Over the stern of a gently swaying boat the white haired old man hauled in a line. Gasping fish filled the boxes on the bottom boards of his boat. Great cod with round expressionless eyes fought against asphyxiation; each gasp became slower, their mouths opened and closed less frequently. Gnarled fingers held the fish by a gill, drew a hook and slipped the silver body to flap its tail amongst the rest. A dark brown sail lay across the thwarts. An island fell away to starboard. It stretched untamed like some ultramarine creature under vast marble clouds. White sculptured columns they rested upon an advancing streak of grey.
The fisherman lashed his tiller and stepped to the mast. A lug sail clawed aloft, barely filling its canvas in the fitful puffs of wind that beset man and boat. He glanced astern. A black line split the sky over the white of a frothing sea. The air hot, then cold. The canvas shivered. Without warning the sail cracked, belly full. Jabbing waves surrounded the boat. Pointed crests broke over the gunnels.
A white head crouched, one hand to free the tiller, the other struggling to loose the main sheet. Stern lifting, heeling hard, he fought a broach. Fish boxes slid. The wind from howling turned to screeching. Mast stays, old tarred rope, rod taut. A hissing sea began to lift and spiral. Crack, crack, the sail backed. Devil’s violence, the mast crashed onto a gunnel. She broached. Beam to sea, she rolled. Boxes slid, dead fish poured into a tumult of lashing spray. Crooked hands grasped the gunnel, their grip was torn away. A face looked up. The face of a Viking.
A shock of white hair, a bobbing head amongst seething wave tops in a green, green world. One light above, dimming, dimming, until only eyes of understanding held the horizon in their blueness, and stared out of a long box.
Consciousness came to me as great white sheets swirling about a floating form. My eyes opened. I struggled to focus on the green figures. Bent and hovering forms against a halo of light. And again, the smell of blood, warm as though oozing from a dying form. I clawed wildly. Escape, escape.
Blackness was closing, I felt neither fear nor bodily pain, only the mental ache of a profound regret, the sadness at an unfathomable loss. Slipping away- the gleam of light at the edge of understanding was slipping away. My mind struggled, grasping ever more feebly to reach the truth my work had been about to reveal. The light dimmed, began to flicker, as though the energy of my innermost soul was being transmuted into dimensions without physical form.
“No, no. Not now, not now, I need to know.” I heard a disembodied croaking. Great black wings spread on a billowing canvas. The Raven had put to sea.
Wavering light played on a dark ceiling, candlelit shapes weaved in and out of being. A sharp face stared out of a long box. Its white hair had been neatly combed above a broad, smooth forehead. Strong features, narrow nose and jutting jaw, no face of smooth living, but carved by Atlantic gale.
Worn hands of sinew and vein, lank and finished, flanked the sides of a coarse grey smock. Crooked hands, clenched by the grip of toil. Thumbs and fingers made cups, each held a spray of the first little blue speedwell. The head tried to rise, hands straining at the rough sides of a long box, eyes burnt with the brightness of a warning, an ardent plea. Gradually the old face sank back into a salt stained pillow, and slowly its flesh dissolved. Bit by bit bones protruded, cheeks became craters below a tall forehead, until only teeth and skull remained.
Last to fade from black round sockets were imploring blue eyes, blue and deep. In their distant focus were horizons of space and freedom.
Vague stooping figures bore a coffin of rough hewn planks along the grooves of a sand blown track. Spring had come to the dunes, the machair sparkled, fresh from the showers which fell like dust on the lambing pastures. The thin bleating of the new born was on a breeze that held the warmth of southern latitudes. Down by the tidal wrack a flock of dark backed curlew were resting before a journey long and far; and occasionally their ascending trill was on the soft rhythm of an ebbing tide.
Above the beach, the green of sheep cropped turf was smothered by yellow primroses. In a burying ground of low stone dyke were simple wooden crosses, their bleached arms and worn spines ground smooth by drifting sand, the wood hardened by salt. They leant against each winter gale, unpretentious symbols, worthy by their toughness of those below. And amongst their number the long box was lowered.
