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Dermot Ryan was born in Dublin and studied Natural Science at Trinity College Dublin, before working a spell as a scientific researcher.
His writing credits are confined to Irish publications, with the exception of ‘The Last Laugh’ which first appeared in ‘Phoenix Irish Short Stories 1997’.
He is not sure how important being Irish is with regard to three of the four stories collected here. As Jorge Luis Borges said about writers from a very different country: “Either being Argentinian is our fate, in which case we will be Argentinian no matter what, or being Argentinian is a mere affectation, a mask. I believe that if we lose ourselves in the voluntary dream called artistic creation, we will be Argentinian and we will also be good or tolerable writers.”
The last of those words also summarise Dermot’s few ambitions as a writer (as opposed to his ambitions as an Argentinian).
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We hope you’ll enjoy this exclusive on-line publication of Dermot Ryan’s ‘The Burnished Egg’, a story which appears in the Aeon Press collection “This Way Up”
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
All my family were good readers, but my brother, Liam McHugh, knocked the rest of us into a cocked hat. That is not to say that he was a very rapid reader, because he was not - he was never hasty, he always fully deliberated the book before him - but where words were concerned, he was intense and appreciative to an unusual extent. When he read a book, he did not devour it whole, as some do; he broke a morsel off, chewed it with great deliberation, and let it dawdle on his tongue and surrender all its juices. Perhaps unusually, he also read dictionaries with great relish; he craved to know every nuance, every nicety of every word he encountered, and so he diligently checked the several meanings of any word that was new or not entirely familiar to him. I never knew anyone for whom language was such a three-dimensional, sensual experience. A particularly pregnant word could leave him staring into empty space, rapt. You could almost hear the brisk electric crackling and sparking inside his head as his thoughts ramified.
My father’s brother, Hugo, and his wife, Fiona, were frankly amazed by Liam’s absorption in the world of letters - or perhaps aghast is a better word, for they remained resolutely unimpressed. They had no books in their house, because they would make it look untidy and gather too much dust. Like many semiliterate people, they saw themselves as exemplary pragmatists. I still remember the day they saw Liam reading Around the World in Eighty Days, surrounded by encyclopaedias and atlases, into which he delved at least as often as the novel itself. They helped him better to visualise the locations in the book, he said.
“It’s not healthy, all this reading. He’ll ruin his eyes!” was Aunt Fiona’s opinion.
“He’s a lazy hound. You should discourage him, Frank!” said Uncle Hugo to my father. “He’s idling away his life!”
“What do you get out of it, Liam?” Uncle Hugo once asked. “Nothing, as far as I can see!”
Liam responded calmly with a shrug. He was so convinced of the superiority of the written word that he never bothered to defend it.
“It’ll injure him in the long term!” said Aunt Fiona.
“He’ll never make a penny from all that reading!” said practical Uncle Hugo.
Well, on those last two points she was right and he was wrong.
***
The whole unfortunate train was set in motion by me, I’m ashamed to admit. Liam had just gone upstairs to his bedroom to study for his school exams, and I was downstairs preparing the dinner with my mother. Liam had brought Dickens’ Great Expectations up with him, since that was a text set for his English exams. He was enjoying it, even though he was forced to follow and analyse to death all of Pip’s movements and motivations.
All of a sudden, my mother and I stopped what we were doing and stared at each other. There was an uproarious sound blaring down from upstairs. It sounded as if there were a pony and trap in Liam’s room, and sixty spectators walking about in ponderous boots.
“Liam must have the radio on,” said my mother. “Tell him to turn it down, love, would you?”
“I doubt that he’s got the radio on, Ma. He’s reading.”
She nodded. She knew that he would never allow any distractions come between him and his appreciation of a text. Besides, he found radio and television broadcasts uninspiring. He scorned them.
“Whatever it is then; go and find out what it is.” She waved her hands at me.
