Fellow Traveller

It was the scratching of the nib that woke me.

Not the jolting of the carriage as the train shunted back over rail and into siding; not the puffing of engine nor the hissing of steam in the frigid night; not the opening of the compartment door as passengers came and went in the half light; nor the shouts, heavy with consonants, of the signalmen outside, making their way, breathing smoke, through the snow alongside the rails. All of these I vaguely perceived in the shadows of my slumbers.

No, it was the nib’s scratching that clawed into my consciousness, rendering me alert and blinking, my forehead pressed against the pane of the carriage, a skein of drool pooling on the scarf that had served poorly to cushion me against the train’s rocking as it climbed through foothill and village and made its way stoutly across glacial slope, dizzying crevasse and towering ice.

This first moment of wakefulness gave sweet relief from the image that haunted me tirelessly across the circadian cycle. Of my beloved, eyes hollow, breath laboured, chest weakly rising and falling, red-speckled foam at his lips. Of his mother, pale fingers clasping his, a fading but resolute sentinel throughout his decline, searching in his eyes and poisoned breath for the hope that pulmonic infection and our parlous finances denied us. And my ceaseless pacing, my tortured self-reproach and loathing for the duplicity of my business partners; for the cruelty of my father, his rejection of his son’s nature, and for his astute assessment of my lack of judgement that has brought us ruin, my heart’s companion to his wasting and me to this desperate race home offering contrition to secure my lover’s salvation.

The nib continued its gnawing, and I raised my head, wiping my mouth and shifting on the creaking seat, to identify the mysterious sound that had roused me. Its source was immediately apparent in the extraordinary individual in the bay opposite me. While the other occupants of the compartment rested deeply, if not soundlessly or fragrantly, in Morpheus’s embrace, my wakeful counterpart, in a pool of light cast by the sputtering gas burner above his head, was furiously active, inky fingers clasping a pen with which he scribbled agitatedly between the leaves of a black journal. The cover of this notebook appeared swollen and peeling, shedding fragments upon its scribe’s knee, releasing them to float in the shifts and ebbs of the compartment’s nighttime vapours. The man’s face was deeply furrowed, framed by a riot of grey curls that writhed as he wrote, bringing to mind the serpented mane of cursed Medusa, while his eyes, sunken in their orbits, burned with a fire of similarly petrifying intensity. As he wrote, his lips moved soundlessly and from time to time, he would pause his account, to pull at the tangle of his beard, his stained fingers toying with the matted growth before he plunged onwards with his literary endeavours. At his side, wedged between him and his neighbour, a soundly sleeping bearded burgher sat a pile of the notebook’s brethren, bound tightly with a thread of finest argentine, upon which balanced an inkpot, a precarious well from which the writer drew calligraphic sustenance. As the eccentric fellow turned the page, to what appeared the final sheet of that bruised volume, I remarked the reflection thrown by the book in the carriage window, scored in fine golden lettering ‘IIIVXXX’ and, musing on their significance, I moved in my seat to observe more closely the excited journalising and peculiar mien of the nocturnal correspondent.

The scratching stopped. A chill beyond the merely barometric overcame me as I watched the pen lift from the page, a tear of ink swelling at its extremity. Transfixed by the ripening at the nib, I followed its passage to the gentleman’s lower lip, where the drop fattened and bled. His eyes caught mine and again I remembered the history of that lusty transformed maiden , as my limbs felt heavy, my skin calcified and the stony silence lengthened. The stranger smiled, revealing teeth redolent of the ancient karst plateau of the ancestral lands towards which I was travelling and, as he leaned forward, my heart seemed transfigured into an immensity of marble, expectant and fearful of the sculptor’s attentions.

“20,000 dollars” he said, with the lilting accent of Atlantic shores, and in the tongue with which I’d flirted desultorily in my youth before mastering it as a far more eager student in the arms of my Anthony.

“Forgive me, but...” I stammered, only to be foreshortened by the fellow’s repetition of the astronomical sum.

“A most appealing figure, don’t you think?”, he snorted, fingernails pressed against his blackened lips to stifle his mirth. “Particularly in the circumstances we find ourselves in.” He giggled again and his merriment injected ichor into my blood’s well.

Indeed, the sum had a paradisal quality to them, encompassing my despair and ambition, being the figure required to liberate myself from the yoke of filial self-abnegation; to place my fortunes on a sound footing; and, most vitally, to provide the succour, the ministrations, the intrapulmonary concoctions required to restore Anthony to full health. To hear the number on these blighted lips only served to increase my apprehension and, responding to him with the coldest of tones, I asked the reason for his allusion to this sum.

“I propose a wager.’, he answered, rubbing his hands together. “If you can tell me the nature of my writings in these jotter, I will give you that exact sum.” He paused, and then added, “Which, I believe, will serve you well”. With that, he thrust himself back in his seat, with an amused look.

