The Haunted Storm

by Philip Pullman

  “Yes, I dare say. But why is it the same as the Holy Grail?”

  “Because something’s hidden in it.”

  “Well, what?”

  “I don’t know!” The Canon’s voice was impatient. “I don’t know at all. It’s infuriating. The only way I could find out would be to take it to pieces, but I daren’t do that because it doesn’t belong to me. But it’s a holy well, beyond any doubt. Miracles used to happen there. And there was a tradition, too, that if you went to the well at certain times of the year and whispered a question into it, it would tell you the answer. It had an echo, you see… I have been afraid to test it, so far.”

  He fell silent again, and crossed his arms, looking at the bars of the electric fire.

  “I think,” he said, and his voice was more contemplative now, “that it’s a channel for something. It acts as a kind of radio receiver. I’ve noticed it when I’ve been working there; it’s as if the place is haunted, there’s a kind of amplifying of your perceptions. You feel more sensitive. You, with your clairvoyance, I imagine it’s how you feel, but I wouldn’t know what that feels like… You’d notice it, if you came there, I can assure you. I still don’t know what it means; that’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Yes, yes; and what are you going to do about it?”

  Again the Canon got to his feet, and this time went abruptly to the window and pulled the curtains roughly open. He rested his hands on the sill and put his face close to the glass to look out. The wind of the day had not yet died down, and huge ragged masses of cloud streamed across the sky, washing like waves over the gibbous moon; some unusual condition of the atmosphere was colouring it yellow and the clouds a shade of sepia, giving to the whole scene an air that was unpleasant and disturbing. Canon Cole stayed there for nearly a minute, struggling to find words for the incoherent hatred that was rising in his breast.

  “I am – restoring it. I am trying hard to establish the history of it, beyond any doubt, and at the same time I’m fighting this devil of a man who is bent on destroying it and on destroying me, too. Oh, I’m sure of it! At least twice to my certain knowledge he’s been responsible for damaging attacks on me – on me personally – in the press. There’s a local newspaper which has printed things that are very close to libel about me… And I have found a stone missing, taken away quite recently. It has part of the inscription on it. If I could see it I’d have practically all the proof I need. What he wants it for I don’t know, but I have a shrewd idea that it’s for some political purpose; he’s a fascist, or something of the sort, and politics, you know – well, that would be the end of it, and I’m not going to let it happen. Now I don’t know why I’m telling you this – what’s the time? It must be getting on – except that you challenged me earlier on to say what I believed, and what it involved in the way of action… there it is.”

  Matthew breathed in deeply. “Perhaps your man’s the murderer,” was all he could think of to say. Canon Cole’s words had left him a little dizzy; the man moved so swiftly from obsession to obsession, and seemed to be rooted nowhere… was he completely paranoid? Matthew was too tired to wonder.

  “Thank you for talking to me,” he said, “it’s been very interesting. I must go now, I’m tired, I’m nearly asleep… not with boredom; I’m just exhausted. Thank you, anyway, and I’ll see you again – may I call again?”

  “Please do,” said the priest. “Come at any time.”

  “I’ll see myself out,” said Matthew. “Goodnight.”

  As he left the house and made his way home in the dark Matthew was filled with the impression above all of the Canon wandering gleefully, like a ghost or a demon, on cold, haunted tablelands where the only light came from the planets and stars of another universe altogether. The gnostic mountains; they were like Tibet.

  Canon Cole watched him go down the drive, with an impulse of regret in his heart, and with the intention half formed of setting out swiftly after him to urge him to forget all he’d heard. “He’ll think I’m mad! He’ll think I’m completely insane! Perhaps that was why he left so quickly…”

  And what the Canon was left with after his evening’s conversation was a memory of Matthew’s face as he described the murder. It had fascinated the priest. As he’d listened he felt – yes! – guilty. True enough, as Matthew had said, he didn’t know if he himself was the murderer; he could be; anyone could be. The Canon was more disposed to imagine what it would be like if someone else was the murderer, someone he knew; someone like Matthew, for instance. His explanation of clairvoyance rang a little thin… no, the whole thing was ridiculous.

