“Pretty much,” though, isn’t the same thing as “completely.” (I know: such precise, scientific terminology.) Once in a while, Gnostic ideas would resurface, usually in the writings of some fringe figure or another. Rumors persist of Gnostic secret societies, occasionally as part of established groups like the Jesuits or the Masons. Which begs the question, Was Vauglais’s Fraternity one of these societies, a kind of order of Gnostic monks? The answer to which is—

  Right: no one knows. There’s no record of any official, which is to say, Russian Orthodox religious establishment: no monastery, no church, in the general vicinity of where we think Prosper was. Of course, a bunch of Gnostic monastics would hardly constitute anything resembling an official body, and so might very well fly under the radar. That said, the lack of proof against something does not count as evidence for it.

  That’s true. He could have been making the whole thing up.

  Transumption? It’s a term from classical rhetoric. It refers to the elision of a chain of associations. Sorry—sometimes I like to watch your heads explode. Let’s say you’re writing your epic poem about the fall of Troy, and you describe one of the Trojans being felled by an arrow. Let’s say that arrow was made from the wood of a tree in a sacred grove; let’s say, too, that that grove was planted by Hercules, who scattered some acorns there by accident. Now let’s say that, when your Trojan hero sinks to the ground, drowning in his own blood, one of his friends shouts, “Curse the careless hand of Hercules!” That statement is an example of transumption. You’ve jumped from one link in a chain of associations back several. Make sense?

  Yes, well, what does a figure of speech have to do with what was going on inside that Abbey?

  Oh wait—hold on for a moment. My two assistants are done with their set up. Let me give them a signa . . . Five more minutes? All right, good, yes. I have no idea if they understood me. Graduate students.

  Don’t worry about what’s on the windows. Yes, yes, those are lamps. Can I have your attention up here, please? Thank you. Let me worry about Campus Security. Or my masked friends out there will.

  Okay—let’s skip ahead a little. We were talking about The Transumption, a.k.a. The Great Work. There’s nothing in his other references to the Abbey that offers any clue as to what he may have meant by it. However, there is an event that may shed some light on things.

  It occurs in Paris, towards the end of February. An especially fierce winter scours the streets, sends people scurrying from the shelter of one building to another. Snow piles on top of snow, all of it turning dirty gray. Where there isn’t snow, there’s ice, inches thick in places. The sky is gray, the sun a pale blur that puts in a token appearance for a few hours a day. Out into this glacial landscape, Prosper leads half a dozen men and women from one of the city’s less-disreputable salons. Their destination, the catacombs, the long tunnels that run under Paris. They’re quite old, the catacombs. In some places, the walls are stacked with bones, from when they were used as a huge ossuary. (That’s a place to hold the bones of the dead.) They’re also fairly crowded, full of beggars, the poor, searching for shelter from the ravages of the season. Vauglais has to take his party deep underground before they can find a location that’s suitably empty. It’s a kind of side-chamber, roughly circular, lined with shelves full of skull piled on skull. The skulls make a clicking sound, from the rats shuffling through them. Oh yes, there are plenty of rats down here.

  Prosper fetches seven skulls off the shelves and piles them in the center of the room. He opens a large flask he’s carried with him, and pours its contents over the bones. It’s lamp oil, which he immediately ignites with his torch. He sets the torch down, and gathers the members of the salon around the skulls. They join hands.

  It does sound as if he’s leading a séance, doesn’t it? The only difference is, he isn’t asking the men and women with him to think of a beloved one who’s passed beyond. Nor does he request they focus on a famous ghost. Instead, Vauglais tells them to look at the flames licking the bones in front of them. Study those flames, he says, watch them as they trace the contours of the skulls. Follow the flames over the cheeks, around the eyes, up the brows. Gaze into those eyes, into the emptiness inside the fire. Fall through the flames; fall into that blackness.

  He’s hypnotizing them, of course—Mesmerizing would be the more historically-accurate term. Under the sway of his voice, the members of the salon enter a kind of vacancy. They’re still conscious—well, they’re still perceiving, still aware of that heap of bones burning in front of them, the heavy odor of the oil, the quiet roar of the flames—but their sense of their selves, the accumulation of memory and inclination that defines each from the other, is gone.

