by Phil Rickman
‘Not one of your gullible rich folk. Ersula was on the staff for the summer. One of the expert research team. They had several archaeology graduates helping organize the field trips and stuff like that. Of course, they weren’t paying her anything either, apart from expenses and accommodation, but she-’
‘-was allowed to be part of the Great Experiment, too,’ Lyndon said with a wry, fatcat smile. ‘Educated people can be soooooo naive.’
‘Nnn-nn.’ Grayle shook her head. ‘This woman is a believer in neither God nor spaceships. A sober, bookish person. Her father’s daughter, you know?’
Five weeks ago, their mother, folding Ersula’s last letter from England, had said lightly, ‘Well … she’s getting into some stimulating areas. She’s having fun. In her own way. I guess.’
It was true that Ersula’s official letter to Mom had been mostly about what fun she was having and how hospitable and kind the Brits were, not stiff and stuffy like you were led to expect. Her letter to their father, although more academically oriented, would likewise include nothing pertaining to nights spent under prehistoric stone monuments.
That Ersula’s letter to Grayle was more revealing came as no big surprise. Since Mom went off with the younger lover and Dad locked himself in his Harvard tower, they’d become warily closer for the first time in years. The letter began, You may be interested in some of this, but for Christ’s sake, DSF!
DSF: Don’t Show the Folks.
Ersula’s last letter. Before the silence.
‘Run this past me one more time,’ Lyndon said. ‘Your younger but normally more balanced sister has been sleeping in a Stone Age burial chamber. She lose her credit cards, or what?’
‘If you aren’t going to take this seriously-’
‘Jesus,’ said Lyndon, whose job at the New York Courier was all about knowing which stories to take seriously. The waitress arrived with the doughnuts and they helped themselves. The waitress stepped back, studying Grayle. She was a new waitress.
‘No, see, the problem with Ersula …’ Grayle inspected her doughnut then shrugged and took a bite. ‘Balanced? Yeah, OK, in some ways. But also passionate. More than that, obsessive. She gets into something, it’s like … whooosh.’
‘Unlike you,’ Lyndon McAffrey said heavily.
‘Unlike me. Like, Ersula would not eat this doughnut. She doesn’t do comfort-eating. Ersula is very controlled. Has concentration. Focus. All of that.’
‘Dear God,’ said Lyndon. ‘We hired the wrong sister.’
‘Also, as a committed academic, Ersula vaguely despises the inevitable superficiality of journalism.’
Lyndon McAffrey nodded moodily. Twenty-five years ago, he’d become the paper’s first black deputy city editor. Since then there’d been three black city editors and Lyndon … well, he was still number two. He knew all about being vaguely despised.
‘Hey!’ The waitress suddenly screamed. ‘You are! I saw you on TV. You’re Grayle Underhill? Holy Grayle? For Crissakes, this is incredible, this is fate. I was gonna write to you. I need your help.’
The waitress pulled out a chair, flopped into it.
‘See, my boyfriend, who most times is this real sweet guy, every few weeks he comes on kind of mean, and I noticed — this is true, I swear on my mother’s grave — he has to shave twice … three times a day?’
Lyndon looked down at his plate, closed lips strained by an uh-huh kind of smile.
‘Time of the full moon, huh?’ Grayle said without enthusiasm.
‘See, I tell this to people,’ the waitress said, ‘and they’re like … oh, sure. Then I’m reading that thing you wrote about how men, they all have this werewolf element to a degree, and I’m going, Right, shit, yes, this is the woman I have to talk with. And now here you are. You tell me this isn’t, like, karma or something …?’
Grayle said, ‘Listen, uh …’
‘Marcia.’
‘Marcia. Right. OK. The piece I wrote, Marcia, that was like an interview with the author of this book, The Lycanthropic Virus, which examines the effect of the full moon on society and blah, blah, blah. So if you have a problem in this area, the person you need to, uh, approach is the author, D. Harvey Baumer. Maybe if you wrote him through the publisher?’
‘That would take forever,’ Marcia said dubiously. ‘See, the way you wrote the article, it was like you really had a handle on the whole thing.’
