‘No matter! Now for your own tricks, John,’ the tactful Abbot broke in. ‘You shall show the doctors your Magdalene and your Gadarene Swine and the devils.’
‘Devils? Devils? I have produced devils by means of drugs; and have abolished them by the same means. Whether devils be external to mankind or immanent, I have not yet pronounced.’ Roger of Salerno was still angry.
‘Ye dare not,’ snapped the Friar from Oxford. ‘Mother Church makes Her own devils.’
‘Not wholly! Our John has come back from Spain with brand-new ones.’ Abbot Stephen took the vellum handed to him, and laid it tenderly on the table. They gathered to look. The Magdalene was drawn in palest, almost transparent, grisaille, against a raging, swaying background of woman-faced devils, each broke to and by her special sin, and each, one could see, frenziedly straining against the Power that compelled her.
‘I’ve never seen the like of this grey shadowwork,’ said the Abbot. ‘How came you by it?’
‘Non nobis! It came to me,’ said John, not knowing he was a generation or so ahead of his time in the use of that medium.
‘Why is she so pale?’ the Friar demanded.
‘Evil has all come out of her—she’d take any colour now.’
‘Ay, like light through glass. I see.’
Roger of Salerno was looking in silence—his nose nearer and nearer the page. ‘It is so,’ he pronounced finally. ‘Thus it is in epilepsy—mouth, eyes, and forehead—even to the droop of her wrist there. Every sign of it! She will need restoratives, that woman, and, afterwards, sleep natural. No poppy juice, or she will vomit on her waking. And thereafter—but I am not in my Schools.’ He drew himself up. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you should be of Our calling. For, by the Snakes of Aesculapius, you see!’
The two struck hands as equals.
‘And how think you of the Seven Devils?’ the Abbot went on.
These melted into convoluted flower—or flame-like bodies, ranging in colour from phosphorescent green to the black purple of outworn iniquity, whose hearts could be traced beating through their substance. But, for sign of hope and the sane workings of life, to be regained, the deep border was of conventionalised spring flowers and birds, all crowned by a kingfisher in haste, atilt through a clump of yellow iris.
Roger of Salerno identified the herbs and spoke largely of their virtues.
‘And now, the Gadarene Swine,’ said Stephen. John laid the picture on the table.
Here were devils dishoused, in dread of being abolished to the Void, huddling and hurtling together to force lodgment by every opening into the brute bodies offered. Some of the swine fought the invasion, foaming and jerking; some were surrendering to it, sleepily, as to a luxurious back-scratching; others, wholly possessed, whirled off in bucking droves for the lake beneath. In one corner the freed man stretched out his limbs all restored to his control, and Our Lord, seated, looked at him as questioning what he would make of his deliverance.
‘Devils indeed!’ was the Friar’s comment. ‘But wholly a new sort.’
Some devils were mere lumps, with lobes and protuberances—a hint of a fiend’s face peering through jelly-like walls. And there was a family of impatient, globular devillings who had burst open the belly of their smirking parent, and were revolving desperately toward their prey. Others patterned themselves into rods, chains and ladders, single or conjoined, round the throat and jaws of a shrieking sow, from whose ear emerged the lashing, glassy tail of a devil that had made good his refuge. And there were granulated and conglomerate devils, mixed up with the foam and slaver where the attack was fiercest. Thence the eye carried on to the insanely active backs of the downward-racing swine, the swineherd’s aghast face, and his dog’s terror.
Said Roger of Salerno, ‘I pronounce that these were begotten of drugs. They stand outside the rational mind.’
‘Not these,’ said Thomas the Infirmarian, who as a servant of the Monastery should have asked his Abbot’s leave to speak. ‘Not these—look!—in the bordure.’
The border to the picture was a diaper of irregular but balanced compartments or cellules, where sat, swam, or weltered, devils in blank, so to say—things as yet uninspired by Evil—indifferent, but lawlessly outside imagination. Their shapes resembled, again, ladders, chains, scourges, diamonds, aborted buds, or gravid phosphorescent globes-some well-nigh starlike.
