The Haunted Storm

by Philip Pullman

  Matthew was fascinated. The priest’s voice was quivering, brim-full of excitement. His eyes, in the red lamplight, seemed to dissolve and disappear; his hands chopped abruptly downwards at the end of a phrase, or hung poised with the forefinger extended, or clasped each other tightly like lovers.

  The narrative drew out; Matthew followed it dizzily. There was a being called Sophia, who had fallen from perfection because she had desired greater perfection too passionately. She suffered torments of loss, and out of her suffering came matter, and out of her yearning spirit. She gave birth to a blind and ignorant god, who ruled the cosmos, imagining that he had created it; and as for man, there was a spark of alien divinity in him, which had somehow survived the entrapment in matter, and longed to return to its home outside the universe.

  As the tale grew, the Canon turned away from the light, and eventually put his hands on either side of his face so that it fell entirely into shadow. Matthew could hardly see it, but he looked closely, and after a while noticed with a slight shock that the priest’s eyes were fixed, with an expression of histrionic anguish, on his own. They stared at each other for a matter of seconds, Matthew openly in hunger and intense curiosity, and Canon Cole, believing himself hidden, in a false dramatization of agony. His voice, when he spoke again, was calm but taut.

  He was talking about the condensation of the Sophia’s torment into matter and time. It was too complicated for Matthew to follow, but he saw that something in it was affecting the Canon powerfully.

  His voice broke suddenly. His face was still in shadow; his hands quivered, but otherwise he did not move. “Out of these feelings,” he went on, a tight edge of pain in his voice, “there came about the universe; for the Sophia with her hands shaped a son, out of the ignorance that filled her and the grief she felt – she felt – a storm of feelings, a tumult of them, sorrow, loss, lamentation…” he was hardly aware what he was saying, in truth; he had almost lost sight of Matthew, and felt that he was talking to himself. He stood up suddenly, pushing his chair away with the back of his knees, and strode rapidly to the bookcase. He stood facing it, a foot or so away, and went on speaking, making the most extraordinary grimaces and pulling his face quite involuntarily into the shape of the mask of tragedy: “From – from the grief she felt – from the grief there evolved matter, it condensed into the elements, and then – she turned back, and in effect from her turning back there evolved everything psychical, do you see – it’s strange, isn’t it, how acutely this has power to affect us – from, at last, from her receiving the light, there evolved the pneuma.”

  He fell silent, but continued to act, passionately, without a word and with his back to Matthew, to dramatise as vividly as he could the course of an obscure but powerful sequence of emotions that flooded through his heart. He wished that Matthew would disappear, and that Gwen and Elizabeth would leave the house for a while; because he really wanted to shout, beg, cry wordlessly out and throw himself into the most proud or the most degrading postures he could imagine, in a frenzy of melodramatic passion. Oh, it was all false, all completely fake – he knew it, he knew there was not an ounce of truth in it, but the fit was on him. Supposing – supposing, though, he took a chance with this Cortez and let it go, let it have its head… He didn’t look as though he’d be frightened. He turned speculatively around.

  Matthew, meanwhile, was wondering what the devil the man was up to. He felt wrought-up, excited – ready to leap out of his chair, and fight, or shout; some germ of impatience had got into his blood, and was making him itch with anger; but the substance of what Canon Cole had been saying held him enthralled, for reasons he wasn’t entirely sure of – it was the atmosphere – the mental solution, as it were, in which such a system crystallised – now the priest was staring at him like a madman.

  “Well?” said Matthew harshly, in irritation.

  At once Canon Cole’s expression changed, and became crafty – confidential – even foxy.

  “Yes…” he said slowly, drawing the vowel out – “If you want a piece of advice, young man, you’ll cling tightly to your soul, you’ll squeeze it so tight that you can’t let go. Give yourself cramp, let your arms get stiff, locked rigid around it. I’m not going to say another word about the gnosis, not another word, it’s lies from start to finish.”

