Miracle Visitors

by Ian Watson

  A moment later Deacon ran across the lawn, torchbeam wagging. Michael followed him.

  Celia, sobbing, struggled with a shapeless mass blocking a gap in the fence. She thrust her brother aside as he ducked and darted helpfully at it, and her.

  “It’s Shep, Dad,” the boy explained lamely. “Shep’s dead.”

  Deacon pulled Celia away, and shone the torch down. He still couldn’t tell which way round the dog was lying. He stared, puzzled.

  “Don’t you realize—there’s no head!” Celia screamed. “Where’s his head?”

  This was a dog reduced to a thing, without dignity. Shep was a stuffed giant cushion with four crumpled legs, rear and front ends rendered identical. Parting the long hair, Deacon hunted about vaguely as though he might find the head still somewhere there—intruded, tortoiselike, into the body of the animal. All he found was a pink circular cross section: skin, muscle, bone, windpipe. As neatly cut as a wire cuts butter.

  “There—isn’t—any—blood!” wailed Celia, a very little girl again. “He’s—empty!”

  • • •

  Michael slipped to one side and doused the kitchen light, a conjuror performing sleight of hand, while Suzie was still hugging Celia to her, comforting a fellow victim…

  “Look—!” he cried.

  Above the bottom of the garden bobbed an amorphous ball of green light, bouncing gently along the line of the fence and back again. A blip on an oscilloscope screen, measuring something, a heartbeat maybe, recording… their reactions?

  “Can you influence it?” whispered Deacon. “Try to make it go to the left. Will it to go!” When Deacon was a boy he had lain in summer fields staring up at a blue sky, to the pock of bat on ball, trying to will the floaters in the vitreous humour of the eyeball to move at his command, trying to influence his own body cells, adrift in that extension of the brain. If there was any truth in psychokinesis…

  “Left,” hissed Michael. “Left, Left.” Mary Deacon stared across the darkened kitchen at her husband and the boy with hatred.

  The ball of light flicked off perversely to the right In a wavering zigzag it rose to the topmost branches of the horse chestnut in the next-door garden, where it faintly illuminated leafless boughs and twig fingers. As they watched, it vanished quite suddenly from sight.

  “If nobody else will, I’ll phone the Police,” said Mary.

  Nine

  “It could have been a sword,” said the sergeant. “A razor-sharp one. One clean blow.” He made a guillotine gesture. “Possibly one of those Jap Samurai jobs. There are some about. It could have been some martial arts nut, with a sick mind.”

  The Sergeant and Constable had found no trace, in half an hour, of killer or dog’s head.

  “Kendo,” suggested Deacon. “Japanese fencing. There are Kendo clubs, aren’t there? Perhaps someone who’d learnt at a Kendo club?”

  “You know something about… Kendo yourself, Mr Deacon?”

  “Nothing really! Only in connection with Zen Buddhism. You see, Japanese martial arts are used as Zen disciplines—I’m interested in Zen.”

  “I see, Sir.”

  Deacon relaxed. No action of his could have had the effect of a sword stroke. He had indeed wandered a few steps on to the lawn, after letting Shep into the garden. The sky was clearing; he’d simply been skygazing. Seeing if anything was up there. He’d soiled his hands when he shifted a spade, left in the rain, back under shelter. Soil had spattered them. Could it have been the blade of a spade? Quite impossible. The atrocity that overtook Shep came from some outside source…

  Or—the thought struck him—was this what he was meant to think? That the Phenomenon was wholly external? When, actually, he’d been considering the opposite!

  He had nothing to do with the death directly… Except that he’d been brooding intensively about the Phenomenon. Except that Michael, apparently a magnet for it, was by then quite near the house. Except for the events of this afternoon! Could a human being both be responsible and not be responsible at one and the same time?

  Deacon felt as though he was staring down a very deep well, inside himself. At the bottom hung a grinning—or sneering—face, which wasn’t his own and never had been. An unhuman face. Simply the sense of a face. Observing. Aware. That it even had human features seemed coincidental—a mere metaphor of the perception filters. If he feared it, it scowled. If he felt it spelled salvation, then it smiled. Suppose that deep down in Michael’s mind, and in every other human being’s, lurked the same protean creature, somehow existing in its own right, independent of its host? Suppose that the mind-creature was shared equally by all minds!

