The Sending (10 page)

Victor Pirrone is somewhat inscrutable, chiefly because of his praiseworthy attempts to appear an English country gentleman when every gesture betrays the Italian. He can have nothing against me; also he is a highly cultured businessman, not a traditional and possible primitive Sicilian like the priest he mentioned who could make goats dance.

Concha Pirrone, with ancestors happily beyond the reach of government unless government arrives by mule, at least has a familiar which could influence her to open its cage, but that is the limit. She could never programme Leyalá to transmit Fear. It would presumably have to be terrified itself, which it isn't. I never knew a more self-confident bird.

July 14

I have got on to a very promising line. Now that I am not so bound up in my own misery my mind is not hopelessly subjected to effects, and free to consider causes. Normal thought runs clear and unworried, carrying its moments of inspiration on a healthy stream of trivialities. I am again attending committees that I had missed and discussing local affairs less formally in the saloon bar of the Royal George. I even allowed myself to be persuaded into relinquishing umpiring—that duty of the old and presumably dispassionate—and into bowling for Penminster, which, after a few hours at the nets to get back a length, I did. A drying pitch was just right for my slow leg breaks and I took four for twenty. One of my victims, who had played for Somerset in his time, remarked that nobody but a wizard could make a ball turn like that and playfully referred to Meg. Now, that's odd and comforting. While haunted by the Fear I dreaded that I might become known as some sort of eccentric specialising in the occult. Not a bit of it! I'll soon be asked to play tricks at children's parties.

It occurs to me that Men in Black when off duty may have enjoyed the same popularity as a sporting parson. I suspect that the common people in our once merry England took their witches with a sense of humour and were content to let them go to the devil their own way so long as they were good companions and rumoured to bring prosperity.

That is by the way. My promising line is a hunch, nothing so definite as a theory, that the macaw may be in some way a relay station for the curse. I asked Rita to call on Lady Pirrone and to admire the bird. She was to suggest that I ought to be invited to paint it, and she should find out when that godfather from the hills gave it to her and when she brought it to Penminster. I had in fact some intention of painting it framed by a pediment. Now I will not. It would be adventuring in the dark when I have only the vaguest clue as to what I am up against.

Rita must have used all her charm on our plump, unassuming infanta of hills and the sea, who was perhaps flattered by attention from the aristocracy of academe. She brought back the answer that Leyalá had arrived here in the last week of May as a present from her godfather. She said that godfather—whom she referred to only as Uncle Izar—had often given her good advice which she passed on to Victor, who laughed at her ‘just like men who don't believe anything', but often acted on it though he wouldn't admit it. Rita then asked if Uncle Izar was an astrologer. Lady Pirrone seemed rather shocked at the suggestion and said he wasn't, but only very wise and much respected especially when dealing with land and animals.

‘And what do you make of that, my Alfgif?' she asked.

‘Izar and his coven?'

‘Don't use that coarse northern word! Spain should be all dryads and naiads and Dionysus.'

‘It isn't Spain. The Basques were there before Celts or Romans, or so Concha tells me. But why should a Basque devil dislike me?'

‘Alfgif, make one of your tiger-brother guesses at the how, and if you get anywhere near an explanation I'll give you the why. And not till then because I can't believe it myself.'

I did not think that Lady Pirrone was in any way guilty. She simply looked after the familiar and no doubt had detailed instructions from Izar for its care. But the macaw itself is under suspicion, since it arrived only a few days before my first attack.

But Leyalá as what I called a transformer station is impossible. Izar at such a distance, far from both the familiar and the target, could not use it for cursing me or any other creature. Yet cursing was an accepted fact in the witch trials. I wish some inquisitive judge had enquired how it was done instead of accepting the familiar as an imp in animal shape which could perform any trick on command.

Training must come in somewhere. Paddy trained Meg. Is it conceivable that Izar programmed the bird's mind by a process of hypnotism? He then presented his macaw computer to Concha Pirrone, where it would be close enough to me to affect me.

