I couldn't take part, even though they expected it of me. I couldn't think of anything except the fact that Gil was dead. I didn't know why, but I knew that I must have had something to do with it. Somehow, it was my fault. I'd never explained to him what I had done, or why. Somehow, it had all gone wrong, and now he was dead. So was Cynthia's daughter. What must poor Cynthia be feeling?
It was all Maldureve's fault, I thought, savagely. If he hadn't abandoned me—if he had only come to save me from the man with the filthy gloves, it would all have been all right. But if he had, I probably wouldn't ever have found out the truth about him, about the owls and about myself.
I closed my eyes, wishing that I could see the light again, wishing that the eyes of the owls were still upon me. There was nothing but the darkness; nothing but the empty, lonely darkness.
Mum's hand was on my shoulder.
'It'll be all right, darling,’ she said. ‘It'll all be all right, now.'
But she didn't know. She couldn't even begin to suspect. It wasn't all right at all; it was all wrong. It had to be put right, if only I could find the strength.
If only.
2
At first, being with the owls was all pain, all fear. At first, it was the ultimate horror. But that was because I didn't understand. How could I? How could I even begin to understand, when everything Maldureve had told me had been so cryptic, so evasive?
He'd intended me to be terrified of the owls. He wanted me to try with all my might to resist them. Because I loved him, I did try. Even though he'd failed to come to my aid, even though he'd let the owls seize me and imprison me, I still loved him. I was still his creature, as terrified as he'd intended, as determinedly resistant as he wanted me to be.
But he'd lied.
He'd lied about the owls. He'd lied about what they were and what they represented. Not that I believed them when they first told me that. I wasn't easy to persuade. No one is, when they're locked into a cage of blinding light, fighting the hunger.
At first, they were every bit as cruel and fearsome as he'd said. They subjected me to the torture of withdrawal. They denied me the blood for which I hungered. I hated them then, every bit as fiercely as Maldureve hated them.
Even when the pain eased, when the hunger gradually died inside me and left me exhausted, I wouldn't listen to them. Their voices were just noise. They could never have persuaded me with their voices alone. They had to prove to me that they were what they said they were, that theirs was the better way, the only true way. They had to show me.
When they showed me, I understood what it had all been about. I even understood why they had saved the ultimate experience for the end, for the climax. Afterwards, my re-education really was complete.
It was as far from what I'd experienced with Maldureve as what I'd experienced with Maldureve had been from my first awkward and embarrassing time with Gil. I'd say that it was perfect, except that I'm more careful about such things now than I once was. Everything is really only one more step on the way; there are always further heights to be scaled, further limitations to be exceeded. Just because something is unimaginable doesn't mean to say that it's unreal. Our powers of imagination are very primitive, and our powers of perception are almost blind. We should beware of the awful stupidity which tells us that what our senses perceive is all there is, just as we should beware of the ridiculous pride which says that all we need to fill in that awful void beyond the reach of our perceptions is faith in the visions of prophets.
There are no words to describe the ecstasy of the owls. How could there be? There aren't even any words to describe the common or garden kinds of sexual thrill. We have words which we use when we try to talk about such things, in our awkward, fumbling fashion. We have a few more which we recruit to help us think about such things in the privacy of our own minds. But they're all just fudge-words, groping for hidden and unreachable meanings in the Stygian darkness. We're a mystery to ourselves. We haven't got the proper tools to get to grips with the simplest of experiences. That's what pornography makes clear to us: that when we try to render the most fundamental of experiences into words, it turns into something absurdly vulgar and coarse.
There's nothing coarse about intercourse with the owls, nothing pornographic. But it is sexual, and unbelievably intimate. It is lust, as well as love.
The bodies of the owls are both unbearably soft and unbearably sharp. Their feathers are like silken cloth or like keen razors, depending on the way that you stroke them—or depending upon the way they stroke you. They tantalize and they cut, they thrill and they wound, but the experience is all one and seamless. The distinction between pain and pleasure simply disappears, and there's only intensity.
When you eventually come it's like the moment of a violent death, with the feathers scything through every last fibre of your being, and soothing all the while, but it's like an infinite journey to the centre of sensation, a fall into the abyss of extremes. To get there ... well, you have to fly, and you can fly, even though your body is perfectly still, perfectly balanced.
I don't mean to imply that you can leave your body behind, to become some sort of disincarnate astral entity. That's nonsense. Pleasure is a function of the body. It's born in the brain in response to signals transmitted by the nerves. It's a combination of electrical circuits and chemical states; it's real. I was never out of my body, nor was my body ever anywhere else than lying on the bed in the county hospital. What I mean by ‘flying’ is a state of mind, a sensation.
But the sensations are only a part of it, just as the feathers are only part of an owl. Pleasure is also consciousness: stimulus and response, mediated by intelligence.
Owls have huge round eyes, which stare with such awesome concentration, and owls have minds behind their eyes. Owls have consciousness; owls have wisdom.