  Matthew’s eyes were wide with astonishment. The priest was babbling like a child, frowning, shaking his head. Matthew felt obscurely annoyed.

  “Tell me, though,” he said “tell me – oh, all right, forget your system, I don’t mind. But what are you doing about it? Where does action come into it? What’s good and what’s evil? Tell me, if you can – yes, go on, tell me what the wickedest thing in the world is, if you know. Is it – can you tell me if it’s murder? And tell me something else – how do you know if you’ve committed a murder yourself?”

  Canon Cole looked wary, and said nothing.

  “I mean,” continued Matthew, “suppose you’d killed that little girl the other day, but you’d quite simply forgot ten about it; but you felt guilty every time you thought about it, that you couldn’t get it out of your head – well, for instance, what has that sort of problem to do with God? If He’s not in the world, I mean. If He isn’t, and I think like you, I think He isn’t, then does it matter to Him that she’s been murdered? If it doesn’t matter to Him then why does it matter to me? You see, if it does matter, then He is in the world, whether we like it or not. But He’s not, obviously, otherwise the world – oh yes, human beings as well – would be infinite and beautiful and rich and important – and it’s not, it’s nothing short of contemptible. Answer that, go on.”

  Canon Cole was biting a fingernail. He went to his chair again and sat down slowly; then he passed his hand across his head, and sighed.

  “It might be… terrible, but you’d have to admit that… no, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “If it matters to you it’s because you’re – er – part of the social being was violated… order – umm – order disrupted, that would be what you felt, perhaps? It’s out of our control really what we feel; I – er – I myself felt compassion for the parents – I don’t know…”

  “No, no,” said Matthew, “it’s not that at all. Talking of the social being is rubbish. I’ll give you another example. What does it mean if you feel – if you, say, fall in love? And if it shakes you so profoundly that you haven’t the least idea what’s happening, if it jolts you like a thunderbolt – you might have been the purest saint there ever had been, you might have been utterly chaste but now you’d perjure yourself and sell your soul, if you could, for just one kiss – no, I don’t mean lust – simple lust is torment but you can control it if you want to – but love, romantic love I mean, is vastly different. You can say it doesn’t matter, but it happens, and I want to know: this woman that you’ve suddenly become a slave to – is she God? Or the love you feel – is that God?”

  “Oh, no, no, certainly not –”

  “Good! Good! I agree! But what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. The God of the world could tell you. These things – however deeply they affect you – are psychical, not spiritual –”

  “Yes, and the measure of their dominion over you is the measure of your weakness – yes! That’s easy enough to say, easy enough to think; now tell me how you begin to live it. It’s not enough to say it and sit back! I want to move – I want to find God. If you’re in prison you have to escape, otherwise you rot. I’m rotting in the world. Do you know – do you know the way to become suddenly reconciled to the world?

  “There’s a way of doing it. Now that murderer, I think, he discovered it. He took her into the wood in the evening, he enticed her there somehow, and he kept her there all night, he kept her prisoner – at first he was friendly but then she got frightened, and he tried to comfort her, he gave her sweets and told her that he wouldn’t hurt her, that he’d let her go when her parents paid a ransom.

  “And hours went by, the whole night went by with him
talking to her, getting more desperate all the time, you see, and she was getting more and more tired and frightened every minute, and still she didn’t understand. And then the dawn came, and she was so exhausted by then that she fell asleep. Even the cold couldn’t keep her awake. She only had a thin raincoat on over her dress. He knew she was cold, and he kept tucking it round her to keep her warm, and, you know, he even took his own jacket off at about four o’clock in the morning and put it round her shoulders so she’d be a bit warmer.” He paused; the Canon was staring at him. An odd certainty made him continue.

  “What was in his mind when he did that? Who knows? I know she was shivering, shivering, shivering, like a little bird trapped in a cage. But when she was asleep, and the dawn came and the sky got a bit lighter, he could see her more clearly. He could see what he was doing.

  “She was leaning back against a tree, her head on her shoulder; and without waking her he laid her gently down on the leaves – he laid her down just as if she was already dead; she didn’t wake, but she stirred a little and pulled the jacket around her like a blanket.

