I wouldn’t, couldn’t afford to. There was pride; there was resentment and stubbornness. There was the need to take a position that seemed fair and appropriate, to be as loyal to David Leeton as I could.
I didn’t take the back road home, didn’t want to be predictable and put myself in the way of more games. If anyone were tracking me, using mobile phones to coordinate the next step in David Leeton’s initiation, they’d have to adjust their plans.
I drove along Summerland Way, grinning at the night, still restless but pleased with myself; finally turned into McDonald’s Bridge Road, then Edenville Road. I half-expected some new surprise: seeing the lights of a car driving over my side of the hill way off in the distance or finding more bottle-trees glinting up on the hillside. But it was quiet, eventless. I refused to check the mailbox, carefully didn’t look at the forest as I drove over the hill. If there were tricks, anyone dressed up and waiting, I never saw them. They could run through the forest yelling Yakkos!—Iackhos!—for all I cared. Tonight I’d be like Gemma hiding behind the curtains in her darkened flat at 14B Rastin Street, standing back from it all as much as I could manage.
There was the backlash, of course. Once safely locked away in the house, everything seemed flat and ordinary. After what the day and the evening had been, it was all an anticlimax.
I made a pot of tea, then distracted myself by going online, but quickly abandoned a search on Dionysos when I realised I wasn’t up to risking mask images at this late hour. Dionysos and the charontes could wait for another day. I didn’t intend to do my intruders’ work for them.
Instead I accessed some of the safer sites on Sardinia, hoping to learn what I could about the Greek and Etruscan influences on the native nuraghic culture.
I did myself an unexpected injury there. As I read about those distinctive nuraghic towers, I learned more than I wanted. In 1587, Philip II of Spain had established a set of watchtowers along the coasts to protect the local ports, mines and villages from the threat of Turkish invasion. Like the nuraghi and the Roman watchtowers before them, the Aragonese towers represented a sensible strategy of having protected high places. But some towers, like the one at Chia, were called ‘dead towers’ because they were out of the line of sight of the semaphore flags and beacons of neighbouring towers.
There was no escaping the term once I’d read it. The Risi tower up on the hill was a dead tower, hopelessly isolated from its kin, lonely and apart. And the other connotation, of course. After the ram-skin on the cross, the blood on the bells, it was a dead tower indeed.
But then I remembered what Carlo had said, remembered the flower garland from Tuesday, bits of life, even if dead or decaying, about to return to the natural world as what?—fertiliser, part of the ongoing cycle? It was John Barleycorn; it was Dionysos: all the aspects of indestructible life: birth-death-rebirth. This tower in the forest was a dead and living tower.
That thought saved me, and the familiar downturn-upturn Jack mantras doing their bit as well. Upturn, know your enemy: just granite, just hard stone and a sturdy wooden door. Downturn: a closed interior, darkness, silence and who knew what else? Upturn: built with care and planning by someone determined to create an effect. And so it went.
To free myself from the loop, I logged off and went to bed, finding it strangely easy to slip away into sleep after four closely printed pages of The Mask of Apollo. I never realised how close I was right then to knowing the rest of it.
CHAPTER 13
It wasn’t quite the trip to the tower we had talked about at our first meeting. Raina packed food for us, certainly, but there was no sense of a picnic. When they arrived at Starbreak Fell around 10:30 the next morning, just the two of them, Raina looked tired and drawn, as if she hadn’t slept well. She smiled when she saw me, but it barely reached her eyes. The muscles of her neck and jaw were tense. This was serious business.
Carlo was quiet, respectful, attentive as always. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he spoke to her in rapid asides, mostly in Italian, no doubt reassuring her, and I pretended to be busy with other things when he did so, fetching my camera, finding a torch, making sure the house was locked.
Finally we put on our straw hats and sunglasses and crossed the grassy terrace together, went through the gate and up through the bonsai garden. It was hot again, far hotter than yesterday, and we probably wouldn’t stay on the hill long. We’d check the tower, learn what we could, then probably have our picnic out on the veranda if there were a breeze, possibly inside with the air-conditioner running if it remained still and windless like this; maybe we’d abandon the idea altogether.
