Clowns At Midnight (19 page)

‘Then someone added a sprig to it.’

Raina gripped Carlo’s hand. ‘
Dio benedetto
!
Da la torre
!
Fa male, non è vero
?’

‘
Molte male, sì
,’ Carlo answered, patting her hand, then turned to me.

‘Raina says the sprigs will have come from the tower.’

‘Then we should go there.’ I was determined now, accepting there was no other way.

‘
Sì, domani
? Tomorrow, David? You and I will go.’

‘The sooner the better.’

‘I will come too,’ Raina said. ‘It is time I saw inside.’

I watched her. She seemed genuinely afraid.

But Carlo gave me no time to say anything more. ‘
Bene
. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll come over after ten, David, okay?’

‘Okay. Raina, I need to speak with Gemma too.’

‘Gemma? You think she has something to do with this?’ Once again, Raina’s eyes were wide with astonishment.

‘No, no. It’s something else. I just need to see her.’
Need to learn the significance of her being in a swing
. ‘Nothing to do with this. Could you give me her address and phone number?’

Which had to seem an odd request right then.

‘Of course. I do not need to look it up.’ She grabbed a shopping memo pad from a nearby sideboard and wrote: 14B Rastin Street, Kyogle, then added a phone number. I could see her hand was shaking a little, and she tried to hide it by giving me a knowing smile. ‘You like her, eh?’

‘I really don’t know her, but, yes, I do.’
Or thought I did until this afternoon
.

‘If you like Gemma, wait till you meet Zoe.’

Carlo looked startled, as if she had betrayed a confidence. ‘Raina!’ he said, and seemed genuinely amazed.

‘
Va bene
,’ Raina told him. ‘It’s time, Carlo. It’s time.’

‘Zoe?’ I asked. ‘Who is Zoe? Her sister?’

‘When you call Gemma, ask if you can meet Zoe. I am interested in what she says. Forgive me being secretive. Gemma will agree that these are secrets
she
has to share, not me.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You saw her in a swing, yes?’

‘Yes, outside a house at the corner of Sellen Road. But it wasn’t her house. I checked.’

‘Of course not. She would have chosen it because of the swing. She likes you.’

‘Raina, please. There have been too many mysteries today. What’s the significance of the swing?’

‘David, I want her to tell you. I’d hate to be wrong about this, okay? But it’s a good sign, a very old one. Ask her when you ask about Zoe.’

‘Right. Does she have a mobile phone?’

‘She does but I can never remember the number. Sorry.’

I stayed another fifteen minutes, but it was small-talk then about the sons and daughter I had met and their respective families. I tried to ask the right questions, the neighbourly questions, accepting the need for polite distraction now, but the eyes of the mask were too full of darkness, its grin too manic and knowing. As soon as it felt tactful to do so, I pushed back from the table, thanked them and rose to go. We agreed to meet the next morning and I bid them goodnight.

But I couldn’t go home. Not now that I had Gemma’s true address, not after the false house, the cryptic remarks about swings and someone named Zoe.

When I reached the end of the Risi driveway, I turned right instead of left and headed towards Kyogle, driving among the dark, lonely hills, with the sky achingly full of stars, and the lights of occasional homesteads rising up and falling away again like ships lost at sea. The wine had had its effect, but the delight and invigoration I felt had far more to do with being in the middle of something, on the edge of discovering answers. Farmhouses came and went like ships, like crowns, like scattered embers from the pented fire of the day, and I grinned at them, welcoming each one, bidding them adieu as they fell behind.

Gemma, I know where you are!

So much had been said, so much about mamuthones and charontes, about fearsome forms and ancient mysteries, but one thing kept going through my mind: what Carlo had said about things standing for other things, about the wine being more than wine, how older forms had been plundered, debased and pushed aside.

I’d recently seen a television program on the Roman gladiatorial games that tried to convey why the ancient Romans were able to endure and justify the incredible violence and cruelty of the games in the Colosseum. I thought of it now. The arena had been a symbol for the great chaos surrounding their civilised world, a measure of the outer darkness that had to be resisted at all costs. By bringing that chaos and cruelty into their midst in miniature, they had a constant and eloquent reminder of all that Rome stood for.

Originally. For it had also become mere entertainment, been made an expedient political tool, and the symbolic force was—not lost, never lost—but sidelined, diluted because overshadowed and forgotten, made part of some collective unconscious rather than an acknowledged, practised, lived thing.