So I ran up the stairs and down the landing to Liam’s door. I threw it open to ask just what he thought he was doing, but I found myself unable to speak. Liam was not making any noise; he was just sitting down reading. But above his studious head, in a luminous volume of air the shape of an egg and the size of a bed, there was what I can only describe as a vision. Inside that golden egg, whiskered gentlemen walked cobbled streets, wearing ulsters and frockcoats. Ladies, arms linked to the gentlemen, wore poke bonnets and bodiced petticoats, and carried prim, unopened umbrellas in the crook of their free arm. Hansom wheels and horse hooves clattered over the cobblestones, as urchins ran hither and thither. Everything was drifting from the centre to the margins of the vision in a most kinetic manner, as if the eye that viewed them was in a moving coach.
Pip had got as far as London.
Of course, right then, watching the vision with my jaw hanging down, I was ignorant of its meaning.
“Liam!” I managed to gasp.
The vision (and the noise) switched off with the immediacy of a light bulb.
“What’s up, Joe?” he said evenly.
“Your head! Above your head -”
He looked up. “Where?”
“It’s gone now!”
“Oh, very funny. Haw-haw.” He returned to his book.
And before my disbelieving eyes, streams of light transuded through his skull, rose to a point three quarters of a metre above his head, and reknit themselves into the vision once more. The din began anew.
I screamed faintly. “Liam!”
“What!” He snapped the book shut indignantly. The vision blinked off again; the sound halted as abruptly.
“What do you want!”
“An egg!” I blurted. “An egg above your head! But it’s gone now!”
“Oh, cop on, will you!” He was about to begin reading again, when I remembered the book in his hand and I was fired with sudden inspiration.
“Liam, what are you reading?”
He held up the book so I could see the title.
“Yes, yes! I know that! But what’s happening in the book? Right now, in the section you’re reading!”
“Pip’s on his way to-”
“Somewhere in a carriage!”
“Yes-”
“In London!”
“Yes-”
“I don’t believe it!” I ran out the door. Minutes later, with the noise once again blasting from Liam’s room, Ma was following me up the stairs, wiping her hands on her apron and panting slightly. I opened Liam’s door slowly.
“Look in,” I whispered. “Not a squeak out of you, though.”
She stepped in front of me, and peeped around the corner. She screamed: “Oh God protect us! What is that?” She ran behind me. The noise and, I presume, the vision faded.
Liam came round the corner, his finger inserted into the book to keep his place. “Have you all gone mad? What for the love of God is wrong with you all?”
“You’re dabbling in the occult, aren’t you? I’ll tan your hide!” said Ma.
“What? What have I done? I’m just sitting quietly in my room reading -”
“That’s just it, Ma,” I told her. “It only happens when he’s reading. I think I know what’s happening, though I can’t believe it. Liam,” I put my hand on his shoulder, “you are reading vividly. Yes, I think I am safe in saying that. Vivid Reading. You’re not aware of it, but you are seeing everything in your head in such copiously realistic detail that you are projecting it into the outside world. Onlookers can see what is passing through your mind as you read. Your appreciation of literature has moved onto a new plane!”
His blank gaze damped my enthusiasm.
“Joe, just feck off, will you?”
He went back in and closed the door. My mother and I exchanged anxious looks. The noise resumed.
***
Later, my father came home with Uncle Hugo. He dropped his bag on the floor, patted the dog, and pecked my mother on the cheek. Uncle Hugo had already sat down in the other room, and was looking for the remote control for the television.
“Why all the long faces?” my father said.
“It’s a long story,” I said drily.
He stopped and cocked an ear. There were plummy English voices coming down from upstairs. There was an urbane conversation proceeding in Great Expectations.
“Does Liam have the radio on?” he said in a voice hushed with wonder.
“No. That’s the long story.”
We told him all that happened earlier that day. Our sincerity was evident, or at least he wasn’t that hard to convince. I suppose the story was only slightly more fantastic than the idea of Liam voluntarily listening to the radio. Da thought for a moment and then went upstairs.
He returned minutes later, looking pale.
“Well?” Ma and I chorused.
“Pip is talking to Herbert Pocket.”
“Then you believe us?”
“I don’t have any choice.” He rubbed his head in an agitated fashion. “This is a very queer thing.”
“What’s a queer thing?” said Uncle Hugo, entering from the sitting room. “Hello Sara, hello Joe. Frank, I can’t find the remote control.”
“It’s probably gone down the edge of the couch, Hugo. I bet you’ll find it there!” my mother said, all too hastily.
