Mr Cassini

by Lloyd Jones

I went through it all again.

  Wells were probably seen as leading to the womb of an earth mother. The Celts probably believed in a well of knowledge. Nine hazel trees grew over Connla’s Well in Ireland and their nuts contained knowledge, wisdom and inspiration. When the nuts fell in the well they were swallowed by a salmon, and the spots on its flank revealed how many nuts it had eaten. In turn, anyone who drank the water of the well or ate the salmon attained knowledge, wisdom and inspiration.

  The Celtic Well of Wisdom was a place of healing. Well-pilgrims drank the water in a special cup made from a skull, creating a direct link with the dead in the Otherworld.

  Some wells had special powers on May Day or Midsummer’s Day when the gates of the Otherworld were open. Fairies or pixies were frequently sighted on these days.

  Some wells overflowed when negligent maidens forgot to cover them, creating lakes such as Llyn Glasfryn on the Lleyn Peninsula. As a punishment, the maidens were changed into fish or swans.

  Some wells held a malignant spirit which stole naughty children if they wandered away from their homes in a mist; this evil sprite was sometimes called Morgan.

  The name Morgan is linked to Morgan le Fay, one of the three queens who escorted Arthur to Afallon. The three queens were another version of the triple-goddess Coventina.

  Olly prompted me, again.

  ‘Well Duxie, come on, spill the beans.’ She smirked a bit and hurt me some more.

  ‘Who was the Lady of the Lake?’ I asked her. ‘Who exactly was she?’

  ‘You’re trying too hard,’ she said. ‘You need to take a rest. Why not go away for a while? Somewhere sunny, where you can relax. This business with the wells has messed up your brain.’

  ‘No, listen,’ I said. ‘I’ve cracked it.’

  Olly waited, her arms folded (rather defiantly) across her chest.

  ‘The Lady of the Lake presented Arthur with his magical sword Excalibur and reclaimed it when Bedwyr hurled it into the lake after Arthur’s defeat at Camlan. Right?’

  ‘Yup. Get a move on, it’s getting cold.’

  ‘Arthur was escorted to Afallon by three queens, right?’

  ‘Trust you to mention an escort agency.’

  ‘You really are trying to hurt my feelings this afternoon, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, of course I’m not. Just joking, right?’

  I continued. ‘The Lady of the Lake was a three-in-one figure just like Coventina. When we throw coins into a wishing well, what are we doing?’

  She makes an idiot-face. ‘Doh! We’re making a wish, right?’

  ‘To whom, exactly?’

  ‘I dunno. Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes it bloody well does. We’re making a wish to Lady Luck. And who do you think Lady Luck is?’

  ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a fuck.’

  ‘The Lady of the Lake, dumbo! The Lady of the Lake has become Lady Luck. Get it?’

  ‘Sounds feasible to me. Yeah, OK, I’ll go along with that one. Can we go now?’

  But I hadn’t finished.

  ‘So when I throw a coin into a well or a fountain and make a wish I’m going back a long, long way – into the distant past, when primitive people threw swords and other bits of metal into lakes, and to King Arthur himself and Excalibur. Clever, eh?’

  ‘OK smart arse, I’ll take your word for it. Now let’s go.’

  We were both subdued on the return journey. Coming down a bit from the cake. We sat on the back seat, me in the middle and Olly sitting with her back to a window, with her feet on my lap. As usual, I ended up massaging her tootsies. Pretty feet, clean feet, so no problem. I sometimes think it was the sole (ha!) basis of our friendship. We were as close as moan is to groan when I stroked her feet.

  ‘You’re the best,’ she’d say coquettishly. And I ended up stroking her feet, for hours, all over the place, not just on buses – in pubs, on cliffs, even at lectures. It was the most pleasure I ever gave a woman, I’m pretty sure of that.

  The old people were creaking to a halt; each movement was getting slower, jerkier, as they boarded or left the bus. Outside they froze into menhirs, propping up the bus shelters as if the tin roofs were cromlechs. Odd sights came our way: a huddle of garden gnomes, in committee, on the roof of a porch above a crooked pathway; a charnel of council houses, burnt onto the landscape with a poker; a man sitting in front of me wearing a cap inscribed Information Security Forum. That sounded spooky – perhaps he was Brains from Thunderbirds, fresh from dealing with another international incident in Nefyn.

