Parallax

The man's name was Creed. He had been a free-thinker for as long as he could recollect.

For this reason, it disturbed him that in the last few weeks he had been troubled by an alien feeling. It seemed as if an extraneous logic had been inserted into his verbal expression. No matter how he began a sentence - no matter how random, far-fetched, or purely personal his inchoate thought - in wording it, he would be driven ineluctably past invisible way stations of the mind to some remote linguistic fastness. His psyche had become at best an unfamiliar room.

He reviewed his situation epistemologically. He believed in personal freedom...

But had not Hamlet commented, 'There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will...'?

Fiddlesticks! Poppycock! Twaddle!

He had tried to fight the unseen cerebral interloper alone, but without success.
It was time to grasp the nettle. Expert help was needed. So he went to JFK and booked air passage.

When he arrived in Paris, Creed immediately acquired a telephone book. Alas, his search was fruitless. The man he sought must be among the immortals. Thought is, curse it, free: Death need be no barrier.

Hailing a cab, he went searching among the tombs of the illustrious. At dusk, he reached the Cimetière du Père Lachaise, and there located the plaque after much ferreting. He breathed a silent prayer to the gods of the agnostics as he stood before the tomb of Georges Perec¹, hoping that the great genius of constrained writing would hear and communicate.

The cough behind him was discreet. He turned and saw a man, in motley black and white, a greyscale Pierrot. The man was grinning.

'You have encountered the extraterrestrials.'

Creed gaped, gawked, and then recovered his power of speech. 'Is that who is interfering with my intellect?'

The man looked morbidly gleeful. 'Indeed. They come from somewhere near Delta Crucis, which as you know is in the Southern Cross.' He lowered his voice conspiratorially. 'They have implanted a device in your corpus callosum.'

'So deep?' Creed keened. 'How horrible!'

The man shrugged, a gesture of helplessness. 'We are their puppets. We dance to their drumming.' He pointed to the mausoleum plaque with its raised lettering. 'Even he, the master, was unable to resist, although in his attempts he was praised for achieving certain...effects.' He grinned again, toothily.

'Here you will not find what you seek. The dead may speak, but only in riddles. Return to the land of your breeding. You know that you require...surcease of sorrow.'

With that, the stranger disappeared. Creed waited by the tomb a few moments, shuddering. Then he went back to his hotel, attended to mundane matters. He even drank a few beers.

On the flight back to America, Creed's thoughts were reeling. He muttered: 'Surcease of sorrow. Where was that uttered?'

By the time the plane reached New York, remembrance had reached Creed. He changed planes for Baltimore, that city of mystery, Southern and genteel.

There he hastened to the final resting place of yet another master scribbler. There he placed a single rose at the grave of Edgar Allen Poe², the bard of sorrow. There he whispered, kneeling: 'You heard their jackboots in your mental corridors. Roderick Usher's house was your barricade.

'Your refuge was in lushness. Someone said, gaudy, like wearing a ring on every finger, writing bejewelled.

'They drove you mad, finally. But the last word was yours, yours alone, oh master of the effulgent....'

Creed raised his arms to the Baltimore sky, himself grown mad on his self-imposed odyssey. From the Inner Harbour he heard them tolling: the churches of Baltimore, the sound, amplified by the water, booming.

'They have arrived!' he shouted ecstatically. 'The bells!'

He echoed the poetic litany over the monstrous metal ullulation.

'The bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells...the tintinnabulation of the bells!'

He thought Poe would have approved.