...but isn't this the first proper draft of Aetheric?
So, I'm probably retaking part of my Philosophy course and then continuing with the degree instead of going onto the creative writing course (for predominantly financial reasons - it's really hard to get a job at the moment, especially as an relatively unqualified Philosophy undergraduate) and I'm swamped with work for that, so there probably won't be much on this blog for a while.
However, before I became swamped with work, I finished writing this: Aetheric, the first short story for a collection of short stories about the fantastical life of Sir Isaac Newton, had he only discovered what is effectively magic instead of the scientific advances he actually discovered. I'll be putting up more details of the book and the ideas behind it as I continue to write it, as I'm determined not to neglect it despite having six essays to write for mid-August (note for any prospective Philosophy undergraduates out there: regardless of workload and your opinion on the relative subjects contained within said workload, don't let your opinions get in the way of keeping on top of the work and handing functional essays in. It leads to problems like six essays in two months if you don't.)
Comments and constructive criticism are, as ever, appreciated.
I met my first aetheric in the summer of 1669, and nearly died as a result of it.
My frantic casting about for something to relieve the interminable boredom of a lazy London gripped in the literal heat of political speculation had availed me naught up till now. Elder readers of these memoirs will recall that Roux de Marsailly, the supposed Huguenot assassin, had been openly and demonstrably tortured in Paris. I knew better of course, but my misadventures in France fighting the terror of the Iron Mask and his doppelgänger is a tale for another memoir.
I lay secluded in my chambers in Cambridge, switching between flicking through and fanning myself with the correspondence I had yet to read, when I chanced upon a letter. It attracted my attention as it was entirely unlike the bills yet to be paid and the invitations to soirées I had frankly no intention of ever attending which made up much of the rest of said correspondence. Nor was it a part of the uninteresting but necessary paper that I was composing slowly that summer, partially out of academic necessity and partially because I owed John Collins (an intelligencer and loan shark of my acquaintance) a small sum of money and had promised him the exclusive scoop on it.
The first point that aroused my curiosity was nothing to do with the contents of the letter within, but that which it was written on – very delicate and very soft vellum, in a creamy shade quite unlike the darker calf-skin parchments I was typically inclined to. The second point which recommended the beige message to me was the crimson wax seal of the Anglicans. Accompanied by the name 'Roger' scribed in a bold hand next to it, it provided me with a name to a face. Roger Ecclesby was a moderate (a Trinitarian, unfortunately) Anglican Vicar and an irregular correspondent of mine own. His views on alchemy and my peculiar theories about the Aether and the Infinite Series varied between the idea that they were blasphemous or sometimes just preposterous, but he was quick-witted in discussions on theology so I indulged him on that count by deigning to reply occasionally with refutations for his arguments.
At this stage of my life I was possessed of a peculiar habit of carrying a carven and whetstone-sharpened letter opener in a small thong on my belt. I had always entertained the notion that it made me look daring and scholarly to be carrying a potentially deadly if very small knife on my belt. I had never received a formal letter sealed in such a fashion from him, and therefore hurriedly drew the blade and cut the seal open to get at the surely intriguing contents within.
The most wondrous event has occurred. An angel – a literal, honest to God in his Heaven angel – has appeared and spoken to me! Yes, I know, you now think me bereft of my wits. But, I implore you, consider my account and judge me by it rather than dropping the matter and my letter immediately and without sympathy.
You may remember my aside in the penultimate letter about poor Mr Conduitt (the local beggar?) and how he had turned to prophecy?
If I recall correctly – and I believe I do, although I cannot for the life of me find the blasted copy of the letter I made – I scorned his supposedly prophetic turn, and you counselled me in return (perhaps with tongue in cheek) that “since truth can apparently come from the mouth of babes, perhaps it can issue forth full-grown from the tongue of madmen”.
Well, Isaac, you were right and I was wrong. I made a simply dreadful mistake in decrying in the man from the pulpit, and have been forced to eat my words for it. And now, now you must come to Pendle with all haste.
I must set down what has happened. Something tells me it is imperative for you to know all I have seen, for what I have seen is wondrous and mad.
