by Phil Rickman
Grayle sighed. In all fairness, what else was the guy supposed to say about this? In a city drowning in drugs, a homicide every hour on the hour, he has to get the woman who disappeared into a dream. Even if he believed in this stuff, taking it any further would be putting his precinct credibility so far on the line as to seriously damage his career prospects for years to come.
It occurred to her that if she were an ordinary member of the public the next person she would probably turn to for advice would be the city’s premier mystical agony aunt, Holy Grayle Underhill.
Just as, in a way, Ersula had done.The events of the past few weeks have given me, I suppose, an insight into your continued need to explore the phenomena of the New Age.I still believe in psychological answers, that the truth lies not Out There, as they say on your beloved X-Files, but In Here. But I confess that my belief system has been sorely tested on this trip. I keep telling myself how glad I am that you are not here, but the truth is I often wish that you were. I suspect that none of this would faze you. I recall how, some five years ago, both rather drunk, we watched some stupid old late-night Dracula movie together, and I saw an all too human sickness in it and was repulsed. While you just shrieked with laughter at the gorier excesses and delighted in the possibility of someone actually being Undead.Sober by then, we argued well into the night about the validity and the morality of horror movies, most of which you kept insisting were scary fun but also basically religious. Well, I still do not believe in Dracula, or the possibility of being Undead. Only in the power of the Unconscious.And you know something? That scares me a whole lot more.The dream experiments both excite and terrify me because, while I am prepared to accept and be fired by the possibility that the abnormally high incidence of lucid dreaming at ancient sites may, in some part, be caused by external geophysical stimuli, I know that the substance of those dreams still comes from within, and that is what makes me afraid. I am afraid of what the Unconscious can make us do. I am afraid of liberating aspects of ourselves that we are unable to control…
Grayle shivered in the damp heat of a September night in New York City and thought about Dracula. Sure, vampires were scary fun which also held out the promise of some kind — OK, a very degraded kind — of immortality. Like werewolf stories illustrated the possibility of human transformation. I swear on my mother’s grave he has to shave twice … three times…
So many people who believed this stuff believed Grayle Underhill had a hot line to the source. Seventy-three letters last week. Grayle read them all; a few would always lead to stories.
Stories. Scary fun.
Maybe this reflected her level of spiritual development: keep an open mind, don’t go too deep, have scary fun.
Grayle drained the bottle. Turned to the next page.We’re instructed not to discuss our dreams, for very sound, scientific reasons. All the recorded dream experiences, thousands of them, are being fed into a central database for future analysis. Only then will any correlations be considered. It is crucial to the experiment that any influences should be as a result of the geophysical properties of the sites themselves and not from each other’s dreams.As the place where this experience occurred was not one of the specific sites earmarked for the project, I approached Prof. Falconer and asked if I could discuss it with him. He was reluctant — he said a dream symbol could spread like a virus if not controlled — but eventually he agreed and we discussed it over dinner at a local pub. I was disappointed with his response but appreciated his reasoning. He said that because I went alone to the site — no therapeute — the experience was inadmissible. He also seemed angry that I had checked out the history of the site with a local historian (Marcus Bacton — I sent you a copy of his magazine) without his permission.Nevertheless, I regard this dream as the most significant so far and have enclosed my description of it. As a connoisseur of Scary Fun, you will no doubt appreciate it, although rest assured that if it comes to my notice that any reference to this has made an appearance in your scurrilous column, I will toss sibling tolerance to the winds and sue your ass.OK. What is remarkable about this dream is that it is the first which, for its entire duration, directly concerns the site itself.The site is Black Knoll (also known as High Knoll) in the Black Mountains, just under a mile from the center. It is a Neolithic burial chamber in a modestly spectacular setting