‘Earth to earth, dust to dust.’ I heard the music of the geese rising from Atlantic’s edge, and on their northbound wings went all meaning of death.
Thoughtful heads were bowed; by turn each figure bent, took sand. In solemn thuds it fell, dull, hollow thuds, a beating drum in the caverns of eternity.
Slowly as the coffin covered, I looked down.
Letters were burned upon its lid.
Hector MacKenzie of Sandray, drowned 30th April, 1846, aged 84.
In utter horror, I looked upon my name.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Sundial without a sunset
Ten days, ten years, a thousand, nothing marked their passing. There is no judge of time beyond a conscious form, nor for a mind separated from bodily sensation. I merely lay, inert and staring; the white ceiling, sometimes clear and bright, often a fog wavering with dark shapes. Yet my thoughts remained surprisingly lucid. The hallucinations, if that’s what they were, I relived clearly and strongly. Had they any meaning beyond the ravings of a brain wrestling on the edge of some great journey, defending itself against death?
Mysteries of the occult, flickering candles and an esoteric cloak of preying shadows, the black art of necromancy, communications from the grave, warning or portent; what factor, what force, totally unknown to present science could bridge the gap, exist outwith time and space?
Nothing in my research on particle interchange so far led me to believe that images sprang from the cosmic void. Exchanges in the energy flow of charged particles I understood, to a degree. Electro-chemical reactions become memories, are stored, forgotten, and await recall; dormant yet existing; but in what form? Could the charged heights of human emotion be transmitted? A psychic wavelength imprinted on some unfathomable dimension of the heavens? There to wait, holistic and impervious to the particle decay which destroys a universe, only to build again.
Beyond all my attempts to frame some logical understanding, her eyes had appeared in my vision, appeared to me moments before we’d gazed at each other; that much I knew. The eyes of the vision and those of the woman were identical. I’d looked into them in a waking dream, only to meet them again in the seconds before a suicide bomber almost took my life and limb.
Moreover, dramatic scenes and faces had arisen as I hovered on the brink of death. Happenings totally unrelated to anything of which I was aware; not in my daily work, certainly not in memories, yet still they possessed an inexplicable familiarity. Was I subconsciously reaching for a wholesomeness, the caress of a breeze untainted by progress, its healing touch, the freedom to work at pace of each tide? An incessant calling filled the corridors of my mind, played like a torch flame on the cave paintings of survival, became rays of sunlight on shallow water that lit the union of radiation with the grains of being. The sun, the sun, I longed for the sun on my aching body.
Yellow and bright on a white counterpane, sunlight poured through a tall window drawing a line across my bed. Three o’clock, one minute past, two, three, then five past, the long hand on the wall clock moved in jerks. My eye flitted between its hand and a shadow moving on the bed. The grandeur of a skyscraper opposite the hospital became the pointer of a sundial which crept across my counterpane until its dying shaft gave way to the glitter of a thousand office windows. The shadow of the skyscraper fell across the bed, a sundial without a sunset. I raised myself on an elbow and gazed at towers of concrete. Street lighting replaced sunsets.
I lay back on the pillows, immobility had revalued attitudes. Behind glass rows of office workers sat at computer systems; by raising my head I could see them, the epitome of an imprisoned population dependent on a surfeit of cheap food produced by artificial means
and adulterated by chemicals. The previous year I’d watched a colleague in Geneva die at fifty with stomach cancer.
Another bout of fear gripped me. Forty flights up and an escalator, buildings leaned into my mind, half my life spent cooped in concrete, the prison walls of a system controlling my existence. Walls were crushing me, entombing me in the terror of claustrophobia. I panicked, “Nurse, is it possible to open my window, please?” I asked as steadily as possible.
She smiled and shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow, if you’re a good boy,” and trying to restrain me, “don’t get up.”