Roger of Salerno compared them to the obsessions of a Churchman’s mind.
‘Malignant?’ the Friar from Oxford questioned.
‘“Count everything unknown for horrible,”’ Roger quoted with scorn.
‘Not I. But they are marvellous—marvellous. I think——’
The Friar drew back. Thomas edged in to see better, and half opened his mouth.
‘Speak,’ said Stephen, who had been watching him. ‘We are all in a sort doctors here.’
‘I would say then’—Thomas rushed at it as one putting out his life’s belief at the stake—‘that these lower shapes in the bordure may not be so much hellish and malignant as models and patterns upon which John has tricked out and embellished his proper devils among the swine above there!’
‘And that would signify?’ said Roger of Salerno sharply.
‘In my poor judgment, that he may have seen such shapes—without help of drugs.’
‘Now who—who,’ said John of Burgos, after a round and unregarded oath, ‘has made thee so wise of a sudden, my Doubter?’
‘I wise? God forbid! Only John, remember—one winter six years ago—the snow-flakes melting on your sleeve at the cookhouse-door. You showed me them through a little crystal, that made small things larger.’
‘Yes. The Moors call such a glass the Eye of Allah,’ John confirmed.
‘You showed me them melting—six-sided. You called them, then, your patterns.’
‘True. Snow-flakes melt six-sided. I have used them for diaper-work often.’
‘Melting snow-flakes as seen through a glass? By art optical?’ the Friar asked.
‘Art optical? I have never heard!’ Roger of Salerno cried.
‘John,’ said the Abbot of St. Illod’s commandingly, ‘was it—is it so?’
‘In some sort,’ John replied, ‘Thomas has the right of it. Those shapes in the bordure were my workshop-patterns for the devils above. In my craft, Salerno, we dare not drug. It kills hand and eye. My shapes are to be seen honestly, in nature.’
The Abbot drew a bowl of rose-water towards him. ‘When I was prisoner with—with the Saracens after Mansura,’ he began, turning up the fold of his long sleeve, ‘there were certain magicians—physicians—who could show—’ he dipped his third finger delicately in the water—‘all the firmament of Hell, as it were, in—’ he shook off one drop from his polished nail on to the polished table—‘even such a supernaculum as this.’
‘But it must be foul water—not clean,’ said John.
‘Show us then—all—all,’ said Stephen. ‘I would make sure—once more.’ The Abbot’s voice was official.
John drew from his bosom a stamped leather box, some six or eight inches long, wherein, bedded on faded velvet, lay what looked like silver-bound compasses of old box-wood, with a screw at the head which opened or closed the legs to minute fractions. The legs terminated, not in points, but spoon-shapedly, one spatula pierced with a metal-lined hole less than a quarter of an inch across, the other with a half-inch hole. Into this latter John, after carefully wiping with a silk rag, slipped a metal cylinder that carried glass or crystal, it seemed, at each end.
‘Ah! Art optic!’ said the Friar. ‘But what is that beneath it?’
It was a small swivelling sheet of polished silver no bigger than a florin, which caught the light and concentrated it on the lesser hole. John adjusted it without the Friar’s proffered help.
‘And now to find a drop of water,’ said he, picking up a small brush.
‘Come to my upper cloister. The sun is on the leads still,’ said the Abbot, rising.
They followed him there. Half-way along, a drip from a gutter had made a greenish puddle in a worn stone. Very carefully, John dropped a drop of it into the smaller hole of the compassleg, and, steadying the apparatus on a coping, worked the screw m the compass joint, screwed the cylinder, and swung the swivel of the mirror till he was satisfied.
‘Good!’ He peered through the thing. ‘My Shapes are all here. Now look, Father! If they do not meet your eye at first, turn this nicked edge here, left- or right-handed.’
‘I have not forgotten,’ said the Abbot, taking his place. ‘Yes! They are here—as they were in my time—my time past. There is no end to them, I was told . . . . There is no end!’
The story, from 1926, qualifies as science fiction, or alternative history, and even ends with a rather Twilight Zone twist. Kipling did quite a bit of research for the story.