But what about identity of target? The macaw cannot be programmed to annoy Alfgif Hollaston, painter, dark-haired, age forty-two, usually dressed in greens and browns, resident at Hollastons. That is ridiculous.

However, the fact of radiation—call it that for want of a better word—is not ridiculous. Take the zebu bull who used to put his head on my shoulder and share my breakfast. What assurance of friendship did he receive from me and offer? What did the birds which used to come to Paddy's hand receive and offer? How does Meg know that a horse will not stamp on her and how does the horse know that the scratching of her claws is not intentional? It appears that there is a radiation of friendship, included by Christ with the Love of God and well known to St Francis. The unity of primitive man with his environment is a manifestation of the same thing. I cannot remember a definite example of tiger brother radiating love, but he was as skilled as any psychiatrist at taking away fear.

Granted this communication between animals, including man, Fear can be received as definitely as Love. Hutchins' bullock was afraid. I did not tell it to be afraid. I merely made it the focus of my will. The effect was to alarm the whole herd. They were afraid because the message was unintelligible, right out of the peaceful pattern of their lives. Anything unintelligible, any powerful signal with no meaning, produces fear in all the higher mammals; for example, dogs are strongly affected by ghosts, whatever ghosts are.

It sounds the very quintessence of the occult to be able to train the macaw as a transmitter; but the only requirement is to hypnotise that amenable bird and there is nothing very mysterious about that, though the process would be lengthy and the technique must be a dual trance. I myself may well have the gift but not the knowledge. Obviously the thought to be imprinted should be within the capability of the familiar's brain. The macaw, as I wrote some time back, is intolerably self-confident and of marked personality and would lend itself to some such ecstasy as this: I HUNT. I KILL. I FLY. BE AFRAID. I AM PRESENT.

That last one is a bit doubtful, but animal consciousness must surely include Here and Now.

When I receive the broadcast it suggests to me an unseen, ever present, hungry carnivore, which is not a carnivore, but a something invisible, fiend or Fury. Tiger brother would have recognised it as the wordless, indescribable thought process of an animal.

That disposes of one difficulty; it is not essential to identify the target. The curse is not like an aimed bullet or a laser beam. It is a short-distance broadcast which will be received wherever it can be received.

Objection! The sending should have affected the highly sensitive Meg but did not. That can be explained. Since she hardly knows what fear is, she is incapable of feeling it. All right, but fear is not the only possible reaction. After a long delay the continued nuisance appeared in Meg as an unaccountable loss of vitality.

If my speculations on the use of the familiar for cursing are anywhere near right, they can be proved.

July 17

How different to sneaking round to George Midwinter trying to pretend there was nothing wrong with me! I asked him to have a quick lunch at the Royal George between his rounds and his surgery. Over a half bottle of their best port with our cheese, he opened up on the subject that continued to fascinate him, as I knew he would.

‘Have you taught Meg to use a stethoscope yet?' he asked.

I replied that I could easily teach her to hold one if it wasn't too heavy, and added:

‘I think that my impression that I received her reactions through my fingers was wrong. It's more direct, mind to mind. Did Paddy ever tell you anything of the sort?'

George thought for a bit before answering.

‘No. But he did once refer to teaching Meg. I don't know what or how. But since Paddy was quietly doing his stuff before he ever had Meg it stands to reason that he must have trained her to fit in and be useful.'

‘Laboratory assistant rather than consultant diagnostician?'

‘If you like. But when it comes to registering what you called Meg's temperature readings, mind to mind seems more probable than just tickling her tummy. Friend Meg has definitely got a mind, but don't ask me how Paddy could tap it!'

‘Do you yourself ever know what your patients are thinking?'

‘If the animal is an intelligent dog or cat, of course I do. But that's observation, not telepathy.'

A good vet could not help developing some of the receptors of hunting man, but would not recognise them. So I let it go at that and started a round-about approach to the evidence I wanted.

‘I've a theory, George, that the nervous system of animals is affected by the moon.'

