The Virgin in the Garden (40 page)

“Did you wish?”

“I can’t think of anything to wish for.”

“Open your mind to the future.”

“I can’t like this place.”

“It has an aura.”

“It is cold and wet. And tripperish.” The water was still freezing on his hand. He would be there for ever. If his hand was not stony it would crackle with ice.

“We must leave something of our own. To maintain contact. A terminal as it were. Have you got anything?”

Marcus poked with his left hand in his blazer pocket. His right hand flamed and tingled. He found a pen, some pennies, a handkerchief, some string. Lucas turned these over and decided on the handkerchief, which had Marcus’s nametape stitched neatly to it. Marcus said he might need to use it, it was cold. Lucas said he had several and would lend one. He placed Marcus’s handkerchief and his own pencil together under the drip.

“Part of us. Part of the Well. A link.”

“I’m hungry.”

“The pencil and the handkerchief should solidify together.” Lucas added rather plaintively, “It’s the pencil I wrote it down with, what you saw. It’s partaken in large areas of the experiment. It should make a powerful terminal.”

Marcus had a brief vision of a stone wire appended to a stone pencil humming stony notes, and a distant crystal set. Lucas peered like an anxious dog into his face. Signs of scepticism, or boredom in his generally well-impressed colleague always filled him with alarm. He made further proselytising efforts.

“You know, Mother Shipton lived in a house cut out of the rock. Like the Sibyl at Cumae, and the Pythian priestess. A striking coincidence. And
they
were known to be at the entries to the other world, umbilical points … 
known
. It did seem likely you might be aware of … some field of force … or something.”

“No. Everything seems solid and heavy and oppressive. I want to go.”

“What form does the oppression take?”

Marcus, tracing aimless figures on the still air with blotchy damp fingers, turned a stony face on Lucas and for the first time exploited his knowledge of his own dubious authority.

“It takes the form of knowing we ought to get away from here fast. This place is against us staying. It doesn’t like us moving.”

For a moment his mind’s eye saw turning corridors of polished smooth blue-veined stone, inviting inwards. He ignored this. He repeated, “It’s against us.”

“But you see no more.”

“No.”

Lucas shrugged himself into his coat.

“We’ll go then. We should take something.”

In a nearby wood they found what Lucas said were some very satisfactory flowers, late winter aconites, dog’s mercury, hartstongue, the only true indigenous fern with undivided leaves. Lucas showed signs of wanting to offer these, green-ruffed gold, creeping hairy fœtid spurge with tiny green flowers, to the Dropping Well for preservation. Marcus
said they were not going back there. Lucas acceded meekly. Marcus said with cunning, “Tell me about Owger’s Howe,” and Lucas brightened, and said it was on a moor south of Calverley near a place called the Obtrush Yat, or Gate, and was an imposing tumulus with door pillars and a threshold which had a long tradition of propitiatory rituals and sightings to do with it, special knockings and bowls of milk put out at certain times of year, ring-dancings and lights from inside at midnight, a vanished shepherd and dog who were believed to have entered Fairyland through those stone gates and never returned. It might take a couple of hours’ driving but it would be a good place. He had brought a picnic. Before they set out he read to Marcus an account by one William of Newbridge of a countryman in the Province of the Deiri (i.e. Yorkshire) who heard from a barrow “the voices of people singing and as it were joyfully feasting. He wondered who they could be that were breaking in that place, by their merriment, the silence of the dead night, and he wished to examine into the matter more closely. Seeing a door open in the side of the barrow he went up to it and looked in; and there he beheld a large and luminous house full of people, women as well as men, who were reclining at a solemn banquet and, as it were, raising their cups to a tall and excellently fair couple who appeared, from the woman’s wreath and fantastic garb, to be newly wedded. One of the attendants standing at the door gave him a cup. It contained a clear, red liquid, something like wine. He took it but would not drink, and casting the contents secretly upon the grass, was struck with terror on seeing that the ground flamed and smouldered where the drops had fallen. At this, still tightly grasping the vessel, he took to horse, and fled; the people of the place, making a shrill buzzing, pursued him with all speed, but he came safe to the town, and there gave the cup into the keeping of the Curate. Once the cup was out of his hands he could neither see his pursuers nor hear their shrill outcry, although his horse was maddened seemingly, and could never again be comfortable or quiet. The vessel, made of an unknown material, indescribable in colour and extraordinary in form, was kept in the Church a many years; and they could not come in at it; though he who held the cup could hear their wailing and singing and threatening sometimes on the wind.”

