The tube wall darkened for a while: there was stone beyond the crystal, clamping it in its vice. Then light flooded back; he was through the roof. He hauled himself over the crystal lip on to the pink stone table.
Knossos had disappeared. Various other crystal tubes jutted out around him, but Jeremy would be covering those. A number of vents led down into the caves in the legs. Alternatively, a rock-slab doorway in the blue-veined base of the onion-domed spire stood open like Ali Baba’s cave. Was Knossos inside the spire, climbing up? Sean stared aloft.
A movement high up the other erection—the great stone agave leaf—caught his attention. This stone leaf was as broad as an oak tree at its base where it grew, like a mineral-plant, out of the table-top. Right up at its zenith where it curved over in the air, tapering narrowly, climbed the naked figure they had seen earlier. He was balancing one-legged, with his arms above his head, high on a thin bridge to nowhere: a Blondin of the sky, swaying slightly. He might have seen where Knossos went! Abruptly the naked climber cart-wheeled along the leaf and stood upon one hand in perfect balance, looking down at Sean. Incredibly, he held the pose.
Sean cupped his hands. “Which way did Knossos go?” he bellowed. “Which way?”
The naked climber pivoted onward, continuing his cartwheel along the ever-narrowing down-curve of that toothed stone frond—which was only inches wide toward the tip. He couldn’t possibly recover himself! Nor did he try to. High over Sean’s head he converted his somersault into a dive, as though the stone table-top far beneath him was a pool of water. Down he plummeted silently, without a cry, his hands flush with his body.
Briefly, Sean imagined that he could catch him or at least break his fall, but realized he would be injured or killed if he got in the diver’s way. He ran helplessly aside, instead. The diver smashed head first into the stone. His head broke open, in a bloody porridge.
Lazily, as though it had been waiting for this moment, a white heron flapped up over the rim of the table. Landing, it stalked long-leggedly towards the corpse, dipping its head and tossing it up into the air as though gulping down a fish. Greedy to fish among the dead man’s brains? Sean ran at the tall bird. He waved his arms to ward it off. Instead of flapping away in panic the heron slashed at him, drawing blood from his thigh with its beak, narrowly missing his genitals. As Sean retreated, the bird mounted the man’s chest. It continued to toss its head up and down, but it scavenged nothing. It was bowing to the dead man. What had Jeremy said? That the heron is sent to people. It was a living bird, but it was also a message . . . And the heron is the bird of . . . natural death? Then this death was natural? Appropriate? Not an aberration or a fit of lunacy or an act of suicide? Perhaps the naked climber had gone so far out on a limb that he no longer inhabited the same reality as ordinary men and women . . . The same could be said of the hermaphrodite! Nursing his wounded thigh, Sean turned away in confusion.
A movement inside the tower attracted him. Its walls were almost translucent in some places, or perhaps simply thinner. About half-way up, a blurred face was pressed to the inside of its skin.
Sean sprinted to the open slab door.
Inside, slanted unrailed steps corkscrewed up around the blue-veined walls—which became a pink marble higher up. A hundred meters above his head he saw a swirl of brown in the rays of light that streamed down from the opening in the swollen bulb tip of the tower. He ran up the steps. As they circled the walls, however, the steps slanted more and more obliquely till they ran into one another, becoming a spiraling ramp, bumpy at first then as smooth as a funfair helter- skelter; though anyone trying to slide all the way down from the top would have his spine shaken to pieces on the lower stretch. Making suckers of the soles of his feet, Sean climbed more cautiously.
“Knossos!” he cried. “Will you bloody well wait!”
The face looked down again. This time Knossos called out—teasingly, it seemed. “If you reach the top in time, I’ll take you with me!”
