by Ian McDonald
The dark was drawing down by the time they reached the first gyrus. It had been sited on a minor chordal node on a wooded knoll known as Townley Wood by the riverward entrance to an old country seat abandoned in the War of Independence. They groped in the twilight through the debris left by early season picnickers. Gonzaga stuck his finger into a partly decomposed condom.
“It has, since long, been this one’s understanding, that Mother Ireland eschewed the use of these,” he complained.
They found the gyrus by the last glow of the sun between the trees. Utter destruction. The buried elements had been sniffed out and grubbed from the earth, as if by tusks, then stamped into nothingness. As a final act of destruction, the centre of the small clearing had been scorched. Gonzaga sniffed the air. “Pookah.”
In its contemporary form, the pookah had been demythologised by the centuries into another member of the pantheon of faeries major and minor—a rural Puck figure, generally good-natured, if prone to occasional acts of minor domestic mischief. In its ancient manifestations, the pookah had been terrible and dangerous, the spirit of the forest itself, with its roots in the racial memory of the woolly mammoth of the periglacial fringelands, haunting with tusk and claw and sinew the nights of the Mesolithic settlers.
“Good comrade, please, one moment’s perfect hush:
This one suspects a presence in this place
Not of ourselves. This one must hear and sense.”
Townley Wood was in complete darkness. Tiresias had spent too many years following the mythlines to fear the dark, yet as Gonzaga turned slowly, as elegantly as a dancer, in the fire-blackened clearing, he felt cold hands touch his spine.
Gonzaga let out a wordless cry and pointed. Tiresias had his glasses on his nose in an instant. Townley Wood was transformed into a place of pale mists and rivers of pastel light. He looked where Gonzaga was indicating. A tangled worm of luminescence was unravelling and dissolving in a shallow dell a handful of yards distant. He glimpsed faces: the horse-headed homunculus, the sea cat, the satyr, the werewolf, the wild boar … and then they were gone, absorbed back into the Mygmus.
They spent the night by the desecrated gyrus, watching, listening, waiting. Gonzaga cut two hazel branches and stripped them into long staves. While Tiresias muttered and fretted across the borderlands of the Dreamplace, he emptied his sack onto the charred ground. His fingers, like small, bright-eyed animals, moved over the strewn items, touching, weighing, selecting, rejecting. Dried flowers, shards of broken crockery, Boy’s Club badges, bones, bird feathers, scraps of cloth, holy medals, broken jewellery, coins, bottle caps; those that passed his test he attached to the staves with short lengths of twine and button thread. Motorists and other users of the Dublin Road were so surprised by the sight of two tramps waving what looked like portable maypoles at them that, needless to say, they did not even slow down, let alone offer them a lift.
11
DESPITE CLAMOROUS REVIEWS AND long lines to book tickets, Damian had not been impressed by the film. Jessica had been annoyed with him because he had not enjoyed something she had anticipated so long. She had been excruciatingly embarrassed when he had laughed out loud at cutlass-wielding Errol Flynn springing from concealed trampolines in a tropical Panama (emphasis on the last syllable) that looked more like the Palm House in the Botanical Gardens than the Spanish Main—the only one in the entire audience who had laughed.
“Look at them,” he said when the final credits had rolled and the audience was cramming the exits before the National Anthem froze them in their seats. “Is this the country our fathers fought for? Is this the Caitlin Ni Houlihan Pearce and Conolly and MacDonagh died for—a cinema full of Irishmen watching an American film of an English pirate played by a Tasmanian queer?”
Jessica sprang, as nimbly as Captain Blood himself, to the idol’s defence, but Damian in this mood was inaccessible to her, walking alone through the pure landscape of the Gael—the blood-washed mountainsides where everyone wore kilts and spoke grammatically perfect Irish and played hurling and lived by the grim sea in a grim cottage with two grim wolfhounds; a land where no one had ever heard of the BBC Light Service, or F. W. Woolworth’s, or Alexander’s Ragtime Band, or the rise of Fascism in Italy, or Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. “We finally throw off eight hundred years of British cultural imperialism and stand alone, the last Gaelic nation, and what do we do? Spend half our bloody lives in the dark watching Clark Gable and Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Bloody Flynn. Jaysus!”