‘Yeah, that’s … that’s part of the job, Marcia. Look, all I can suggest is maybe if I was to do an article on your situation.’ Grayle pulled a pen from her bag. ‘So your second name is …?’
‘Uh-uh …’ Marcia was up on her feet and back behind the counter in a couple of seconds. ‘I don’t think so. I think I misunderstood. I mean, you sound like some kind of journalist …’
Lyndon started to chuckle, dusting sugar crystals from his big hands.
‘This is not funny,’ Grayle told him when Marcia, mercifully, had gone to wait on another table. ‘I get this all the time. You write a New Age column, people think you must be a person of, like, higher dimensions.’
‘You write a crime column, they think you’re a sleazeball with Mob connections,’ Lyndon said unsympathetically. ‘What’s your problem?’
‘This is different. This is about spirituality. How do I know I’m not messing up someone’s immortal soul? How do I know how much of what I’m publicizing is true or at least well intentioned and life-enhancing? Crime, you know who the bad guys are, New Age, you can never be quite sure.’
Grayle licked raspberry jam from her fingers. Nearly thirty years separated her and Lyndon, a sweet tooth glued them together. Journalism could be a hostile world, especially when most of your colleagues thought everything you wrote about was a piece of crap.
‘Ersula thinks I just peck around things, like a chicken.’
‘She thinks that, huh?’ Lyndon’s eyes widened. ‘Imagine.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Screw you too. Maybe she’s right. Back when I was in college and she was still in school we were both heavily into New Age. Like, we’d talk about cosmic consciousness and read the Tarot and stuff in my room and have a lot of innocent fun. I should’ve realized that Ersula, even then, she only had serious fun. She would throw herself into something and then emerge the other side, dismissing it all as bullshit. When she was fourteen or fifteen and I was at college I found she’d been, you know … initiated? As a witch?’
‘Eye of newt?’ Lyndon was unfazed. ‘Toe of frog?’
‘As I recall, they were known as the Hermetic Sisterhood of Central Park West. I didn’t look too closely at her altar. I think it was just candles and pentagrams, but she made sure and piled it all in the trash before the folks got home from vacation. It was OK; by then she’d concluded this was all phoney shit anyway. You wanted to get into the real, authentic stuff, you checked out True Ethnic Sources. It was a short hop from there to anthropology and related studies … and to despising her sister, her sister’s crystals, her sister’s amulets … OK, go ahead, read the letter …’
St Mary’s
Herefordshire
England
August 20Dear Grayle,First off, if you want the nice stuff about the accommodation and the scenery and all the wonderful people I’m meeting, you should read Mom’s letter. I’m not doing that crap twice.OK. You may be interested in some of this, but for Christ’s sake, DSF!As I may have indicated, I was frankly skeptical about the University of the Earth summer school. There is a lunatic fringe which has infiltrated archeology here in Britain (people who believe ancient sites were strung out in mystical straight lines, to follow the courses of some mysterious earth-power which they cannot define except to say it can give you a buzz) and I was less than enthusiastic at the thought of working with an organization which seeks to build bridges with these airheads.However, in the absence of a better way of researching prehistoric remains in the British Isles and getting paid for it … here I am, in this tiny, comparatively isolated village on the border of E
ngland and Wales.So … OK.The dreaming experiment.The airheads have been suggesting for some time that human consciousness can be altered or infiltrated by the ‘energies’ at ancient burial mounds, stone circles, whatever, and that this occurs most effectively during sleep.Our distant ancestors were people whose day-to-day survival depended upon an intimacy with their environment, an understanding — which we today would consider inexplicably precognitive — of what the Earth was going to do and when. Dreams were considered to be an important way in which useful information was conveyed to them. In the Old Testament, wasn’t it Jacob who slept on a pillow of stone and had prophetic dreams? While in ancient China, the emperor would spend the whole night on stone before making some important decision. You get the idea.The University of the Earth Dream Survey aims to establish whether specific images or motifs occur in the dreams of people sleeping at particular ‘sacred’ sites. Individuals elect to spend the night in a sleeping bag inside a circle or a burial chamber with a helper or therapeute who, while they sleep, stays awake with a tape recorder, watching for the Rapid Eye Movement which will indicate they are dreaming. At which stage the dreamer is awoken and gives a full resume of the dream into the recorder.Off-the-wall? Yeah, I thought so when I was appointed therapeute to a middle-aged woman who talked about meeting fairies with which she frolicked naked under a waterfall! Then Roger suggested I should sleep at a site myself… and my mind was somewhat blown by an extraordinary vivid and lucid dream — one in which I was fully aware of dreaming and able to function on a mental level I would never have imagined possible.I was, you might say, hooked.