“Why, what’s wrong, Sara? Is something wrong?” He stopped and cocked an ear in an inquisitive manner so like my father, that for once you’d believe they were brothers.
“Is Liam listening to the radio?” he asked incredulously. “This I have to see!”
“Stop him, Frank!”
Too late; already he was up the stairs. The next thing, we heard Liam’s door fly open, and the heavy thump of Uncle Hugo hitting the floor in a dead faint. When we got upstairs, Liam was standing over Hugo, an expression of acute disbelief on his face.
“Mad. You’ve all gone mad today,” he said firmly.
“Liam,” my mother said, “go downstairs to the kitchen. We have to talk. Joe, put your Uncle Hugo on the bed. We’ll deal with him when he comes round.”
***
Liam didn’t believe us. Of course, he hadn’t seen the vision floating above his head, so why should he believe us?
“Look, please, this is a waste of time. Let me get back to studying. I have exams coming up.”
“Liam, this isn’t a prank. Why would we all lie to you? Why did Ma scream? Why did Uncle Hugo faint? Something uncanny has happened to you. You must believe us!”
He hesitated. “But what has happened to me? What?”
“How do we know? But just because we don’t know the cause, it doesn’t mean the effect isn’t real! Look, ask your Uncle Hugo-”
“Yes, where is he?”
“Upstairs, on the bed -”
But he wasn’t. Four footsteps, nimble as a hare’s, brought the eavesdropping uncle from the kitchen door to the front door. Four more and he was off in his car.
“What’s up with him?”
“Oh Lord, I hope he keeps this to himself,” sighed my mother.
***
“Now, listen to me everyone,” barked Uncle Hugo. “This is too good a thing to keep to ourselves!”
“We’re not going on the news!” interrupted my mother, scandalised.
“Too right we’re not! We’re going to give public readings!” said my Uncle Hugo. “The demand for this is going to be huge!”
“No, no, Hugo! Think of the boy - he’s only sixteen!”
“I don’t mind- “ said Liam.
“Keep out of this, Liam,” warned Da.
“- as long as I get to choose the book.”
“Good boy, Liam!” trumpeted Uncle Hugo. “I have the Apollo auditorium booked for next week. Leave it all to me. What are you going to read anyway?”
***
After hiring the Apollo auditorium for six nights, he did not have much money left for publicity, but Hugo was not deterred. He spent the last of his free cash on one large poster in the centre of town.
***
And we had a half-full auditorium on the strength of that one, cryptic advertisement. I had never fully appreciated the talents of Uncle Hugo. He understood quite intimately the easy purchase of curiosity. He had even persuaded a local-radio reporter to attend. And it was he - level-headed pragmatist that he was - who had convinced Liam of the veracity of my theory of vivid reading (though, as it turned out, we wished in the end that he hadn’t).
When the crowd had seated itself but was still conducting whisper-debates about what form this mysterious reading would take, Uncle Hugo took to the stage to quell their talk and announce Liam’s entrance.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, I thank you for coming here. I promise you that you will not disappointed. No words can do justice to what you are about to witness -” From where I was sitting I could see Liam cringe in the wings. I know him well; I know what he was thinking: that words well-chosen can do justice to anything. “- so without further pomp, I give you: Liam McHugh!”
There was a smattering of polite and bemused applause, but not much more - except of course for our family; we were pounding our hands together and cheering him on. Liam walked to the centre of the stage, where a simple chair and the book awaited him. He sat down without looking up at the audience. I could tell he was nervous. He began to read, not aloud, but to himself. Expectant silence gripped the spectators.
For one long minute, nothing happened. Liam’s eye kept leaving the page, as he cast sidelong, apprehensive looks at the large auditorium. He couldn’t concentrate. It seemed that our venture would founder just as it was beginning. Some members of the audience began to suspect a hoax, and indignant chatter began to manifest itself sporadically. That all stopped instantly though, as Liam’s concentration slipped into gear, and the splendid vision, the burnished egg, began to form above his head. The crowd gasped, and little children hid their heads. It was far better than the cinema - Liam would despise the comparison even - because it was of a far higher visual quality and resolution, and because it was in three dimensions, rather than two. Coupled with the extraordinary richness of the sound, and the fact that never in their entire lives had the spectators come upon a like phenomenon, it was enough to hush the usual coughs, splutterings and munchings at any public event. An awe-struck silence held sway.