So it wasn't just a matter of down-and-blade feathers, stroking and striking into me; it wasn't just a matter of feeling. People who say that when you come you turn into an animal, experiencing pure intoxication without the mediation of consciousness, as an animal supposedly does, are dead wrong. They have no idea what it is to be truly unconscious, because unconsciousness is by definition incapable of representation by ideas; one of the things consciousness can never have any intelligence of is its own absence. When you come, you come consciously; what happens to you then is something known as well as felt; something which you observe, in yourself, and to which you respond, with whatever intelligence you can muster. The higher the intelligence, the greater the wisdom, the better it is.
Believe me. I've been there. I know whereof I speak.
When I flew with the owls—when they brought me to the ecstatic moment of imagined annihilation—the whole of my existence was filled with light, and it seemed that the walls of the universe were made of huge and staring eyes.
I was frightened by those eyes at first, taken to the very limits of terror by their unrelenting gaze. Even the fugitive glimpses I'd caught of those eyes, before the owls came out of the borderlands and seized me in their cruel claws, had filled me with an unreasoning fear which struck directly at my heart. Actually to be with the owls in the borderlands, to live beneath the scrutiny of those focused, all-seeing eyes, was worse by far. But fear too resolves itself in the end to pure intensity. True ecstasy can no more exclude fear than it can exclude pain; true ecstasy isn't just pleasure magnified. The terror of those eyes, the terror of having them look at me—knowing that everything I was could be seen and examined, that nothing could be hidden—was all part of it.
Now, in a sense, those eyes are my eyes. I can see at least a little of what they see. The world outside, in which I move, is as full of shadows and lies and mysteries and uncertainties as ever it was, but I see myself with different eyes, different powers of perception. That's one of the ways in which the ultimate ecstasy transforms us. And it isn't just seeing. It isn't just staring and finding light where there was no light before. It's understanding, too.
; We think of knowledge in terms of facts and skills; we think of wisdom in terms of adapting one's hopes, fears and expectations to the limits of possibility and plausibility; and we're right to do so. Wisdom is knowing how to be in the world in a balanced and rewarding way. It's the end of self-evolution. Wisdom is a reconciliation of intellect and emotion, the forging of a whole way of being out of the uncomfortable fragments of experience. Not many people have it, even in a primitive form. Maldureve and his kind don't have it either, and probably can't ever attain it, by virtue of their nature. The owls are very different. By virtue of their nature, the owls have all the wisdom they need, and that's perhaps the most important aspect of their enduring ecstasy.
The fact that I couldn't wholly share the experience with which the owls completed my initiation into their mysteries was due far more to the limitation of my wisdom than to anything else. In another era, bringing different resources from my experiences in the everyday world to the task of trying to understand, I suppose I would have imagined that I saw God, talked with an angel or penetrated the veil of the world-illusion to see the rooms of Paradise, but along with all the philosophy which I had absorbed in my half-baked fashion I had at least imbibed a healthy measure of doubt. The true wealth of wisdom was out of my reach, but I think ... I believe ... that I avoided the mistake of seizing upon some tawdry counterfeit coin.
Maybe, if I had been able to acquire true wisdom along with everything else which the owls donated to me, what happened wouldn't have seemed like a kind of lovemaking at all. But it was sexual, even if it was so much more as well. It was the same kind of thrill which sex is supposed to deliver but never really can: the ultimate, stark-naked reward of an electric explosion in the pleasure centres of the brain. It was connection with something not me, being to being, flesh to flesh.
It was love; deep-down true love.
It sounds perverse to say it like that. It sounds, I guess, like a crazy kind of masturbation. After all, I was in my hospital bed, fast asleep, and dreaming. But I wasn't really alone.
I wasn't really alone.
With the owls, I truly found that state of mind of whose possibility I'd had my first inkling when I let Maldureve suck my blood. I became the molten lava of steely flesh, the pure flux of hot young blood, and I glowed with incandescent fire. Their feathers smoothed me to polished chrome with their infinite softness, cut me to silken ribbons with their edges, pulled me apart with their barbs. And all the while, the eyes watched, infinite in number and infinitely dark: the eyes watched, and saw, and understood. The pain forbade screaming, the fear forbade flight, and the pleasure forbade intoxication...
Into the owls’ world, I came.
After I woke up again, I kept repeating to myself, from time to time: ‘I'm here still. Although I'm awake, returned to consciousness and active life, I'm here still.’ Whenever I had time, and leisure, I'd add more, just for the pleasure of hearing the facts asserted. ‘I'm beginning to understand,’ I'd say to myself. ‘I haven't yet acquired wisdom, but its seed has been planted, and one day soon, I'll find the words which will let me begin to know what I really am, and what I'm still in the process of becoming ...'
It was comforting. It was necessary. The cold, bleak world didn't seem very welcoming, once I'd learned to love the owls. I needed the strength that the owls had given me, and I needed to remember where it had come from, what it was worth. I was afraid of forgetting, or perhaps being beguiled again by Maldureve and by the shadows from which he came. Once you've caught a glimpse of Paradise, you can't ever really be satisfied with anything less, and wherever you go you have to carry with you the horrible thought that perhaps you'll never get back.
I always knew that the owls were close at hand, that the borderlands were everywhere and anywhere, but sometimes—whenever the shadows drew in around me—I had to tell myself over and over again that I was still in their world, still in their safe hands, no matter where my body was or what I had to do. That was just the way of things.