  Only one person got on the bus when we reached the hospital – the girl who’d scrutinised her doctor’s note earlier (all the rest had died, presumably). She looked a lot happier; I had a feeling that this particular day would be framed on the wall of her life for some time to come, possibly for ever.

  Anyway, on with the story – and the search. I was about to quit the wells meditation; I’d hoped that a handful of recollections would come rattling into the sunlight, floating about in a rusty bucket, and if I was quick enough I could grab some of them before they escaped through the holes, back into the well. I read so much about wells my friends became worried about me. I even read some stories by HG Wells. Does that sound a bit nutty? Yes, I became a bit concerned myself at that point.

  I was using wells as a symbol of the forgotten past, the unseen, the hidden, the unconscious, and the subterranean vaults in my mind, whatever. I was trying to use wells as a mnemonic, as a bradawl to bore into the past. But nothing was happening. I decided to have one last go, by reading one of the most powerful books ever written about wells – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The main character in the book is Toru, a young man living in a Tokyo suburb. Toru’s cat disappears and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for them involves a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters and an old soldier who saw many horrors during the Second World War. The book is all about trying to get answers – through wells, mainly – and it’s about responsibility, both personal and national. Atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface of the book, as if they were repressed memories bobbing about in a well-bucket. Toru enters a netherworld beneath the placid surface of Tokyo, and below the history of Japan itself. Wells play an important part in his search for his own true self, and for the truth behind his country’s past. Here are a few passages from the book:

  ‘I don’t mind fighting,’ he said. ‘I’m a soldier. And I don’t mind dying in battle for my country because that’s my job. But this war we’re fighting now, Lieutenant – well it’s just not right. It’s not a real war, with a battle line where you face the enemy and fight to the end. We advance, and the enemy runs away without fighting. Then the Chinese soldiers take their uniforms off and mix with the civilian population, and we don’t even know who the enemy is. So then we kill a lot of innocent people in the name of flushing out ‘renegades’ or ‘remnant troops’, and we commandeer provisions. We have to steal their food, because the line moves forward so fast our food supplies can’t catch up with us. And we have to kill our prisoners because we don’t have anywhere to keep them or any food to feed them. It’s wrong, Lieutenant. We did some terrible things in Nanking. My own unit did. We threw dozens of people into a well and dropped hand grenades in after them. Some of the things we did I can’t bring myself to talk about. I’m telling you, Lieutenant, this is one war that doesn’t have any Righteous Cause. It’s just two sides killing each other. And the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or ideology…’

  We travelled north for two hours or more, coming to a stop near a Lamaist devotional mound. These stone markers, called oboo, serve both as the guardian deity for travellers and as valuable signposts in the desert. Here the men dismounted and untied my ropes. Supporting my weight on either side, two of them led me a short distance. I figured that this was where I would be killed. A well had been dug into the earth
here. The mouth of the well was surrounded by a three-foot-high stone curb. They made me kneel down beside it, grabbed my neck from behind, and forced me to look inside. I couldn’t see a thing in the impenetrable darkness. The noncom with the boots found a fist-sized rock and dropped it into the well. Some time later came the dry sound of stone hitting sand. So the well was a dry one, apparently. It had once served as a well in the desert, but it must have dried up long before, owing to a movement of the subterranean vein of water. Judging from the time it took the stone to hit the bottom, it seemed to be quite deep.

  The noncom looked at me with a big grin. Then he took a large automatic pistol from the leather holster on his belt. He released the safety and fed a bullet into the chamber with a loud click. Then he put the muzzle of the gun against my head.