atop a promontory affording a wide view all the way to the Malvern Hills where the composer Elgar found his inspiration.The only person recorded as having found inspiration here at Black Knoll, about three-quarters of a century ago, was a teenage girl called Annie Davies who claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. This vision accords with the published accounts of such experiences (see Seward: The Dancing Sun, 1993) in which the sun itself appears to gyrate or, in this case, to descend and resolve itself into a robed, female figure. The story was recounted to me by the aforementioned Marcus Bacton, publisher of that obscure journal The Phenomenologist, who lives at Ms Davies’s former home, Castle Farm, and is in some respects a most alarming person.However, I had found the tale of the unsophisticated country girl charming (I was surprised to hear that it had not been well received by the local people at the time) and determined to spend a night at Black Knoll, if possible, alone — for I have found that, having done this so many times, I now awake with a total recall of the dream experience.I waited until two a.m., when the center was silent. Adrian, Magda and I — the scouts and guides as Roger somewhat patronizingly refers to us — sleep in small rooms converted out of the lofts above the old stables, so it was easy for me to creep out of the center and make my way along the ancient trackway to Black Knoll.It was a three-quarter moon, so there was light enough, and I felt a pleasant sense of adventure as I approached the monument; it seemed more awesome by night, but I was not afraid, finding myself, as usual, attracted by the silence and loneliness of it. I wished, more than ever, to know its mysteries. It seemed to me that an obviously pagan site which could inspire a fundamentally Christian vision was a weighty argument for the theory that the hallucinatory experience was directly influenced by the geophysical nature of the site itself.What did make my flesh crawl, I confess, was a scuffling beneath the capstone suggestive of rats — of which, as you know, I am not overfond. There was no way I was going inside after that — probably wouldn’t have been able to squeeze in anyhow, the way the middle part of the monument has collapsed — so I spread my sleeping bag on top of the capstone. I was used, by now, to sleeping on stone and drifted off quite quickly.THE DREAM.I am walking to the Knoll. You have to cross a beautiful hay meadow. It is harvest time now and the bales are stacked in the meadow like small skyscrapers. As I wander through the stubbly canyons between the stacks of bales and find the footpath which takes me up into the hills, into the sparse, ochre moorland grass, I am aglow with anticipation. Will I, too, have a vision of the Holy Mother? My dreamself, I have discovered, is a firm believer; this shedding of normal academic skepticism I find oddly refreshing, like a holiday, like becoming you for a while. Jesus, never thought I’d say that.
Grayle’s eyes began to prickle. It was as if Ersula was reaching out to her.
Automatically, she closed her eyes, pictured Ersula with her efficiently cropped blond hair, more blond, more pure than Grayle’s, and her steady, watchful, almost cold blue eyes.
Slowing her breathing, reaching out for Ersula.
Nothing. It never did work, did it? Especially when your senses were swimming in three-quarters of a bottle of stale Californian white wine.I am not aware of it for a while but the temperature must have started to drop as soon as I left the meadow. Not only that but, in what I would guess was direct proportion to this decline, the colors are fading. Some people only ever dream in black and white. I guess my noticing this means that I have always dreamed in color.Visibility is also declining because of a thickening mist through which I can see the sun like a pale coin. Familiar clumps of gorse sprout from the otherwise bare hillside. The Offa’s Dyke Path which more or less marks the boundary between th
