by Ian McDonald
A second shadow approached through the fog, human shaped but not human-sized: the hurdy-gurdy man’s monkey, stumbling through the shifting mist on its hind legs in a ghastly parody of walking. It grimaced at Jessica, canines bared, mouth gaping. A shape darted forth—a head, a tiny woman’s head, shining gold. It heaved itself forward, and the monkey’s mouth split at the shoulders. Arms, breasts, body heaved out. Golden arms peeled the monkey’s mouth down over hips, curving thighs, like a snake rolling off an old skin. The woman was twice the size she had been when she had forced her way out of the monkey’s mouth, and was growing visibly. The empty skin clung to her foot and she shook it away, flung it behind her. In the mist, the birds dived and gobbled for the carrion. Grown to full size, the woman stepped forward. She was naked, but shone with golden light. She gathered handfuls of the mist and from it wove a vestment for herself—a cream silk wedding dress decorated with embroidered roses. She reached out a perfect hand to Jessica.
“My darling,” she said. The voice of the bells of cities beneath the sea; drowned carillons. “My daughter.”
18
I HAVE LITTLE DIFFICULTY in accommodating Tiresias’s concept of the mythlines as pathways of psychic energy superimposed on the physical landscape by generations of human imagination and storytelling. The notion of an unseen geography conterminous with the mundane is a familiar one in folk anthropology: the alignment of stones and local landmarks, the placement of religious sites along “ley lines” in southern England, the Chinese “Lung Mei” or “dragon lines,” the songlines drawn across primeval Australia by the Ancestors waking from the Dreamtime. No, what I found uncomfortable was this thing they called the Mygmus. From Tiresias’s expositions, as we motored along through the predawn murk, one psychiatrist, one tableware designer still beset by occasional blinding reprises of distorted vision, and two tramps who were, to all intents and purposes, angels in disguise, I garnered an impression of a universe, quite small, quite close to our own, in which all human memory and imagination were stored—a pliable matrix we unconsciously imprint by the very process of thinking; an independent domain accessible only to certain individuals in rare moments of transcendence.
I could grasp, albeit dimly, the Mygmus as a psychic sink of human thought and symbol out of which a certain kind of consciousness could create phaguses. What utterly baffled me was the nature and logical working of Gonzaga’s brand of pocket magic. Teapot spouts, tin Legion of Mary badges, bird feathers, bottle tops, cigarette packets, pebbles, vials of multicoloured sand and tin foil chocolate wrappers: with these he claimed to have defended Jessica from Emily Desmond’s Otherworldly power for over twelve years and now proposed to challenge her directly at the heart of her command and control.
The first time Tiresias had translated his partner’s gobbledygook into a request to stop the car by a charmless country crossroads some three miles outside Colooney, I had refused and found Gonzaga lunging forward from the backseat to yank on the hand brake with both hands. God’s wounds! It could have been the end of us all. While he grubbed about in the roadside ditch, Tiresias endeavoured to explain the nature of their magic—gyromancy, as they called it. All I could make from his words was that form was more important than substance; it was the pattern in which the objects in the sack were laid across the mythlines that gave them power, though, conversely, there had to be a certain quality inherent in the objects themselves to render the pattern effective. What the quality might be that distinguished the tuft of sheep’s wool Gonzaga plucked, grinning triumphantly, from the barbed wire fence, was quite beyond my fathoming. That was to be the first of fifteen such sudden interruptions of our journey to Sligo. With each halt and subsequent foray along the hedgerows, Caldwell’s patience frayed visibly.
The whole of the previous day had been divided between the clock and the bandages over Caldwell’s eyes. It had come as a terrible blow to find in the morning that he still could not tolerate the light of day. When, by nightfall, there was still no improvement, we had almost despaired. We had spent the day constructing and revising endless tables of distances, times, and speeds; that we might already have been too late was a possibility, fast approaching a probability, neither of us dared mention. In the depth of that long night, Caldwell told me that if he did not regain normal vision by dawn, to go on ahead and leave him. Fate, or perhaps persistent, heartfelt prayer, had it that when we removed his bandages for the three o’clock check he claimed that the rivers and floods of light were fading, and by four he could see normally, if a little blurred, by the electric light in the room. Without breakfast, almost without paying the bill—five pounds, three and fourpence, ye gods!—we were into the car and away before the first cock woke Mullingar.
