Medusa Frequency (3 page)

Here sleeps the Kraken, I thought:

Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

The music was part of the look of the place and of Istvan Fallok; the music and the half-light clung to him like the smell
of the roll-ups that he used to smoke continually when he and I were working on Hermes. He didn’t look like his name, didn’t look dark and eastern. He was forty-three, tall and thin, with lank red hair and a long white face and pale hard blue eyes with dark circles under them and he looked awful. He’d never been a very robust or healthy type but now he looked haunted. He was twisting a piece of red insulated wire in his hands. Maybe he’s just stopped smoking, I thought, nothing more than that. ‘Hi,’ he said and kissed the young woman, then he saw me and said ‘Hi’ again and we shook hands.

‘Nice to see you again,’ I said.

‘It’s been a while. You two know each other?’

She turned around, looked at me and smiled. ‘No.’ I SAW YOU STARING AT ME, said her eyes.

YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT, said my eyes.

‘Melanie Falsepercy; Herman Orff,’ said Fallok.

‘Hello,’ she said. For a moment her hand lay in mine. IT’S POSSIBLE, said her hand. Her face looked intently at my face. ‘You don’t look like your jacket photo.’

‘Time passes,’ I said.

‘I’ve read your books,’ she said. Her voice was the one that had answered Fallok’s telephone, breathy and shadowy and there was something heartbreaking in it: youth with the world before it; youth and the world passing, passing; stay yet awhile! She’ll be alive when I’m dead, I thought, but never mind, it’s a sporting proposition, go in to win. Was I in shape for it? Film stars ten years older than I ran lightly up the stairs but I’d found it hard to keep up with her walking from Oxford Circus to Fallok’s place. Was I going to need a rope for the Mountains of Orgasma? What about the Cliffs of Angina? Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to be born twenty years later? On the other hand, when I was twenty-nine I hadn’t yet written the books that had aroused her interest. Could I have been interesting at twenty-nine without the books?

‘I read
World of Shadows
three times,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I knew this was going to be a good day.’

‘I can’t stay,’ she said to Fallok, ‘I only wanted to drop off the tape.’ She gave him a cassette. I wondered what was on the tape, I wondered what was between them. ‘See you,’ she said
to him. ‘Nice meeting you,’ she said to me, and her legs took her up the steps and away into the rain.

I LOVE YOU, I transmitted with my mind. I PROMISE TO BE FOOLISH.

YOU’LL BE SORRY, said her departing legs.

‘The place looks about the same,’ I said to Fallok as we went into the studio. ‘A little more technological maybe.’

‘Did her legs say something to you just now?’ he said.

‘I wasn’t really listening.’

‘That’ll be the day.’

‘Strange name, Falsepercy. Is it from the French:
Fauxpercé,
the false pierced?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t speak French.’

‘What does she do?’

‘She’s a reader at the Avernus Press.’

‘What a small world it is.’

‘And crowded,’ he said.

All around in the dusk of the room watched and waited the little eyes of coloured light. An Anglepoise lamp on a drawing table in a corner made an island of bright warmth. Pinned up among notes, announcements, posters and photographs on an expanse of corkboard was a large print of
Head of a Young Girl.
There was a Melanie Falsepercy look in her eyes.

On a table near the door was something that looked like a piano keyboard. On top of its housing sat a computer keyboard; to the right of it was a visual display unit from which hung a lightpen. Under the table was a box for the computer works and the double disk drive. On the screen in luminous green letters was a double row of names beginning with ORPHEUS and EURYDICE.

‘Is that a music computer?’ I said.

‘Yes, it’s a Fairlight.’

‘And ORPHEUS and EURYDICE are voices you’ve got loaded into it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is Luise the Eurydice voice?’

‘Yes. Anything else you need to know?’

‘Is that still the Hermes music I’m hearing?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s really no foot powder at all in it, is there?’

‘That’s what the client said at the presentation. Shall we get started?’

‘How does it work?’