Inside the bright vision, the captain was making his way up to the door of the ‘Admiral Benbow’ inn, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow. We could see the proud flesh around his livid, dirty-looking scar. We could see the tiny motes of wood-dust fly up as his stick rapped against the door, and when the proprietor appeared, and the Captain bawled for a glass of rum, we could hear the years of sea-air in his voice. The vision was convincing beyond measure. We were enthralled.
And at the end of the reading - this reading of Part I of Treasure Island, wherein we had seen miserable Black Dog, and evil Blind Pew, and the death of the captain, and the death of Blind Pew beneath the hooves of the rescuers’ horses (how we cheered to see his body trampled, and the blood!), and with the map of the island discovered and the plans made for Jim and Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey to seek the island and its hidden treasure - Liam snapped the book shut, and the vision shimmered away. Liam stood up, gave a low bow and left the stage without a word. For an overwhelmed half-minute, the audience did not move; then it rose to its feet in frenzied applause.
Liam was on the news that night.
***
Radio, international television, print media - all beat a path to the door of the Apollo auditorium. For the next five readings, every square foot of the auditorium, whether or not it contained a seat or indeed a flat surface, was full. The back wall of the auditorium bristled with lenses and mikes. We followed the fortunes of Jim and the Squire and Dr. Livesey as they searched for the treasure, and we abhorred the treachery of Silver and his crew. We followed it every night, we took it all in avidly: the Man of the Island, the abandonment of the ship, the battle in the stockade, the nerve-racking fight between Jim and Israel Hands - we followed everything. Even those unable to get into the Apollo were following it - imagine this! - by actually reading the book! Treasure Island became a best-seller all over again. The publicity mounted with every reading, and every night brought a fresh round of newscasters to the doors of the Apollo. Poor Liam didn’t enjoy being so much in the public eye - and all this in less than a week!
I was more worried however - and I don’t know how I came by this premonition of the misfortune that was to be Liam’s next reading - by a curious development that I had only noticed during Liam’s reading of Part V. The visions had become more realistic over the week - not only grander in scale, but more substantial almost. The earlier apparitions in Liam’s bedroom were small; this was large, its breadth the equal of the auditorium, and very intricately detailed. But what truly made me realise how much the apparitions had changed was that now I could smell the salty sea air and the musket shot; before I could smell nothing but buttered popcorn. In fact - and I was by no means certain of this at the time - a thin, moist aerosol seemed to settle on us when the great sail bellied in a sudden gust. The phenomenon was extending to take in every sense. The more Liam read, the more vivid became his vision. Somehow, this made me uncomfortable.
***
Finally, Part VI was read to its conclusion. Jim had returned from sea safe with the treasure, as a ruby sun blushed over the calm home straits. The audience applauded rapturously, and Liam went home too. There were camera crews there from all around the world as he left the theatre. A forest of microphones sprang up before him; an ordnance of lenses was trained on him. Just then, he really wanted to get away from the publicity that had risen up around him. We were keen for this to be an end to the whole venture too. It was straining the poor lad. We told Uncle Hugo that Liam was retiring.
***
Uncle Hugo looked up from his calculations.
“Well, we have made a killing. Well done, Liam.”
He put the lid back on his pen, and switched off his calculator, and set them neatly side by side on his desk. He took out a handkerchief and rubbed his nose in an embarrassed fashion, as if he was about to broach a subject of great delicacy.
“I have been offered the use of the town park for another reading. The rate of hire is very reasonable, and the capacity is far greater than that of the Apollo.”
“What!” exclaimed my father. “Hugo, you promised that this reading would be enough! The boy has exams to study for, he has to plan a career for himself!”
“This will be the last,” said Uncle Hugo steadfastly.
“You’ll turn him into a circus freak!”
“Never!” affirmed Uncle Hugo. “This is the very last venture I propose.”
“You are not Colonel Parker, Hugo, and this boy is not Elvis Presley!”
