The Midnight Eye Files: Volume 1 (Midnight Eye Collections)

by William Meikle

  “I just fancied a change “ I said, taking a Herald and paying him. “Can a man not change his mind?”

  “Not after five years. And not as often as a woman “ Joe said, and laughed. “And talking about women—I’ve remembered where I saw that stoater before—the one that visited you a couple of days ago.”

  I’d been on my way out, but I turned back.

  “Don’t tell me. Artie Dunlop.”

  The old man looked shocked.

  “She’s mixed up with ‘The Undertaker’? Then maybe it isn’t who I think it is. But I saw her double in Blackpool, in a fortune telling booth. About ten years ago now, but I never forget a pair of legs.”

  “I don’t think so “ I said. “She doesn’t seem the type.” But then I remembered how she seemed to know about the typewriter. Then again, she’d known I was drunk last night as well, but that hadn’t been difficult.

  I left Joe with the promise that I’d keep him posted. There was little chance of that—the only time you told Joe anything was if you wanted the whole West End to know quickly.

  I stepped out of the shop, and found Doug trying to force something through my letterbox.

  “I only want it if it’s a plain brown envelope stuffed with twenties “ I said in his ear. He jumped, suddenly flustered, and spilled a wad of A4 sheets across the pavement.

  I helped him pick them up.

  “They’re all out of sync now “ he said accusingly. “I hope you’re not in a hurry to find out what I found.”

  I looked at the pile of papers.

  “Christ, Doug. How much is here?”

  “Don’t worry “ he said. “It’s not as bad as it looks. There’s a lot of repetition—I haven’t had time to sort it out yet.”

  “You weren’t up all night, were you?”

  He looked sheepish.

  “I got carried away “ he said. “You know how it is.”

  Actually, I didn’t—I’d so far managed to avoid hooking up to the Internet. I preferred to get my information first-hand, or as near to it as possible.

  “I suppose I’d better give you some coffee “ I said. “I wouldn’t want you falling asleep at your desk—who knows what the world would come to.”

  I led him up the stairs. He tutted when he saw the whisky bottle. I didn’t tell him why I’d been drinking; the wound was too raw. If I started talking about the wee man again, I’d start drinking again. Much as the idea appealed, I had work to do.

  “Park your bum “ I said and motioned him to the desk. “And tell me what kept you away from the triple-X sites.”

  “It’ll be easier if you read it “ he said. “It’s a bit far-fetched, and you’ll have a lot of questions.”

  “Okay. I’ll do you a deal “ I said. “You shuffle them back into the right order, and I’ll make the coffee.”

  When I got back with the coffee there was a neat pile of paper on the desk in front of my chair.

  “Fast work “ I said. “Have you been practicing your poker shuffle again?”

  “It wasn’t as bad as it looked “ he said.

  “What is it about?” I asked.

  “Just read it “ he said. “You’ll be entertained, if nothing else.”

  I gave him my newspaper, a coffee, and a cigarette, then I settled down to read.

  The top pages were all about Arthur Dunlop. There were fuzzy pictures taken with long telephoto lenses, masses of press speculation, hundreds of column inches, and nothing I didn’t know already.

  “Thanks for this “ I said. “But it’s all standard stuff. What about the Gilbert and Sullivan link?”

  Doug leaned over and sorted the papers before handing them back to me.

  “There you go. There’s the good stuff.”

  The heading at the top of the first page read “http://www.moonlichtnicht.co.uk/harris. html.”

  “What’s this—the Harry Lauder appreciation society?”

  That one went over his head.

  “No, it’s a ‘magazine of the weird’. One of the sites where conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists gather.”

  “UFO...what? I said.

  “Just read it, will you “ Doug said. “I’ve got to be at work in half an hour.” .

  It all began on September 20th, 1987. John Harris was a musical prodigy and a Doctor of Physics, a youth with perfect pitch and an interest in the acoustic properties of archaeological sites. He had already, at the age of twenty-four, published several papers that had stood archaeology on its head.

  He had made it clear that ancient man had been much more ‘acoustically sophisticated’ than had been supposed, building their tombs, halls and homes as perfect places in which to sing and play music. His book The Acoustics of the Ancients was already much sought after by those in the know, and he was working on a blockbuster tentatively entitled Did Cheops play Jazz? with which he intended to prove that the Great Pyramid at Giza was actually a giant acoustic amplifier.

  On that day in September, John was studying tablets in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow University. These tablets had been brought from Ur by the infamous Johnson expedition, and he’d had to get special permission from the University authorities just to look at them. He was working on a new theory—that some of the untranslated tablets actually held an undiscovered form of musical notation.

  John hoped that, by gaining knowledge of how the Sumerian’s music was structured, he would be able to finally translate, and play, music that had not been heard for more than three millennia.

  He had spent the bulk of the summer in a small triangular room in the attic, annoying the numismatist next door with his constant attempts at articulating the ‘music’ he was reading.

  Today he thought he might finally have it cracked. Abut eleven o’clock in the morning he had finished transcribing the tablets into what he could recognize as music. He started singing.

  And hell came to Glasgow University. Witnesses in the corridor said that the walls seemed to shimmer and shake. Some reported an intense, numbing cold, others a stifling heat. But all remembered the deep, atonal chanting that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

  The numismatist reports that the wall between the rooms became transparent at one point, and that John Harris himself seemed to be fading in and out of reality.

  Out in the museum itself, a party of schoolchildren fled in fright as a stuffed woolly mammoth began to wave its trunk and show suspicious sign of life. Farther back, in the storerooms beyond, a paleontologist was studying a fossil fish when he found he was looking into a deep pool of sea water, with his fossil fish, now suddenly re-animated, swimming happily in it.