It was like that now. Swings and mask-poles. Shrove Tuesday and festivals to Saint Anthony. Mamuthones as dancing charontes. I had to learn about Dionysos, and about what Dionysos had become among the Sardinians—or, rather, what he had been able to remain.

I turned onto Summerland Way, and ten minutes later reached the outskirts of Kyogle, passing the truck and farm equipment sales yards, then the district hospital, the high school and the local swimming pool. It was 9:45 on a balmy Friday evening. There was barely any traffic, hardly any movement at all but for the wind in the trees and the flicker of insects around each yellow street light I passed.

I found Rastin Street easily enough and pulled up outside number 14, a modest timber house under a sheltering poinciana that stirred in the evening breeze. It was all so strange. Not a farmhouse, not a rural property at all. A spacious-enough, rented flat at the back of a fifty-year-old house in town, tucked away down this quiet side-street.

Gemma might be at work, either here locally or over in Casino. She might be visiting friends. Since she’d lied about the house with the swing, she might have lied about everything else too. She might be with her boyfriend, her lover, a husband for all I knew, might be with her children, for heaven’s sake. The 14B suggested she was single or at least lived alone, but that was only if Raina had told the truth, or if Gemma weren’t tricking Raina as well. Just how well did they know each other?

Certainly I could see the second mailbox near the back gate. The 14B marked in white letters was clearly visible in the light from the street-lamp opposite.

And that was my answer. I wouldn’t knock on the door. No lights were showing, and I wouldn’t put myself through another staged event, waiting hours only to be left disappointed when no-one turned up. Deliberately didn’t. She might be standing in darkness behind her curtains for all I knew, watching to see what I would do, but there had been too many games. I’d leave a note, not in the mailbox but slipped under her door. I took a pen and paper from the glove box and wrote my message.

Raina
said I should meet Zoe. Please phone. 6632 1888. David.

I almost put a PS:
Thanks for the swing
, but decided against it. I’d said too much to Gemma during our drive into town on Sunday. Let this be simple, direct and slightly cool. No anger, no reproaches, just quietly accepting.

I unlatched the side gate, went up the back steps and slipped the folded note under the door. Then I drove back to Starbreak Fell.

Had I been too clever? What if 14B was just another decoy house, used only as a mail drop? Gemma might never find the note. Should I go back and leave another in the mailbox?

I wouldn’t, couldn’t afford to. There was pride; there was resentment and stubbornness. There was the need to take a position that seemed fair and appropriate, to be as loyal to David Leeton as I could.

I didn’t take the back road home, didn’t want to be predictable and put myself in the way of more games. If anyone were tracking me, using mobile phones to coordinate the next step in David Leeton’s initiation, they’d have to adjust their plans.

I drove along Summerland Way, grinning at the night, still restless but pleased with myself; finally turned into McDonald’s Bridge Road, then Edenville Road. I half-expected some new surprise: seeing the lights of a car driving over my side of the hill way off in the distance or finding more bottle-trees glinting up on the hillside. But it was quiet, eventless. I refused to check the mailbox, carefully didn’t look at the forest as I drove over the hill. If there were tricks, anyone dressed up and waiting, I never saw them. They could run through the forest yelling Yakkos!—Iackhos!—for all I cared. Tonight I’d be like Gemma hiding behind the curtains in her darkened flat at 14B Rastin Street, standing back from it all as much as I could manage.

There was the backlash, of course. Once safely locked away in the house, everything seemed flat and ordinary. After what the day and the evening had been, it was all an anticlimax.

I made a pot of tea, then distracted myself by going online, but quickly abandoned a search on Dionysos when I realised I wasn’t up to risking mask images at this late hour. Dionysos and the charontes could wait for another day. I didn’t intend to do my intruders’ work for them.

Instead I accessed
some of the safer sites on Sardinia, hoping to learn what I could about the Greek and Etruscan influences on the native nuraghic culture.

I did myself an unexpected injury there. As I read about those distinctive nuraghic towers, I learned more than I wanted. In 1587, Philip II of Spain had established a set of watchtowers along the coasts to protect the local ports, mines and villages from the threat of Turkish invasion. Like the
nuraghi
and the Roman watchtowers before them, the Aragonese towers represented a sensible strategy of having protected high places. But some towers, like the one at Chia, were called ‘dead towers’ because they were out of the line of sight of the semaphore flags and beacons of neighbouring towers.

There was no escaping the term once I’d read it. The Risi tower up on the hill was a dead tower, hopelessly isolated from its kin, lonely and apart. And the other connotation, of course. After the ram-skin on the cross, the blood on the bells, it was a dead tower indeed.

