A Whistling Woman (39 page)

“I have studied the mysteries,” she said. “I know things about how to bring the Work to completion. Do not reject me.” She said “Everyone has a seed of the light in them, you know that.”

“Sit down,” he said. “You are welcome to eat with us, as everyone is welcome. But the dogs must not touch the sheep.”

“Come with Mummy,” she said, taking her gaze off his face, cutting the electric current between them.

He sat at the table with them, but he didn't eat. He didn't eat at all, that day, and every day he ate less. He knew that they liked him to be with them when they ate their lovingly cooked feasts, and he sampled things to please them, flakes of oats, spoons of lentils, grains of wheat. Eating was necessary to life. But his body appeared not to need to eat. It appeared to him to be becoming transparent. Sometimes he spoke to them, whilst they ate. He told them about the Manichees' respect for the particles of light trapped in seeds and apples. He told them about the spirit, trapped in flesh, which could be released into light by disciplining and diminishing the flesh. He knew, when he began to speak, that the whole air in the room became still and heavy with the mass and energy of their attention, like the concentration of power around lightning-conductors, before thunder. He looked into their upturned faces, and their faces shone a mild light, a pale gold warmth on him. But also the dark holes of their eyes, and their open mouths, with the wet shine on their teeth, took him in and ingested him, consumed his body of light as the flame consumes the candle.

They were eating him, and he was a trained theologian and knew to what this thought related. Gideon still broke bread ceremonially at all these meals, bustling from seat to seat with his warm-smelling basket of crust and crumb. If he was eaten up, would he become light, or nothing, or be scattered and broken into dispersed specks of light-energy? He was not a god, he was a being, he did not understand his own nature, he only knew that it was not what he had been told it was. The Syzygos knew what he was, but had not been seen for some time. And now this semi-Egyptian mummy was come. He saw blood on Gideon's bread. He had never told any of them about the blood. Like the whiff of the flame of his anger it needed to be hidden until it broke out and drowned everything.

They were emptying him out, the marrow of him, leaving the ice-glass husk walking in the light.

He walked, too, when it was dark, most of the night. As he did not eat, so he did not sleep. He prayed, if it could be called prayer, his white head and his pale face turned up, as he strode across the dark pastures, to the pale stars and the white moon. He walked more, and faster, by full moon. He did not believe that light was flowing in brimming bucketsful to the well of the moon, for he knew a little, though not much, about the planetary system and the modern cosmos. He knew that the moon pulled the great mass of the oceans around the rocky sphere of the planet he stood on, with its molten centre, and he knew that the pale light pulled him, pulled the life out of him. He knew a body needed sleep, as it needed food, and he knew his own body was in revolt, was trying to dispense with both. His cold energy was coming from elsewhere. His inner flame was diminishing to a pinhead, like the stuttering bubble on the wick of an almost-empty lighter. He felt his own blood running like lighter-fuel, and knew enough to know that it was full of red corpuscles and white, and in his mind's-eye he saw his veins transparent, and the dangerous red turning white, the pale seeds of light extinguishing the blood-red which tried to ingest them, escaping, bubble by bubble, from bloodstream to innocent air. He cat-napped after walking. If he was exhausted in his body, he didn't dream, and he didn't like to dream.
He also instituted what he called “Night Watches.” He liked to sit motionless, on the floor, in front of the empty television, which he liked to have on when it was transmitting nothing, full of whirling snowflakes of light. He had devised a spiritual exercise in which he poured the blood into the glass tank of the box, and the snowflakes soaked it up, and dispersed it, as though it had never been. He did not tell the others about the blood. He kept his most secret things in his heart. He was strong and very fragile. He permitted occasional privileged Hearers to watch with him in the dark hours. Lucy came and sat quietly. Lucas Simmonds was banished: he was told courteously that he perturbed the currents in the box. This remark was and was not a joke. Gideon—who did not often come—was twice asked to leave because Joshua could smell sex on his clothes. He did not give this reason. He said Gideon's spirit was disturbed, and Gideon accepted his judgement with a soft smile in his beard. Ruth came, now and then, and Canon Holly, who was forbidden to smoke, but stank of dead burning. Clemency came. Zag came, but could not keep still for long.
The night of the day of the coming of Eva Wijnnobel, he was perturbed. He went up to the Night Watch room, and turned away those who timidly, or meekly, tried to join him. I must be alone, he said, not wishing to be weak enough to ask for their understanding, and therefore speaking forbiddingly. Lucy nevertheless had the temerity to say “I want to watch with you,” and because he had to say “Not tonight” he had also to touch her hair, and her tremulous red cheek. She kissed his fingers, and withdrew. Then he was alone with his own disturbance.
He lit the box, but did not sit down in his usual meditative position. He walked restlessly, and became aware that the rectangle of glitter was reflected like a ghost of itself both in the dark window of the room, and in the skylight. He took off his shoes and stood in the place where the lines which joined the shadows to their origin crossed and recrossed, as he turned his head. He had a sense of power, and recognition, as though this bare room was a lovely place he had known, and been seeking, all his life. The face of the Syzygos, unlined and smiling, appeared on the black windows and the bright box. The Other said, as he had said before, come out, come out in the moonlight, and Ramsden saw the full moon hanging in window and skylight, perfectly framed, hugely sailing, clouded, clear, clouded, clear, dizzying. He went out, purposeful and barefoot, slipping the back-door catch with confident stealth, striding silently across the farmyard, under the trees, which blackened the moon with turbulent spikes, and out on to the moor, where it sailed high, the shreds of cloud dropping away like dead skin, dead lashes, leaving the great silver eye staring blankly. The Other came to him barefoot, dressed in white, over the heather. His hair gave out white light, his smile was lightness. You have had the sign, the Other told him. His voice was unbearably pleasant. You have been visited, now you are ready to make the descent. It will be hard and hurtful, but if you return, you will be able to save them. To save yourself, and all of them.

