After several minutes of knocking and refusing to go away, Riven cracked open the door enough to look me over with his eye.
“He’s not home. ‘S just me.”
“There’s no one else here?”
“He’s on holiday.”
“Is he feeling okay?”
Riven looked momentarily confused, but seemed to remember the events of my last visit eventually. It surprised me that his boss’s behavior on my last visit did not prove to be more memorable for him.
“Ah, yes. Well. he’s better now. Just on holiday.”
It was clear that Riven wanted me to simply leave, but I hadn’t stayed up all night and then rowed across the channel to be turned away at the door.
“He did say I could use his library.”
“The library?”
He blinked several times at this. I wondered absurdly if his empty socket blinked, the eyelid closing over an empty flesh hole.
“He said I could use it,” I repeated. “I’m working on my book.”
The door groaned on its hinges as Riven opened it just enough for me to pass by him, but not nearly enough for me to do so comfortably.
“You remember where it is?”
I nodded. As he stumped down the hallway I called after him.
“Are you still considering my request?”
“Still thinkin on it.”
It was better than I could have hoped for, really. I made my way to the library, my desire to get to the older mysteries of this strange place only slightly outweighing the more immediate curiosity of the face in the window. It was none of my business if Riven had friends or lovers or children or whoever the face might have been...although he did say there was no one else around. It was probably just something he said to get me to leave.
I settled down in a comfy wingback chair in the library and selected Dubose: A Life now that I knew his connection to the channel. The few paragraphs in Mr. Runch’s Medical Myths would not be enough to flesh out my story. For many reasons, I cannot transmit all of what I read that day to you here, but the important details are as follows:
Dubose: A Life (pp. 87-109)
...after he died simply removed that aspect of his writings completely. Dubose’s writings were sanitized to fit the narrative of the humors that medical men all over Europe clung to so strongly. Thousands upon thousands of country doctors’ livelihoods depended on the efficacy of bleeding patients for a whole host of ailments from toothaches to uncontrollable bowels. Upset stomach? Let a little blood. Pain behind your ear? Let a little blood. On and on it went, and so certain were these men of their craft that even kings and queens were bled for their health. By and large, these medical men of their age were inquisitive and well-meaning, following along with the dictates of their field.
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It is only the men of Dubose’s own generation that are to blame for the needless pain of generations of sick people, many of whom thereafter died of a grisly infection from an unclean incision made by their doctor for letting. The solution to the infection? We need not say. Dubose himself, in spite of his tattered reputation as a philanderer and an apostate and a lunatic, was very clear about his revelations:
The blood’s stream must not be broken before it reaches the water of the channel. It may
drip directly down into the water, or be funneled by any device near at hand, but it must
maintain clear, unbroken lines of a river or stream. Any break in the stream, and the letting
must be begun over with a new point of bodily entry. [Modern Translation, Roberts, 14-19.
1976. Oxford University Press].
It is clear that Dubose was not speaking in general terms about the efficacy of bloodletting, but rather doing something more akin to keeping a diary of what he believed to be an effective treatment for his daughter’s particular case, and only as it pertained to the particular channel on which they lived, and in which he had his revelation. The attribution of bloodletting as a concept to Dubose is based on inherently flawed logic. More accurately, medical men of his generation, despite vilifying him as a madman, stole his methods and applied them incorrectly. It is without
I was torn away from my history lesson in the unfair maligning of Dubose by a loud crash above my head. I stood up, carefully placing the book on the arm of the wingback chair. The weather had changed while I was engrossed in my reading and the rain slapped in hard waves against the small library windows. They were like portholes on a ship in the midst of a storm.
“Riven? Riven was that you?” I called out, stepping gingerly into the hallway, listening for another crash. “Is everything alright?”
While the crash was still echoing in my ears, there was a new noise. It was a sort of skittering, like an animal with claws trying to find purchase on a slick, wooden floor. This too was short lived and silence reigned in the house as I stepped into the entryway and grasped the knob at the end of the staircase railing. It was an elaborate carving of a squid engulfing the globe. My fingers rested in the notches between tentacles as I took the first step up the stairs. A tremendous squeak echoed from the warped and faulty board. A door slammed above me and boots slapped on wood grain as Riven huffed into view. He glared down at me from the top of the stairs; I had frozen in place.
“Thought you were using the library.”
“I wanted to make sure everything was okay. I heard a loud--”
“I had a tumble is all. Don’t have great depth perception these days,” he said, rubbing his ear behind the empty eye socket.
It was the first I had ever witnessed Riven reference his disability in any way and it struck me as hollow and unfelt. He was entirely capable and did not seem to suffer any inconvenience he could not easily overcome. I was not brave or stupid enough to call Riven a liar, but I believed him to be so at that moment.
“Sorry to hear that. You’re alright though I hope?”
“Perfectly fine, Mr. Grady.”
We parted awkwardly and I returned to the library to write up my notes of what I’d read so far. It was clear that Mr. Blud’s house was proving to be entirely too interesting of its own accord for me to get much more research done. On a whim, I picked up the book I had been reading and stowed it in the deep, oilcloth pocket safe from the rain. Mr. Blud had told me his materials were at my disposal and he hadn’t been entirely clear on the terms. I was making my own terms.
I rowed back to town through a clinging mist, never seeing further than the prow of my small boat cutting through the shimmering droplets hanging in the air. As I rowed, my mind revolved around Dubose’s obsession with the channel and with the strange events at Mr. Blud’s: the pale face in the window, the loud crash, and Riven’s lie. I was going to get to the bottom of all these mysteries, one way or another. The bottom...where in my dreams the fir trees waved in current winds deep beneath the dark, cresting waves.