But then I remembered what Carlo had said, remembered the flower garland from Tuesday, bits of life, even if dead or decaying, about to return to the natural world as what?—fertiliser, part of the ongoing cycle? It was John Barleycorn; it was Dionysos: all the aspects of indestructible life: birth-death-rebirth. This tower in the forest was a dead
and
living tower.

That thought saved me, and the familiar downturn-upturn Jack mantras doing their bit as well. Upturn, know your enemy: just granite, just hard stone and a sturdy wooden door. Downturn: a closed interior, darkness, silence and who knew what else? Upturn: built with care and planning by someone determined to create an effect. And so it went.

To free myself from the loop, I logged off and went to bed, finding it strangely easy to slip away into sleep after four closely printed pages of
The Mask of Apollo
. I never realised how close I was right then to knowing the rest of it.

CHAPTER 13

It wasn’t quite the trip to the tower we had talked about at our first meeting. Raina packed food for us, certainly, but there was no sense of a picnic. When they arrived at Starbreak Fell around 10:30 the next morning, just the two of them, Raina looked tired and drawn, as if she hadn’t slept well. She smiled when she saw me, but it barely reached her eyes. The muscles of her neck and jaw were tense. This was serious business.

Carlo was quiet, respectful, attentive as always. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he spoke to her in rapid asides, mostly in Italian, no doubt reassuring her, and I pretended to be busy with other things when he did so, fetching my camera, finding a torch, making sure the house was locked.

Finally we put on our straw hats and sunglasses and crossed the grassy terrace together, went through the gate and up through the bonsai garden. It was hot again, far hotter than yesterday, and we probably wouldn’t stay on the hill long. We’d check the tower, learn what we could, then probably have our picnic out on the veranda if there were a breeze, possibly inside with the air-conditioner running if it remained still and windless like this; maybe we’d abandon the idea altogether.

We stepped over the thread of the electric perimeter fence while Carlo held it down with a stick, and finally reached the spot where the mamuthone had entered the forest two days before.

‘I’m pretty sure this is it,’ I said. ‘It’s where I started from on Thursday.’

‘
Bene
,’ Carlo replied. ‘
Andiamo
!’

Carlo and I were the only ones who said much at first. I kept up a running commentary, as much to fill the silence with cheerful, unconcerned conversation as to provide information. Walking slightly behind me and carrying the picnic basket, Carlo made appropriate responses. He truly was one of the most courtly people I had ever met. Possibly it prompted Raina, for soon she became part of it too, especially when I began pointing out the blackened tree trunks that had scared me before. It must have reminded her that I had been alone with this, had deliberately put myself in fear’s way.

‘You were very brave, David,’ she said. ‘It must have been difficult.’

I smiled my thanks at her. ‘The choices are either denial and a hermit’s existence or keeping as much of a scientific mind as I can.’

‘You’ve become a natural investigator,’ she added. ‘Something we all need to be.’

‘People with fixations usually pay attention to detail. They have no choice.’

She nodded. ‘Most of us lose that and never know it.’

‘It’s true,’ Carlo said. ‘You look closely.’

‘Fear is a great motivator,’ I said, intending it as a light-hearted quip.

But Carlo seized on it. ‘It’s what fear does,’ he said. ‘Appropriate fear. Puts us back in the world. War and crisis, loss of loved ones, they always make life vivid again. We all need appropriate fear and wonder. As Derek Jacobi said in that movie,
Gladiator
: “Fear and wonder: a powerful combination”.’

‘You should have seen me on Thursday, Carlo,’ I said, determined to keep it light. ‘There was a whole lot more of it.’

‘I can imagine. But Raina is right, David. You are very brave. I do not mean to flatter. Just getting through every day must be quite a thing for you.’

‘It’s exhausting. It wastes energy. There’s
too much
stimulation. The imagination keeps providing whatever’s missing. The burnt-out trees –’ I pointed to a trunk just off to the left. ‘– like that one there. The other day, every one held a demon. I couldn’t help myself.’

‘It’s a perfect black, isn’t it?’ Carlo said, stopping near the trunk and peering into the cleft. ‘An utter black. A true bit of the dark world.’

‘Carlo,
basta
!’ Raina said, to remind him, and he quickly moved along, swishing at the bracken with his stick, remarking on the grow-back of lantana that was such a local nuisance, talking about mundane things again.

