Free Flying to Nowhere: A Tale by John Fuller Page A

occasional knot oozed gum. He had done nothing about the stony seeping from the walls, and now his sandals slithered about in the dirty veils of moisture on the flags, and the pediments of the wooden shelves were soaking up the liquid from the floor.
    He was putting the finishing touches to his sermon, and had needed to consult some books. In any case, the sound of Vane’s hammering and digging disturbed him and he wanted to escape from it. Vane had already traced the channel to an exterior wall, and had now excavated half the courtyard beneath his study. Stripped to the waist, he led the operations with a single-minded fervour. The last view the Abbot had had of him was as he lowered himself into the opened conduit some thirty feet below the window. It almost looked as though he were wriggling into a bed, pulling the Abbot’s house over him like a blanket.
    It always seemed possible to retreat further and further into the house to escape from intruders. Although turning left at the end of every corridor should have brought him back to his starting-point, it never did, and staring up the broad chimneys never brought a view of sky. The library, though a cellar, had cellars beneath it, and those cellars had access to rooms that were not cellars and which the Abbot had never seen. The humidity at the centre of his house seemed to be not due to the weather, but to be self-generating, like the property of a living organ. The library, dank, acrid and awash, became at once this organ’s necessary manifestation and its secret function. The words it contained were closed from immediate view, nourished by the structured textures and surfaces that contained them.
    The Abbot gently stroked the supple leather of the book he was reading. He fancied it yielded beneath his palm like the flank of some peaceable grazing creature. Could leather be cured of its curing? Could the sightless hides be reassembled, clasps turn to bells, the branded spines grow tails again?
    He would lose first those books bound in vellum, for the bindings would turn back to stomachs and digest the contents. Or the shelves would grow into a hedge and keep out the hand that reached for knowledge.
    He replaced the book while he still had access to the shelves, before its covers might twist from his grasp with newborn awkwardness, trailing from embryonic gums a voided spittle of silent language.

17
    He had not forgotten Mrs Ffedderbompau, but his visits had less and less use, and his mind could not reach her. She, for her part, could no longer even attempt to project her will upon the world she imagined. Even the world she saw, a dim arc of webs and beams, had nothing about it worth ordering. To be carried away, like a pet, in the folds of a garment: that was an objective indeed. If she could ride, a mite or a fairy, on the Abbot’s left ear, clinging to a tuft of his hair! The spirits of the dead would have a short life of this sort, she reflected, aunts perched on the shoulder, a grandfather tucked into a sleeve like a handkerchief. Who would be lumbered with these crumbs of matter, themselves hoarding a distant army of forebears? Washed away with useless flakes of skin, fingernails, moisture, hairs, the whole world a litter of discarded receptacles of eternal life all as dry as the husk of glow worm, starved in its paper box.
    She concentrated her attention now on the perhaps doubtful existence of the throbbing effigy of discomfort that used to be her body. Experience told her that if she moved her arm she would find a cooler surface of the bed, but she was too weary to do more than lift the middle fingers of her hand, a gesture symbolising the awareness of the passing of time as in talking or waiting, a gesture that indicated or demanded the exercise of a barely-won patience. But this was a private piece of manual rhetoric, conducted beneath a blood-stained sheet. After a moment her hand was still.
    She felt now beyond the disaster that had befallen her, beyond