Will you come, with me, he asked the Other. The Other smiled more and more. I must come, he said. I am the executioner. I conduct the evacuation. I will be there. We will go down into the dark together.

Then he knew he was having a fit in the moonlight, and he was cast down on the heather. In foam and froth, bones and teeth jerking and jangling, flesh bruised and bleeding.

They went down together a long way, into a funnel of rock so deep that the orifice was smaller than the illusory moon, and then smaller than a pinhead, and then it was dark. His feet were cold, the uneven stairs were icy and slippery. He found his voice, and asked the Other, whom he could no longer see, if he was now dead. The Other replied cheerfully that he was not dead, no, but they were going among the dead, and when he had spoken to them, he would know death. I do know death, he told the Other, death is what I know. The Other told him that he did not know that he had been excluded, evacuated, eliminated. The dead, the Other told him, hang on the underground roots of the Tree, and cannot leave them. They have their own moon, but it is only a makeshift, and you may not be able to see by it. It is a fake moon they made from stolen light. They make fake living-things in their heads, the dead, though they would do better to let go.

Then after a long, or a short, an immeasurable time, he began to be aware of the dead hanging like black fruit, or folded bats, or bundles of tubing, from the immense knot of violently-probing iron-hard roots he saw above him, moving through earth-crust like great blind worms, hung about with hairs that also thrust out, clung, thickened, entered cracks and crevices. The dead were fitfully restless. There was a smell of humus, and a sickly smell he remembered.

They went on, and on. He had been in that place long enough to know that simply being there, in that stultifying closeness, was worse than torture. He asked if the dead had faces. They make fake faces, he was told. With an effort of will, they make fake faces. You will see faces. He said he did not want to see faces, and was told brightly that it was not a question of want or not want. The Syzygos' voice reminded him of something. His father's church voice, telling him what was good for his soul. He did not want to see his hanged father but his mouth would not form those words. To be helpless in dream, or vision, or dream-vision, is to be more helpless than anything living, with any semblance of will or thought, can comprehend.
Round a corner, they came upon the fake moon. It dangled from the root-roof by an insubstantial aluminium thread, and appeared to be a kind of lopsided silver-coated balloon shrinking and wrinkled where its inflation was failing, painted clumsily with grey-blue fake continents, craters and oceans. It gave off a miserable light, like inadequate fluorescent tubing in cheap canteens.