Finally we reached the glade. At 11:07 it was already fiercely hot. Cicadas roared in the trees. Even with our sunglasses, the glare was terrible.

We headed for the tower, already aware that the cross was empty.

‘Nothing today,’ Carlo said.

‘But check for blood,’ I said. ‘Just in case.’

‘
Sicuro
,
sì
, David. Of course.’ And he hurried ahead to do just that.

Beside me, Raina lifted an arm to her forehead.

‘Raina, are you all right?’

She nodded and gave her lovely smile. ‘Just tired. Strange you asking me this when I should be asking you.’

I looked over at Carlo examining the cross—what had he called it?—the stulos. ‘A locked tower hidden on a hilltop. It’s understandable. But it’s just a place.’

‘Just a place,
sì
. I can’t explain it. Here, David.’

Raina handed me an old rusty key, long and appropriately solid. I almost said I’d take it to Carlo, but realised that she might have a reason for not giving it to him already. She wanted me to do it.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Please. Carlo is checking the cross. He worries. You do it, if you can.’

I could. I realised I could. Like not being troubled by the burnt-out trunks today, being in company made this possible too. I went and stood before the tower’s single entrance, just as I’d done several times now.

But this was different.

There is nothing more profound than a door. As profound, certainly: windows, masks, light, a closed box, a sudden view, a rusty old key like the one in my hand, flags and fossils, a bend in the road, a pair of old gloves, the waves of the sea, an infinity of things, but never
more
profound.

A door in a wall in a quiet lane, in a hedge, in a garden beside the ocean, leading to an attic room, a forgotten basement, to an old tower like this one, but a door—ever, always, quintessentially itself. I’d once met a man—a portophiliac client of Nellie Barwood’s—who, since a temporal lobe seizure at age 37, had walked through 917,294 doors at the time we spoke, had counted and remembered every one.

This was a door I would never forget: strong, durable; the worn, hardwood timbers given even more character by the heavy brass ring in the lock-plate. But now I had its key; now its intrinsic mystery would be altered forever. A locked door can stay with you for years, haunt you for a lifetime. Once unlocked and opened, it becomes something on the way, the means to an end. It loses the promise of itself. Like roads not taken, some doors should be left unopened.

Not this one.

I guided the key into the hole below the ring. It took a little effort, clearing whatever was blocking the hole, then more force to turn it, but finally there was a click. I grabbed the ring, turned it; the door swung back. Warm morning light fell in a bright sweep across smooth stone paving.

The tower was open.

Carlo had left off searching the ground near the cross when I’d first tried the key, and now stood beside Raina. There was precious little to see: no clutter, no bales or boxes, no old tools or pieces of farm machinery set aside for some future day and forgotten, no fallen stones or timbers. It looked empty, perhaps too tidily so. Where were the cobwebs, the accumulation of dust, grit and other detritus?

It was both a relief and a disappointment.

‘
Niente
!’ Carlo said, right by my ear. ‘There’s nothing.’

‘Was there anything last time?’

‘I don’t remember. I seem to recall tools and things, but I was so little. I might have imagined them. Or Papa may have cleared them out. Papa and Tomaso came here a lot, like I said.’

‘Raina?’

‘This is the first time I’ve seen inside it, David.’

‘You’ve never used the key.’ I hoped it didn’t sound too sceptical. Her claim was hard to accept.

‘Silly, isn’t it? Carlo feels the same way about travelling by plane. You’re troubled by clowns and masks.’

I had to smile. My condition was pathological, but she was making it sound as if we were a band of happy phobics together.

I hesitated in the doorway. What if there were paintings on the walls, faces or demonic forms not yet visible? There had been the fleece and the mask on the cross. What if there were related things inside?

Carlo must have guessed what was behind my hesitation. ‘Let me,’ he said, pushing by, shining his torch into the gloom as he entered. A few seconds later, Raina followed, and I did, dreading the place but needing to see it.

The thick granite blocks had not been left rough-hewn inside. They were dressed and smooth, expertly fitted, and more than ever helped create the sense of a lighthouse interior, a great chimney or an inverted well pushing up into the sky, all of it completely unembellished. No stairs led into the gloom above, though dark supporting beams cut the upper part of the cylinder into segments, two sets of two, arranged one atop the other to form the sense of a square that was a deeper black outline in that darkness. But just those double sets of beams. It meant an even more expert construction job. Whoever had built this had intended the walls themselves to bear most of the weight.

Carlo and I shone our torches up into the darkness, lighting the heavy beams and revealing stone slabs even higher.