Liam interposed here. “I don’t mind doing one more -”
“Good boy!” chuckled Uncle Hugo. “And this is what you will be reading.” He pulled a novel out of his pocket. It was some sensationalist piece of trash about dinosaurs taking over the planet.
“Hugo, no! That rubbish!”
Looking offended, Uncle Hugo defended his choice. “It’s a number one best-seller! The crowds will turn up in droves! Besides,” he shrugged, “I’ve already printed the posters up.”
“I won’t read that,” said Liam quietly.
“Now, see here, Liam-”
“You didn’t let me finish what I was going to say originally. I don’t mind doing another reading, as long as I get the choice of what I read. I won’t read that book though.”
“Quite right, Liam.” said my mother.
“Why don’t you read The Children of Lir, Liam?” I suggested.
“Yes, or The Cattle Raid of Cooley!”
“No. Those are good suggestions, but I have a book in mind, a work of rare genius and accomplishment, of great imaginative power and artistry that is hardly ever read. It is a book that deserves a wider reading. Even if the shagger who wrote it did support Cromwell.”
“Really, what is it?” I asked.
“I don’t really think that the public will go for a book of rare geni -” began Uncle Hugo.
“It’s Paradise Lost. Don’t even try to dissuade me. I’ve made up my mind. You might as well go and change the posters, Uncle Hugo.”
“What’s Paradise Lost?” whispered Hugo to my father when Liam had left the room.
“Poetry,” said my father quietly.
Uncle Hugo gasped for air.
***
So, in spite of all our misgivings, the reading in the park went ahead. It must have been the most well-attended and unusual poetry reading ever. Usually at a poetry reading you’d expect some titivated fop, announcing:
Of Man’s fahst disobehdience and the Frrruit
Of the Fohhhbidden Trrree ...
But Paradise Lost as read by Liam McHugh was a far different thing. For a start, it was going to net us a fortune.
***
The crowd assembled in the park at seven o’clock as advertised. The fact that it was a poetry reading did not seem to damp the enthusiasm of the masses for the unprecedented novelty that was Vivid Reading. The audience was of frightening size. It spread before the stage that had been specially built for the occasion, it moved out over the swards, and spilled out onto the playing fields. Some younger spectators had scaled lamp posts with the alacrity of Polynesians climbing palm trees. I hoped that everyone would be able to see and hear.
I was worried for another reason. We lost some money that day, I know, because I could see kids clambering over the park walls, so avoiding the turnstiles. I shouldn’t have been greedy though. It was infectious.
Liam’s choice of Paradise Lost was not motivated by any base or commercial instinct, of that I was sure. He thought it was a work that should be more popular, and if he could help, all well and good. Nevertheless, it is a particularly visual piece of writing, with many lively and apt descriptions of battles, heroism, good and evil. In particular, I was looking forward to the reading of Book VI, in which Raphael relates to Adam in panoramic detail the bitter and long battle fought between the forces of Satan and God by the crystal walls of Heaven. There are some powerful scenes in it. But, now I think of it, considering what happened during the reading of Book I, it is perhaps as well that Liam didn’t get that far. He’d have trashed Dublin, at the very least.
The sea of human beings rippled randomly, as people sat down and rose up from the grass, trying to get comfortable. The square, temporary dwellings of outside-broadcast units littered the park grounds. A T.V. helicopter glittered in the evening sun, like a delicate fly. The gathering was a little impatient, but they had to wait until we had everyone in. Finally, Uncle Hugo took the stage, a megaphone in his hand, looking for all the world like a P.T. Barnum.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for your patience,” he announced with expansive gestures, “I apologise for the delay in starting. But now relax, and prepare yourself for the experience of a lifetime. None of us will ever forget this day!”
Uncle Hugo left the stage, and Liam took it. He carried the complete Paradise Lost and a wooden chair. These apart, he had no props. He moved to the very centre of the stage, bowed gravely, and sat down. He did not begin to read at first, but instead sat breathing calmly and slowly, his eyes closed, the book resting in his lap. Nobody said a word. All we could hear was the quiet thrum of traffic somewhere in the town and the distant whirr of the helicopter.