  He was actually, he realized, very tired and already in a hypnogogic state—falling asleep where he stood, on the fringes of exhaustion, with dream imagery welling up while he was still awake, half-dreaming what Michael had said in the lounge an hour ago.

  “Are you feeling all right, Sir?”

  “It’s a terrible shock.” Deacon sat at the pine table; he shook his head. “Filthy.”

  “Yet strangely clean, Sir. The lack of blood is very odd.”

  Vampires…? In another age, there was another frame of reference… Dogs and cattle certainly disappeared in the wake of UFO visits. There were enough reports of this. But today’s frame of reference was one of alien spacecraft, so that vampires were no more; the visitors must be analysing Earth’s biology… Apparently they needed to steal living matter. Why? To make new tulpas?

  “Can we keep this from the newspapers?” Mary asked the Sergeant. “I’ve already heard enough foolishness for a lifetime.”

  “How do you mean, Madam?” Reluctantly, she explained why the two students were there at night. The Sergeant looked increasingly nonplussed.

  “These two strangers tried to force their way into your room, posing as Air Ministry Investigators—because you saw a flying saucer?” he asked Suzie.

  “They didn’t exactly force their way, they just scared me—”

  He asked Suzie more questions. Suddenly he turned to Deacon.

  “So you really think that green light you saw was one of those things? And it decapitated your dog?”

  Deacon spread his hands on the table. Ten fingers, ten explanations.

  “There’s nothing that cuts off a pet dog’s head and steals it, except some very insane nasty human being!” said Mary.

  “A very odd way for visiting spacemen to conduct themselves! If you think that, Sir, why did you mention Kendo?”

  “No, you mentioned swords first—” The insane swordsman was preferable as an explanation, if more immediately frightening.

  “Ah. So I did. What do you think that green light really I was?”

  Mary frowned at her husband.

  “A balloon,” she prompted. “A luminous one. Whoever did it brought it with them.”

  “Why should anyone do that?”

  “Why do people wreck bus shelters?” Mary asked.

  The Sergeant nodded. “I sometimes wonder why people do what they do half the time.”

  Ten

  “We’ll try and locate any previous contact episode—not necessarily with your space people from Ulro, but any weird, anomalous events which might be a precursor—”

  Deacon injected Michael with sodium amytal, and spoke the cue word.

  “I want you to fix on any incident in your life, before the UFO-consciousness event when you were sixteen, that struck you as remarkably out of the ordinary…”

  The day was crisp and sharp; crows the size of terriers stomped hungrily around the empty fields, wheeling into the air and bouncing down again. After three weeks’ tactful delay, the Christmas vacation was due in a week; so Michael sat in the green chair again. Celia had buried Shep’s headless body in the garden. The episode, officially, was closed or at least dormant; it was, after all, only a dead dog…

  In trance, Michael recounted a number of coincidences, which could all be explained as precisely that: coincidences, grassroots acausalities…


  Yet what had Sheikh Ali Ibrahim Muradi, delivering his lecture on Sufism in the “Consciousness: Ancient and Modern” series, said about such coincidences? He had said that there are invisible connections between events. That things happen in succession but sometimes it is a different sort of succession from what most people imagine. Sometimes another dimension impinges upon events, their real cause lying there. Miracles, said the Egyptian (visiting London, en route to America), are really bound up with problems of causality. Cause and effect relationships can be other than generally thought, because of these inner correspondences between things. When true intellect occasionally If breaks through, revealing inner causes and linkages, so-called “occult” phenomena can occur…“Occult”, that is, in the eyes of everyday consciousness. But mind could not I know itself by force of will alone. You must tap the roots of grace instead. You must seek hidden help. Help would be forthcoming, however unexpectedly, if you entered the right state of mind…

  Suddenly Muradi seemed very vivid to Deacon. He seemed to hear the Sheikh’s own voice—quiet, humorous, incisive—speaking in the room, though in fact it was only Michael’s trance voice recounting another trivial happenstance event.