‘David, is that the top of the tower or a floor?’ Carlo said.

‘Hard to tell. Maybe if we judge the angle.’

‘The angle of convergence, yes!’

He hurried outside again. When I looked over at Raina, she shrugged. ‘No matter what it is,’ she said, ‘Carlo always enjoys himself.’

He returned a few moments later. ‘It seems to be the top of the tower. The height and angles correspond as far as I can tell.’

It was difficult to accept. ‘So why build something with this shape, this height, if you’re not going to use it for something?’

‘Perhaps it was never finished,’ Raina suggested.

Carlo nodded. ‘
Sì
. Or perhaps there was an internal staircase originally and it was pulled down.’

‘Leading where?’ I said. ‘If that’s the roof we’re looking at, why go to the trouble?’

‘What else can it be?’ Carlo asked.

I shone my torch around the walls again. Carlo did as well. But there were no frescoes, no adornments.

No, that wasn’t true. One of the smoothed granite blocks had a carving on it, a hieroglyph, a petroglyph. It was the only one.

It was the wheeled table image I had found on TT Disk 5!

I dared not speak. There it was, positioned at eye level, the only marked block in the whole interior as far as I could tell: the familiar narrow rectangle of the table about forty centimetres long and two wide, the same downturned ends, the wheel or five-pointed star inside its circle, the same resting stand extending downwards.

‘It’s a pentagram,’ Carlo said, innocently enough. ‘A pentacle,’

‘What about the table?’ I was able to ask now that he had spoken. ‘This band with the pointed ends?’

‘I’m not sure. But the star in the circle is the pentacle, yes? The sign popular with magicians and the alchemists; used originally by the Pythagoreans.’

I ran my finger along the inside of the carving, tracing one of the arms of the star. It was half a centimetre deep, clean and sharp, expertly done. ‘These rays are very narrow, Carlo. More like spokes on a wheel.’

‘Except for the surrounding circle, it’s the Egyptian hieroglyph for a star. You see them on the ceilings of Seti’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. They have five very narrow rays.’

‘So a hieroglyph then?’ I managed to keep my voice calm, casual.

‘It looks like one.’

‘It took a lot of effort. It’s obviously important.’ So casual.

Carlo was shining his torch across the rows of stones, searching for other carvings. I did the same.

‘It seems to be the only one,’ he said. ‘The only thing here.’

Raina laughed. ‘They built a tower for this? A hieroglyph?’

Now I could ask. ‘Carlo, do you know hieroglyphs?’

‘Not this one. I seem to recall that the band with the spiked ends—the table as you call it—represents the sky.’

‘Is it the sun?’

‘As far as I recall, the sun is a large circle with a tiny circle at its centre, but I’d have to look it up.’

‘You have books on this?’

‘No, but we can do an online search.’

I took two photos of the carving, more to contain it somehow, keep it real, than because I needed any further help remembering it. It was for Carlo, I told myself. Carlo. The camera flash struck like lightning in the empty stone throat.

When we went outside, I immediately saw that Raina wasn’t well. She leant against the tower wall, one hand to her forehead.

‘Raina? Are you okay?’

‘
Scusi
, David. This heat. The tower. Perhaps we should postpone our picnic for another time. I do not feel so good.’

‘Of course.’ I took the basket and followed Carlo as he led her through the trees, sat her in shade on the slope overlooking Edenville Road and the distant ranges to the southwest.

‘I should get the car,’ Carlo said. ‘David, can you keep an eye on her while I go?’

And there it was. My chance to be alone with Raina, to ask about Gemma and Zoe, to pose gentle, off-handed questions.

‘Why don’t I get it?’ I said, out of concern, out of courtesy, hoping he would override me and still go.

But Carlo seized on it. ‘Would you?
Grazie
, David!
Bene grazie
!’ And he handed me his keys.

In seconds I was hurrying through the forest, taking the shortest route back to the house.

I was furious with myself. How else to put questions to Raina, without risking impropriety, without drawing undue attention? A phonecall wouldn’t do. Any visit would have to include Carlo. I’d lost my chance. And I’d lost the key. In the rush to get Raina away from the tower, Carlo must have pocketed it; it certainly wasn’t in the tower door.

Within twenty minutes, I’d been dropped back at the house and they were on their way, once again leaving me with the sense of insufferable anticlimax, dislocated reality and things gone awry. One moment the tower, the petroglyph, the mystery; the next the day stretching before me, suddenly empty.