Then Liam lifted the book, turned past the scholarly introduction to the opening words of the poem. The golden streams oozed out into the space above the dais where Liam sat, and there they reconstituted the brilliant egg of light, but on a scale that we had never seen before. Its greater diameter was at least equal to the length of a Zeppelin, its lesser diameter about half that. It was stupendous. There were gasps of awe breaking out all around us. It glowed warmly. We were bathed in oracular light.
A peruked man robed in seventeenth-century English style appeared in the vision, reading from a great scroll. His voice was deep and authoritative. It delivered the opening invocation of the Heavenly Muse with such timbre and feeling that, although I think that the sense of it was lost to some of the audience, the very music of it won them over. I settled back into my seat.
As the invocation ended and the true narrative portion of the poem began, the egg began to contract and the voice of the narrator grow fainter. Above, another, larger golden ovoid formed, in which Satan’s drama unfolded. As that drama progressed, the lower ovoid continued to contract and the new one expanded. I presumed at the time that it was Liam forgetting about the presence of the narrator - him literally slipping to the back of Liam’s mind. By the end, we could no longer even see the first egg.
The spectacle - a word I do not use lightly - began with the rebel Satan’s long precipitous descent into Hell, hurled from the walls of Heaven after his defeat at the hands of God, the air groaning and ripping before him. With a terrible crunch and a resounding boom that had the audience wincing in sympathy, Satan’s fall ended in Hell. It was the most impressive thing I had ever seen. Dark flames vaulted into the air and the park shook upon impact. Satan writhed agonisedly in the burning lake. You had to feel some pity for him, scorched in that twilit fury. And the look on his face would either break your heart, or set it crossways in you: such stern, dignified nobility, and yet how underscored by vanity and ruined pride. Liam looked minuscule beneath him, and you felt that if Satan fell out of the egg he would crush Liam into oblivion.
Eventually, after a despairing interval, Satan saw a companion, transfixed by the same pain, rooted to the same fiery spot. He addressed him - it was Beëlzebub - and in an exhortation of great persuasiveness and mellifluence, during which the pursuing armies of God returned to heaven with a final retributive hail of sulphur, he coaxed Beëlzebub to join him, to lift himself above this miserable place, and go to a more solid part of hell that was visible from where they lay.
When Satan rose with difficulty to reach that less incandescent plain, we all gasped at this daring and courage, but also at Satan’s staggering size. The ovoid had swelled again, but it did not encompass his entire length, as he rose above the flames and extended his long, powerful body into the dreepy air.
Forthwith upright he rears from off the Pool
His mighty Stature; on each hand the flames
Driv’n backward slope their pointing spires, and roll’d
In billows, leave i’ th’midst a horrid Vale.
Then he extended his wings - which spread from the blunt end to the sharp end of the ever-growing egg, and flew to his destination. And after him struggled Beëlzebub. Curiously, as Satan looked around at the endless sweep of hell, and lamented the loss of heaven:
Farewell happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor
I could have sworn that the audience were sympathetic to his grief, some of them even sighing regretfully. I have to concede that there was a forlorn quality in his voice.
But he was huge; even now the egg, expanding, could not take him all in - his spear disappeared out the top, his huge shield only just fitted inside. Now he raised his bellowing voice to exhort his troops to awake, arise or be forever fallen! His voice thundered through the park and out into the empty city sky.
The stricken droves of fiends then forsook their remorse and forgot their agony, and shook their wings until they rose up in their countless multitudes - Moloch, smeared with blood, Baal, Ashtaroth and thousands or millions of others unnamed, all the lewd, treasonous and perverted faded angels, beating their dark wings above Liam’s head. It was a discomforting sight. Satan’s ensign streamed in the breezes of hell and shone in the darkness like a limelight, and the demons rallying before him raised their flaming swords from their scabbards and beat their sounding shields until our ears hurt, and the children, silently terrified until now, began to bawl. The egg was full of furious activity: the banners, the swords, the thick flocks of winged infantry. A reek of pitch and sulphur was making us gag.