‘I’ve got it set up over here.’ He indicated several circuit boards thick with condensers, transistors, resistors, silicon chips and vari-coloured wiring. On each was a fascia with authentic-looking gauges and dials; connected to one of them were leads to a harness obviously meant for the subject’s head; there were also a scientific sort of printer and a revolving drum with a pen for recording the brain waves. The whole thing looked reassuringly ordinary; I might possibly be electrocuted but other than that it seemed safe enough.

‘I use thirty-six electrodes to build up a reference grid,’ he said. ‘When you’re hooked up I’ll ask you to say a couple of words about what you’re after. From that this receiver will give me a digital printout of signal strength and frequencies from each of the thirty-six electrodes. With those data I can work out a complementary sonic pattern on the Fairlight and I’ll feed that into the headphones you’ll be wearing. When I get both patterns in sync I’ll send a low-powered charge to selected electrodes. It’s just a little more juice than your brain generates and it excites the neurons in such a way that it might or might not get you to those places in your head that you can’t get to on your own.’

‘It did it for you, right?’

‘Oh yes, it did it for me.’

‘How many times have you done it?’

‘Just once.’

‘Just once. And that was …’

‘All I needed.’

‘Did it help with your music?’

‘Hard to say.’

‘But at least it didn’t do any harm?’

‘Do I look as if it’s done me any harm?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. He looked as if
something
had done him harm, but then so did I, I supposed.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘shall we do it?’

I’d better not, I thought. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’ He was still twisting the piece of wire. ‘Where’s your Golden Virginia?’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you smoking?’

‘I stopped.’ He dabbed electrolytic cream on the thirty-six locations and with great precision harnessed up my head with the thirty-six electrodes and put the headphones on me. Then he switched on the frequency counter and the computer-printer. Various new red and green and yellow lights winked on, adding to the watchfulness of the already attentive room.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘we’re operational; is there a particular place in your head you’re trying to get to?’

I’d been listening to the Hermes music that had become a field charged with energies not of this moment. My mouth opened and I heard it say, ‘The olive tree.’ I hadn’t intended to say that.

‘Right, the olive tree. Can you say a little more about it? I want to see what kind of a reading we get.’

In the Hermes music the particles of time past coalesced into sunlight on the island of Paxos, the summer air warm on my face, and Luise and I walking to the beach. It was our second summer and our last. The road that led from the hills down into the town passed between terraces of olive groves dry-walled with grey and white stones. There were empty blue plastic mineral-water bottles everywhere, there were thrown-away cookers and meat-grinders rusting in the olive groves. The trees had been planted long, long ago before there were such things as plastic mineral-water bottles; for hundreds of years they had twisted their roots into the stony earth of their stone-walled terraces. The tree that I was thinking of was one that we always stopped to look at. Often there was a black donkey tethered to it, sometimes there was a black-and-white goat nearby. When the donkey opened wide its jaws and brayed it made the most tremendous heehaw, it was like the creaking of the door of the world. It was much too big a sound for a donkey to make, it was as if something else was making itself heard through the donkey. When the goat was there it looked calmly at us with its strange eyes that were like tawny grey stones in which were set oblongs of black stone. Most of the time there was a cock crowing somewhere amongst the mineral-water bottles. The tree was alive, the sunlight sang and twittered in the silvery leaves and the olives made black dots against the sky. Yet the trunk was empty, it was only the shell of a tree with darkness inside the ancient lithe and ardent shape
of it. The greenish-grey thick bark all ridged and wrinkled stood open as if two hands had parted it, as if a woman or a goddess had stepped naked out of it into the greenlit shade of the olive grove.

Luise and I had often talked about this tree; we agreed that it was an entrance to the underworld, a Persephone door. Now on this particular morning she went to the tree and stood before it with her hands on the two sides of the opening. The skirt of her little white beach dress stirred in the warm air; the August sunlight was elegiac through the whispering leaves.

‘Are you talking to Persephone?’ I said.

‘Yes. She’s been telling me about the underworld; it isn’t what people think it is, it isn’t just a place for the dead. What we call world is only that little bit of each moment that we know about - underworld is everything else that we don’t know but we need it. Underworld is like the good darkness where the olive tree has its roots. Did you know that?’

‘I suppose I did.’

‘But what if it’s a bad darkness? What if it’s a darkness in which people tell lies and are deceitful? How does one live then, Herman?’