e countries of England and Wales is close, and, in my dreamstate, I can sense a converging of separate energies; I don’t know how else to explain this.I feel lonely. Suddenly isolated. A strange sensation, considering that the center itself is ten minutes’ walk away, that the towns of Abergavenny and Hay-on-Wye and the city of Hereford are all less than thirty minutes by car. And although my waking self relishes solitude, in my dream I wish someone were here with me, even that amiable buffoon Adrian Fraser-Hale, whose enthusiasms tend to be as nonsensical as your own.Upon the Knoll, encircled by a muff of most unseasonal fog, it is alarmingly cold. English summers can be capricious, but this is not the cold of summer. I bend and touch the capstone; it has a patina, like a hoar frost. I am feeling depressed about this as I know it was on such a summer’s day that Annie Davies had her vision and was enveloped in a kind of rosy warmth. There seems little prospect of warmth here now.I lie down upon the capstone. A curious sensation. Let me try to explain it.It is as if my dreamself is entering into my corporeal self, two aspects of me fusing together. There is a quite awesome sense of what I can only describe as hyper-reality. For example, when I touch the stone at my side I feel I am touching a living thing or, more exactly, putting my hand into a vortex of swirling, pulsing energy, as though I am being permitted to penetrate the stone’s molecular structure. And it mine.I open (in my dream) my eyes. My dream eyes. Oh yes, I am fully aware that I am dreaming.The air is hard with cold. I am naked, by the way.It is now that I sense the smell. It smells as if all the rats or whatever they are under the stone have died and rotted. It is a stench so utterly abhorrent that I push my nose into the crook of an elbow in disgust and revulsion.Of what I saw, I am still uncertain. Although, as an archeologist, I have been present at the excavation of several graves, some no more than two hundred years old, this is outside my experience and I can hardly bear to think about it.I wrote it down at once, describing in as much detail as I could what I thought I saw, but when I read it back it seemed stupid and nasty, and quite unbelievable, and I thought, what does this say about me, what kind of credibility would I ever have again? And I thought of you, the way you laughed and took it all so lightly when we were watching that filthy movie.OK. Here goes.Awakening (when you awake in a dream it becomes a lucid dream, remember?) with a stiff back. On the hardest mattress you can imagine.Lying on my back. Neck stiff; can’t move it.Although, my God, how I want to. I just want to turn my head away from the suffocating stench.The night sky is moonlit, but full of racing clouds. I want desperately to float up, into the wild, fresh night, chase the clouds rushing past the moon, torn like rags, lacy scarves of vapor. (Lift … lift … you can do anything in a dream. Lift … float.)Can’t move. Pain. Muscles knotted, twisted like old lead pipes.Stench of decay, corruption. Turn away.A night breeze gets in my hair and my stinking bedfellow rattles beside me.Finally. I am allowed to turn my head. Turn it — oh Christ — his way, into the stink and it fills my throat, and we are looking at one another and he’s grinning his savage grin. His gums have gone. His jaws are agape like a trap, strands of yellow skin overhang his green-filmed eye sockets and the white, fleshless tip of his nose appears beaklike under the three-quarter moon.And we lie there, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, his shoulder naked bone where it pokes through the ragged clothing ripped at by the buzzards and the breeze.He’s been dead a long time, I guess, my companion.And I cannot wake up.Presumably, the dream ends at some point but I do not wake up until morning and when I do I am trembling and drenched in a cold sweat so thick and glutinous it is almost like Jell-O, and I am virtually fused to that stone.Scary fun, Grayle? You tell me.
Grayle found it more chilling each time she read it.
What was worst was that you would expect Ersula to offer a scientific explanation involving hypnagogic hallucinations or some such — Ersula’s predictable answer to stories about people who woke up and saw ghosts in their bedrooms. There was no attempt to explain this away; its effect on her had been too corrosive.
Grayle picked up the copy of The Phenomenologist Ersula had sent. What a rag. Badly printed, cheap paper, no layouts to speak of. No wonder it was entirely unknown even to Holy Grayle.
Still, there had to be a phone number in there somewhere. She’d call up this Marcus Backhouse or whatever he was called.
When she was sober.
VIII
Wiltshire
The Holy of Holies.
Defiled.
Yesterday evening, the Green Man stood before a six-foot sarsen as it was being examined by people from the National Trust, a dozen or so tourists and villagers looking on in horror and disgust.
He’d been alerted to the atrocity by the lunchtime radio news and driven at once to Wiltshire, the county of his birth. He drove between the fields where he’d hunted, learned to shoot, snare and gut. Where he’d learned, also, about the lines of ancient energy which gridded the fields, making Wiltshire probably the only county in England where all the ground was sacred.