Sitting on heaps of rags were three people he recognised, though as he recognised two of them, one in a ghastly flesh-pink nightgown, one in mouldering pyjamas, he saw that the Syzygos was right, they had faked their faces. They lifted their arms rather uselessly towards him, like rag dolls who could not hold a position. They had dirty feet which looked more successfully like flesh than their almost prosthetic cheeks and brows. The third figure was full of rude health. Her hair glistened, her eyes glittered, her mouth and nails were crimson. She sat at her ease, and stretched out strong arms towards him, as if to embrace him. All sorts of creatures ran in the damp sawdust around the ragheaps. Earwigs, slugs, blind white snails carrying their spiral houses. And scorpions. Fat and pink, black and busy, tawny and rusty, their energetic tails curved.

His mother began to speak to him. Her denture was still half out of her mouth, and she gagged and yammered and her words clacked on her false teeth. Eva said, I can interpret her speech. We, the Mothers, welcome you. We feed the sap as it rises, and we alone—we alone—help you ... she doesn't say, what we help you to. But I know.

His mother clacked a little more. His sister managed to lift a limp finger to point out her bruises. Even when the dead speak, he saw, they do not breathe. He did not know speech without breath could be so obscene. Eva, alone of the three, breathed, long, slow, sleepy breaths, filling out her great breast, pumping air, in, out, in, out.

This place has a bad smell, he told the Syzygos. I do not like this woman, he said, in his mind, to his twin.

“It isn't a question of like or not like. She cannot be rejected. You will need her. She is what you need. She is not what you see here. Or there. She
is
. You must take in what you do not want, to finish the Work.”
Next, as he remembered only in snatches, the Syzygos, smiling whitely in the light of the fake moon, took out a knife and dismembered him. He felt no pain, indeed he saw the process—the expert flaying, the stripping of nerves, the coiling of living organs in a series of strangely coloured earthenware bowls and vases—more through the eyes of the Other, than through his own body, which felt no pain, only an increasing bewilderment and sense of scattering and loss of coherence, of which his fits had been a mild premonition. There came a point when he was a cleanly-scraped living skeleton, with red films clinging to living ivory, looking curiously out of the bone-box of his head. The Syzygos said that now he would also part the bones from each other, and build them into a cairn, from great to small. “And if you can reassemble all these parts, and thread back the nerves, and hook up the muscles,” said the smiling Syzygos, “you will find you are able to mount the tree, and go up as high into the heavens as you have come deep into the foundations. And then you will see in the sky how to prepare for the mystery that will be enacted and the consummation that will come.”

His own voice clacked out of his own bloody teeth.

“And if I cannot?”

“Why then, the flesh will decay and after a time the bones will roll apart, or be dispersed. But I think you can do this. You are ready.”

And he reassembled himself, trembling, hearing in his head the fatthighed boy of long ago, singing, dem bones, dem bones,
connected
to ... It was all precisely lived, the fingers at the end of the arms above the rib-cage collecting the pelvis, attaching the hips. He squatted under the roots, and spread his skin over the slippery bloody surfaces of his breast and buttocks. Then he found he could stand, and his strength was inordinate, and his senses were sharpened so that he heard worms, miles away, sifting loam, and the top point of the tree rattling in a light wind against the night sky. And he climbed, surefooted as an ape, agile as a tree-frog, bursting through the crust like a blind mole, who became a marmoset, a snake, a lizard. Up he went, and up, and the real moon beat about his head with floods of silver, and he stood on the very top of the tree and crowed and crowed at the dawn.
They found him out on the moor, wounded and unconscious, with bleeding mouth and broken nails in the peaty dust of the heather. They carried him back to Dun Vale Hall, which seemed to him for two days to be an unknown place, full of unknown people. On the third day, at dawn, he opened his eyes on a washed world, and saw Ruth, sitting beside him, watching. She was wearing a pallid garment, with a square yoke, and pleats falling like a gym-slip or perhaps a Greek garment, down and out. He liked Ruth, on ordinary days. He liked her fastidious face, her reluctance to speak. He moved his bruised tongue to tell her she was a maiden of light. She appeared not to hear, so he stirred himself, and said it again, more clearly. Her eyes were wet. She brushed them with the back of her hand. He told her not to cry, he was back. She nodded, and her tears ran more freely.