The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
On passing the Chief Curator on the steps outside, he reached into a bag, drew out a vase of exquisite Egyptian design, and passed it over. When opened, within the neck of the previously sealed vase was a perfectly preserved red rose, its scent a fleeting moment of an ancient summer day, instantly lost as the flower became dust.
Not on the cart that day, however, were thirty sheets of paper, loosely bound between two stiff pieces of cardboard (marked with his initials) and tied with string. He had placed a red wax seal across each of the round edges of the sheaf. On being handed the package, I slit the seals and cut through the formidable string knot with my penknife: shades of an Alexander who lived long before William.
Most of the sheets in the folio are blank. I shall summarise the puzzling contents of the rest.
Sheet 21. This consists of the single word: REVELATION!
Sheet 22. This is written in a more precise hand, but clearly William Alexander’s. It reads: “The Bard too! The knowledge passed down as far as ELZBTH 1st. Who censored it? Who changed the text? Two references are clear, but there must be more. There must be. Too sweet a myth for WAS to ignore. P-has discovered lost folio, but spirited it away.”
(Two sheets covered with numbers and letters: a code of some sort?)
Sheet 25. This is headed “The Dream of the Rood.” It is one of two sheets that clearly relates to the “thorn” and “resurrection.” The margin of this sheet is peppered with words from the Anglo-Saxon language, but the main body of Alexander’s text reads like this: “Sigebeam.” This means Victory tree? The runic character “thorn” is used more prolifically in the alliterative half-lines than seems usual around this point in the poem’s body. Then the word swefna: “of dreams.” Then there are the words syllicre treow: “wonderful tree.” This phrase is enclosed by the rune “thorn.” A dream tree, a tree of victory (victory over death?) surrounded and protected by thorns.
“Yes.” The tree of everlasting life. The tree is the rood, of course, the symbol of Christ’s cross. But surely “tree” is meant in another sense too?
A literal sense. Then, to confirm this, the phrase in the poem “adorned with coverings.” Perhaps this means more than it says? Perhaps strips of material? Rags?
“I am certain that the message here is the ragthom tree. ”
This is the only note on The Dream of the Rood in my great-uncle’s file, but it proves that some albeit cryptic references to the ragthom remain extant, since this text can be read in any school edition of the poem.
It is clear that an abiding and darker myth concerning the return to life of a soul “buried beneath a tree” has been imposed upon the Christianity of the author (who probably wrote the “Rood” in the eighth century). But was the ragthom at that time a tangible shrub that could be plucked, planted, and left to resurrect the corpse of the thane or lord buried below? Or was it already a myth by that time in Old England?
The last sheet contains two fascinating pieces of Middle English poetry, dating from the late 1300’s, I would think, as one of them is the last stanza of Chaucer’s famous poem The House of Fame, believed to be unfinished. It is clear that the poem was completed, but the last few lines removed, either by Chaucer himself, or by orders of his patron:
Alexander, who must have discovered the parchment, though it is not part of his file, had this to say:
“It is Chaucer’s script, no doubt about it. The parchment page is faded, the ink has spread, but I am certain this is the original. Other editions omit the final four lines. Here they are, following the known ending:
To put those last few lines into more familiar language: Lo, this man spoke of strange things, of ragthom trees scything away the darkness and how death will creep away from the body if it is buried beneath the ragthorn’s roots.
Finally, a single stanza from an English religious lyric, which my uncle found at the same time:
This, then, concludes my listing of the sheets bound into what I shall call “The Alexander Folio.” How much further in his quest my great-uncle managed to journey is hard to know, but he certainly discovered more than have I. What fire must have burned within him. What a fever of discovery!
How death shall from the body slink when down beside the root it sinks. . .
That tree. That terrifying tree. It is the route to and from the Underworld for a man who is reluctant to die, who wishes to remain . . . immortal.
I am being directed, or drawn, towards new discoveries. It is my great-uncle? Or the tree? If it is William Alexander, then he must be dead, for the spirit of a living man would not work this way. It is only spirits that have been freed from mortality that can guide the living.
This leaves me wondering about whether Alexander attempted immortality— and failed.
I suspect that if I searched the grounds of Scarfell Cottage carefully, or dug below the walls, into the space below the tree, I believe I would find his bones. Is he here, urging me to finish what he could not, whispering to me: Do it right, do it right? Or . . . am I influenced by something else, some other spiritual presence?
I can only conclude that if not he, then the ragthorn is my guide. This would beg the question: Why? Why would the thorn wish me to find the clues to its secret power over life and death, its unnatural, no, supernatural, force? Unless— and my heart races at the thought—unless I am its chosen disciple! Gilgamesh was chosen. No doubt others after him, with Alexander the last. It is possible to fail. Of course it is possible to fail. But I intend to understand, thoroughly, what is expected of me, and succeed where Alexander did not.