  He held it there for a long time but did not pull the trigger. Then he slowly lowered the gun and raised his left hand, pointing towards the well. Licking my dry lips, I stared at the gun in his fist. What he was trying to tell me was this: I had a choice between two fates. I could have him shoot me now – just die and get it over with. Or I could jump into the well. Because it was so deep, if I landed badly I might be killed. If not, I would die slowly at the bottom of a dark hole. At last it dawned on me that this was the chance that the Russian officer had spoken of. The Mongolian noncom pointed at the watch that he had taken from Yamamoto and held up five fingers. He was giving me five seconds to decide. When he got to three I stepped onto the well curb and leaped inside…

  How much time went by after that I do not know. But at one point something happened that I would never have imagined. The light of the sun shot down from the opening of the well like some kind of revelation. In that instant, I could see everything around me. The well was filled with brilliant light. A flood of light. The brightness was almost stifling: I could hardly breathe. The darkness and cold were swept away in a moment, and warm, gentle sunlight enveloped my naked body. Even the pain I was feeling seemed to be blessed by the light of the sun, which now warmly illuminated the white bones of the small animal besides me. These bones, which could have been an omen of my own impending fate, seemed in the sunlight more like a comforting companion. I could see the stone wall that encircled me. As long as I remained in the light, I was able to forget about my fear and pain and despair. I sat in the dazzling light in blank amazement. Then the light disappeared as suddenly as it had come. Deep darkness enveloped everything once again. The whole interval had been extremely short…

  What happened down there? What did it mean? Even now, more than forty years later, I cannot answer all those questions with any certainty. Which is why what I am about to say is strictly a hypothesis, a tentative explanation that I have fashioned for myself without the benefit of any logical basis…

  Outer Mongolian troops had thrown me into a deep, dark well in the middle of the steppe, my leg and shoulder were broken, I had neither food nor water: I was simply waiting to die. Before that, I had seen a man skinned alive. Under these special circumstances, I believe, my consciousness had attained such a viscid state of concentration that when the intense beam of light shone down for those few seconds, I was able to descend into a place that might be called the very core of my own consciousness. In any case, I saw the shape of something there. Just imagine. Everything around me is bathed in light. I am in the very centre of a flood of light. My eyes can see nothing. I am simply enveloped in light. But something begins to appear there. In the midst of my momentary blindness, something is trying to take shape. Some thing. Some thing that possessed life. Like the shadow in a solar eclipse, it begins to emerge, black, in the light. But I can never quite make out its form. It is trying to come to me, trying to confer upon me something very much like heavenly grace…

  I would not have minded dying right then and there. I truly felt that way. I would have sacrificed anything for a full view of its form.

  Finally, though, the form was snatched away from me for ever…

  The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment – perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one’s life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.

  After reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle I decided to end my study of wells.

  I had bored into the crust of my past, drilled with all the energy I had, but I had failed to tap any hidden memory – that’s assuming, of course, that I had any memories to uncover. For many months I had behaved like the solitary spiny mason wasp, which bores into sandbanks or into the mortar of old walls, stocking its nest with small caterpillars; or another digger wasp, ectemnius cephalotes, which drills into rotten tree stumps and then stocks its nest with paralysed flies. I had dug down too, but to no avail; I had failed to line my nest with a single grubby memory. There was either nothing there to discover or I had failed, miserably, to reach the subterranean river I had hoped to find. It seemed possible that I had put my past into a paper boat, while I was still small, crouching on a riverbank, and sent all my memories spinning into the darkness beyond. Or maybe all my memories had been taken – like nectar – to a glass beehive inside my brain, and the glass now prevented me from touching the honey.

  There is a marked change of mood in chapter seven of Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise. The jaunty, optimistic air of the previous chapters is swept aside as ap Llwyd deliberates the pros and cons of embarking on a bold and dangerous descent into the heart of the mountain beneath him. Although he has discovered seven interconnected wells containing water of the highest purity, he feels impelled to go a stage further: as he sits in sombre mood by his campfire, at the mouth of a cave, he muses thus in his unfinished diary:

  It is now, more than ever, that I need Stefano’s advice. The seven wells are fed by a deep and untraceable source which seemingly emanates from the centre of the Earth itself. Should I attempt to trace it? What would Stefano say? The cave behind me, sunk as it is in limestone, bears plentiful evidence of having been a water conduit in times past. It seems logical, therefore, to assume that it would take me to the source of the well water. But I am daunted by the many dangers I face. The cave is likely to go down a very long way, and I have only two spare batteries for my torch. I am alone, and there is no one to summon help if I become trapped or lost. I feel sure that Stefano would say: This is a foolish mission my friend, it is too dangerous for one man to face alone. Go in haste to the town, fetch your friends, they will wait at the mouth of the cave, and they will follow the rope down if you do not come back. But a voice inside me says: Now is the time. Seize the moment.