  Muradi’s voice was talking about miracles. About help beyond comprehension. About help as though from another world. Karama was the word for it in Arabic.

  “Michael,” Deacon cut in, “has a miracle ever happened to you? Have you ever been helped—or saved—as though miraculously? If you were told to forget it, you can ignore that instruction now. I say so.”

  “Yes! Of course! The petrol tanker—it nearly hit me!” “What age are you?”

  “I’m twelve. And five and a bit months. I’m cycling home from school. There’s a very long hill with a curve at the bottom, I always freewheel down it very fast. Today there’s a big black car parked halfway down with a man standing beside it. He’s wearing sunglasses, though the sun isn’t shining. It’s a misty day.”

  “What does the man look like?”

  “He’s short. His skin’s sallow. He has black hair, I think—but he’s wearing a peaked cap. He’s dressed like a chauffeur. He flags me down… some trouble with their car, I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s quite old—a pre-War Bentley, though it’s very clean and shiny. Another man’s sitting in the driver’s seat, wearing the same sort of uniform; sunglasses too. That’s odd—two chauffeurs.

  “They couldn’t have stopped me much further down the hill; I’d have been going too fast. I get off my bike—and the chauffeur grabs me the elbow. I think it’s because something else is coming; but nothing is. I get scared and I try to pull free, but he hauls me round the car.

  “ ‘If you run away, you’ll have a terrible accident,’ he says to me. ‘Get in.’ It sounds like a threat, as though they’ll harm me if I run away. The man inside pushes the door open, and I’m bundled in with him. The car’s incredibly clean. It looks brand new, even though it’s such an old model. The dashboard’s strange—full of little winking lights of different colours. They fascinate me. I just want to stare at them, even though I’m scared.

  “The man in the driver’s seat points down the hill ‘Look,’ he says. ‘You are reaching the bottom just now. Travelling so fast, so very fast—’

  “Suddenly a petrol tanker comes round the bend. It’s really speeding, and it’s right over on the wrong side of the road, against the far verge. Soil is spraying up from the wheels.

  “ ‘That’s where you are right now,’ the man says. ‘You’re flying up against it. You’re dead. It skids out of control. It turns over. Boom, it explodes. Gasoline everywhere.’ That’s what he says, but he isn’t American. The accent sounds South African, clipped and nasal. ‘Flames!’ As if he’s actually seeing all this! I can believe him too. That’s where I’d have been. I couldn’t have missed the tanker. But the tanker’s coming out of the bend now, and it’s heading up the hill towards us. It goes past us with the engine roaring. The driver looks as if he’s seen a ghost.

  “All those coloured lights on the dashboard start flickering madly. They seem to be flashing morse code. All sorts of different messages. I learnt morse in the Scouts, but I was only in them for a few months… Too fast, too many messages at once. They’re just… very pretty. Pretty patterns.

  “The chauffeur man opens the door to pull me out. He stares at me through his shades. The glasses really bend his eyes and magnify them! I ask him, ‘Did you just save my life?’ He says, ‘Forget it.’ And I do. That’s the strange part. I can’t remember them—afterwards. But I always ride down that hill a lot slower. Even if I have to walk all the way up the other side.”

  • • •

  Karama… Help beyond comprehension.

  Michael had received it from two Men in Black parked in an antiquated yet brand new car. (As though, to get their timing right in one respect, to anticipate the very moment when a petrol tanker would have hit his bicycle, they had by some principle of compensation to get it wildly wrong in another…)

  In Sufist lore, said Sheikh Muradi, a mysterious saint called Khidr often brought help beyond comprehension: a secret guide, whose nickname was The Green One. Dressed in luminous, shimmering green—as though he wore green fire—he appeared at moments of insight and breakthrough. After delivering his message, he would vanish into thin air, disappear from normal cognition.

  Was he one of the UFO personae too—elder brother to the Little Green Men, the UFO gremlins? Muradi’s lecture! It was even in the book Consciousness: Ancient and Modern! Why hadn’t he made the connection till now? The two areas had seemed too far apart to register… when in reality they lay side by side, as close as the inside and outside of the same bottle. Had Sufi adepts conceivably achieved a state of mind that tamed and mastered this phenomenon, which he had christened UFO-Consciousness?