The sultry evenings had made St. Stephen’s Green a natural magnet for strolling couples. That night there was the added attraction of a band concert.
“Can we go and listen to them?” Jessica sometimes felt isolated in Damian’s company—she loved his uniqueness, that he was not just another Hoover salesman or conductor on the Howth electric tram—but she also loved the company of other people. Damian listened to the brassy notes softened by the warm, amber air. “Jaysus. The British Grenadiers. I despair for this country. Why the hell am I bothering trying to save you all?” Jessica stared at him in open hatred as he walked away. She caught up with him at the Leeson Street gate. He stood with his hands in his pockets watching a street entertainer grinding the handle of an old hurdy-gurdy. At his feet a monkey skipped and grimaced to the droning slip-jig and held out a sequin-stubbed bag for alms.
“Paddy-on-a-bloody-string,” Damian said. He dropped a penny into the monkey’s bag. It doffed its cap but its eyes were turned inward to purely animal concerns.
“Thank you kindly, sir.” The hurdy-gurdy man tugged a cap peak. Jessica gasped. He had no eyes. Blank skin covered the sockets where eyes should have been.
The monkey screamed and chattered and threw itself at Jessica, straining at the extent of its tether. Pointed teeth snapped and clashed. Swearing at the monkey while apologising to Jessica, the hurdy-gurdy man brought the thrashing animal under control. Jessica was shaken. For one moment it had not seemed a monkey at all, but a very small, very old, very wizened, naked woman.
The hurdy-gurdy man was on his pitch by the Leeson Street gate, grinding out his doleful tunes when she passed on Monday evening after work. His archaic instrument gave a peculiar, almost lamenting air to even the most familiar of tunes; there was a spirit in those drones and strings that drew Jessica, while at the same time repelling her. The hurdy-gurdy man remained on St. Stephen’s Green until Wednesday, when she saw him on a new stand by the canal locks. As she passed in the tram, the blind hurdy-gurdy man looked up and, with some sense other than sight, fixed his empty sockets on her. Thursday he had moved on to a new location in front of the big church on the Lower Rathmines Road. From her seat in the third row on the top deck, Jessica’s eyes met his eyelessness. The monkey thing skipped and gibbered. She remembered what it was about it that made her shudder when she had seen it outside St. Stephen’s Green: for a moment, she had thought it was the tiny woman in Gaiety Green who had tried to give her the golden torque. The next day she took a different tram home, by a different route. A creeping sentience of being followed, through the streets and avenues, over the bridges and tram lines, to the brass welcome of number twenty, haunted her. She could not rid herself of the sensation that the hurdy-gurdy man’s blindness in this world was vision in the other; that, in the alien perspectives of that shadow-Dublin, she shone in his sight as bright as an angel.
Friday the hurdy-gurdy man and his homunculus had crawled their blind way to residence in Belgrave Square, the next street down from Belgrave Road. She could hear his melancholy drone on the warm, yellow air as she sat at her mirror and made herself glamorous for Damian Gorman.
A scratch at the door was The Shite, leering malevolently.
“What do want, you little frigger?”
The Shite’s leer deepened.
“I know where you’re going, and what you’re going to do, and who you’re going to do it with.”
“Oh, do you, now? And how the hell would you know?”
“The man
told me.”
Jessica seized The Shite by the lace collar of her sundress and dragged her into eye-intimidation range.
“What man?”
“The man in the park. He’s ever so nice. It’s such a pity he’s blind, the poor man. He says he’s a friend of yours, he knows all about you. He told me all about your boyfriend—Damian, isn’t he? He told me he was in the IRA. He says he has something very important he has to give you. You can call down with him any time. He’s got a nice monkey—he let me play with it.”