  He made himself some coffee, and later on went down stairs and tried to make peace with Gwen. For the first time in months he felt the inclination to make love to her; and when they were in bed and he was caressing her white body she felt, unwillingly, the growing warmth of hope. But after wards, as he always did, he wondered what had possessed him; and he turned away and lay sleeplessly for a long time with his face to the seething darkness.

  Chapter 7

  MATTHEW saw Elizabeth as often as he could in the following days. They found that one of the results of their decision – so arbitrary it seemed, and so sudden – to be utterly chaste, was that they acquired an extraordinary sense of intimacy and, somehow, purpose. Both of them longed to make love; Matthew thought he had never wanted it more, sometimes, as they talked or listened to music together; but their pact enabled them, by acknowledging the sexual impulse and holding it back, to examine it more closely. Most lovers, they agreed, were misled by it into thinking that the only purpose of their love was to bring their bodies together, and that in the mating of their bodies, their souls or their minds would be brought closer as well. “They think it means communication,” said Matthew; “but what’s the point of that, if they’ve got nothing to communicate?”

  “Well, perhaps they have,” she answered, “but I don’t think it does communicate anything anyway. It’s not as effective as talking…”

  Sex, thus, was a matter which fell squarely into the scope of Matthew’s morality. It wasn’t church morality, which said that sex was good if you were married and bad if you weren’t; and it wasn’t the more modern personal-relationship morality, which said that sex was good if you loved each other, married or otherwise. For both of these he felt quite instinctively something like nausea. His morality was iron-bound: and its highest good was intensity of purpose, and for this sex with a prostitute might be as important at times as utter chastity. Elizabeth’s reasons were more subtle and intangible, more Neptunian, as she called them. She was not entirely sure what they were, at bottom, or even that they were not changing all the time.

  They had the idea, very soon after that first afternoon. of cutting their hair short. It was a symbol, half playful and half serious, of their new puritanism. His hair was very nearly as long as hers, and black and fine, and he had let it grow for no other reason than that he couldn’t be bothered to have it cut. They couldn’t remember afterwards whose idea it was, but one evening in the drawing-room at the rec tory they spread newspaper on the carpet to catch it and cropped each other’s hair short. She cut his first, and then sat down herself. He ran his hands through hers before he picked up the scissors; it was thick and wavy, and a beautiful dark brown, and she always kept it immaculately clean, like a cat.

  “It’s lovely, Elizabeth, it really is,” he said. “I’m almost reluctant…”

  “Rubbish!” she said. “Off with it.”

  He cut it slowly and carefully, making sure it was even. “My mother used to cut my hair at home,” he said, “and my brother’s. I had to sit on the table.”

  “What brother?” she said. “You didn’t tell me you had a brother. How old is he? What’s he doing now?”

  “I’d forgotten about him, to tell the truth. He was older than me, about nine years older. I had a sister too, but she died; she had polio, I think, I can’t remember… no, my brother – his name was Alan. They threw him out wh
en he was about nineteen, and no-one knows where he is now. I think it was something to do with his school. I didn’t understand it, I was too young, but it was probably some scandal about him being queer. That’s what I thought it must be, later on. I never found out because we went to different schools, and I never dared ask. He just disappeared.”

  “But don’t you know anything? Did you never hear from him?”

  “No, not a word – he probably went to sea. Or perhaps he met a rich queer and lived with him.”

  “What makes you think he was queer?”

  “It’s an intuition, that’s all.”

  “Mmm… but what was he like?”

  “Why do you want to know? I’ve been the one who wants to know that sort of thing, not you.”