Irritation flared within me with the realisation that I was dealing with a fellow who had wandered far from reason’s path, or else whose pungent sense of mischief had touched me at my most vulnerable point. To humour him, and because I still felt the tantalising allure of the bounty he had conjured, I asked him how I might arrive at an estimation of his books’ contents , and what my forfeit would be in the casein which I averred incorrectly.

The man leant towards me again. ‘It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,’ he declared. “Therefore, would not a life be the appropriate stake?”. He snorted. ‘You could say that your life would be both the stake and at stake”. With that, he buried his face in his hands, delighted with his verbal dexterity.

I prepared a stinging rebuke to this foolishness, but then with its splintering emotional charge, the image of Anthony returned to me, his eyes dark pools of hopelessness; his blue lips, the paleness of his cheeks; the chamber, suffused in candlelight and rank with the stench of his body’s exudations; and underlying these images, the sotto voce of his mother’s hushed prayers. Then, in a curious interplay of memory, fear and hope, her incantations altered both in cadence and timbre to become the voice of the devil opposite me and her words became those of the lifegiving sum, repeated over and over again, until I was seized by the irresistible urge to throw myself at his feet, pleading for my personal calvary and committing myself to this desperate wager.

The stranger cradled my head in hands reeking of gall and sulphate, wiping from my cheeks with blotchy thumbs the tears that had sprung forth. He reache dfor the pen that stood in the inkpot and brought its nib to press gently but remorselessly against my carotid artery. As penitent before confessor, I sought absolution in the man’s features but, in the face of the sacred nature of this profane exchange, his manic quality had vanished, replaced with the cold deliberation of an executioner’s regard.

“Tell me” he murmured, “what lies between the pages of my volumes?”

Closing my eyes, I felt the bite of the nib at my neck, and sensed its poisonous draught. I pondered the possibilities: a journal of the slaughters he had enacted? An inventory of the abject kneeling before him? A necromancer’s book of unholy incantations? A fabulist’s account of the cupidity of the world? I thought back to the gnawing that awakened me; to his feverish scribbling; to his offer of the opportunity of a lifetime. And I thought of Anthony and our embraces and his inevitable end.

And then I saw in gold inscribing across a snowy landscape, the lettering of IIIVXXX, the reflection of the notebook. And I inversed the letters so that they read: XXXVIII. And it was as if the light of morning was breaking into a valley, and I gasped. I looked again at the silver-roped volumes at the stranger’s side, and knew instinctually they numbered thirty-seven. That Volume 38 was almost completed. And I remembered that, forgotten in the frantic flight, in the bewilderment of grief, tomorrow, while making our way down from the high snowy peaks, I would be marking the commencement of my thirty-ninth year.

I looked into the eyes of the stranger. And for the first time, I saw him. And I realised with amazement that I seen him many times before.

The crabbed and hunched apothecary of our village.

The aloof and threadbare bouquiniste on the banks of the Seine.

The ruminative and monosyllabic dealer of scrimshaws in London

The disdainful register seated behind the dealing desk at the Börse of Berlin,

All through my life, he had been there, notebook in hand, writing. But not, as I had thought, scribbling out a prescription, nor a sale, nor a review, nor a record of losses. But instead committing the record of my life.

In thirty-eight notebooks.

And I shouted ‘My life! It is the story of my life!’

This caused great commotion in the carriage as the other passengers started with fear, and gazed around them, blinking in incomprehension at the grotesque tableau vivant to which they were witnesses.

The stranger threw back his head and laughed. He flung the pen against the opposing wall, where it bit deeply and thrummed in its burying, to the astonishment of all.

“Well done! Well done!”, he exclaimed, and pushing me backwards, he jumped onto his seat, and brought down from the rack overhead, a brown case which he tossed towards me.

“This is yours!”, he cried, and then taking hold of the bundle of books, he slipped under the ribbon the volume in which he had made his final notes. “And these are, too.”, he added as he handled the bundle to me.

I opened the case and a gleam that would have warmed the heart of Croesus shone forth.

But resting on that auric pile signalling the end of all of my fears and the beginning of a life well lived and filled with companionship and love, there sat with my winnings one further gift from the stranger, my fellow traveller in life to this point. An unblemished, unopened pocket-sized black notebook that smelled of new leather and crisp virgin pages.

Taking the book in my hands, I looked up at the stranger, who had made his way to the compartment door, and was swaddling himself against the wintry blast that awaited him outside.

“What am I to do with this?” I asked him, holding up the book to the first ray of morning light that was breaking into the compartment.

He shook his head and raised his hands in supplication. “No more”, he said. “It’s for you to write the next chapter of your life.”

He turned towards the compartment door and slide it open, letting in a cool draught of mountain air, setting the pages of the notebook aflutter.

He paused.

“Write them well” he said, and with the briefest of bows, he was gone.

Extracting the pen from the compartment wall, astonished, I held the newest volume in my hand.

And with the pen, I began to write.