The vision was now directly over the crowd. Its area in cross-section was probably greater than that of the park. It had descended a little from its original altitude. Its realism was now hair-raising. I could feel the blood draining from my face. It was disturbingly vivid, far more so than at the beginning of the reading. Trumpets and brass and flutes joined the noise, and thousands more banners rose in the air, as the demons marched in perfect formation towards their leader, who towered above them like a colossus. All those faces twisted with demented glee made me fell faint. The park was dusky by now, and the shadows cast by the cheerless flames of hell were as dark as blood in the first chamber of the heart.
Their accursed chief began to comfort them, telling them that they could yet fight Good with Guile, and that they would not always reside in Hell - and here I flinched, because he actually looked out of the egg towards us - that there were other worlds where they might make their home. As he looked out through the surface of the egg, he said wistfully:
Thither, if but to pry, shall be perhaps
Our first eruption
The brutes then beat their sounding shields again, even more thunderously than before, so that our ears began to ring. The brass and flutes rebegan the cacophony. Within minutes, they had contaminated and blackened the air of Hell once more with their airborne presence, and flown off in a huge, brooding cloud. With a deafening roar and the shrill whine of drills and the flat smack of hammers, they tore up the ground of Hell, extracted metallic ore, and built a startling edifice of gold and battered metal before our startled eyes, so rapidly that they were just a blur, and on such a huge scale that the egg expanded to a point where I was sure it would break asunder. They flew inside without hesitation to debate their escape from hell, and their campaign beyond. The Council Chamber was like a gilded cavern, lit by blazing torches. At the far end, on a throne taller and blacker than a Gothic spire, sat the King of the fiends. Everything we had seen before was as nothing to this. The egg was so many times its original size. I have never seen anything so terrifying as that sea, wave after wave, of expectant brutish faces and glinting weapons, congregated beneath the frowning vaults of Pandemonium.
***
And there, just as the diabolical meeting, the Great Consult, was beginning, Liam snapped the book shut. That was the end of Book I. He rose, bowed and tried to leave the stage, but somehow he could only stagger a few steps, and then he stumbled to his knees. The first hearty rounds of applause pattered away into silence. The intricate, glistering, staggering, fabulous, towering vision had not disappeared.
The audience did not move or make any sound. The demons did not move. The only motion was the flickering of the thousands of torches that hung from the roof of the vast council chamber. We stared at each other across the polished surface of the egg. That surface was all that separated us.
Uncle Hugo was on stage announcing that Book II would be read next week, at this same venue. He stopped when he saw that the vision was still there, and that the innumerable and unbearable troops of fiends were looking out of the egg at us. A hungry, knowing, patient smile disgraced every one of their faces. That smile was self-satisfied, as if they had fooled us into doing something we had not wanted to. We faced them for a long time; they looked out from their world, and we looked in. Every one of us was hoping with all our hope that this was a delay, that it would be only a matter of a few minutes more and then the vision would blink off as it had always done before.
Eventually we left the park in sober silence. It had not disappeared. We brought Liam home and sent for the doctor.
***
The recital of Book II was scratched, the park was sealed off, and no-one was allowed to re-enter it. However, the vision was enormous. You could see it from any point in the city, and the sight of it ruined every day for us.
The whole miserable incident incapacitated Liam. He wasn’t physically crippled, but the poor scrap was never the same again. It is hard to recover from the things that had passed through his young mind. He barely spoke; he spent days on his own in his darkened room, head to the wall, shivering under the blankets. Sometimes he would cry out in the night like an animal, panic-stricken. He became gaunt, his eyes got dull and glassy, and cysts and boils formed on his legs, back and neck. The doctor said that he was suffering from shock and anxiety. The shock and anxiety seemed to go on without end. He remained a pale shadow. We never forgave Uncle Hugo for pushing him into it, or ourselves for letting him do it.
***
And ever since, the vision has remained there, motionless but for the dancing of the torch flames, static above our unhappy town, like a grim weather balloon. Satan and his cohorts never change expression. Occasionally they blink; perpetually they show their patient smile, as if all they need to do is wait. And so it has remained. We live in fear. Nobody can say what will happen. Will the burnished egg vanish? Will it break and release its contents?
Liam’s vision hovers above us; it casts a terrible shadow over all we do.
(c) 1997 by Dermot Ryan. All copyrights retained.
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