Sligo was stirring itself as we passed through, interrupted only to allow Gonzaga to root about in an especially magical corporation rubbish bin for a broken briar pipe and a discarded Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake tobacco tin. We drove straight out the Drumcliffe Road and I parked the car for the second time that month in the gateway of Craigdarragh House.
Space may be a stronger dimension than time—there are certain places that on revisiting you know that no time has passed since you were last there. Some great cities possess this quality. Indeed, it is an inherent factor of their greatness. But so may certain street corners, preserved intact by a trick of the lighting. From the blackened walls of Craigdarragh I could still recall the laughter of woman poets, the clink of sherry glasses, the rustle of taffeta, the whisper of old books taken from their places on library shelves.
Snuffling around in the pile of mouldering plaster and rotting carpet, Gonzaga’s fingers lighted upon fragments of charred photographs—messages from that other age: a woman in a high-collared Edwardian dress, fingers tightly clasping a parrot’s-head-handled parasol. I moved to stay Gonzaga—it seemed like a desecration. He looked at me from beneath his thatch of hair, mumbled an unintelligible mantra, and slipped the fragment into his knapsack.
Caldwell called me into the drawing room. Still-smoking ashes in the fireplace had excited him. Tiresias discovered a piece of blackened sausage in the hearth. Gonzaga hurried to look, took it between thumb and forefingers, studied it minutely before popping it into his mouth. Tiresias estimated the embers were no more than an hour old. Caldwell was all for racing off pell-mell, ram-stam, there and then. Gonzaga barked an order that needed no translation by Tiresias.
“There are a number of, shall we say, precautions it would be advisable to take,” Tiresias said as Gonzaga measured us with his fingers, like a Gardiner Street Jewish tailor. “One would not wander out of the trenches into No Man’s Land unprotected. While the dangers awaiting us are not of so direct a nature, they are still perilous.” Gonzaga was sniffing up the lapels and down the shoulder seam of my Harris tweed sports jacket. From his sack he produced needle and cotton and a square, pierced Chinese coin which he sewed to my left elbow. Then from his sack he conjured an entire cornucopia of junk: buttons, feathers, cigarette cards, horsehairs, scraps of leather and wood, and lemonade bottle labels, with which he decorated the lapels, collar, and cuffs of my jacket. He then turned to my hat, pushing slips of green willow into the band, pinning an assortment of Boys’ Brigade Service badges to the brim, and finishing it off with a length of butter muslin tied to the back like an explorer’s mosquito veil. While Caldwell’s jacket received similar treatment as mine, I became aware of the heavy sense of nostalgia I felt from the ruins of Craigdarragh lifting—the walls were walls, not boundaries of compressed memory; the old antique voices tailed off in their ceaseless reminiscing. I fingered the pattern of shells and jewellery that weighed down my jacket: power in the form, not the substance?
An intimate, junk-shop magic, indeed.
Gonzaga’s final task was to cut two straight green sticks slightly taller than himself from the gardens and fix to them more of the same items with which he had adorned us. He gave one to Tiresias, and then the signal for the off.
I could feel the
twentieth century disappearing behind me like the coast of a great continent as we advanced into Bridestone Wood. That first occasion, when I had been defeated by the wood, I had sensed a vague, numinous presence inimical to my intrusion. Now I sensed that presence doubled and redoubled into an active and malign sentience. Every branch, every twig, blade of grass, clump of moss, spray of bracken, seemed to protest my passage. I do not exaggerate when I say that I felt a tremendous, hostile pressure turned against me, barely restrained by the patterns of gyromancy Gonzaga had worked on my clothing. But for those scraps and sorts of junk, I would have fled, gibbering like a madman in a Gothic novel, from Bridestone Wood. Looking upward through the rare breaks in the leaf canopy for a glimpse of sun, I saw birds. Nothing but birds, gliding and wheeling. Noting my concerned upward glances, Tiresias commented, “I do rather fear she may have created the Bird Storm.”