I was working in the chapel cemetery, as is my wont given our lack of undertaker, when it seemed to me a brilliant light all the colours of the rainbow veiled my eyes.
My sight recovered in but a moment, and I raised my gaze heaven-ward from the grave I had been digging. I beheld the great oak tree, in all its glory, and a shimmering unclothed man leaning on the trunk. His stare, his eyes connecting with mine, sent shivers through me. Melodramatic, yes, but I am sworn to God's truth.
The man was none other than Mr Conduitt.
He then spoke to me of wonderful things. The truth of Eden on Earth. The romantic notion of Heaven in Nature. He even spoke of your Aether (albeit in different words). I knew then that I must write to you about it as soon as I could.
His Name is John now – the better to spread the Word.
He showed me the true revelations and that which I must do to bring them about. When the village heard the good news – I confess I may have 'shouted it from the rooftops' – they joined me immediately in rapturous celebration of God's gift to us. You must witness this for yourself, Isaac, and aid me to speak the Word as I am bound by He to. You must come here, and right swiftly.
Well, perhaps our relationship was little more informal than I have described. Certainly Mr Ecclesby read more into it than was actually there, but I should assure you, readers, that I was nothing but proper in my replies to his entreaties.
Nonetheless the combination of remarkable occurrence, divine or not, and my terrible boredom caused me to seize upon this as my figurative salvation. I threw myself off my bed (scattering papers everywhere in a most unsatisfactory fashion) and placed a few instruments I might require in a bag while calling uproariously for Christian Bunkum, my manservant at the time, to bring the carriage round and gather provisions for a long journey. The good Vicar, I slowly recalled, presided over the village parish of Pendle, so it was to Lancashire I must go.
The journey itself, while not brief, was somewhat uneventful. The summer haze was soporific in its humidity, and I must confess that despite leaving Cambridge with my mind abuzz with speculation I fell into a fitful sleep for much of the time. I was awoken hours later only when we entered Lancashire proper, by a gigantic summer storm boiling around and swirling over Pendle Forest. Bunkum's cursing (of the horses, the weather, himself and me respectively) and the din of precipitation rattling on the ceiling of the carriage prevented meaningful sleep from that point onward. I spent the latter stage of the journey observing the clawed branches of the forest scrape the misted windows as I looked for a cessation of the journey that went ever up Pendle Hill.
Just as suddenly as it began, the squall ceased. We had, coincidentally it certainly seemed at the time, arrived.
From Roger's letters, I knew he lived in the chapel he administered itself rather than a separate vicarage. I now saw the chapel through my aforesaid narrow grated window, and slammed my fist on the roof twice to instruct Bunkum to halt the horses. After he did so and came round to open my carriage door, I stepped down into the...refreshing... country mud track that served here as a road, and looked up at the chapel itself. Roger's church was built in the new Presbyt style – all simple arches and locally quarried stone – but I spared it only a few more glances (noting with unease the large chain and crude smokehouse lock securely fixed to bar entry to the main front doors as I did so) as my immediate attention and running feet were taken by two sounds resonating from behind the out-of-village chapel.
As I ran down a sharp gravel path, I could hear a clearly-untrained chorus of voices, singing mostly in the deep burr of the Lancrastian accent, singing a hymn I did not recognise which spoke of 'all things bright and beautiful'. The second sound, however, was the reason for my indecorous haste. I rounded the small chapel and vaulted the low-set cemetery gate as the piteous screams of pain combined with exultation rang as clear as church bells in my ears again.
The scene I greeted with my sight was monstrous strange. A well-kept, English green cemetery full of country folk – cattle farmers and their families I guessed, considering their simple dress – who formed a ragged semi-circle around an ancient and towering oak tree. In front of the oak, which seemed to glitter in the dying sunlight of dusk, a man knelt facing east. He was stripped to the waist, and scourged his broken and bloodied back with what appeared to be a broken fragment of tombstone knotted into a rope, punctuating every line of the disturbingly unknown hymn with a whip-crack of thudded pain (and an anguished cry to accompany it). A fallen dog-collar next to him bespoke his identity as Mr Ecclesby. But these facts were as so much terrible background to the being that strode towards me now as I stood, stock still and staring with slack jaw at the edge of the cemetery. The gaunt, albino, red-eyed fiend of a man who now stood in front of me speaking.