  “But it didn’t cover her legs, and she wasn’t wearing stockings, she wasn’t wearing tights; every minute it got clearer, you see, every minute it was more inevitable. The idea of just turning his back and walking away may have come to him, but he didn’t move, he couldn’t move an inch except towards her; and so he knelt down and touched her legs, carefully at first, as if he expected them to burn him; and she didn’t wake up, she didn’t move.

  “And then it came over him like a flood. He flung himself on her and tore at her like a wolf, he raped her and put his hands around her throat to stop her screaming. It was so slender and so weak that he couldn’t help but strangle her. You know what a bluebell’s stalk feels like? It’s so weak, it bends easily, but it snaps easily too. Her neck felt like that. And it only took a minute; only a minute, two minutes at the very most, before he was exhausted. He’d had enough of it. But he even went on for a bit longer than he really wanted to, because it seemed such a waste.

  “But after all that hunger and that lusting for every curve on the surface of her body, for every tiniest declivity, it only lasted a minute and then he’d had enough. And then he hated the sight of her. He hated, hated, hated her, lying dead in front of him. D’you know, if you could kill a dead person, he’d have killed her then, out of loathing, he hated her so much. Why was that? I don’t know; but you see when he’d finished, just for a second or so, in the instant, maybe, when he picked up his coat or his scarf, if he had one, just for those few moments he was reconciled to the world; in those seconds, ordinary things – like a cup of coffee, or two friends talking about a football match, or eating a meal – they would have glowed as if they were immortal, there would have been the essence of heaven in them, there would have been such a light on them! So, you see, there is a way of being reconciled to it. It’s not inevitable to hate the world.”

  “How do you know?” said the Canon swiftly. “How do you know that? What do you know about it?”

  “I dreamt it,” said Matthew. “I’m clairvoyant. I dreamt it the other night. That doesn’t matter…but in it, at least, I’ve seen a kind of truth. A partial truth. That is, that to make the world eternal, you have to shine a certain kind of light on it, and one of the lights is murder… just by contrast, you see, it makes everything else – and everything human in particular – seem glorious and innocent. But then it burns you out, too, the light doesn’t last for long. In fact if you took those two friends talking about the football match, they’d only look innocent; really, if they knew about it, they’d be fascinated; they’d want to see the body, and if the murder was going on in front of their eyes they wouldn’t stop it, they’d even secretly enjoy watching… where is all this leading? Why am I saying this? I suppose… oh yes, the reconciliation; well, it looks true for a moment, but it’s false, that’s what I mean. Murder is the most desperate thing you can do, but even that doesn’t work. So: what do you do?”

  “I am astonished –” said the Canon; he ran his hand over the top of his head – “I have not the least idea what you mean. This dramatisation of evil isn’t the point, I’m sure it’s not the point; and in any case are you sure that you’re correct about it? It seems to me that you’re attributing – oh, attributing motives – at least attributing a degree of intelligence to him which – no, no, no, it was only brutal, a squalid release of lust, that was all. To bring theology into it is absurd.”

  “But how do you know? I should have said it was absurd to leave theology out. This is a thing that engages you – oh Christ, it’s like being hit with a hammer. And how do you know that wasn’t what he felt? How do you know that it wasn’t you, or me? We might have forgotten; it’d be natural to forget, if you possibly could, wouldn’t it?”

  The priest breathed in deeply. His eyes were troubled. Again Matthew had the disturbing sense that they were melting and beginning to run down his cheeks, and looked away from him.

  “But – no, go on,” he continued, “You hadn’t finished telling me how man came about.”

  “Yes,” said the Canon slowly, “yes…did you say that you were clairvoyant? Did you mean that? It’s extraordinary…I’m forgetting: now Sophia created a son for herself, and he is the Demiurge, the creator of the world. He was ignorant, ignorant even of his mother, and he formed the world in ignorance. His name is Ialdabaoth. He drew power from his mother and brought into being a number of inferior powers, angels, Archons, and all of them come out of ignorance, all of them embody wrath and greed. He, Ialdabaoth, you know – they say He was the God of the Old Testament.”