‘What are you getting at?’ But I knew.

‘You know very well what I’m getting at. I was looking in your writing folder for stamps and I found a letter.’

‘
Can
you say something about the olive tree?’ said Fallok.

‘Persephone lives in it,’ I said.

Paper came out of the printer in perfect silence like a mystic arm from the water. Fallok studied it.

‘Have you got your reading?’ I said.

‘Yes, I’ve got it.’ He was busy with the Fairlight while the Hermes that was not foot powder danced in the electronic twilight not as a picture in the mind but as a mode of event, a shift in the relativities of the moment, a new disposition of probabilities. The music that drifted through the dusk and the little coloured lights seemed a way through the olive grove to the tree that stood open as if a naked woman or a goddess had parted the wrinkled greenish-grey bark with her hands and stepped out into the greenlit shade.

I turned to the Vermeer girl on the corkboard. The look on her face was a look that made no attempt to avert anything. The
music in my headphones, while still moving forward, seemed never to depart; other shapes configured themselves to it in a moire that shimmered in my head like a watered silk of sound.

‘OK,’ said Fallok. ‘Here it comes.’ He pushed a button. The dusk poured itself into darkness, the darkness inside the tree, the dark entrance. I saw into the darkness, saw down into the earth where all around me, as if the dark were silvered like a mirror, I saw a face, a face not mine, a face not clear but almost recognizable, with a speaking mouth saying words almost intelligible.

‘Persephone?’ I said, dropping, dropping, faster and faster through the darkness, down, down into the blackness at the bottom of the sea. The blackness thickened crushingly, became millstones of blackness grinding my brain. The eyes of the Vermeer girl, of Luise, of Melanie Falsepercy dilated enormously and disappeared into the vast pulpy head that shuddered for ever in the chill of the ultimate deep.

Blackness, blackness, black water pressing down on me for ever, all the sunlight, all the daylight gone for ever into ancient night. The tentacles convulsed in vast and writhing tremors; widening in clangorous circles came the waves of terror spreading from the brute bell of the first great terror of Creation. Ah, that the possible should burst out of the blackness! That there should be no rest, no ease, no comfort! That there should be life and world and that all, all, should return to the blackness, even the sun itself gone cold and dead and shrunken back to blackness. Drowning, I gasped and shuddered in the moment that would not depart, ascending through black, blue-black, deep blue, blue-green, deep green, sunlit green. With me rose the great head of the Kraken, terror in its eyes. We broke the surface, there was sunlight hot on my face, dancing in a million sunpoints on the rocking ocean, dazzling in my eyes.

Rolling in the rocking sea, green-slimed and barnacled, the great head filled my vision. It was a human head, rotting and eyeless. It was enormous, a floating island over which seabirds wheeled crying under the heartless blue of the sky. I tried to climb on to it as it rolled but my fingers slipped on the green slime and I scraped my flesh bloody on the barnacles as I fell back into the water. The great cavern of the mouth opened and showed its white teeth, its red tongue, its cry was like the
rending of mountains. ‘Eurydice!’ it bellowed, ‘Eurydice!’ as the seabirds rose up screaming.

I clung to the hair that floated round the head and undulated with the swell. Looking down into the water I saw rising a vast and ivory nakedness and a woman’s face of terrifying beauty. Her red-gold hair streamed round her, her green eyes were open wide, her pale silent mouth was open.

Closer and closer came the face of Eurydice, her mouth open and grinning, her tongue hanging out. Larger and larger grew her face, widening in my vision until I saw it all around me, this great and loosely grinning face of the Vermeer girl and Melanie Falsepercy and Luise becoming, becoming… Who were they becoming?

‘Luise,’ I said, ‘Luise, Luise.’

‘I used to know a Louisa,’ said the man on my right as the sunlit sea slid past the window. LANCASTER GATE appeared and was gone. He had an unsure look and was wearing a broken-brimmed hat.

‘How do you spell it?’ I said.

He pulled up his jacket sleeve and his shirt sleeve and showed me a tattoo on his forearm, a snake twined around a dagger. On a little banner above it was the name
Louisa.
‘Like that,’ he said.