“Sir Isaac Newton, I presume?”
Roger did not exaggerate his gaze. His eyeballs continually rolled around in their orbitals, but just as consistently flickered back to me every second or so as if checking I was not only still there, but that I still existed. In the circumstances, therefore, it is understandable that some of the surprise I felt at being addressed in such an incorrect manner.
“No. Not sir. Not yet. Not now.”
His tongue – long, pink and lascivious it seemed at the time – flicked out and licked what certainly looked like a blood droplet hanging from the end of a scraggly beard hair. There was a patina of it and grass stains, I realised with a slight start, decorating his body like so much rudimentary paint.
“Potentially... Never.”
This last remark brought my intellectual curiosity to a peak of excitement, although some of that may have been due to my peripheral vision registering the villagers turning to regard the newcomer as I was with a non-too-friendly gaze. Vicar Ecclesby, even, had ascended to his feet and was spinning and whirling the rope in complex patterns adding up to one threatening conclusion.
“Wait! Stop, just a moment-”
I only realised I had cried out after the fact, but I was disgusted with myself for doing so. The plaintive high-pitched voice I had assayed with was not a tone I was accustomed to using, and while the situation somewhat explained my fearful manner and my roiling stomach, the sensation was definitely unwelcome. I resolved to overcompensate, then, and fired off a staccato-flurry of pointed questions in the hope of distracting the obviously homicidal aetheric's attention.
“J-John. John Conduitt. John the Baptist.”
He was delusional. Good. It tallied with my thesis. Best not to question why Mr Conduitt thought he was the Lazarus of the day, though.
John's eyes brightened at this question. He took a half-step back from me, then abruptly perched himself on top of a tombstone which yawed forth crazily from the ground as if the Rapture had come but the dead had encountered problems rising.
“I am Egypt's last warning. I am a nephilim.”
Village wiped out ~ Corpses horribly burnt ~ “A Light from Heaven” ~ New Sodom?
This “Oxford Gazette” journalist has today witnessed the surest confirmation he has seen yet of the coming of the end as foretold by the Calvinists in righteous Scripture. After reports by local farmers of “A Divine Light Atop Pendle Hill” [visible from Manchester Central and leagues away generally in all direction] this journalist's curiosity was aroused, and his person undertook to travel to Pendle to ascertain the Truth of these rumours. Given the propensity of the working classes to drink and fabrication in equal measure, this humble journalist was sceptical, for his sins, but the repeated and uncannily similar reports combined with the interest and speed of his erstwhile colleagues led with all haste to the hiring of a most disagreeable carriage up to the top of Pendle Hill. Be thankful that he did, dear readers, for the horrific devastation that greeted him upon the summit Cont’d Page 5...
“So you do claim to be an angel then?”
“No. I am a humble messenger with a divine point to prove – nothing more, nothing less.”
As I had hoped, my engagement with his personal delusion was focusing his probably-fractured mind and preventing mania from setting in. I had my own somewhat sketchy theories on what prolonged aether exposure would do to a healthy mind, let alone one which was damaged to this extent. Suffice it to say, the galvanic currents which run through the brain tend to atrophic destruction over time, and the disjointedness of thoughts this can cause in a person made me wonder, in a surprisingly calm fashion given my predicament, for my own safety.
Mr Conduitt, meanwhile had been shaking his head for the duration of these thoughts, looking for all of England like a mannequin with a few precise strings recently cut. His followers were also muttering disturbingly similar noises of negation. My hypotheses (irksomely unconfirmed as they were) had taken into account the concept of 'aetheric influence' – the very concept of aetherics such as John here being essentially a hyper-producer of aether, which would ripple out from him and influence in a similar emotional fashion all in the vicinity.
I found myself shaking my head also, and a spasm of fear gripped me. I must confess, dear reader, this moment of human weakness only made me angrier at this mortal in front of me. Regardless of his state of mind, the heresy his point of view represented at least to me was intolerable, and I told him so.
