Fiend-voices, beautiful and sleep-loud, called down through darkness and light, developing the thread of ancient memory.
Staggering blindly in the whitewashed glare, his eyes, sleep-corded opened slowly as he was born anew, umbilically cut, from darkness.
Waken, ghost-eared boy, but into darkness.
Waken, phantom, O into us.
Try, try, O try the way.
Open the wall of light.
Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost?
O lost.
Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost?
O whisper-tongued laughter.
Eugene!
Eugene!
Here, O here, Eugene. Here, Eugene.
The way is here, Eugene.
Have you forgotten?
The leaf, the rock, the wall of light.
Lift up the rock, Eugene, the leaf, the stone, the unfound door.
Return, return.
A voice, sleep-strange and loud, forever far-near, spoke.
Eugene!
Spoke, ceased, continued without speaking, to speak.
In him spoke.
Where darkness, son, is light.
Try, boy, the word you know remember.
In the beginning was the logos.
Over the border the borderless green-forested land.
Yesterday, remember?
Far-forested, a horn-note wound.
Sea-forested, water-far, the grotted coral sea-far horn-note.
The pillioned ladies witch-faced in bottle-green robes saddle-swinging.
Merwomen unsealed and lovely in sea-floor colonnades.
The hidden land below the rock.
The flitting wood-girls growing into bark.
Far-faint, as he wakened, they besought him with lessening whir.
Then deeper song, fiend-throated, wind-shod.
Brother, O brother!
They shot down the brink of darkness, gone on the wind like bullets.
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
He dressed and descended the stairs gently to the back porch.
The cool air, charged with blue starlight, shocked his body into wakefulness, but as he walked townward up the silent streets, the strange ringing in his ears persisted.
He listened like his own ghost, to his footsteps, heard from afar the winking flicker of the street-lamps, saw, from sea-sunk eyes, the town.
There sounded in his heart a solemn music.
It filled the earth, the air, the universe; it was not loud, but it was omnipresent, and it spoke to him of death and darkness, and of the focal march of all who lived or had lived, converging on a plain.
The world was filled with silent marching men: no word was spoken, but in the heart of each there was a common knowledge, the word that all men knew and had forgotten, the lost key opening the prison gates, the lane-end into heaven, and as the music soared and filled him, he cried:
“I will remember.
When I come to the place, I shall know.”
Hot bands of light streamed murkily from the doors and windows of the office.
From the press-room downstairs there was an ascending roar as the big press mounted to its capacity.
As he entered the office and drank in the warm tides of steel and ink that soaked the air, he awoke suddenly, his light-drugged limbs solidifying with a quick shock, as would some aerial spirit, whose floating body corporealizes the instant it touches earth.
The carriers, waiting in a boisterous line, filed up to the circulation manager’s desk, depositing their collections, cold handfuls of greasy coin.