  Now Prosper is telling them to think of something new. Picture the flesh that used to clothe these skulls, he says. Warm and smooth, flushed with life. Look closely—it glows, doesn’t it? It shines with its living. Watch! watch—it’s dying. It’s growing cold, pale. The glow, that dim light floating at the very limit of the skin—it’s changing, drifting up, losing its radiance. See—there!—ah, it’s dead. Cool as a cut of meat. Gray. The light is gone. Or is it? Is that another light? Yes, yes it is; but it is not the one we have watched dissipate. This is a darker glow. Indigo, that most elusive of the rainbow’s hues. It curls over the dull skin like fog, and the flesh opens for it, first in little cracks, then in long windows, and then in wide doorways. As the skin peels away, the light thickens, until it is as if the bone is submerged in a bath of indigo. The light is not done moving; it pours into the air above the skull, over all the skulls. Dark light is rising from them, twisting up in thick streams that seek each other, that wrap around one another, that braid a shape. It is the form of a man, a tall man dressed in black robes, his face void as a corpse’s, his head crowned with black flame—

  Afterwards, when the half-dozen members of the salon compare notes, none of them can agree on what, if anything, they saw while under Vauglais’s sway. One of them insists that nothing appeared. Three admit to what might have been a cloud of smoke, or a trick of the light. Of the remaining pair, one states flat-out that she saw the Devil. The other balks at any statement more elaborate than, “Monsieur Vauglais has shown me terrible joy.” Whatever they do or don’t see, it doesn’t last very long. The oil Prosper doused the skulls with has been consumed. The fire dies away; darkness rushes in to fill the gap. The trance in which Vauglais has held the salon breaks. There’s a sound like wind rushing, then quiet.

  A month after that expedition, Prosper disappeared from Paris. He had attempted to lead that same salon back into the catacombs for a second—well, whatever you’d call what he’d done. A summoning? (But what was he summoning?) Not surprisingly, the men and women of the salon declined his request. In a huff, Vauglais left them and tried to insert himself into a couple of even-less-disreputable salons, attempting to use gossip about his former associates as his price of admission. But either the secrets he knew weren’t juicy enough—possible, but I suspect unlikely—or those other salons had heard about his underground investigations and decided they preferred the comfort of their drawing rooms. Then one of the men from that original salon raised questions about Prosper’s military service—he claimed to have found a sailor who swore that he and Vauglais had been on an extended debauch in Morocco at the very time he was supposed to have been marching towards Moscow. That’s the problem with being the flavor of the month: before you know it, the calendar’s turned, and no one can remember what they found so appealing about you in the first place. In short order, there’s talk about an official inquiry into Prosper’s service record—probably more rumor than fact, but it’s enough for Vauglais, and he departs Paris for parts unknown. No one sees him leave, just as no one saw him arrive. In the weeks that follow, there are reports of Prosper in Libya, Madagascar, but they don’t disturb a single eyebrow. Years—decades later, when Gauguin’s in Tahiti, he’ll hear a story about a strange white man who came to the island a long time ago and vanished into its interior, and Vauglais’s name will occur to him, but you can’t even call that a legend. It’s . . . a momentary association. Prosper Vauglais vanishes.

  Well, not all of him. That’s right: there’s the account he wrote of his discovery of the Abbey.

  I beg your pardon? Dead? Oh, right, yes. It’s interesting—apparently, Prosper permitted a physician connected to the first salon he frequented to conduct a pretty thorough examination of him. According to Dr. Zumachin, Vauglais’s skin was stubbornly pallid. No matter how much the doctor pinched or slapped it, Prosper’s flesh remained the same gray-white. Not only that, it was cold, cold and hard, as if it were packed with ice. Although Vauglais had to inhale in order to speak, his regular respiration was so slight as to be undetectable. It wouldn’t fog the doctor’s pocket mirror. And try as Zumachin might, he could not locate a pulse.

  Sure, Prosper could have paid him off; aside from his part in this story, there isn’t that much information on the good doctor. For what it’s worth, most of the people who met Vauglais commented on his skin, its pallor, and, if they touched it, its coldness. No one else noted his breathing, or lack thereof, but a couple of the members of that last salon described him as extraordinarily still.

  Okay, back to that book. Actually, wait. Before we do, let me bring this up on the screen . . .

  I know—talk about something completely different. No, it’s not a Rorschach test. It does look like it, though, doesn’t it? Now if my friends outside will oblige me . . . and there we go. Amazing what a sheet of blue plastic and a high-power lamp can do. We might as well be in the east room of Prospero’s Abbey.