  There is another issue, and I must face up to it now. If I am to discover the truth about what is inside me, True Self or False Self, this is the time to find out. In the dark bowels of the mountain I will discover which part of me will survive in a crisis; whether my True Self will emerge victorious through the mouth of the cave, or my False Self. That is the issue I must face alone, in the darkness beneath me. Perhaps I have been seized by a temporary madness, but of one thing I am utterly sure: tonight is the night when I will find out.

  As I sat on the bus, studying the stark contours of Carnedd Llewelyn and the rest of the range around it, and massaging Olly’s feet (she was almost asleep now), I considered that last sentence again. It seemed as though a magnetic force was pulling him towards the cave, an irresistible power dragging him downwards. And it became clear, also, that a battle was raging inside him: a battle between two forces – one called True Self, the other called False Self. I had never heard those terms before. What, exactly, was ap Llwyd doing?

  He was a diviner, a water witch whose preferred instrument was the hazel rod, rather than metal, or whalebone, or the pendulum, or even a twisted coat hanger.

  Since that journey with Ol
ly I have studied ap Llwyd’s Well Diary, which is kept in a vault at Aberystwyth. He was aware of the tendentious nature of his work, but he was a firm believer in its virtues. His own studies had been exhaustive. Ancient wall paintings in the Caves of Tassili in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains of North Africa depicted a tribesman dowsing for water. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled as late as 1861 that ground water was too secret and occult to be adjudicated by law. In the 1920s a Major CA Pogson, the Government of India’s Official Water Diviner, had ranged for thousands of miles finding wells and bores.

  There was another branch of the science: radiesthesia, which attempted to locate missing people and detect illnesses. Medical diagnosis through dowsing was permitted in Britain and Europe but not in the United States. Some dowsers operated telepathically, using maps and pendulums. Some modern theorists believed that diviners became attuned to the object they sought; others believed the dowser’s nervous system was stimulated by electro-magnetism. Einstein was fascinated by dowsing.

  It seems that ap Llwyd was an experimentalist, regarded as a maverick by his contemporaries. But he had some rare results. We can only speculate on what he discovered before he had that terrible accident deep inside the mountain. The misfortune put paid to all his adventuring; he worked for Stefano thereafter, in the Italian café at the top end of town, near the notorious 43 Club. He was noted for his limp, his acute sense of humour, and the inner radiance which shone from him throughout the rest of his life, after his recovery. For although he lost a leg he gained something else down there at three thousand feet below the foothills of paradise: he gained an inner awareness, a self-knowledge which brought him great happiness… a hidden lake of contentment.

  I had such a lovely time that day at Glynllifon. But now I must put aside my memories of ap Llwyd and Olly, our trip on the bus, my wave of farewell to Olly as she slipped off homewards, still a bit zonked by the chocolate cake. It happened some time ago, and all that remains is a soft and muted remembrance of things past. When Olly disappeared I was forced to formulate a new plan. It was my turn, not Olly’s, to go to the dark side – to a sinister substratum in our tale. It was time for me to act on her behalf, before my tiredness overwhelmed me. Olly and I had failed to eliminate Mr Cassini, to eradicate him from our dreams and our daily thoughts. He had attached himself to us parasitically – and don’t forget, almost half of all living things are parasites. I had a cunning plan: in Olly’s absence I would continue the task on her behalf. I would purge the monster known to all of us as Mr Cassini. And I would do that by invoking a character in her dreams – PC 66. Who better? He was an accessory to the fact. At best he was guilty of inertia, at worst collusion. Maybe he and Cassini were crude symbols of the state and the church, I don’t know. The ambivalence of his number – 66 or 99 – seemed to point towards a central ambiguity. But he seemingly wanted to redeem himself. So I would give him an opportunity to do so now. I would send for him, metaphorically, and outline a possible plan of action. I would show him how he could get rid of Mr Cassini – a man who stole childhoods. But PC 66 needed some allies, since he couldn’t do it all alone.