Lyndon shook sugar from Ersula’s letter. ‘Looks like she’s headed back your way.’
‘Which is not good, for the reasons I already stated.’
‘Whooosh?’
‘As an academic, Ersula believes nowadays in the power of the mind over the power of the spirit. Well, OK, she has a good mind and I’m stupid, and when you’re stupid all you got to fall back on most of the time is, like, the dream that some kind of spiritual earthquake will come along and get us out of all this shit.’
‘This may be getting too heavy and West Coast for a poor Brooklyn boy,’ Lyndon said.
Grayle stared at the river of blood seeping out of the half-eaten doughnut. For Ersula, nothing was an inexplicable phenomenon any more. So nothing was spiritually threatening.
She looked up, saw her own frustrated face in the mirror across the counter, lumps of blond hair all over the place, the Eye of Horus earrings swinging. Crazy Grayle Underhill, New Age Sub-culture Columnist, widely syndicated.
‘Huh?’
‘I said, if there’s some way I can help you,’ Lyndon McAffrey said patiently, ‘maybe you could just lay it out for me in moron-speak.’
‘Finish the letter,’ Grayle said. ‘I’m delaying you. Your wife will think you’re having an affair.’
‘Haw,’ said Lyndon. He picked up the second sheet of blue airmail paper and read it with obvious concentration before re-reading the first sheet.
‘Hmm.’ He grunted thoughtfully. ‘I begin to see your point.’At night, you discover, stone is always cold.Sleeping on stone — that’s not natural. You awake time after time, usually uncomfortable as hell and sometimes in a panic simply because of the stone all around you. Well, that’s good — it shouldn’t come easy, not at first. Without a challenge there can be no achievement.Which is just as well because this particular burial chamber, where I slept last night, is fully exposed, the earthmound which once concealed it having long since eroded. It is like a long, low stone table on little, stubby legs. Or maybe a clump of big mushrooms fused together. Kind of weird-looking, but not what you would call spectacular. Indeed, without a large-scale map you would not find it at all except by accident.Well, certainly not at night.Under your head is an old gray stone which you can feel as though there was no sleeping bag there at all. What it makes you think of is those petrified pillows supporting marble effigies on tombs in old churches. Creepy, huh?Hey, come on. This is a scientific experiment.Anyway, like I said, when you sleep on stone, sometimes you awake but you’re not awake, if this makes sense. You know you can’t be, because the stone isn’t cold, nor even hard; you’re sinking into it — so damn grateful it isn’t cold and hard any more that you just let yourself luxuriate in it. And down you go, quite painlessly, into the ground, into the earth. Your subconscious mind that is. Or whatever you want to call the part of you that admits the dreams.You come to realize that the very easiest phase is the letting go. I say easy … it was hard for me at first. I am, as you can guess, the odd one out on this course, most of the others being half-assed pseudo-mystics who are just here for the buzz. (You will notice, Grayle, that I have been at pains not to say ‘people like you’.)They tell you not to think too hard before you go to sleep, so maybe it’s just as well your main concern is to get comfortable. If you go into waking fantasies and your conscious mind influences your dreams, this is a bad thing, obviously.Before you know it, you’ve been gently awoken and the therapeute is whispering, Did you dream? Tell me … describe it to me…You feel wonderful then. You did it. You interacted.The actual interacting, the dreaming, often becomes, well … kind of scary, if you want the truth. Not at all what you’re expecting. Maybe it has occurred to you that this place where you’re sleeping, when it comes down to it, when you get beyond all the screwball stuff about secret energies and the healing powers of Mother Earth…… is a grave.A repository for bodies. Flesh has rotted here, bones have crumbled.The claustrophobia, at this point, can be intense. You start to scream inside. All you want is out of there. But, like I said, you have to stop your conscious mind getting a hold of you. What you are dealing with here is the unconscious and that must be left to find its own route to what you would probably call enlightenment.In relation to this, OK, there is one small problem, I am told.You know how, in nightmares, when you get into a very frightening situation — like, you’re about to fall a thousand feet onto rocks or you turn around to find the psycho with the ax was behind the door all the time — you awake?Well, sleeping in a prehistoric burial chamber, so they tell me, you can’t always count on this happening — implying that under these physical conditions it is possible to reach a deeper level of unconsciousness. This, I am convinced, is the first step to a scientific explanation of so-called prophetic dreaming, as supposedly experienced by Jacob and tribal shamans the world over, and it excites me profoundly.Before you say a word, sure I’ve heard that stuff about how, if you weren’t able to awake from a nightmare, when you got into a terminally tight corner you’d just die.Like I said, it’s important that it isn’t easy. That there are risks. Nothing significant is ever achieved without risk.