I took little comfort from his words. I was familiar with the allusion: the Norse myth of the Crow of Battle, the birds that flew from the mouth of Ragnarok, the Abyss that is the end of everything.
Caldwell let out a cry, stopped in his tracks, reached blindly out with his hands.
“Silver by gold, gold by bronze, silver, everything silver by bronze,” he whispered. Gonzaga waved his stubby, grubby fingers in front of his face, muttered to himself.
“The mythline nexi here are so powerful that they are superimposing themselves onto his normal vision,” Tiresias said. “The disturbance should clear in a minute or so, but be prepared for more of the same.” As Tiresias had promised, Caldwell’s vision did clear, but in the next ten minutes he was dazzled five times, Gonzaga offered to lead him by the hand, and guided Caldwell, eyes firmly closed, over roots and boulders. I was becoming increasingly convinced of a large, hostile presence stalking heavily behind us. When I mentioned this to Tiresias, the old tramp called a halt and slipped on his glasses.
“Rather as I feared, comrade. The pookah phagus seems to have reintegrated itself into a later manifestation. Phaguses, I had expected, but not so large, so close to the house.” I told Tiresias about the disorientation I had experienced on my recent attempt to penetrate the secrets of Bridestone Wood. Observing the passage of birds across the sky through his spectacles, he said, “You were moving across mythlines, contrary to the flow. It was only natural that the wood would resist you. We are moving with the mythlines, along the grain, following the local microflow. She will not resist us, that way.”
Gonzaga took us back and forth across the hillside in a zigzag. As we crossed the stream for the fifth time I reckoned we must be covering one hundred yards horizontally for every ten we gained vertically. My worry was that our return passes across the slope would bring us rather too near to the dark presence Tiresias had called the pookah phagus. I doubted the efficacy of Boys’ Brigade badges and bird feathers against the claw and fang of the mythical shaggy beast of the forests. Tiresias directed my attention to a hollow tree stump a few yards off our course to the left. Perched just above the pool of stagnant water that had collected in the stump was a classically perfect faery, complete with diaphanous wings, decorous white shift, and flapper hairdo.
“As the Adversary draws herself further and further out of the Mygmus into this world, so the manifestations will increase.”
In the space of a few dozen paces Bridestone Wood became a Celtic bestiary unleashed. Every leaf and fern concealed watching, liquid eyes. In every hollow and dell one could see the gleam of gold and the rainbow sheen of beating faery wings. The woodland rang with the sound of faery bells no larger than appleseeds. Faces streaked and striped with outlandish tattoos fled at our approach; I caught brief glimpses of leather-clad elves and woodkernes crashing away from us through the underbrush. Farther removed among the trees were glints of shield and spear. From farther yet came the distant baying of warhounds and the thrashing of pursued deer. In one moment of clarity I saw a pair of giant elk horns upraised in the light of a far clearing.
Caldwell stumbled on, oblivious—or was the nature of his affliction that he was unable to see anything but the phagus manifestations?—but even he paused when all Bridestone Wood throbbed like a harp string to a colossal pulse of power and over the treetops passed an immense aerial vehicle in the shape of a dish studded with glowing portholes. It hung for a moment over the hillside, then was gone the next, as if it had flown away at unimaginable velocity. Shortly after I had a clear view of a large manshaped metal automaton striding purposefully through the undergrowth. He granted me a parting glance. His eyes were red electric light bulbs, his cranium a transparent dome beneath which luminous glass tubes flashed off and on. As we prepared to recross the stream for the ninth time we found it defended by a fellow dressed only in mottled green pants and a red scarf tied around his forehead. This overmuscled chap was armed with a rifle so powerful it was virtually a one-man arsenal. We hid among the bushes with the faeries and pixies while he sniffed the air and moved off downstream. Before we had gone twenty paces a volley of gunshots in rapid succession and the scream of some unknown large animal in death agony sent the birds flapping and cawing.
No catalogue of faeries ever contained creatures like these. My conclusion, unpalatable as it was, was that these phaguses were the manifestations of future mythologies—the elves, pixies, and Wild Hunt of generations yet unborn.
Close to the upper boundary of Bridestone Wood, an inexplicable and unseasonable mist started to infiltrate between the thinning trees. It was visible even to Caldwell. He pulled up abruptly, reached out before him.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “Nothing at all.”