Though kindness surrounded me and treatment had been faultless, I pushed her arm to one side. Coughing and wheezing for the first time I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Shaking her head, the nurse helped me to stand tottering at the window ledge.
Forty stories below car lights probed a haze of diesel fumes and weaved amongst bus roofs, a torrent of civilisation swept along the motorway, a species under pressure, threshing erratically in the quick-sands of a modern lifestyle. A planet killed by coal and the motorcar, the supreme irony of sunshine buried for three hundred million years being in released in three hundred. Death by diesel. I struggled to stop a frenzied train of thoughts from controlling my mind?
Pavements jostled with earnest people, hurrying minions under constant surveillance, their private affairs stolen by hidden computers. It reflected my own hustling days, flagging a taxi to meetings, drinking coffee with pompous chairmen heading for the knighthoods nudged by political donations. I suffered research budgets cut by top brass civil servants retiring to index linked pensions paid for by the nation’s masses. Talk, talk, a facility for jargon in a safe pair of hands. Invited to fancy bow tie Geneva parties because I’d been introduced to some of the faceless Bond Market and currency manipulators. It didn’t take long to realize their interest was limited to speculating on how quickly scientific results could be turned into cash. From the safety of exclusive bunkers they viewed the world, natural or otherwise, as a giant bank vault. It left me in no doubt that financial fanatics controlled international affairs.
Narrowly escaping death at the hands of another breed of fanatic had overwhelmingly altered my perceptions of modern society. My view that evening from a hospital window took on a strangely objective detachment. A massive unstoppable charade played out on the street below; civilization walked blindfold towards a precipice and the yawning chasm of planetary collapse. The certitude of the peril we faced struck me with the power of a revelation.
Momentous decisions are straight from the gut. From that moment the direction of my life would be changed totally. My head ached, my heart pounded. I was being driven, unmercifully driven by the calling of some other place, the challenge of finding some another way to achieve a purpose for existing. Geneva no more sounded melodramatic. But to where, to what? That didn’t matter. Sick or not I’d break out of here.
The nurse helped me from the window. I sank back on the bed, panting from the effort. Good god, my arms were thin, I held up the left one and studied an ugly red weal on my wrist? Of course, the briefcase, yes, where was it now and its politically damning contents?
Confused thoughts were clearing. I found it possible to recall my appointment with the swivel eyed Goldberg and the soft handshake of a scientist putting a front on politician designs. Sitting beside the PM., a man of gushing bonhomie brimming with altruism, his nuclear intentions held with a messianic certainty.
More particularly, I recalled the unspoken pressure to gag my research paper hid a certain menace. Would I be followed? My research results could impact adversely on the whole nuclear industry, the weapons’ industry and definitely the wider field of international treaties. The problem of the safe long term storage of lethal material lay at the crux of all these issues.
I knew the Non-Proliferation Treatise was in limbo, had failed to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. Any agreement based on ‘we have weapons, and won’t give them up, you haven’t and are not allowed them, was bound to fail. The fact of America not signing the Treaty amounted to defying any ban. Some countries were even withdrawing from current arrangements and weapon testing was suspected.
Worse still, turning a blind eye on Israel’s secret nuclear bombs by a main player in negotiations, the U.S.A., had made diplomacy a fraught business. Other nations clambering to develop civilian nuclear plants with potential for producing the fissile material required in bomb making would become a dire threat. Back in 1995 the U.N. had proposed a treaty which aimed to outlaw the making of weapons grade material. Nothing came of it, mainly due to America’s refusal to accept the required inspection.
Depression always followed a high. I knew at first hand the dangers of radiation and I’d picture the mushroom cloud which obliterated Hiroshima. Suddenly the flash would strike, back on the tube train, I’d smell cordite, see the blood, hear the tortured screams, the hideous screaming. Arms flailing, an unstoppable groaning would seize me, until gradually the scene faded and I’d look into beckoning blue eyes and feel a surge of relief.
