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.’
‘I couldn’t do much more about it, short of sending him to a psychiatrist, which somehow seemed to me all wrong for Bill, so I told him to confide in the vicar. He said the vicar didn’t approve of him. Bloody old fool—the vicar, I mean! There he had an earnest Christian performing minor miracles in his parish and he didn’t approve of him! But in the end he seems to have done his duty, whatever it was, and it worked.’
I remembered at once Bill Freeman’s obscure remark when he implied that he had been cured of some sickness of the mind by a minister of religion.
‘And the cats?’ I asked.
‘Cleared out for a week’s hunting on their own, I understand, and returned in a better temper. They tried to apologise by coming home with a fine young rabbit, but rather spoilt the effect by depositing it on Mrs Freeman’s freshly laundered sheet.’
How it all fits in! Imagine a village three or four hundred years ago where the inhabitants, though agriculturalists, still retained vestiges of their ancestors’ beliefs and sensitivities to nature! Suddenly animals start behaving strangely and there are cases of psychosomatic illness, some of them ending in death. The known and suspected witches, up to then tolerated for their healing powers but distrusted, immediately become the objects of collective hysteria and are gaoled until herded to the assizes to be hanged, imprisoned or acquitted, while their Robin, heartbroken but helpless, finds business abroad.
I suspect that the vicar does not know how to use exorcism—always assuming that it’s effective against a curse—but as a man of undoubted faith and simplicity merely prayed with Bill Freeman. There we come into realms of the spirit which Paddy would have understood without words, but I am frustrated and seek for parallels.
Just as the communal praise and the dancing and feasts of animism have power to heal body and mind but appear mere play-acting to most of us, so the solemn ritual of the Church would seem melancholy to our far ancestors in the forest; yet both offer the same access to the Purpose as my own prayer offered in painting. An apparently ‘evil’ influence—if it is fair to call Izar and the macaw evil when I have only the vaguest idea of the mechanics and none of the motive—is defeated by the contemplation of unity. Because I can rarely find the beauties of primitive paganism in Christianity, I doubt if anything less than the full hosannas of a cathedral service could have helped me. My own Job-like faith, persisting through the agony, did.
I am reminded that one night, standing with my brother on a barren outcrop of rock above the trees of the jungle, he asked me if I knew what the stars were singing to us. I replied that I heard but it was beyond my understanding, and I translated for him—since the marvel of the words went easily into Munda and perhaps into any of man’s languages—‘When the morning stars sang together and the Sons of God shouted for joy.’
Far away a tiger roared, and he said:
‘So does our brother shout, Alf, but we may only shout in the silence of our hearts.’
July 21
Ginny has been bothered by the police again. I thought that we had heard the last of Paddy’s death and that they had merely added it to their list of unsolved crimes. They accepted the fact that she would be asleep when my stolen car was returned but were still not happy about the earlier time when it was driven away, which, they had decided, was round about eleven.
She had brought this on herself by saying at the first investigation—trying to cut corners out of loyalty—that of course she always heard me from her flat in the stable block if I drove away in the evening after dinner.
The police had proved by experiment that this was not true. She could not hear a car starting up in the drive if she was in her flat. Very intelligently they now wanted to find out who, besides myself, could be quite certain that she would have gone home to the flat by eleven. It was a vague question, difficult to answer since I seldom entertained at home. Ginny tells me that she could not think of anyone who would be sure, except Paddy with whom I sometimes talked late, in summer usually sitting in the garden or strolling under the trees. She also mentioned Miss Vernon, adding for the sake of propriety that Miss Vernon only called on business when she would be sure to find me in.
She thought this renewed interest plain silly, but I can see what the police are after. They are still wondering if I lent my car to someone and whether I told the loyal Ginny to pay no attention if she were still in the house and heard the car driven away while I was at the Pirrone party.
Then the superintendent had the damned impertinence to call on Rita and enquire—with infinite tact and circumlocution—if she could tell him anything of Ginny’s routine. She replied, no doubt with a touch of courteous hauteur, that she was not conversant with my domestic arrangements, but so far as she knew Ginny prepared a simple supper for me when I was in, washed up and returned to her flat.
This I learned when I ran into her on the street and dragged her off for a drink in the Royal George. She insisted on taking me home to her cottage for lunch, tempting me—my God, does she think she needs to?—with an offer of cold guinea fowl in aspic. That, with a bottle of Meursault between us, was too delicate and blue-skied a meal for a conversation which would have been better fitted to the bloody foreleg of a half-grilled deer and the drip from unseen trees hissing on the fire.
‘I think they have let you off lightly,’ she said. ‘Your story was suspect from the start. Whoever arranged to take your car knew that Ginny was most unlikely to hear it go off and return, knew your habit of going to Penminster parties on foot and knew that you would have a perfect al
ibi. Alfgif, who could be sure of all that but you? So from the police point of view it’s ten to one that you lent your car to someone without knowing why it was wanted, and afterwards you won’t say who it was for reasons of friendship and because you are convinced that Paddy’s death was pure accident.’
I told her that if the police thought that, they were crazy. I wouldn’t protect Paddy’s murderer for a moment. And it was murder, not an accident.
‘It hasn’t occurred to you that it could be suicide?’
Yes, it had occurred to me and to everyone else, all of us mystified as to why Paddy did not move out of the way when he must have heard or seen the car. But there were no conceivable motives for suicide, financial, emotional or from fear of incurable disease.
Rita filled my glass and changed the subject, reminding me that after she had given me her report on Concha Pirrone and the macaw we had agreed that the unknown Izar could be responsible for my haunting and she had promised to give me a why if I could give her a how.
‘Now can you?’ she asked.
I have never been able to pigeon-hole Rita’s beliefs. And what do they matter anyway? My love of her is enough to welcome and include them all. She takes clairvoyance and telepathy as proven and I believe she pays for a horoscope, yet she fails to see that every faith must present its true meaning in the form of myth, and that myth is not a term of abuse. Religion to her is a human curiosity, like ambition, which moves history and is therefore of vital importance. That historical standpoint is useful because, myth or not, she keeps an open mind wherever there is first-hand evidence.
So I started off with a memory of tiger brother who kept, fed and enjoyed the company of a large, tame toad. He told me it was not a toad; it was a snake to frighten away leopards and hyenas. Tigers, being of our clan and friendly, had no need to be frightened. At the time and up to recently I took this as a bit of hocus pocus. I remember writing that tiger brother had no familiar, but now I see how toad fits in to the unity. Shaman hypnotises toad. Toad emanates the snake warning—which exists, all right, if you can feel it—and intruder thinks better of entering hut. Shaman’s direct command to the leopard or hyena is not impossible, but he might not be present. The toad-snake, however, always remains in the hut.
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