  If only Muradi were still in the country. The ripples from his unpretentious lecture—which Deacon had thought one of the least in the series at the time—were actually still spreading out, still resonating. Deacon wanted so much to be beside him, asking for a hint of how to proceed…

  He woke Michael. As he did so, the single word “ego” popped into his mind.

  Michael remembered the “miracle”. He felt no headache after this trance—all the weight had lifted. However, Deacon felt excited for another reason.

  “I have an idea, Michael. A great idea. When you get down to a certain level in a trance, it doesn’t feel as though your everyday ego is present any more, right? Your awareness of a personal ‘self’ vanishes. You feel as if you can be anybody or anything. And deeper still, when you enter the void of the mystics, there isn’t even anybody or anything to be.”

  “I… we haven’t really explored as far as that.”

  “We will. I’ve seen how to. Your ego is absent from those deep states—because ego is really only a tag or flavour that gets applied to some mental structures, but not to others. This ‘ego-tag’ just doesn’t attach itself to the deep experiences, so you don’t have any sense of volition or control. I suggest this is the case with UFO-Consciousness. You feel yourself manipulated by other agencies, don’t you?”

  Michael shivered. “Are you saying that the self is just an illusion? That there isn’t really any ‘I’ at all?”

  “Oh, it’s real enough. Obviously this idea of self is a powerful survival mechanism. It’s bloody necessary. And it maintains the tone of our being—it keeps our waking consciousness in tune. Yet it only applies to certain mental states—on and around the workaday baseline—while our whole mind is really a bundle of different, coexisting structures. This coexistence comes apart deep in hypnosis, I’d say. The ego gets left behind. Different mental subprogrammes become independent ‘minds’ in their own right. If only we could graft the ‘ego-tag’—this flavour of personal self—on to some of these deep ‘non-ego’ structures we’d be able to control them consciously.”

  “But is that possible? I mean, to graft the ‘ego-tag’?”

&nbs
p; “I think so—using hypnotic commands. There’s actually an analogy with our sense of time. All our memories are ‘tagged’ in our minds with the label ‘past events’—or we wouldn’t be able to distinguish memory from present experience. Yet we know that this time-tag can get displaced. That’s where you get the sense of déjà vu the belief that you’ve already experienced something which is actually happening right now for the very first time. If the time-tag can get displaced, why not the ego-tag too? It’s just a question of isolating the neural flavour of the ego-tag by a process of subtraction as you go deeper into trance—holding it in brackets, as it were—then ordering it back into the game. If we can graft this ‘tag’ on to the UFO-Consciousness state, we’ll be able to tap directly into this area. That’s what was missing last time, with the pterodactyl—conscious control.”

  And safety. Sufis seemed to know how to tap this area, without being possessed by its devilries, by the jinn locked in the bottle of the soul.

  “You want to try this… grafting process with me?”

  “I don’t exactly know how to do it—not yet. It might still be the wrong model, you understand?”

  “But you feel it’s right.”

  “Along the right lines, yes.”

  The telephone rang.

  “I thought nobody could interrupt us while we were—?”

  “They can’t,” frowned Deacon, “I switched off. I know I did.”

  “It isn’t switched off now.”

  “No.”

  He lifted the receiver and listened.

  “Cosmos and Humankind are one,” said a voice. The voice reminded him of Suzie Meade’s, though the words were nothing she would be likely to say. “All mind and matter form a unity—”

  “Who’s that? Is it you, Suzie?” (“What?” from Michael. “Ssh!”)

  “Mind flourishes when the Moon pulls strongest. Why else should a woman void her womb every thirty days, by the Moon? All is synchronized: mind and matter! Humans can untune Creation by their actions—”

  If it was her voice—and he began to doubt it—she sounded drugged. Or hypnotized. As he listened, he wondered whether this queer, archaically phrased melange of Tharmon’s warning and the MIBs’ obscene questions had any essential meaning? Had someone—or something—been trying to convey a genuine message to Suzie three weeks earlier, with utter inefficiency? With so much noise in the signal that it turned it into an obscene insulting threat?