I’d turned the key of my two bed-roomed Geneva flat on the morning of the tube train attack and flown into London. Colleagues at the research establishment had wished me success. A single chap, none left to worry about me nor expect any contact until my return. None at all, not even the shreds of a broken love affair, two years past and a regret rather than the anguish of separation.
Long days at the research establishment, do they mean more to you than me? She’d said this again as we walked that night along the shores of Lake Geneva. How could I explain I’d embarked on a quest that burnt in my mind by day, lit fresh insights on wakening. I was climbing, slipping, climbing again, striving to grasp The Holy Grail of science, the unravelling of particle behaviour at the birth of the universe, perhaps even the mystery of dark matter.
How often I’d tried to explain. She’d walked a little ahead. The meal had lacked conversation, no mention of the of the film we’d seen that evening, but its background music lingered. The sadness of ‘Watership Down,’ played through my head. “Bright eyes, burning in like fire. How could eyes that burned so brightly suddenly burn so dim, bright eyes?” Perhaps the tune set my mood. I had caught up with her and put an arm round her waist. “I’m sorry,” was the best I could muster. Across the lake in the bitter sharp night of an Alpine winter the great giants had their peaks under snow and slept on the lake. She followed my eyes and guessed my meaning. We clung, sobbing, and then, without a kiss, we walked in opposite directions.
I phoned a line which rang and rang.
My father, the chief analytical chemist with Imperial Tobacco in New York, and a forty a day man, died relatively young with lung cancer. Mother, as a beautiful young widow, stayed on in America and eventually married again. For all I knew there could be half brothers and sisters somewhere in the States. Although she was a first generation American, the mark of Highland blood showed in her strong, handsome face. I recall her expressive playing of the old Scots fiddle tunes. To childish amazement I’d watch a tear trickling down her cheek. Possibly because I was still quite young when they packed me off to boarding school, neither of my parents featured greatly in my affections. Was she still alive? I didn’t know.
A week before Dad’s death she’d flown me out from school to see him. I stood beside his hospital cot. Sunlight through the window fell across a crumpled, yellow faced old man, all that remained of the virile father I’d known. I see yet the form of his face; broad, high forehead, a hooked nose, predacious in profile, but most strikingly, the clear blue eyes. That afternoon they shone out of his gaunt features with a peculiar light which penetrated through and beyond me.
We had never been familiar but he caught my hand and the smile which always lurked behind his eyes appeared as he spoke, “All my life has been a search, a quest for that ultimate equation, the key to unlocking a mathematical pattern which is the pure and glorious template of infinity. Understand infinity and you strike the
anvil upon which every force and particle of this universe and all other universes, past and future are forged. It’s the music of unending beauty.”
His voice became a cough; he turned aside for some minutes, until, with a spark of the vigour which I remembered from childhood, he said, “I never found that equation. If you ever do, guard it with your life. It’s the key which unlocks the secret haven of eternal consciousness.”
I looked out of his window. Sunlight played on the leaves of the aspen trees. They shivered in a breeze which highlighted their paleness. And in their yellow fluttering, the sun danced.
He stirred a little, “Hector boy, I lie here dying. Tonight, tomorrow? The music is soaring, filling my head, taking away fear. I’m young again. There is no void, only these soaring notes of beauty. I hear them, as though from the heart of all creation. There is no death. Believe in beauty. Its melody is the key to eternity.”
I was twelve. Those were his last words.
The blue eyes remained staring.
He was reaching for that key.
CHAPTER FIVE
Escape
How long had I been in this single ward? Had I been identified? So far I hadn’t been asked to put any details on a form. That struck me as strange. No visitors, but then there was nobody I knew in London. Would my colleagues trace me? Unease continually affected my thinking. Never mind the contents of my briefcase. If the damn thing still existed, maybe I’d shown my contempt for the politicians too openly. So far no police to see me, but I was getting increasingly alarmed. Concern over being detained erupted. God, I must get out of this place.
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