‘So is ours.'

‘Especially the first days of June.'

‘Balls, Alf!'

‘Have you never noticed it?'

‘No. But I did have a queer case about that time. Gave me the fright of my life! I thought it was rabies.'

I led him on. He had been called out to look at a sheep dog. Its owner refused to bring it down to the surgery and said on the telephone that he had shut it up in a stable and George would see why.

He watched the dog for a time over the stable door. It was slavering at the mouth, suffering from sudden muscular contractions, lying down on its side and only getting up to howl. The farmer said nothing, nor did he enter the stable. He caught the dog by the collar with a long shepherd's crook, pulled it within George's reach and nodded.

When George had put the dog down, he very carefully lifted the body into the boot of his car and roared away to the lab in Yeovil for an analysis of brain and tissues. The lab report was that the dog had been in all-round good health and that the symptoms were unaccountable. They got near to suggesting that George had imagined half of them and panicked. The farmer didn't blame him, though he had worshipped his sheep dog; it could read their little minds, he said, without any help from him.

I asked George if he remembered the date. Yes, June 5. That was the week when I could stand it no longer and ran away to the Purbeck Hills.

‘It had been coming on gradually?'

‘Yes. The farmer had been very worried for several days.'

It is interesting that the victim should have been a top class sheep dog of marked sensitivity. ‘Could read their little minds,' the farmer had said. I should have expected that the trouble, if any, would have hit in the wilds. Perhaps it did, but none of us would have known it. I wonder how my vixen is.

‘I wish Paddy had been alive,' George said as we got up to go, ‘but I'm not sure that I would have dared to take his advice. How would Meg have reacted, do you think?'

‘Much as you. And I doubt if even Paddy could have been certain whether it was rabies or something else attacking the brain.'

Poor, bloody dog! There but for the grace of God go I.

I did not have to seek out Gargary. He came to me, so brisk and business-like that I felt he was mentally filing notes for an article in a medical journal. He, Rita and Ginny were the only persons who knew how ill I had been and rejoiced at my return to normal. Others had only noticed my absence from all my usual resorts and pursuits, ascribing it to an artist's preoccupation with his work.

‘And so you are really all right again?' Gargary asked. ‘It's not just courage?'

‘Quite all right.'

‘And you know the cause?'

‘Not unlike the collective fear of a rabbit warren which you suggested.'

‘I wasn't serious, Alf, you know. It was you who implied that your phobia was not due to your own subconscious but to an outside agency acting on a sixth sense. What did you do about it? Did you employ any—well—er—technique from Hindu religion?'

‘No. I painted it.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘I couldn't deal with its form, so I made it formless.'

‘An abstract?'

‘In the sense that it was a picture of emotion, yes.'

‘Very interesting. They encourage alcoholics to paint pictures. In your case I suppose it's a kind of self-hypnosis?'

‘Exactly. You've hit it.'

‘Would you call prayer self-hypnosis?' he asked.

‘Or trance or a unity with the Purpose. Why?'

‘Because I seem to have done the right thing without really believing in it.'

‘Recently?' I asked with as casual an air as I could manage.

‘About a month ago.'

I got it out of him. At first he very properly suppressed the name of his patient, but it soon became apparent to me that it was Bill Freeman, the one man whose receptors may be as good as my own. He had had a series of terrifying nightmares, dreaming that their two cats had been on his pillow trying to tear his eyes out. The primary cause of the dreams was obvious, Gargary said. The cats had been more impertinent than usual, and one of them had badly bitten Mrs Freeman.

‘It was she who made him come to me,' Gargary went on. ‘They aren't either of them characters to be bothered by bad dreams, but I have a feeling that Mrs Freeman resented the insult to her cats. She is very fond of them in spite of the civil war that goes on. Well, I asked the usual questions and tried the usual remedies, but the dreams continued and Freeman's imagination turned the cats into imps from hell, after him even when he was awake. He's a bit of a religious maniac, you know.'