vengeance. I don’t care which. Know my life as I have lived it. Know my experience as you knew his, and judge for yourself how deeply intimacy can coexist with ignorance. How the two, in fact, rely upon each other. Do this for your poor, debased uncle, and then set the black tooth which I become in that same collection with his, who you and I both loved in our fashions.

Through all my occult explorations, I have heard the refrain: There are such things as man was not meant to know. Bitter the revelation that one such thing is each other.

Do what you will. I shall wait for you as long as I can.

Your Uncle and Servant,

Edward Cawl

*********************************************************

"Do you think she did?" Maya asks.

He statts to shake his head, then stops. "I don't know. I kind of hope she did. But I can't guess. It's a very period creepy story." The cat is curled up on his lap, purring loudly.

"I'm glad I didn't read it before bed," Maya says. In the bright morning sunlight with the cat purring away the creepy inn and the poppy are thrilling terrors, in the lonely dark of the empty library they might have given her bad dreams.

He nods. "Perfect example of what it is," he says. "And isn't it interesting how easy it is to tell it's a complete story, not a first chapter, even though we don't know what happens next and we want to."

"Well, with Lila Garrott's Venice one I didn't really think it was. I just wanted it to be! It could have been a prologue to a different kind of story set there." Maya bounces a little in her chair. "Which Daniel Abraham series do you like best, the Long Price, or Dagger and Coin?"

'Long Price," he says at once. "Dagger and Coin is really fun and I really like it, but Long Price is just extraordinary."

"Me too," she says. "I love Idaan so much."

'What about The Expanse?" he asks.

"James S. A. Corey is Daniel Abraham?" Maya's eyebrows rise up to her hairline. "Why does nobody tell me anything?"

'Daniel and Ty Frank, writing together as Corey."

"Oh, that's more difficult. But... I think still Long Price." Maya nods. "Yes. I love those books so much. What shall we read next?"

"Something with breakfast in it, and preferably coffee," he says. He picks up a book. "Ha!"

"What?" Maya asks.

"This is A.E. Prevost's The Skies of Paris. I love it already."

"Why?" she reaches for it.

"The first word is breakfast!"

And they read.