Tiresias and Gonzaga conferred. The mist alarmed them in a way the ghostly manifestations of the wood had not. I shivered—the temperature was dropping by the second. I recalled the time in my study that Jessica had drawn out the latent heat energy in the atmosphere to create pseudophaguses. We resumed our march. Gonzaga led, staff held before him in both hands. I followed. Caldwell and Tiresias, similarly prepared, took up the rear. We looked to my mind rather like a procession of minor clerics in some obscure High Church ritual. Within a few dozen more paces the mist had thickened to virtual opacity. Only by the change of texture beneath my feet did I know that we had emerged from the woodland onto the sheep turf of the hillside. The cold was outrageous. I became aware that I was cringing from an unseen presence; within the mist I could hear a muted rushing. Gonzaga screamed an order; instantly both he and Tiresias snapped their staves into position above their heads, arms outstretched.
And in the same instant, the birds broke upon us. Thousand of birds, tens of thousands of birds, close packed into a single flock-being, tunnelling toward us unseen through the mist. They hurled themselves upon us, and broke around the power of Gonzaga’s pocket magic. Wings, claws, screaming beaks, glaring eyes, beat past me in an almost solid wall … and were gone. Caldwell’s voice could barely be heard over the cries of the birds: “What’s happening! What’s happening!”
Tiresias and Gonzaga lowered their staves. The march resumed.
Twice more the birds attacked; twice more they broke around our protective barrier woven from bottle caps, beads, and cigarette coupons. But for the speed of the old men’s reactions, I shuddered to contemplate our fate under those myriad slashing, pecking beaks.
As I was becoming convinced that we must walk forever through fog, I saw an area of darker greyness within grey fog. I knew in an instant what it had to be.
The Bridestone.
19
THE MIST SWIRLED IN close around the Bridestone and swallowed her. The changeless grey of death: bird wings fluttered, darted at her. Feathers brushed her face, her fingers. She grasped at them, but she was falling, falling forward through the mist, an infinite plummet. Feathers and wings beat about her in the mist and she saw that what she had thought of as grey mist was the grainy texture of an infinite number of objects filling the infinite dimensions of a perfectly transparent medium.
Birds. She was falling through
a space filled with hovering birds, wings outstretched, touching each other at wingtip, tail, and beak. As she approached the uppermost of them she saw that the birds were immense, each the size of a continent. Their backs and spread wings were feathered with forests and mountain ranges, oceans and plains: each bird was a land unto itself. She fell past land after land after land, possible worlds cast in the shapes of hovering birds—worlds of ice and worlds of fire, worlds of chivalry and worlds of cruelty, worlds of cities in the shapes of great towers, or pyramids, or mountains, where cities sailed upon the sea driven by a thousand sails, or cruised the skies, held aloft by balloons or rotating blades or millions upon millions of swans; cities in the shapes of clouds, or forests, or icebergs; cities in the shapes of leaves, or smoke, or dreams; cities that corresponded to psychological and emotional states; New Jerusalems, Infernal Dises. As she fell between the unfurled feathers of a world that was one endless city from which the smoke of a great burning went up and up, she saw far below her the gleam of gold in the greyness. It arced up toward her through the spaces between the touching wingtips. She fell between a dark, blasted birdland lit by the flare of eternal trench warfare and a pastoral Arcadia of chateaux, formal gardens, minor members of the Greek pantheon, and dairy maids on swings. The shining form drew parallel to her infinite plummet.
“See, Jessica, every dream and vision that lies within the mind of man.”
Mother and daughter, they grazed past a world composed entirely of chained naked bodies piled on top of each other, one million high, one billion wide, glowing with the heat of their own combustion, close enough to gag on the stench of searing, putrefying flesh. Jessica looked within the golden light and saw not the mythic figure that had revealed itself to her on the mountainside by the Bridestone, but a girl of fourteen or fifteen, bright, eager—a girl she could have imagined for her own younger sister. To their right was a world entirely of steel, all tubes and pipes and ducts and rectangular protrusions, and a billion lit windows. In place of a tail were two engine parts, blue-hot, each large enough to swallow a moon.