“You stay away from him, you hear me? You go near him or his monkey again and I swear to God I’ll break every one of your fingers in the door.”
“You touch me and I’ll tell about Damian, the IRA murderer, and what you do with him in the alley behind Hannah’s Sweet Shop.”
“You little frigger.”
They glared at each other in mutual impasse, The Shite not the least intimidated.
“Get out,” Jessica ordered. “You’re a spying little bitch. Get out.”
“God’s very angry with you for being a Protestant associating with someone who’s a rebel against His Law. God’s going to punish you; God’s going to make you have a baby.”
“Up your bum till it comes right out your mouth, Shite.”
12
“YES! OH, YES! THERE, look, don’t you see it? So far away you’d almost think there was nothing there at all… there, I’ve glimpsed it again—something bright, like a silver needle, shining in the heart of the storm. I’m getting closer. I can see it more clearly now. It’s not a needle at all, it’s a tower, a tower of glass, so clear it’s as if it isn’t there at all, but at the same time shining with a light of its own. It seemed tiny because it was so far away, but now, as I fly closer, I can see that it’s miles and miles and miles tall, it goes up forever and ever, straight and sheer and smooth, pure and perfect crystal. Closer still, and I can see there are no doors, no windows. Silly! What would a glass tower need windows for? It’s all solid glass—pure, perfect shining crystal, rising out of the sea. The sea is so black it’s like ink, and the clouds are black, too. It’s hard to tell where the clouds end and the sea begins; it’s hard to be certain of anything. Everything is so fluid and changeable, except the glass tower.”
Despite the heat in the room, I felt icicles along my spine.
“Oh! The clouds have parted. I can see the top of the tower. It’s opening up like a flower in bloom, like a rose with hundreds of petals and each petal is a different land with hills and forests and rivers and seas. All different, so different, some with red skies and purple clouds; some where mountains float in the air; some where there is no grass, only many-coloured waving tentacles woven into patterns like a Persian carpet; some where everything is crystal, bright, brilliant sharp, diamonds and rubies and emeralds; and others that are made out of poems and music and time and hate. Here is a place where everything is made from dreams so that nothing is the same from one moment to the next, and here a place of wheels, all running around and around the outsides and insides of each other. All of them are different, lying folded next to each other like the petals of a rosebud unfolding to the light.”
We had arrived; the place of Jessica’s primal memories, the nonquantifiable domain from which all human symbology and mythic power is derived, a place where our notions of discrete time and space are without meaning, our Lost Edens, our Gardens of Earthly Delight. I shivered. A sudden, inexplicable chill had entered the study. Outside the window Merrion Square shimmered under the heat haze. Within, my breath hung in steaming clouds. My fingers were so cold I could barely scribble down my pencil notes.
“I can feel myself being drawn down, toward the petals of many lands. Like a sycamore seed I am spiralling down. I am being pulled toward one of the world petals. Why I am attracted to this one I don’t know. It’s strange—not like any of the others. Its hills and valleys and plains look as if they are made of skin. I’m settling toward it, into a little valley—not so much a valley, more like a pit, with steep, wrinkled sides. It’s soft and warm, though, and I can feel deep underground the sound of throbbing. But I can’t keep a hold. It’s too smooth—I’m slipping, I can’t hold myself, I’m sliding down into the pit, down, down. It’s dark down here, and the sound of the throbbing is growing louder. What’s happening, where am I going?”
The cold, it must be her doing. Is she drawing on the latent heat of the atmosphere, channelling it through her preconscious self? But to what end?
Manifestation?
“I’m inside now. This is strange. It’s a bit like being in a cathedral—all pillars and arches and vaults—except, when you look closely, you see that the pillars and arches and vaults are made up of twisted ropes, and everything’s red. It’s more like hell than a church, but why do I feel so safe here? Why do I feel that this place welcomes me, that I’m returning home after a long time away? I can’t understand this, that everything is so strange, and yet I feel so safe, so welcomed, so protected. Everything swells and contracts in time to the booming, beating noise. It shakes me to my very centre, but even that is comforting. Do you understand? How can something so overpowering and terrible be so comforting?”