  Yes, the blue light makes it appear deeper—it transforms it from ink-spill to opening. Prosper calls it “La Bouche,” the Mouth. Some mouth, eh?

  That’s where the design comes from, Vauglais’s book. The year after his disappearance, a small Parisian press whose biggest claim to fame was its unauthorized edition of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine publishes Prosper’s L’Histoire de Mes Aventures dans L’Etendu Russe, which translates something like, “The History of My Adventures in the Russian,” either “Wilderness” or “Vastness.” Not that anyone calls it by its title. The publisher, one Denis Prebend, binds Vauglais’s essay between covers the color of a bruise after three or four days. Yes, that sickly, yellowy-green. Of course that’s what catches everyone’s attention, not the less-than-inspired title, and it isn’t long before customers are asking for “le livre verte,” the green book. It’s funny—it’s one of those books that no one will admit to reading, but that goes through ten printings the first year after its appears.

  Some of those copies do find their way across the Atlantic, very good. In fact, within a couple of months of its publication, there are at least three pirated translations of the green book circulating the booksellers of London, and a month after that, they’re available in Boston, New York, and Baltimore.

  To return to the book itself for a moment—after that frustrating ending, there’s a blank page, which is followed by seven more pages, each showing a separate design. What’s above me on the screen is the first of them. The rest—well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Suffice it to say, the initial verdict was that something had gone awry in the printing process, with the result that the bouche had become bouché, cloudy. A few scholars have even gone so far as to attempt to reconstruct what Prosper’s original images must have been. Prebend, though—the publisher—swore that he’d presented the book exactly as he had been instructed.

  For those of us familiar with abstract art, I doubt there’s any great difficulty in seeing the black blot on the screen as a mouth. The effect—there used to be these books; they were full of what looked like random designs. If you held them the right distance from your face and let your eyes relax, almost to the point of going cross-eyed, all of sudden, a picture would leap out of the page at you. You know what I’m talking about? Good. I don’t know what the name for that effect is, but it’s the nearest analogue I can come up with for what happens when you look at the Mouth under blue light—except that the image doesn’t jump forward so much as sink back. The way it recedes—it’s as if it extends, not just through the screen, or the wall behind it, but beyond all that, to the very substratum of things.

  To tell the truth, I have no idea what’s responsible for the effect. If you find this impressive, however . . .

  Look at that: a new image and a fresh color. How’s that for coordination? Good work, nameless minions. Vauglais named this “Le Gardien,” the Guardian. What’s that? I suppose you could make an octopus out of it; although aren’t there a few too many tentacles? True, it’s close enough; it’s certainly more octopus than squid. Do you notice . . . right. The tentacles, loops, whatever we call them, appear to be moving. Focus on any one in particular, and it stands still—but you can see movement out of the corner of your eye, can’t you? Try to take in the whole, and you swear its arms are performing an intricate dance.

  So the Mouth leads to the Guardian, which is waving its appendages in front of . . .

  That green is bright after the purple, isn’t it? Voila “Le Récif,” the Reef. Makes sense, a cuttlefish protecting a reef. I don’t know: it’s angular enough. Personally, I suspect this one is based on some kind of pun or word play. “Récif” is one letter away from “récit,” story, and this reef comes to us as the result of a story; in some weird way, the reef may be the story. I realize that doesn’t make any sense; I’m still working through it.

  This image is a bit different from the previous two. Anyone notice how?

  Exactly: instead of the picture appearing to move, the light itself seems to—I like your word, “shimmer.” You could believe we’re gazing through water. It’s—not hypnotic, that’s too strong, but it is soothing. Don’t you think?

  I’ll take your yawn as a “yes.” Very nice. What a way to preface a question. All right, all right. What is it that’s keeping you awake?

  Isn’t it obvious? Apparently not.

  Yes! Edgar read Prosper’s book!

  When. The best evidence is sometime in the early eighteen thirties, after he’d relocated to Baltimore. He mentions hearing about the green book from one of his fellow cadets at West Point, but he doesn’t secure his own copy until he literally stumbles upon one in a bookshop near Baltimore’s inner harbor. He wrote a fairly amusing account of it in a letter to Virginia. The store was this long, narrow space located halfway down an alley; its shelves were stuffed past capacity with all sizes of books jammed together with no regard for their subject. Occasionally, one of the shelves would disgorge its contents without warning. If you were underneath or to the side of it, you ran the risk of substantial injury. Not to mention, the single aisle snaking into the shop’s recesses was occupied at irregular intervals by stacks of books that looked as if a strong sneeze would send them tumbling down.