The blue-veined sides became rose-red. Sean’s feet ached. How many steps? No, not steps; that was earlier, lower down. ‘A hundred thousand spermatozoa, each one of them alive,’ he thought grimly. Mixed in God’s test tubes, and scattered over the land. He became obsessed with the vision of an uprush of milky, salty, musky liquid from the depths of this tower—and from the tubes beneath it—which would transform it into a slippery fountain, a gusher spraying him, too, out across the land till he hit the ground as dead as any sky diver. It is a phallus, he thought, and I’m climbing it. Like the sperm I once was, recapitulating my origin! Here’s the tumescent shaft. Up there is the rosy glans and the hole in it is the meatus. This is one better than a birth trauma! It’s a conception trauma . . .
He felt far from orgasm, though. His legs and loins cried out in no song of joy, only with aches and pains, and his thigh throbbed painfully where the heron had slashed him.
The magpie—the familiar of Knossos—flapped free through the meatus into the sky. Momentarily the fans of descending light were blotted out as the clothed man pulled himself up through the meatus of this vast mineral penis, and stood astride it on its swollen bulb.
What did Knossos mean? Take me with him? There was nowhere else for him to go—unless he meant to do the dive of death.
Increasingly the rosy glans of the tower was becoming translucent. As he climbed Sean could see: pink clouds, pink sky. From outside it might look like solid stone—one couldn’t see into one’s own body, after all!—but an internal organ could ‘see’ out of the body, albeit vaguely.
“Catch a Knossos by the toe!” he panted.
Reddened by the thin tough wall, some shape outside was drifting through the sky towards the tower. Squashing his nose to the wall, he paused to stare. A flying shark? Something with glider fins—a cross between a torpedo and a glider, but alive! On the shark’s back perched a helmet-headed merman. Its forked tail curved over its head; it gripped the tip in one hand, forming a hoop. Its other hand held a spear, or staff, with a ball dangling from the point upon a cord. The shark-and-merman came closer and closer.
Only moments before Sean himself reached the cleft of the meatus and a chance of catching hold of Knossos’s ankles, the clothed man jumped . . . aboard the fish, astride the merman’s arched back. The great flying shark cast off again, backpaddling its fins, gliding off through the sky.
Sean’s head emerged. The true color of shark-and-merman was green, though the ball that dangled from the merman’s staff was cherry red.
“Please!” he cried. The shark was still almost within jumping distance if he could have taken a running leap; then no longer so.
Knossos saluted Sean. The clothed man looked genuinely sorry for all Sean’s wasted effort. He pointed down at the tiny corpse splayed upon the table-top, ridden by the heron.
“Only whatever can destroy itself is truly alive, you know,” he called—sympathetically. “Only in the place of danger do you find the secret.” The shark, steered by the blank merman, drew away.
Sean slid back, exhausted. The temptation to let himself continue sliding was great. Then he remembered the rugged steps which the helter-skelter led to lower down. Doggedly, he backed down the helix of the shaft, one pace at a time. Taking care, avoiding danger.
EIGHT
“I think the fish evolve into mermen in time,” said Jeremy excitedly, “on their way to becoming full people. Or maybe it’s the other way round sometimes—people devolving through mermen into fish? Should / know? Anyway, mermen aren’t real men yet. That’s why they don’t have human features. Now, you say that one carried a ball? That’s the perfect shape, Sean—the potential it inherited, the cause working on it, so it really must have been a fish earlier on . . .”
Sean panted like a beached fish himself from his descent back down into the grotto. Once he’d gasped out his account of the climb Jeremy had launched into a flood of comments or suppositions, as though his lonely vigil in the grotto had had an effect on his mind. Now, in the gree
n fight of the grotto his eyes seemed to be bulging, as if the cave itself was squeezing invisible hands around his throat, making him gabble like some alchemist’s apprentice having the truth squeezed out of him.
“Ah, you think it’s too soon for evolution from the fish psyche to the psyche of the merman? What, even when there’s a God involved in the act? He’s the transforming agent, Sean. His creatures incarnate his transforming ideas at the same time as they’re their natural selves, don’t you see? For example, the merman and that winged shark together make up the Spirit of Mercury—in other words, spirit drowned in the watery element and striving for the air to redeem itself. But the thing isn’t integrated yet—so they’re still two separate individual beings. Their partnership can literally fall apart—in mid-air! Well now, if we look at our friend’s escape route this way, it suggests we’re on the right track—we’ll catch up with Knossos yet.”
