The Soviet delegate drew in a deep breath and looked up gloomily. “Also, this answers one long-standing question.”
“What’s that?”
“One of your writers asked it long ago: ‘What’s in a name?’”
The delegates all nodded with sickly expressions.
“Now we know.”
ENCHANTMENT
by Elizabeth Emmett
No matter how indistinct the boundary between fantasy and science fiction, there are clearly defined areas on either side —and this story is undoubtedly “pure fantasy,” quite outside the limits of what I ordinarily call “SF” . . .
When she first saw the house, the spell of April lay upon it. Rain had changed to mist during the long drive. At journey’s end the sun was breaking through the clouds, and the house, still moist as from a morning bath, stood exposed before her, draped in green ivy.
She pulled the car to an abrupt halt. That castlelike structure had no more place in an American setting than Pan in its groves and woods; and yet, at the end of a drive through woods silent except for woodland sounds, it seemed as natural as the white spire of a Baptist church in a New England village.
While she stared, a gnarled and sourish-looking man appeared. She put the car in motion and drove to the entrance. He came forward with a gesture of hand to grizzled head. “You’ll be Miss Reed, no doubt?”
He took her bags, and she followed him into the house where she expected to spend several weeks alone, except for this caretaker and his wife. She had felt little curiosity as to what sort of place she was coming to. An old man had died, and among his assets was a library. The executor of the estate had sought a librarian with the proper credentials for cataloguing it before putting it up for sale. She had got the job.
Where she worked never mattered much. Regardless of what place she was in she would always be slightly out of place. To her, books were kinder than life. She found her acquaintances, forged her friendships among the people created by man instead of by God.
Never, however, had she worked in a castle. Small though it might seem in association with the word, it’s empty rooms might by their very silence prove distracting.
The living room was a joy forever. She could look down upon it as she worked in the book-lined gallery that swept above it on two sides. If she paused in her work, she had but to swing her chair and see, reflected in a huge mirror below, the terrace upon which the living room opened, and beyond the terrace a world occupied only by nature.
She had been there several days, making a preliminary survey of the library, before she climbed the four flights of stone steps to the tower. The person who came down was not the same person who went up.
At first she thought it was the river that worked the transformation. Seen from the tower, it might have been time, without beginning and without end, flowing from and to eternity. To watch it was like being hypnotized, surrendering the mind to the river as a swimmer might surrender the body. On and on, her mind drifted in musing such as she rarely had allowed it, because she could not afford the habit. Suddenly she became aware that at some point she had left the river and was on the verge of a strange country.
The complaint of aching feet brought her back to a realization that she had been standing an unconscionably long time. And with reality came a feeling of desolation such as Eve must have felt when looking back at the Eden from which she had been expelled.
I don’t believe opium ever wafted anyone into a greater state of happiness, she thought as she went slowly, reluctantly down the stairs.
The next day she came upon a privately printed book. Its one illustration showed a winged animal of unidentifiable species, bearing a shadowy something upon its back as it plunged through waves of mist. Its destination was Ultima Thule, a region that, as she saw as soon as she began to read, made Olympus seem little better than a county fair for the gods, and the Elysian Fields but a country club for poets. This was paradise, without God, without cherub or seraph, without recording angel to grant permit for entry. One laid the body aside as one might lay aside clothes preparatory to bathing; but she gathered that it took superhuman effort for the self, thus stripped, to breast the waves or surmount the barriers that intervened between vision and attainment.
Reluctantly she laid the book aside and resolutely she turned to work. But something tapped persistently at her mind for notice. She picked up the book and read on its cover, Ultima Thule by Thomas Wentworth Woods.
Thomas Woods was the man whose library had brought her to this place of solitude. From that high tower his eyes, too, must have watched the river which might be time flowing on to eternity. From that tower too—
She could not get her mind back to cataloguing books. She carried a chair up the four flights of stairs and placed it in front of one of the windows, deeply recessed in the thick walls of stone. She spent the morning there reading the book and thinking about it, feeling the presence of Thomas Woods, who had put such terribly beautiful visions on paper. While reading, she was tantalized by the feeling that its meaning escaped her even while it enthralled and frightened her. It represented no Faustlike deal with Satan; yet it recognized no deity beyond that of self. What self did, it did unaided, even to creating paradise. But when she laid the book aside and let her mind drift with the river, the meaning of the words became crystal clear—until something again called her back to reality.
The noon hour was nearly over. Like one stealing from a liaison, she made her way down softly, carefully preventing her shoes from clicking against stone. She shrank from the thought that anyone should guess that all the morning she had been neglecting work for an excursion into what was little more than poppy-land.
That projected a thought—had Thomas Woods been an opium addict? It was disclaimed by the tart second question, Am I? After luncheon she returned to the tower to test the experiment of trying to maintain consciousness of her own practical personality while crossing the borderland between reality and nonreality.
She found that the latter state was preceded by a slow transformation of the outward sense—in somewhat the same manner as the sky, with its drifting clouds and dying splendor of sunset, seems to become the sea with islands shaping and reshaping, and colors paling or deepening as they merge. Gradually the scene she looked upon became something fascinatingly terrifying, because its beauty was like nothing she had ever seen before. Then came complete submergence of mind until brought back to earth by some disturbance, probably a manifestation of physical discomfort. And there was left memory only of ecstasy and a craving to recapture it.
One day, while in the preliminary state so carefully observed, she heard steps. Was the caretaker spying on her? Her guilty conscience had suggested that he and his wife knew that she was not spending much time in the library. The steps ceased. Had she imagined them? Probably—but she ought to be fortified with material at hand to give the appearance of working, if necessary. Next morning she summoned the caretaker.
“The light is so much better in the tower; I think I will take up some books to work on. Can you bring a table there for me?”
The air in the tower was wonderful. Its peculiar ozone struck her for the first time as she surveyed her sanctuary. Here she would work. She sat down by the table which had been placed in front of a window more highly vaulted than the others and broader at the base. It had a platformlike step in front of it.