  Matthew settled back in his chair. Canon Cole was lost again, and Matthew felt in that moment extraordinarily close to him; it would be easy to lose himself in a myth as powerful as this, he thought. The priest went on, staring at the electric fire, one hand on his knee and the other resting on the table beside him.

  He spoke about how the false God had created Adam because it taught Adam about his lineage and the alien life that was in him; and he told how it had been the Demiurge himself in the shape of the serpent who had taught them the mystery of procreation, hoping thus to enslave them and their generations of children for ever.

  At last he said, “And that’s how the world came about. That’s the story of it all; that’s what you wanted to know.” He sat back wearily and crossed his legs.

  Matthew sat still. During this last part of the Canon’s narrative he had suddenly found himself caught up in it, involved and dizzy, The priest was so mild now, so tired and dreamy and lost to the world; Matthew had the feeling of standing on a vast plateau miles and aeons above the flood of history, surveying the first cause of things and their last issue. There was nothing here, nothing at all, of the riddles and sadnesses of human things. A cold wind blew round him, a wind not of air but of thought, of spirit it might be, of sublimity; and his soul ached, but not with pain. It was an icy ghostlike joy which hurt him, and he welcomed it; it was no stranger.

  He looked up at the priest and said “And that’s what you truly believe? Every word?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good; thank God for that. I can’t tell you how strange it is to find something like that. Something definite. Yes, that’s absolute, in the sense I wanted. But still… it’s a course of action that I’m searching for, as well. I don’t just want to know where God is: I want to know how to get to Him – oh, I’ve said it before, yes, I’ll go soon, but tell me, before I go: is there nothing in the world, no thing, which is any good? Is there no justification for the flesh at all?”

  “Odd, you know, you do remind me of someone – have I said that before? He was an enemy of mine in a particular matter – this is to the point, it’s very much to the point. Now I think of it, it’s extraordinary, you might be his double; it’s as if he sent you to me like a spy, because the matter we quarrelled about was –”

  Here he stopped, regarded Matthew closely, and got to his feet and p
aced restlessly about for a moment. Finally he went to the desk and took out his drawing of the well. He sat down, and put the drawing face downwards on the desk. Matthew stared at it curiously.

  “In fact,” said the Canon, “it is my belief that ·- yes, that there are things which are, as you say, good. The Holy Grail… And I think I’ve discovered something which may be like that. It’s not far from here. How I came to find it is a secret, only because you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. But never mind that. Anyway, this is a drawing I made of what I found.”

  He handed the drawing to Matthew, who studied it intently. The technique was fussy and precise; it showed a ruined stone coping emerging from a tangle of undergrowth. Ivy climbed over it, hiding a good third of the stone. There seemed to be an inscription carved on it, but the letters were indistinguishable. So this was the well he’d heard about all those months ago, on the beach! And this enemy of his must be her lover – had she seen him again since the beach? He felt a stab of bitter, murderous jealousy.

  “What does the carving say?” he asked.

  “It says – ummm,” the Canon murmured a little suspiciously; but after a second he went on – “it says DEO… well, there’s only one full word there, and that’s ‘Deo’; then there’s a gap where… there’s a gap, and then the letters TO; and I think what that means is that the well was dedicated to Mithra. There are other inscriptions on altars and temples that read ‘Deo Invicto Mitrae’ – to Mithra, you know, the invincible god; and then, usually, there’s the name of the man who put the altar up, followed by the letters ‘V.S.L.M.’ which stand for a Latin phrase meaning ‘willingly and faithfully carries out his vow’. That’s a common phrase; you find it all over the country. Now there’s a gap there where the name would be because the stone’s crumbled, but just here –” he indicated it with a pencil – “I’ve stripped the ivy away, and there are the letters L and M, unmistakably. I think it’s Mithraic, without a doubt.”