Jeremy rubbed his hands together enthusiastically, and a trace of phosphorescence took fire on them, green flames in his palms. “You’re going to be my luck, Sean!”
“You sound like a gipsy fortune teller,” said Sean. He felt sadly out of condition—all those years spent coldly hibernating, and an orgy at the end of it all to tone him up ... He felt that he needed to be dipped in something, like the child Achilles, to toughen him up and temper him! He understood what Jeremy was saying, all right—it echoed many things from way back. Only, it was one thing to deal with such psychic currents by way of dreams and symbol language; it was quite another to have to pursue them concretely, on foot, even on hands and knees.
“Oh, I know you’re disappointed,” said Jeremy. “But don’t you see how you’re making progress? Knossos gave you a hot tip. That’s more than he ever gave me!”
“A tip? What—to seek the place of danger?”
But yes, oh yes, it had been advice . . . Knossos really had sympathized with his efforts.
Hauling himself off the stone floor where he had collapsed, Sean stepped into the blue pool to wash the sweat off his body—aware as he did so that he was performing a kind of rite as well as an ablution. He was dipping his ignorant self, inside this alchemical cromlech, in a vessel . . . which illuminated the grotto. So the pool was a vessel of illumination . . . Dunking himself under the surface, he opened his eyes underwater; but he could see as little as a fish on land.
In water we drown, he thought. Water is the sea of unconsciousness where we evolved as fish with no consciousness at all, no self-awareness, only preconsciousness—the old hindbrain that still sits atop the spinal stem which we share with fishes—What is baptism but a memory of this? As well as of the amniotic waters of the womb? By returning underwater, we drown our consciousness in unconsciousness, seeking reintegration and a higher consciousness. Why did that acrobat dive down from the agave spike on to dry stone, as though it was the sea? Was he driven to despair by “The
Work’? Or had he seen a short cut—a route through? A sublimation? If I drown myself here and now, if I breathe in these waters of distillation, shall I awake as a preconscious fish dragging my fins across land, trying to struggle erect again into my former state—more fully integrated with the hindbrain?
His lungs ached, fit to burst. He let his head break the surface. Shaking his ears free of water, he stepped out and shook himself dry.
“We’d better tell Denise and Muthoni that he got away . . . Wait a minute, they should have seen him hop aboard! Where are they? Muthoni!” Sean ran to the rear exit, and out along the thistle path.
He spotted the Kenyan woman immediately. She sat cross-legged some way off. A white unicorn was nuzzling at her lap. Its long corkscrew horn dug into the turf beside her—gouging it.
“Muthoni!”
At the sound of his voice, the unicorn pranced away from her. Looking mightily relieved, Muthoni jumped up. Halting, the unicorn eyed them both then drove its horn into the earth a few more times.
“So the lady tames the unicorn!” laughed Sean. “I thought that was a prerogative of virgins!”
“It isn’t tame, Sean.”
“Knossos—”
“I saw. I had a ton of unicorn on top of me, that’s all.”
Now the beast was stropping its horn to and fro, to clean off the soil it had skewered. Abruptly it cocked its head and trotted off toward the maze of the flower-wood, vanishing into it.
“Its horn was covered in blood, Sean. It’s been cleaning itself. Look.” She held up her hand. Blood smeared her fingers where she had gripped the horn to push it from her.
“You’re hurt!”
“No, it isn’t my blood. But I thought it was going to be!”
Was Knossos’s hint about seeking danger a taunt, after all? Because danger was already actively seeking them . . .
“Whose blood, then?” '
They raced round the thistle jungle to the far side of the cromlech, calling, “Denise! Denise!”
Her body lay, quite neatly, on the green sward. As they ran up to it a bird took wing and flew away. A red-backed shrike—a butcher bird. A red hole impaled Denise’s chest. A hoof mark bruised her breast where the unicorn must have thrust against her to free its long horn.
“Dead. She’s dead!”
