Fantastic Metropolis

I hesitated, watching him hold his satchel up to protect his head. He called out for his mother. Then I heard one note, the twang of the jaw harp, and with this, I fired a bullet into his heart. The stranger died immediately. Tooms went to inspect the body, but… Before I could lean over to check the wound, Ogatai was there in a starry whirl, holding the corpse over his shoulder. I carried the satchel and we headed for the springs. The osteomorphete creaked horridly along behind me, and I could hear it breathing.

Tooms and his weird companion deposited the dead man’s clothing, his satchel and the book it contained into the springs. Enormous bubbles rose as if the waters were belching. Then they proceeded down into the caves, to the chamber that had held the ancient man’s bones. They carefully laid the body out and covered him with the leatherized petals of pre-history. Out on the desert sand, I watched Ogatai dance in the moonlight, writes Elijah. When the morning came, I was alone in bed.

Thilliada Bass left the canyon a week later on the evening stage. Tooms never recorded his feelings about the departure. All he wrote was, She left behind for me her book of castaways, and I read it ragged as if it was the Bible. Two months later, he received a letter from her in which she stated that her mother had forced her into an arranged marriage with a young banker named Reginald Mortenson and that she was due to have a child before the year was out.

This was all I got out of Mrs. Dyson before she again reverted to complete gibberish. I thought I had taxed the poor woman enough for one day, so I called for the attendant to come and take her back to her room. When the young man arrived with a wheel chair, Mrs. Dyson became suddenly lucid again and asked me, “Why do you want to know all of this?”

I told her I was writing an article on it for a newspaper.

She started to laugh, and said, “If you’re smart, when you are done writing it, you’ll burn it. Don’t give it a chance to keep growing.”

I assured her I would consider her suggestion.

“No you won’t,” she said, and with this, the attendant wheeled her away.

There is one final article of evidence pertaining to this story that might help you to decide what it all means. Near the end of his life, after nailing the last plank onto the boardwalk, Tooms stopped writing in his diary, because, as he told Thilliada (by then the widow Mortenson) in a letter, the book was stolen. That missive had apparently been folded once by the old woman and hidden away in a copy of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. A few years ago the volume of Poe and the letter were discovered among the volumes of her grandson’s, J.T. Mortenson’s, library when his ex-wife sold the entire collection to the archives of Preston University for a tidy sum. The following is an exact transcription of Tooms’ only remaining words.

Dear Thilliada:

Not a day has gone by that I have not thought of you. Although I resolved long ago not to interfere with your life, things have changed now that death is close at hand. I was awakened from a dream of you and I the other night by the sound of something moving in my house. At first, because of my dream, I hoped it might be you, returning. Then, as I came fully awake, I thought it must be a strong wind blowing out of the canyon. As I listened more intently, though, I heard a distinctive creaking like a great wheel of bones endlessly turning and the labored breathing of a creature trapped by Time. The next morning, I discovered that my diary had vanished and in it’s place I found my old jaw harp. Back in the days when your youthful beauty graced the waters of the spring, I gave away everything to love you for a few brief hours. Now I know that what I agreed to set in motion will never end. So, I send these words to you from out of the spiraling canyon, and beg that you protect them from the flames.—Elijah