  It’s as he’s attempting to maneuver around an especially tall tower of books, simultaneously trying to avoid jostling a nearby shelf, that Edgar’s foot catches on a single volume he hadn’t seen, sending him—and all books in the immediate vicinity—to the floor. There’s a huge puff of dust; half a dozen books essentially disintegrate. Edgar’s sense of humor is such that he appreciates the comic aspect of a poet—as he styled himself—buried beneath a deluge of books. However, he insists on excavating the book that undid him.

  The copy of Vauglais’s essay he found was a fourth translation that had been done by a Boston publisher hoping to cash in on the popularity of the other editions. Unfortunately for him, he the edition took longer to prepare than he’d anticipated—his translator was a Harvard professor who insisted on translating Prosper as accurately as he could. This meant an English version of Vauglais’s essay that was a model of fidelity to the original French, but that wasn’t ready until Prosper’s story was last week’s news. The publisher went ahead with what he titled The Green Book of M. Prosper Vauglais anyway, but he pretty much lost his shirt over the whole thing.

  Edgar was so struck at having fallen over this book that he bought it on the spot. He spent the next couple of days reading and re-reading it, puzzling over its contents. As we’ve seen in “The Gold Bug” and “The Purloined Letter,” this was a guy who liked a puzzle. He spent a good deal of time on the seven designs at the back of the book, convinced that their significance was right in front of him.

  Speaking of those pictures, let’s have another one. Assistants, if you please—

  Hey, it’s Halloween! Isn’t that what you associate orange with? And especially an orange like this—this is the sun spilling the last of its late light, right before all the gaudier colors, the violets and pinks, splash out. You don’t think of orange as dark, do you? I know I don’t. Yet it is, isn’t it? Is it the darkest of the bright colors? To be sure, it’s difficult to distinguish the design at its center; the orange is filmy, translucent. There are a few too many curves for it to be the symbol for infinity; at least, I think there are. I want to say I see a pair of snakes wrapped around one another, but the coils don’t connect in quite the right way. Vauglais’s name for this was “Le Coeur,” the Heart, and also the Core, as well as the Height or the Depth, depending on usage. Obviously, we’re cycling through the seven rooms from “The Masque of the Red Death;” obviously, too, I’m arguing that Edgar takes their colors from Prosper’s book. In that schema, orange is at the center, three colors to either side of it; in that sense, we have reached the heart, the core, the height or the depth. Of course, that core obscure the other one—or maybe not.

  While you try to decide, let’s return to Edgar. It’s an overstatement to say that Vauglais obsesses him. When his initial attempt at deciphering the designs fails, he puts the book aside. Remember, he’s a working writer at a time when the American economy really won’t support one—especially one with Edgar’s predilections—so there are always more things to be written in the effort to keep the wolf a safe distance from the door. Not to mention, he’s falling in love with the girl who will become his wife. At odd moments over the next decade, though, he retrieves Prosper’s essay and spends a few hours poring over it. He stares at its images until they’re grooved into the folds of his brain. During one long afternoon in 1840, he’s sitting with the book open to the Mouth, a glass of water on the table to his right. The sunlight streaming in the windows splinters on the waterglass, throwing a rainbow across the page in front of him. The arc of the images that’s under the blue strip of the bow looks different; it’s as if that portion of the paper has sunk into the book—behind the book. A missing and apparently lost piece of the puzzle snaps into place, and Edgar starts up from the table, knocking over his chair in the process. He races through the house, searching for a piece of blue glass. The best he can do is a heavy blue jug, which he almost drops in his excitement. He returns to the book, angles the jug to catch the light, and watches as the Mouth opens. He doesn’t waste any time staring at it; shifting the jug to his right hand, he flips to the next image with his left, positions the glass jug over the Guardian, and . . . nothing. For a moment, he’s afraid he’s imagined the whole thing, had an especially vivid waking dream. But when he pages back to the Mouth and directs the blue light onto it, it clearly recedes. Edgar wonders if the effect he’s observed is unique to the first image, then his eye lights on the glass of water, still casting its rainbow. He sets the jug on the floor, turns the page, and slides the book closer to the glass.