  “Well, I’ve got an intuition too. Go on, cut more than that! “

  “All right. But I don’t remember, it was years ago and our ages were too far apart; we never used to play together, or whatever brothers do. I remember he had a bike that he was very keen on, and he used to ride for miles and miles. And he used to fence at his school, and he was in the boxing team; I saw him boxing once. He was very strong. That’s all.”

  “What a muscular school it must have been. Did he have any brains?”

  “Well, that’s what I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him at all. I was never interested in bicycling or boxing, even to the extent of copying it because my big brother was doing it – no, I never copied him, and he never bothered me. We weren’t particularly interested in each other.”

  “Good. Is it nearly short now? I want to look like a skinhead. There, that shocked you, didn’t it? I think you’d like to pretend you don’t know what skinheads are, or what the name of the Prime Minister is, but you do know; you can’t help it.”

  “Yes, but I’ve got a morbid fear of being out of date. There’s nothing so old-fashioned as –”

  She laughed at him, and he had to laugh at himself. “No, but it’s true,” he protested. “If Heath was going to be Prime Minister for the next three hundred years, it might be worth taking an interest in him, to see whether he’s going to be up to the mark; but five years one way or the other doesn’t matter a scrap. Of course I know his name, but if you take too much notice of something that’s going to go to the wall in a few years’ time, you’ll go with it. That’s why I pretend not to know about skinheads, as you put it. In fact I know lots and lots. I even know who won the F.A. Cup last year. But there you are, how’s that? It’s almost as short as mine.”

  He ruffled it affectionately. He had left it an inch and a half long all over, not nearly as short as his, in fact, but so different from what it was before that he could hardly recognise her when she stood up and faced him.

  “Christ, Elizabeth,” he said, “you look so strong… whenever I catch sight of myself in a mirror, I’m always amazed by how furtive and weak I look. I must look like a convict now, as well.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “You look like Rimbaud.” She shook her head. “Isn’t it lighter!”

  “I’m going to shave it completely,” he said.

  “No! Don’t you dare do that. It’s short enough now.”

  “I know why you said that,” he said. “For the same reason that I didn’t cut yours as short as mine. Oh, God, we still want beauty, don’t we! Maybe it’s just a blind, this cutting our hair. We pay lip-service to being harsh and anti-aesthetic and things but underneath we still like to be good-looking. If we were honest about it we’d slash our faces with razors, or burn them with petrol.”

  “No,” she said, sighing, “it’s not the point, really; to cut yourself up would be to acknowledge how important you think it is; and is it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well then. At least now we’ve got something out of the way. We’ll save a little time; it won’t take so long to keep it clean. That’s really why we did it. No, we were right about it, I think. And maybe we could be proud of being good looking.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Go and play the piano.”

  He found, as he came to know her more and more, that she expressed herself more completely through the piano than through anything else. Her playing was entirely her own, as characteristic of her as her voice or the way she moved. At first it sounded careless: not because she couldn’t play what was on the page but because it nearly always suggested something much more interesting, some different sequence of chords, which she would follow until she tired of it; and there was such grace and verve in her improvisations that Matthew was never irritated when Handel seemed to change suddenly into Scriabin, or Prokofiev into Chopin. On the contrary, he would find himself becoming hypnotised, and he noticed too that when she had been playing for some time he was more prone to receive those psychic impressions he called by the name of clairvoyance. They were quite sudden; they were very nearly instantaneous, in fact; and they were like dreams in their compelling emotional content, and dreamlike too in the fact that the emotion had no apparent cause, or was linked to a scene or an image apparently unconnected with it. There was also an impression he had at times of seeing his surroundings not from one position but from all positions at once; obviously this was so strange that the first time it happened – and these were at all times sketchy, momentary glimpses, like figures seen on the edge of sleep – he thought he had gone blind.

  There were other things, too. Once the two of them were in the rectory kitchen, and Elizabeth was looking for some tea. “I think we must have run out,” she said, “unless mummy’s bought some more today and put it somewhere else… I’ll go and ask her.”