We stepped over the thread of the electric perimeter fence while Carlo held it down with a stick, and finally reached the spot where the mamuthone had entered the forest two days before.
‘I’m pretty sure this is it,’ I said. ‘It’s where I started from on Thursday.’
‘Bene,’ Carlo replied. ‘Andiamo!’
Carlo and I were the only ones who said much at first. I kept up a running commentary, as much to fill the silence with cheerful, unconcerned conversation as to provide information. Walking slightly behind me and carrying the picnic basket, Carlo made appropriate responses. He truly was one of the most courtly people I had ever met. Possibly it prompted Raina, for soon she became part of it too, especially when I began pointing out the blackened tree trunks that had scared me before. It must have reminded her that I had been alone with this, had deliberately put myself in fear’s way.
‘You were very brave, David,’ she said. ‘It must have been difficult.’
I smiled my thanks at her. ‘The choices are either denial and a hermit’s existence or keeping as much of a scientific mind as I can.’
‘You’ve become a natural investigator,’ she added. ‘Something we all need to be.’
‘People with fixations usually pay attention to detail. They have no choice.’
She nodded. ‘Most of us lose that and never know it.’
‘It’s true,’ Carlo said. ‘You look closely.’
‘Fear is a great motivator,’ I said, intending it as a light-hearted quip.
But Carlo seized on it. ‘It’s what fear does,’ he said. ‘Appropriate fear. Puts us back in the world. War and crisis, loss of loved ones, they always make life vivid again. We all need appropriate fear and wonder. As Derek Jacobi said in that movie, Gladiator: “Fear and wonder: a powerful combination”.’
‘You should have seen me on Thursday, Carlo,’ I said, determined to keep it light. ‘There was a whole lot more of it.’
‘I can imagine. But Raina is right, David. You are very brave. I do not mean to flatter. Just getting through every day must be quite a thing for you.’
‘It’s exhausting. It wastes energy. There’s too much stimulation. The imagination keeps providing whatever’s missing. The burnt-out trees –’ I pointed to a trunk just off to the left. ‘– like that one there. The other day, every one held a demon. I couldn’t help myself.’
‘It’s a perfect black, isn’t it?’ Carlo said, stopping near the trunk and peering into the cleft. ‘An utter black. A true bit of the dark world.’
‘Carlo, basta!’ Raina said, to remind him, and he quickly moved along, swishing at the bracken with his stick, remarking on the grow-back of lantana that was such a local nuisance, talking about mundane things again.
Finally we reached the glade. At 11:07 it was already fiercely hot. Cicadas roared in the trees. Even with our sunglasses, the glare was terrible.
We headed for the tower, already aware that the cross was empty.
‘Nothing today,’ Carlo said.
‘But check for blood,’ I said. ‘Just in case.’
‘Sicuro, sì, David. Of course.’ And he hurried ahead to do just that.
Beside me, Raina lifted an arm to her forehead.
‘Raina, are you all right?’
She nodded and gave her lovely smile. ‘Just tired. Strange you asking me this when I should be asking
you.’
I looked over at Carlo examining the cross—what had he called it?—the stulos. ‘A locked tower hidden on a hilltop. It’s understandable. But it’s just a place.’
‘Just a place, sì. I can’t explain it. Here, David.’
Raina handed me an old rusty key, long and appropriately solid. I almost said I’d take it to Carlo, but realised that she might have a reason for not giving it to him already. She wanted me to do it.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Please. Carlo is checking the cross. He worries. You do it, if you can.’
I could. I realised I could. Like not being troubled by the burnt-out trunks today, being in company made this possible too. I went and stood before the tower’s single entrance, just as I’d done several times now.
But this was different.
There is nothing more profound than a door. As profound, certainly: windows, masks, light, a closed box, a sudden view, a rusty old key like the one in my hand, flags and fossils, a bend in the road, a pair of old gloves, the waves of the sea, an infinity of things, but never more profound.