‘Your parents seen any of this?’
Lyndon McAffrey solemn now, maybe the old newsman’s antennae starting to vibrate.
Grayle shook her head. ‘Don’t Show the Folks. Pain of death. We used to put it on cards and letters when we were kids.’
‘When you were kids is one thing-’
‘Listen, it’s bad enough we haven’t had a letter or a phone call in five weeks. No, I didn’t show it to them then and I don’t plan to. My father would be acutely embarrassed on his younger child’s behalf and blame it on my mother’s genes, like he does with me. Mom would be spooked all the way to the cocaine cupboard. No, hell, this is down to me. Time for Crazy Grayle to get her shit together.’
‘OK.’ Lyndon leaned back. ‘What are your own personal conclusions here? That Ersula blew out her mind under some old stone and went native? Among the primitive Brits?’
‘I know … you don’t believe, any more than my father would, that my sister could be psychically damaged by any of this. You don’t believe for one second that she’s messing with awesomely powerful cosmic forces. You think more likely she got laid inside a stone circle, fell in love, lost track of time …’
‘OK,’ Lyndon said. ‘What do you plan to do about it?’
‘Well … I already called t
his University of the Earth summer school. Spoke to a guy who was very helpful. Surprised we hadn’t heard from Ersula, on account of the course ended a month ago and they presumed she’d flown home. He didn’t sound like a fruitcake …’
Lyndon’s expression said he wouldn’t trust Grayle to identify a fruitcake at knife-swinging distance. She averted her eyes.
‘So, I … I called the police department. I guess there’ll be some kind of hook-up with the English cops. But …’
‘The English police are very thorough,’ Lyndon said. ‘If there’s anything wrong here, they’ll find out.’
‘You don’t think I should fly over there?’
‘How would that help?’
‘Well … it would help me, I guess.’
‘Grayle, you yourself admit that Ersula is the balanced one.’
‘And, yeah, she went to Africa, just out of high school, and we didn’t hear from her for close to two months. But that was when the folks split. Her way of coming to terms with all that. This is different. She’s a grown woman. Also she knows that if the very last letter I get from her is as weird as this …’
‘OK,’ Lyndon said. ‘You have a point. See what the cops come up with. They may not be too enthusiastic about finding a grown woman who’s only been missing a few weeks, but being she’s a professor’s daughter and all … Leave it to the cops.’
‘Right.’ Grayle’s voice a little too high. ‘You’re right. That’s sensible.’
Lyndon nodded. He folded the blue airmail letter, tucked it under Grayle’s coffee cup. He hadn’t read the other pages.
Because she hadn’t given them to him.
About Ersula’s dream. The page with the disturbing details of Ersula’s dream lying out on the burial chamber.
So Grayle went home to her windchimes and her crystals and her tree-of-life wallchart. Tried to meditate, gave up and half watched an old John Wayne movie on TV until she fell asleep and dreamed uneasily about dreaming.