  “No, stay there,” said Matthew without thinking. “I’ll fetch her; sit down.”

  He closed his eyes, wondering briefly how he knew he could, but the certainty was so strong that he felt like laughing at the idea of doubt. He concentrated on the image of Mrs. Cole, and within a minute she had come into the kitchen.

  “Hello, dear… hello, Matthew,” she said. “I was just going to make some tea.”

  What Matthew wondered at afterwards was the force with which he managed to concentrate. It felt as if he himself were being concentrated by something else. And this kind of thing happened on a number of occasions, bewildering him as well as making him feel quite irrationally pleased. The annoying thing was that he had very little control over it.

  And there was another aspect of it which frankly frightened him, and which he did not mention even to Elizabeth. It was this: that all these odd powers which descended into him and then left him were part of a general sensation of opening-out, of feeling barriers crumble, of remembering. His memory itself began slowly to clear, and absolutely insignificant details of what, for instance, he wore at his sixth birthday party, or a meal he had eaten at Oxford, would float unheralded into his consciousness: sharp, clear as daylight, and accompanied each by its own particular fragrance, its personal scent, of emotion. Like flakes of snow they fell, brushed him softly for an instant, and melted; and this he did not mind, although he didn’t think it meant anything in particular; but occasionally there would come an image which, while it was clearly a memory and had the emotional force of a memory, he could not place at all. He simply couldn’t remember it. It tantalised him: and it frightened him because they were usually ac companied by a feeling of intense fear, or bitter aching tension; and, once, he saw again that picture he’d described to Canon Cole of the little girl dead in the woods.

  So gradually he came, though he dismissed the thought time and time again, and tried to laugh at it, and tried to ignore it, came to think again about what he’d said so carelessly the other night about committing a murder and then forgetting it.

  The only person he thought he might be able to tell about it was Harry Locke. Without actually mentioning his own fears in the matter, he managed to ask the old man one evening, as they sat by the fire in Harry’s sitting-room, what murder meant in terms of his God, and how he thought God would regard the murderer.
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  “Poor fellow,” said Harry instantly; “oh, I feel sorry for him, you know, as much as I do for the girl’s family. They can comfort each other, but he can’t go to anyone. The police’ll catch him in the end, and he’ll be persecuted in the prison they send him to; they’ll have to keep the other men away from him. No, God wouldn’t judge him harshly.”

  “But only if he couldn’t help it. Yes, I’m sure you’re right, uncle Harry; but what if he did it cold-bloodedly? If he deliberately set out to do evil? Or even if he just didn’t know it was evil?”

  “If he didn’t know, then we can’t understand it, and we should feel all the more compassion. There’s no question, Matthew, no question of a man doing evil if he knows what it is – if he truly knows all about it. We can’t condemn anyone at all, I’m certain of it. Compassion is everywhere, we all share it, and we all share guilt. There’s no getting away from it. It’s like light.”

  “I can’t understand it, though. I can’t connect what you’re saying with what I feel… when you say compassion is everywhere, what do you mean? Do you mean people’s compassion? Because they’re not compassionate; most of them are indifferent, or hostile – oh, yes, it’s true. Most people would be glad to hang that murderer, if they could.”

  “No, I mean the compassion of Christ. It’s overwhelming. It’s all around us, it’s greater and stronger than anything… It’s a love of everything that exists. Nothing’s shut out from it.”

  “But whose –” Matthew began, but broke off and said no more. He had been going to say “whose is it, who feels it?” But he remembered that Harry had already given him the answer: Christ. And it was useless to complain, as he had been on the point of doing, that Christ was not here, not in people’s hearts, that Christ might never have existed. The fact that He didn’t depend on people or on their faith could only be a good thing, according to Matthew’s morality; but if it had not been for this hidden and tormenting doubt about the murder, and the consequent doubts it raised about how far his morality extended both out into the world and inside into his soul, he would not have begun to think of Christ in terms of compassion.