A door in a wall in a quiet lane, in a hedge, in a garden beside the ocean, leading to an attic room, a forgotten basement, to an old tower like this one, but a door—ever, always, quintessentially itself. I’d once met a man—a portophiliac client of Nellie Barwood’s—who, since a temporal lobe seizure at age 37, had walked through 917,294 doors at the time we spoke, had counted and remembered every one.
This was a door I would never forget: strong, durable; the worn, hardwood timbers given even more character by the heavy brass ring in the lock-plate. But now I had its key; now its intrinsic mystery would be altered forever. A locked door can stay with you for years, haunt you for a lifetime. Once unlocked and opened, it becomes something on the way, the means to an end. It loses the promise of itself. Like roads not taken, some doors should be left unopened.
Not this one.
I guided the key into the hole below the ring. It took a little effort, clearing whatever was blocking the hole, then more force to turn it, but finally there was a click. I grabbed the ring, turned it; the door swung back. Warm morning light fell in a bright sweep across smooth stone paving.
The tower was open.
Carlo had left off searching the ground near the cross when I’d first tried the key, and now stood beside Raina. There was precious little to see: no clutter, no bales or boxes, no old tools or pieces of farm machinery set aside for some future day and forgotten, no fallen stones or timbers. It looked empty, perhaps too tidily so. Where were the cobwebs, the accumulation of dust, grit and other detritus?
It was both a relief and a disappointment.
‘Niente!’ Carlo said, right by my ear. ‘There’s nothing.’
‘Was there anything last time?’
‘I don’t remember. I seem to recall tools and things, but I was so little. I might have imagined them. Or Papa may have cleared them out. Papa and Tomaso came here a lot, like I said.’
‘Raina?’
‘This is the first time I’ve seen inside it, David.’
‘You’ve never used the key.’ I hoped it didn’t sound too sceptical. Her claim was hard to accept.
‘Silly, isn’t it? Carlo feels the same way about travelling by plane. You’re troubled by clowns and masks.’
I had to smile. My condition was pathological, but she was making it sound as if we were a band of happy phobics together.
I hesitated in the doorway. What if there were paintings on the walls, faces or demonic forms not yet visible? There had been the fleece and the mask on the cross. What if there were related things inside?
Carlo must have guessed what was behind my hesitation. ‘Let me,’ he said, pushing by, shining his torch into the gloom as he entered. A few seconds later, Raina followed, and I did, dreading the place but needing to see it.
The thick granite blocks had not been left rough-hewn inside. They were dressed and smooth, expertly fitted, and more than ever helped create the sense of a lighthouse interior, a great chimney or an inverted well pushing up into the sky, all of it completely unembellished. No stairs led into the gloom above, though dark supporting beams cut the upper part of the cylinder into segments, two sets of two, arranged one atop the other to form the sense of a square that was a deeper black outline in that darkness. But just those double sets of beams. It meant an even more expert construction job. Whoever had built this had intended the walls themselves to bear most of the weight.
Carlo and I shone our torches up into the darkness, lighting the heavy beams and revealing stone slabs even higher.
‘David, is that the top of the tower or a floor?’ Carlo said.
‘Hard to tell. Maybe if we judge the angle.’
‘The angle of convergence, yes!’
He hurried outside again. When I looked over at Raina, she shrugged. ‘No matter what it is,’ she said, ‘Carlo always enjoys himself.’
He returned a few moments later. ‘It seems to be the top of the tower. The height and angles correspond as far as I can tell.’
It was difficult to accept. ‘So why build something with this shape, this height, if you’re not going to use it for something?’
‘Perhaps it was never finished,’ Raina suggested.
Carlo nodded. ‘Sì. Or perhaps there was an internal staircase originally and it was pulled down.’
‘Leading where?’ I said. ‘If that’s the roof we’re looking at, why go to the trouble?’
‘What else can it be?’ Carlo asked.