But the holiest ground of all was Avebury.
Perhaps because he grew up in its shadow, Stonehenge never had the same power for him as the henge-village in the Kennet valley, encircled — except for the church — by a ditch and the remains of the greatest Stone Age temple in the world.
The stones of Avebury were shaped by the Earth Herself. Each is an individual organism — here a lion, here a human head, a fist, a gnarled penis, a woman’s pocked and scarred torso and upper thighs with a tightly clenched vulva. One can almost see them all flexing, pulsing, breathing, and he wanted immediately to offer a sacrifice. However, the problem with Avebury is the modern community at its heart. And the tourists. With their children, dogs, cameras, ice creams.
Always people. Their vulgarity and their ignorance. Even at dead of night, when this act of sacrilege was, presumably, carried out.
The affected stones had been covered ignominiously in sacking by the National Trust people.
To hide the abomination.
Dozens of disgusting, pseudo-cabalistic symbols had been scrawled over two of the outlying sarsens, in white emulsion and black bitumen paint. The megaliths defaced from top to bottom, so that when the paint was cleaned off, the sensitive skin of mosses and lichens would also be scrubbed away, leaving the stones flayed and aching, as bald as housebricks.
Who was responsible?
So-called New Age travellers, perhaps, the itinerant vagrants who live on social security and consider ancient shrines to be their inheritance.
He was reminded yesterday of the eighteenth-century farmer who went around massacring megaliths and rejoiced — literally rejoiced — in the name ‘Stonekiller’ Robinson. The Green Man does not know how the stonekiller had died but he hopes it was a long and exceedingly painful death.
Through the sacking, he heard the stones calling out to him in their pain and, from beneath his feet, the Earth shrieking for revenge.
Knowing then that he had been sent for, that he was to be the instrument.
Parking his car for the night on the outskirts of Marlborough, he walked to the Ridgeway and joined a line from the Avebury circle and walked on until he found the place.
They always turn out to be marked in some way, these sacred sites, but sometimes the marker is far from obvious and takes time to discover. It might be a small stone hidden in a wood or obscured by tufts of moorland grass. Or lost among buildings, because sometimes the place will be in the middle of a village, even a large town.
For instance, earlier this year, the Green Man slept in a hollow in the ramparts around an Iron Age fort contoured into the summit of a holy hill. There were pine trees here, as well, and through his dreams galloped the spectral figure of the Knight of Swords, from the Tarot. The Knight was riding down from a hill with stark pines upon it. His sword was raised. He was on a mission of vengeance.
There was no denying the command.
At first light this day, the Green man followed an obvious alignment from the hill to a church steeple in the centre
of the town below. The church was locked, the churchyard deserted. He walked on. The town was empty, there was very little traffic. Following the line, he arrived at the stump of an old market cross, a familiar marker. The line followed a paved, pedestrianized area into a small shopping arcade, where the frontage of one shop jutted out beyond its neighbours into the middle of the line.
The shop was … an ironmonger’s.
The first sign.
In its doorway was a large cardboard box. Inside it was a young vagrant.
The box was not quite long enough to accommodate him, so he had protected his feet from the cold by encasing them in another, smaller box. On it was a line-drawing of a carving knife and one stencilled word.
MEATMASTER
All the confirmation the Green Man needed. Putting down his rucksack in the silent, newly cobbled arcade, he located the serrated-edged sheath knife he sometimes used to skin rabbits.
He remembers how the vagrant awoke with half his throat open, that soundless liquid scream again.
The remains of the Barber-Surgeon are on display in Avebury’s small museum.
The skeleton was found under Stone Number Nine in the henge circle.
His profession was suggested by the implements discovered on the body — scissors and what was believed to be a medical probe. The dates on the coins he carried suggested he died in the early 1320s. Surgeons, in those days, needed no more qualifications than those required for cutting hair.