“I can see that,” snapped Muthoni. Kneeling, she rubbed her fingers in the grass to clean them. She swung round. “Is she really dead, Jeremy? I mean, dead for ever?”
The once-Captain shook his head. “Not unless God hasn’t got you in his register. You being strangers—new arrivals.” “But if He has . . . registered us?”
“Oh, so now you do want to believe in Him!” Jeremy seemed to have been overcome by a mood of argumentative piety since his sojourn in the grotto—as though he was about to be saved, though from what (or for what) was hardly clear, perhaps least of all to him. Denise’s death at least proved to him that something important was about to happen—unless it already had, in his absence ... He grinned crookedly. “She’ll have to pass through Hell, that’s what.”
“He’d send her to Hell? Why, the vicious—!” Muthoni stroked Denise’s Primavera hair: her joy upon awakening, her gift from the cold. Then she closed her eyes tenderly with finger and thumb.
“You have a warped understanding of the purpose of Hell.”
“Isn’t Hell painful, then? Doesn’t it hurt? How can it be Hell if it doesn’t hurt?”
“Meeting one’s own deep self is often a painful thing. One must step into that furnace.”
“Don’t be so goddam holy about murder!”
“You want me to tell jokes? Here’s one: perhaps Denise is feeling a bit holy herself right now? She has a big enough hole in her chest! Which is a bit of a holy joke in the circumstances.” Jeremy laughed asininely. There was a bitterness in his laughter as though he had just been elected to play the buffoon at the foot of a crucifixion. Or was it ... a fear? A fear that he might also be so honored?
“We’ll hunt that bloody unicorn,” vowed Sean, ignoring him. “We’ll nail it. It’s the danger-beast.”
“But it’s innocent,” protested Jeremy sweetly. “It was only an instrument in His hands.” It was impossible to tell whether he was being serious or sarcastic.
“It killed Denise. So we’ll hunt it. We’ll take Knossos at his word—we’ll hunt danger. Come on, it’s getting away.”
“But what about Denise? Do we just leave her here for the hyenas?” Muthoni clenched her fists. “What hyenas? Nothing here eats flesh.”
“Look,” pointed Jeremy. “Look before you leap.”
A gaggle of men had appeared over the brow of the hill, on the run. They were bowed down under the weight of a great black half-open oyster shell. The shrike flapped ahead of them, leading the scrum with its cries. Ignoring Sean and Muthoni, it landed upon Denise. It bent its neck and, with its beak, deftly reopened her sightless eyes. Grunting and puffing, the men arrived. They laid the open bivalve down beside Denise then stood back, grinning and mopping their brows. Both valves of the oyster were plump wit
h milky flesh. The nacre around the shell rim shone iridescently blue and silver.
“Who are you people?” screamed Muthoni.
Paying no attention to her, then thrusting her back when she actively got in the way, three of the men picked Denise’s corpse up and slid it right into the open shell. They pressed down on the upper valve, closing this coffin lid upon her.
“Where are you taking her?”
Grunting and heaving, but with no explanation, the undertaker team hoisted up the oyster shell again, maneuvering it on to their backs. Thus bowed down, they left in the same fast scrimmage of shoulders and elbows and straining thighs.
Jeremy restrained the two from following. (He was restraining himself too, trying to remember that he was The Witness.) “The old body will dissolve into the prima materia of flesh—a protoplasmic jelly. When the shell opens again, it will host a new being.”
“A new Denise?”
“No. She will have to hatch in Hell. Death leads to Hell. Hell leads to new life.” Jeremy sounded convinced enough, but he was sweating. “Did she have much of a devil in her?” he asked cautiously.
“Perhaps a tiny little imp of the perverse,” said Muthoni sourly, remembering Denise’s fantasies about psychotronic radiation—a biomysticism which she’d kept locked away in a secret cupboard in herself. (But were those fantasies any longer?) “She was gentle. Does she have to be tortured to make her devilish?”
“Everybody has a devil in them—the old dragon of our dreams. Every time we go to sleep, it marches, breathing fire. It’ll present its calling card in Hell.” He swallowed.
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