“It seems to me that you have made your point.”
A quizzical glance at my face, with barely visible golden eyebrows raised.
“Your point being, of course, that you are a raving madman seduced by actual power but only delusions of grandeur, when in fact you deserve to be put down like the common canis lupus familiaris when it contracts the frothing disease and bites at it's master.”
With the benefit of hindsight, I may have been a little more affected by his aetheric emanations than I believed at the time. I was angry with John Conduitt.
Really, truly and genuinely angry.
With no regard for scientific interest or more personal curiosity as to whether the aether could, for instance, allow a person to foretell the future, I glared at him for the split second after this statement of what I for my part considered absolute fact rather than emotional subjective opinion. In that microcosm of time, I was unsurprised to see my own face and feelings reflected back at me in his watery crimson eyes.
Ecclesby then stood up, hunched in an aggressive bestial posture with hands forming clawed shapes at his sides. The villagers appeared to have mirrored this pose exactly, though I could not be entirely certain so fixated was I on staring down Conduitt. Truly I only noticed Roger at all due to his swiftly-paced advance to Conduitt's back. I hope he will forgive me for that when I meet him after death.
John spoke through clenched teeth which broke apart into a howl on the last word:
“You will be an excellent follow-up point.”
In my opinion, the phrase “everything seemed to happen at once” is overused. There was an exact sequence of events that happened next, though whether my memory of it is accurate Bunkum at least has a few doubts.
Mr Conduitt sprang for me, putting deed to words with a snarl most unlike his claimed angelic status.
Bunkum – having been concealed behind a gravestone this entire time – dropped John mid-leap into a crunching grapple. They crashed down very near to the gravestone that Mr Conduitt had perched upon only a few moments before, and fell to struggling with one another in deadly contest.
Being rather useless in a melee, I fell and stumbled back a few paces, fumbling for the nearest weapon at hand. Dear reader, I had not yet developed the blade of concentrated light and crackling spirit I am now known for. As such, my only recourse it seemed was my sharpened letter opener. I drew it and felt very sorry for myself.
The villagers, bar one, had frozen in place. They seemed to quiver and twitch with spasmodic anger as Bunkum and Conduitt fought, and shuddered as if rocked by a stiff breeze each time Bunkum landed a solid blow. Christian was a strong man in his early thirties at this point, but even I could see the fight going against him.
The only native that hadn't frozen in place was Roger. He advanced slowly upon me, uttering a low moan that seemed to come from the very depths of his diaphragm and thudding the sharp stone knotted at the end of the rope into the ground with every pace taken.
To this day, I am uncertain as to how I survived my first encounter with an aetheric. I can offer only a contrived hypothesis, and frankly detest even contemplating that much given how little data I have available.
I moved to interpose a gravestone between myself and Roger, with an eye to evading him and moving to aid Bunkum when the moment presented itself. It may have been at this point I started shivering.
Manipulating aether, as I have previously mentioned, has a peculiar effect on the galvanism of creatures. I would not go so far as to state as fact that aether is the 'primum movens' Aristotle spoke of, but it certainly appears to be something of the sort. It operates as a radiated extra-normal kinetic force that everyone (designated aetheric or no) produces simply by living, and influences most lives in subtle ways. I have oft since observed with my optics speculum that particularly charismatic people often create and manipulate more aether unconsciously, but perhaps effect comes before cause and those who have a better unknowing influence on aether are consequently able to make others perceive them as more charismatic.
Roger's eyes were rolling back in his sockets as he advanced implacably upon me.
I do not know, as I am not a Cartesian man. I am fallible and as vulnerable to outside physical influences as any man alive, including and perhaps especially the influence of aether.
The chunk of rock was digging into the ground so hard now that it was throwing up pieces of sod and stalks of grass.
Performing actions allows the spirit of lightning to inhabit a person; Descartes observed this in his experiments on frogs and so we know it to be true.
I tripped backwards over a sunken memorial as I evaded Roger's first whipping strike with the tomb-rope, which cracked over the gravestone I had just been trying to skirt around.