Marcus asked what Owger meant, and Lucas said it was believed by some to be a corruption of Ogier le Danois, a Danish paladin who had gone into Fairyland for several centuries but had been promised release in time of great need – like Arthur and Merlin and other aeonic sleepers under stones and within hills. Others insisted Owger was just a local goblin, who took the offered milk and occasionally bothered cattle and sheep with his pranks.

The Howe was reached by a grassy track running steeply up a hillside of fields so clotted with bracken, heather and thistles that it was hard not to see them as invaded by moor. The barrow, high and distinctive, stood on the top of a raised circular mound surrounded itself by vestigial terraces, or furrows in the crust of the earth which, Lucas waggishly assured Marcus, beaming brightly at him as they tramped upwards, bearing canvas holdalls of picnic and specimen jars of fauna and flora,
which
were generally believed to be the marks of the dying wreathings and constrictions of a loathly worm or dragon which had secured itself to that tump for its last battle. Marcus, somewhat breathless, did not ask why Lucas was so sure that the idea of Worms was comically fictive whilst the ideas of little or good or green folk or people in barrows and mounds, or angels in cathedrals, or Mothers who sensed magnetic shifts centuries ahead, were somehow wrong-headed descriptions of actual forces. No doubt all would be made clearer, in so far as Marcus chose to seek clarity. He preferred, in fact, a certain area of cloudiness, as to the naming and categorising of things. His capacity for belief in particular propositions was no greater than it had ever been. Plans and patterns there might be; biospheres and lithospheres and entelechies were no more than evocative words.

The terminals and focal objects Lucas was scattering about the surface of Yorkshire he treated with a mixture of scepticism and fear. They were almost certainly not what Lucas said they were. But what they were doing was instigating all sorts of tuggings, and urgings, and pricklings and singings and expansions and contractions in him which were connected with fields of force in which he did perforce believe, and which resembled things that were most respectably taught in schools, electricity, X-rays, magnetism. An electric charge could pick up a mouse or a sheep, or a man, and shake it till it chattered, singe and char it to a calcined clod. Something had gone through him when he saw the light, and something related went through and through him now, and shook him, so that without Lucas he might well, he considered, have been wiped clear of mind like a washed slate, or clear of body, like something set in a vacuum.

They made a sort of camp near the earthed and closed mouth of the barrow. Lucas, who tended to treat Marcus as a kind of human dowsing twig, or divining rod, or maybe, Marcus grimly thought, exposed on this hummock top surrounded by blackish clouds, as a lightning conductor, now plucked at his blazer elbow and asked if he had any sense of the nature of the place, any awareness of anything there. Marcus said, rather irritably, “Let go of me, I can’t think if you touch me,” and wandered away along the side of the hummock, trying dutifully to
empty his mind. He reiterated hopefully that he was hungry. Lucas replied, equally irritably, that they should do their work on
empty
stomachs, that was well known. Look at the Eucharist. When their work was done, they could have their picnic, of which there was a lot, and very good too. He giggled. Marcus went on walking, listening to earth and air, sniffing, staring. The tumulus was old, and silent. Inside, there was earth, and dust, and earthy, dusty particles of air. Things grew on it. Things here were mingled: out of earth, grass, and thistles, out of bones, earth: water ran through it all, and came out, and fed things, and evaporated. He put a hand on the grassy flank of the thing: it had its own warmth. He went down, and found a blue flower. He called to Lucas, “Here’s a blue one. I’ve found a blue one. A lovely blue.” Lucas trotted up, smartly, and became very excited. The blue flowers rose on fluted tall cups on smooth stalks, an inch or so high. Their leaves were in a little rosette at the base of the stalk.

“Don’t pick it,” Lucas cried. “It’s rare. Up here, very rare, very rare indeed. That’s a spring gentian. You get them up here very infrequently – there are more in the Burren, but no one could say they weren’t rare. It’s a sign. Here, where it is, we must carry out the experiment. Wait, I’ll bring the aconites. And maybe milk. Shall we pour milk, a kind of libation? The country people did.”

Marcus sat on the grass and considered the rare gentian. Lucas came and laid the other plants, aconite and wood mercury and fern round the gentian. He poured a small glass beaker of milk from the thermos, and set it beside the flower. After thought, he crossed some of the stems of some of the flowers. He said to Marcus, “I’ll also have one of your pennies. And with one of mine, we shall have an offering. You took coins to the underworld. And I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that gentians are torches of the dead.”