I shone my torch around the walls again. Carlo did as well. But there were no frescoes, no adornments.
No, that wasn’t true. One of the smoothed granite blocks had a carving on it, a hieroglyph, a petroglyph. It was the only one.
It was the wheeled table image I had found on TT Disk 5!
I dared not speak. There it was, positioned at eye level, the only marked block in the whole interior as far as I could tell: the familiar narrow rectangle of the table about forty centimetres long and two wide, the same downturned ends, the wheel or five-pointed star inside its circle, the same resting stand extending downwards.
‘It’s a pentagram,’ Carlo said, innocently enough. ‘A pentacle,’
‘What about the table?’ I was able to ask now that he had spoken. ‘This band with the pointed ends?’
‘I’m not sure. But the star in the circle is the pentacle, yes? The sign popular with magicians and the alchemists; used originally by the Pythagoreans.’
I ran my finger along the inside of the carving, tracing one of the arms of the star. It was half a centimetre deep, clean and sharp, expertly done. ‘These rays are very narrow, Carlo. More like spokes on a wheel.’
‘Except for the surrounding circle, it’s the Egyptian hieroglyph for a star. You see them on the ceilings of Seti’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. They have five very narrow rays.’
‘So a hieroglyph then?’ I managed to keep my voice calm, casual.
‘It looks like one.’
‘It took a lot of effort. It’s obviously important.’ So casual.
Carlo was shining his torch across the rows of stones, searching for other carvings. I did the same.
‘It seems to be the only one,’ he said. ‘The only thing here.’
Raina laughed. ‘They built a tower for this? A hieroglyph?’
Now I could ask. ‘Carlo, do you know hieroglyphs?’
‘Not this one. I seem to recall that the band with the spiked ends—the table as you call it—represents the sky.’
‘Is it the sun?’
‘As far as I recall, the sun is a large circle with a tiny circle at its centre, but I’d have to look it up.’
‘You have books on this?’
‘No, but we can do an online search.’
I took two photos of the carving, more to contain it somehow, keep it real, than because I needed any further help remembering it. It was for Carlo, I told myself. Carlo. The camera f
lash struck like lightning in the empty stone throat.
When we went outside, I immediately saw that Raina wasn’t well. She leant against the tower wall, one hand to her forehead.
‘Raina? Are you okay?’
‘Scusi, David. This heat. The tower. Perhaps we should postpone our picnic for another time. I do not feel so good.’
‘Of course.’ I took the basket and followed Carlo as he led her through the trees, sat her in shade on the slope overlooking Edenville Road and the distant ranges to the southwest.
‘I should get the car,’ Carlo said. ‘David, can you keep an eye on her while I go?’
And there it was. My chance to be alone with Raina, to ask about Gemma and Zoe, to pose gentle, off-handed questions.
‘Why don’t I get it?’ I said, out of concern, out of courtesy, hoping he would override me and still go.
But Carlo seized on it. ‘Would you? Grazie, David! Bene grazie!’ And he handed me his keys.
In seconds I was hurrying through the forest, taking the shortest route back to the house.
I was furious with myself. How else to put questions to Raina, without risking impropriety, without drawing undue attention? A phonecall wouldn’t do. Any visit would have to include Carlo. I’d lost my chance. And I’d lost the key. In the rush to get Raina away from the tower, Carlo must have pocketed it; it certainly wasn’t in the tower door.
Within twenty minutes, I’d been dropped back at the house and they were on their way, once again leaving me with the sense of insufferable anticlimax, dislocated reality and things gone awry. One moment the tower, the petroglyph, the mystery; the next the day stretching before me, suddenly empty.
Though Raina being ill and the hieroglyph gave me reasons to phone.
I needn’t have concerned myself. It was barely an hour later that Carlo called.
‘David? It’s Carlo.’
‘Hello, Carlo.’
‘Mi dispiace. The day did not go as we planned. The tower always troubles Raina. The hieroglyph. It was too much. That it was there.’
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