In spite of everything, it still is, and probably always will be.
3
When I first woke up I was in a room of my own, but I was moved next morning to a ward. I was being kept in for ‘observation’ and didn't warrant special treatment any more.
The ward was awful. It was mostly populated by old ladies in for hip replacements and middle-aged ones for hysterectomies. It might have been a little bit interesting if there'd been some authentic human tragedy on display, but there wasn't. The prevailing mood was one of grumpy resentment; they felt that their bodies had let them down by failing to stand up to the pressures of everyday life, and they had all spent so long in queues waiting for vacancies at the repair shop that whatever patience they'd ever had was quite gone. Not one of them seemed relieved that it was going to be over at last; all their fear of the scalpel was diverted into streams of bitter misery. They took in one another's emotional laundry with evident relish, each one pandering to the paranoia of the next and all joining in together for the hymns of complaint. They envied me for having healed up already, and were not reluctant to make pointed comments about the unlucky person who was presumed to be waiting in line for my bed, plunged into abysmal depths of misery by fibroids or a dodgy pelvis. I hadn't even been properly raped.
I'd only been there half a day before I was longing to get out. I wanted to discharge myself, but Mum sided with the doctor in saying that I'd be a very silly girl if I did, given that I'd been unconscious for so long. Dr Fellowes didn't know why I hadn't woken up much earlier, and neither did Dr Hodgson, the consultant; they hadn't even got a theory to work on. They only wanted to keep me in so that they could pretend to be taking all possible precautions, but I had to let them. At least the hospital staff kept the reporters out—three or four of them tried to talk to me, but I only had to tell the nurses that I didn't want to. The nurses liked having an excuse to be firm with outsiders; it gave them a rare opportunity to vent their pent-up aggressions safely.
Dad drove all the way back for one day, just to see how I was, but he went home again in the evening so that he could go to work next day. He wanted to take Sharon with him, so that she could go back to school, but she stubbornly refused to go, saying that it was hardly worth it for half a week, and she'd come back at the weekend. Actually, there was no particular reason for Mum or Sharon to hang on, now that I was better, but Mum wouldn't have felt that she was doing her duty if she wasn't at my bedside every minute the hospital would allow.
It was difficult to believe that I'd only been away from home for less than a dozen weeks, and that Mum, Dad and Sharon had until recently been almost the whole of the society in which I lived. In the hospital, of course, Mum and Dad were out of their natural environment and out of their depth, but they seemed so very strange and alien that it was no longer possible for me to comprehend how I had let them shape and define my life and my identity for so long. They seemed ridiculously ineffectual as they racked their brains to try to think of new things to say and good advice to give.
They were just as uncomfortable, in their own way. Back home, when we were all together, they'd never had any reason to doubt that they knew best—that whatever situation I found myself in, they'd have the answers and the explanations, the essential wisdom to pass on. Whether it was falling down and gashing my knee when I was four, or seeing some freak expose himself when I was eight, or becoming infatuated with some boy at school when I was ten, or being mocked and harassed by the big kids at my new school when I was eleven, or starting my periods when I was thirteen, or doing GCSEs when I was sixteen, or leaving home when I was eighteen, they were always the experts. They had always been there. Even if they couldn't tell me exactly what to do—and they were sometimes scrupulous about letting me make my own decisions—they were perfectly certain that they knew how to go about weighing pros and cons.
They had convinced themselves, and me, that they knew how to live and how to teach others to live. They seemed able to take anything in their
stride, even Sharon's crude and half-hearted attempts to go against the grain. Jet-black hair, studded jackets and the fervent idolization of the Sisters of Mercy weren't nearly enough to faze or frighten them. But once a façade like that cracks, it shatters. They were finished now, and useless. I knew it and they knew it, although they didn't quite understand why. They had no idea how far things had gone. They still thought I was human.
I knew how much Mum hated being away from home, and that she hated it three times as much now Dad wasn't there to share the burden, but I knew too that she couldn't have torn herself away from me without falling prey to agonising guilt and anxiety. The pressure of absolute necessity forced her to go on being useless and miserable. I couldn't help but feel that she was the patient and I was the moral support. It all seemed rather unfair, somehow.
'I don't see why they can't transfer you to a hospital back home,’ Mum said, in the faintly fretful voice which she always used when the world wasn't living up to her expectations and she couldn't quite figure out why it had to be so intractably perverse. ‘Then Daddy could come to see you every evening, and Sharon would be prepared to go back to school.’ Sharon evaded the critical sideways glance which accompanied this statement with a casual expertise born of long practice.
'I can't come back yet,’ I told her. ‘There's still a whole week of term left, and I'm way behind in my work. They can't keep me in much longer. There's no need for me to be here at all.'
'Daddy could come down in the car and pick us up,’ she said, as if I hadn't said a word. ‘He could drive you to the local hospital himself. We could all go back together. They wouldn't mind, at the university. We spoke to a Dr Gray—he said that you didn't have to go back, when Daddy asked about it. You could catch up at home, and have a nice long rest. A good Christmas is what we all need.'
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