The blue flower had a very airy outdoor look. Marcus said, “I don’t think we ought to try to call up the dead.” “No, no, not that. We want a way in, a way through, to another dimension. I only mean a light to see by. Now, how? What did they do, the wise old ones in such places? They danced. They danced fast enough to make the cosmos dance with them, part of them, till they could see the dance of particles … That’s why dervishes whirl, to free the mind, to have power over the solid parts –”

Marcus dropped his straw-coloured head. He said, “I can’t whirl like a dervish.” He stared at the little circle of flowers. It looked silly. It looked glittering and significant. Lucas crossed his wrists and held out his hands.

“If we hold hands – crossed – over this spot. Then do you see, we
shall form your intersecting pattern – and if this
is
a Place of Power, we are over another intersection – of two realms – we shall align ourselves with the powers of this place –”

“Owger –”

“That’s a name. You might as well say, grass, gentian, dog mercury, aconite, earth, air, water …”

“I feel a fool.”

“Please
try
. Please at least
try
, after all this trouble.”

Marcus held out his hands, bony and long, and they were clasped in Lucas’s thick square ones. It was the first time they had deliberately prolonged any contact by touch since the experiment began. Marcus, limp, was gripped: Lucas gripped.

“Lean back. Clear your mind utterly.
Now …
”

The grip tightened and then strained. Their feet moved fast and faster. The heavy sky swung and swooped: the hill lurched and hovered; their feet tamped, stamped, shuffled, and whirled: Marcus heard his own voice nervously and wildly laughing: Lucas was making a strange hooting; in their ears the air became a high-pitched shrill singing. They went faster: now and then, in the middle of the spinning cocoon of his vision, whipping lines of grey and brown and gold and green and flesh, Marcus saw the blue point of the flower. From outside, had anyone been there to see, they looked less like whirling dervishes than school-children who spin in playgrounds in such tense figures of eight in order to disorient themselves, to laugh, scream, stumble, stop and see the school, iron railings, goal-posts, wheel solemnly past.

They spun themselves out of laughter into a panting silence. The rhythm of their feet became delicately automatic. What happened then had the inconclusiveness of much reported occult experience. Neither of them remembered the end of the spinning. Both certainly woke, at different ends of the barrow, both having the impression that they had been sleeping heavily. Marcus opened his eyes to blackness on the cold hillside, so for what seemed a very long time he thought it was night and could not remember where he was. He stared into the black, which took on the aspect of a tunnel when he saw a white disk which grew and shimmered towards him, opaque and milky until, when he could no longer see round the circumference, he saw undifferentiated paleness as he had seen undifferentiated dark. Then, bit by bit, as in lifting fog, he saw his surroundings: the ridged hillock, the poor fields, the barrow-mouth, the standing stone gate, against which he was propped. He stood up, and went uncertainly back to where they had gone round. The gentian was still there. The beaker was empty. There was a half-crown, possibly spun out of someone’s pocket, on the flowers. From the
opposite end of the barrow Lucas staggered. Marcus’s ears, or the air, or just possibly the tumulus, made a shrill singing sound in his head. Lucas put his hands on Marcus’s shoulders: Marcus solemnly reciprocated: they stood, heads down, breathing heavily. They bent down and picked up the beaker, and the half-crown, which Lucas pocketed.

They had the picnic some miles away. Salty beef sandwiches, a thermos of tomato soup, apples and cheese and heavy fruitcake were very strengthening. Marcus, looking back as they opened the car door, had seen a thick twisted column of different-coloured light, amber maybe, compared to the slate-grey of the sky, which rose like boys’ books’ depictions of waterspout or hurricane, or like the rooted bole of a transparent, measureless tree, up and up over the tump, sending threads of seeking, aery root down between cleft and stone, along ridge and under ledge. He did not at that time tell Lucas about this. He did not want Lucas either to have, or to be unable to find, words for what they had done. After a moment or two of frantic chewing he noticed that besides beef he could smell fear, in Lucas, in the tiny car. So he said mildly, “I don’t think we should talk about this, now, maybe ever.” Lucas’s round sweaty face came up from his sandwich. Marcus said, “I
know
we shouldn’t talk.” He hoped he was making it better for Lucas. If not, there was nothing he could do.