What Descartes did not observe, with his incorrect emphasis on the ordered clockwork universe, is that living beings also move aether at a distance, which causes others to move and the effect to spread like ripples in a pond where the people are the proverbial stones. Normally, this has little to no effect. The ripples are lost in the white noise of humanity and nature.
I felt the rope catch round my neck and pull taut as I scrambled round to my feet to flee. I could hear Christian crying out in pain, but it seemed quiet in comparison to the dull pound of my heartbeat reverberating through my skull.
If humans are small skipping stones with relation to aether, then aetherics are large boulders – they cause splashes which destroy the noise around them and bend the surface of the pond to their weight. Every aetheric I have interviewed and subsequently had cause to dissect has, without exception, shared two traits in common: significantly damaged brain chymistry and personal or social obsession with a goal (the latter is often associated in the subject's mind with some previous mental trauma, like the loss of a loved one). Over time, those affected by aetherics begin to manifest this same appearance in the brain – increased resistance to and conductivity of galvanic current – so perhaps the condition is contagious.
My hand was so slippery with sweat that the knife nearly slipped from my grasp before I could use it. I stabbed backwards hurriedly and was ...rewarded... with a grunt of pain from Roger. I later found that I barely scratched him, but perhaps the pain allowed him to concentrate enough to throw off John's control for a second or two. That is, at least, what I tell myself when I wish to have a night's worth of peaceful sleep.
The slackened rope allowed me precious true air again, and I fell to my knees atop the grave we had been struggling over, gasping for breath.
Bunkum tells me that it was around about this point that he tackled John's head into a gravestone. I have been told he played sport, so I do not doubt him upon this specific point.
What emotional turbulence John Conduitt had suffered to make him so I could only speculate wildly about, so I shall not. The fact of his explosion and consequent spontaneous combustion, however, I can begin to tentatively explain: the loss of concentration caused by the sharp powerful slam to the head Bunkum administered caused a massive spike of galvanic currents in his brain of a kind often observed before death by interested and intelligent surgeons. With Mr Conduitt's ability to create aether came therefore a price. He created too much and it literally blew him apart, and the excess galvanic currents set him on furious fire.
Certainly I had to roll a number of times to prevent any more than my clothes and the hairs on my head from burning (to this day, observant readers will have noted that I wear a wig), and those Mr Conduitt affected were unfortunately likewise affected to a lesser degree by his violent death. Many suffered strokes and burn injuries from the explosions, dying there in the graveyard with John.
Bunkum was shielded mostly by a tombstone, he tells me, and only lost his fine frock coat. I bought him another, and gladly.
The coach and horses were shielded from the blast by the church, which itself now bares the end of the scorch mark cast by John's dire end. Seeing that the horses were merely a little skittish, and that Roger himself was in a bad way, Bunkum and I lifted him into the back seat of the carriage, covered him with the blankets I had previously used to sleep on during the journey here and departed post-haste.
This action afforded me no small amount of guilt and annoyance later. The scientific information I could have gained from a vivisection of one of the dead villagers would not have been insubstantial, and some were still alive and in need of help when we left, but the likelihood of a successful explanation to any authority who thought to investigate the column of multicoloured light that was apparently visible from miles around atop Pendle Hill was slim indeed. Neither Bunkum nor I especially wished to go to prison for mass murder, given the authorities lack of other obvious suspects or indeed witnesses.
The survivors, as it turned out, were perhaps better off dead. All were possessed of horrible alterations to the brain, and many died swiftly afterwards, biologically unable to deal with the radically different spirit which inhabited their minds. Others suffered less alteration, but were rendered catatonic for the rest of their days, needing constant care and attention. Roger is numbered amongst these latter, and may God forgive me on Judgement Day for ever sending him those letters and including him in this sorry business. Mr Ecclesby now resides at Bethlem Hospital, and will probably remain there the rest of his drastically shortened days. I see to it that he is comfortable, but visit only on occasion.
He thought to herald an angel, but was all but destroyed by a false prophet instead.
God is just, it seems, but not merciful.