The cold had grown so intense that every breath crackled like needles in my lungs. Delicate filigrees of ice coated the windows. The water vapour in the study was condensing out into a band of mist at dado-rail height. Knots and whirlpools in the mist layer fleetingly called to mind human faces.
“I’m walking through the cavern. I’ve been walking for what seems like miles but there’s still no sight of an end to it. I can see things now I couldn’t before—things pulsing behind thin translucent walls; things that look like bunches of grapes, except each one is the size of my head; tubes and pipes that throb and pump in time to the beat. I can hear something: a voice. I can hear it even over the pounding heartbeat; a woman’s voice. She’s saying she doesn’t know what to do. She sounds very upset. She says part of her wants to keep the child here with her for always, but another part of her knows it must leave and enter the world. It sounds like the kind of talk you talk when you are talking to yourself—the kind of talk people aren’t meant to hear. Wait, I can see something! I can see something.”
Those phantom faces in the eddying mist, they were not the product of imagination.
“It’s a woman. She’s kneeling. She looks as if she’s crying. She’s naked. I come closer but she doesn’t hear me. She just keeps talking to herself.”
No mist now, but a circling choir of faces: fools, kings, priestesses, pretenders. Thick lobes of ice covered the windows and spilled onto the radiators. Ice; cold, ghostly faces. To Jessica it might have been an afternoon in a summer meadow.
“I’m beside her now. I’m bending down to touch her. What’s the matter? Why are you crying? Can I help? She looks up at me. I see her…”
And her expression was no longer one of supernatural serenity. Her face was an inhumanly blank porcelain mask.
“It’s her. She’s here. She’s come for me again.”
I reached through the whirlwind of faces to take her hands. The shock was almost electric. I have never felt anything so cold, so dead.
“Who, Jessica? Who?”
“My mother,” she said with devastating simplicity.
And all was still.
The manifestations were gone. Gone, too, the unnatural iciness. The sudden return of summer afternoon temperatures made the study seem tropical.
Some power other than I had decreed the session ended. Jessica shook her head, breathed deeply through flared nostrils. Her eyelids flickered. In a moment they would open and she would behold what she had wreaked upon my study. Questions, of a kind I did not much desire to properly answer, and would probably not be able to, would be asked.
Quickly, I asked her the level of her hypnotic trance. It is one of the features of my style of hypnosis that the subject remains conscious at all times of the depth of his state of consciousness, in ten-point levels, s
ubdivided into integers for finer discrimination.
“Level thirteen,” Jessica replied. “Level twelve, level eleven.” She was surfacing rapidly, but still amenable to suggestion. Less than level ten and I would have been lost.
“Go to level thirty,” I ordered. It was a level of deep hypnotic suggestibility, the one at which posthypnotic commands are best introduced. “At once. Your state?”
“Twenty-five. Twenty-eight… thirty.”
“Good girl. Good. Excellent.”
And, loath though I am to resort to such music hall tricks, I inserted a posthypnotic command that on my instruction she would get up, leave the study, make the usual appointment with Miss Fanshawe, and go straight home. At the tram stop, she would emerge from the hypnotic state and remember only that the study had been pleasantly cooled by a small breeze from the park through an open window. It grieves my professional ethics to play so light and free with the human psyche, but the alternatives would have been even more grievous.
A reality-shaping adolescent possessed of the full knowledge that her dreams and desires could become physical reality: the shiver that ran down my spine was not entirely due to the arctic state of my study.
After Jessica had left, seeming in every way no different from her normal self (well, I will admit, a little less uncouth), I sent Miss Fanshawe home early, and with the aid of tea, a week’s supply of Huntley and Palmer’s biscuits, and a pleasing Mozart piano sonata on the wireless, sat down in the reception area to think.