  Finally, there was a piercing scream. The numismatist had to break open the door, and found Harris on the floor. He was breathing and his eyes were open, but his face was contorted in terror, and his arms were raised as if to ward off an unseen attacker.

  The woolly mammoth was found half in and half out of the roped area in which it was displayed. In the storeroom, the paleontologist found that his fossil fish was now embedded in the stone floor beneath his feet.

  I raised my head.

  “You were here in ‘87, weren’t you?” I asked Doug.

  He nodded.

  “Do you remember hearing anything about any unbelievable nonsense in the Hunterian Museum?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll tell you later. Just keep reading “ he said. “It gets better.”

  It was while Harris was recuperating in hospital that things took a strange turn. Firstly he was visited by two men dressed all in black. They spoke at him rather than with him, and told him that he was messing with forces he couldn’t understand. They told him that if he didn’t desist, they would be forced to take action. Strangely, after they were gone, nobody in the ward apart from Harris remembered seeing them.

  I put the papers down and lit another cigarette.

  “What is this shit? It’s like a teenager’s episode of The Twilight Zone “ I said.

 
“Doo-doo doo-doo “ Doug sang, in a passable imitation of the theme tune. “Just keep reading. You must be close to the bit that concerns you by now “ he said.

  I sighed loudly to let him know how disgusted I was, but in reality I was keen to keep reading. I needed to know how my singing friend was connected to the case...

  Harris had another visitor soon afterwards. This man has never been identified, but some have suggested that it was a distant relative of the Johnson who had financed the expedition to Ur. Yet others would have you believe it to be Arthur Dunlop, although why a Glasgow gangster would be interested in esoteric acoustical studies has never been explained. Whoever it was, they were to have a profound effect on John Harris’s life afterward.

  The man funded Harris’s research for the next year. Even while lying in a hospital bed, Harris broke all ties with the scientific establishment, and no more is recorded of his work, either in note form or on any computer we can find.

  On leaving hospital, Harris went straight back to the Hunterian Museum. The University wanted to deny him access to any more of their exhibits, but it is recorded that the Museum received a large charitable donation in the winter of ‘87. After that, Harris had no trouble continuing his studies. It seems his benefactor was at work behind the scenes

  Harris immersed himself in the Ur tablets, studying everything that had ever been brought out of the ancient city. Now that he knew how their music was constructed, he was on a quest to translate as much of it as he could find, and find out what uses the people put it to.

  It is to be conjectured that the direction of his research was by now being directed by the mysterious benefactor. Whatever the cause, his search took on an increasingly esoteric, even occult, tone. By spring of ‘88 he had what he believed to be a full incantation, a song used by the peoples of that time to contact their gods.

  It is unclear whether Harris actually believed in the power of what he had discovered, or whether it was merely an academic exercise. What is clear is that his benefactor was a believer. An experiment was set up in Maes Howe on Orkney.

  It is also clear that the benefactor was a man of some influence, for they were able to hold the test on the spring equinox, inside one of the biggest Neolithic sites in Europe. Apart from Harris, all that is known of the participants is that there were two others, and that one may have been a woman.

  Most of what happened next is speculation and is taken from depositions of farmers and other islanders.

  At sunset, just as the sun’s rays penetrated the inner sanctum of the mound, Harris began his chant. Strange lights were seen in the sky—silver and blue globes of energy that hovered over the Howe and the nearby stone circle, the Ring of Brodgar.

  They say that the sound of the singing rang through every stone circle, every burial chamber, in the whole of the northern hemisphere, with reports on file from Malta, Carnac, Germany and from the Serpent Mound in North America. It is even said that vibrations were detected in the stones on Easter Island.

  All along the coast of Scotland, Viking longships were seen coming ashore. A busload of Japanese tourists was surprised when a forty-foot serpent dragged itself from Loch Ness and went to sleep on the shore near Urquhart Castle. At Culloden field and Bannockburn the sights and sounds of the old battles were played out, as if time had suddenly gone haywire. At St Andrew’s golf course groups of men in plus fours and wielding hickory golf clubs were seen playing the road hole on the ‘Old Course’. And in Dunvegan Castle, strange, piping sounds were heard, and the ‘Fairy Flag’ fluttered in its frame. Out in the North Atlantic, a new volcanic island rose near Surtsey, and a fishing boat went missing just after reporting the appearance of a sea-monster, a kraken nearly a mile long.

  Inside the mound on Orkney, reality was becoming fluid.

  It is said that the stone walls, Viking graffiti and all, began to fade, and that the people inside were given glimpses of other realities; places where gossamer wings fluttered and thin whistles blew. Great barreled creatures with strange star-shaped extrusions for heads pushed against the thin vein of reality, which started to rip and tear.

  Things got very strange after that. Outside the mound, regulars in a bar in Kirkwall told of great moans coming from deep under the sea, as if the ocean floor was splitting. Around the world, the greatest UFO show in history was taking place, with sightings over the White House, the Great Pyramid, Sydney Opera House, and the South Pole Research Station.

  Maes Howe was seen to fade in and out of reality. It had almost gone completely when a blue flash lit the night sky over North Scotland. A woman’s voice, high-pitched and beautiful, began to sing over the top of Harris.

  Harris faltered, and finally stopped. An Orkney farmer would later see two people carrying another away from the Howe. Afterwards, the farmer entered the Howe, and reported seeing strange, five-pointed depressions on the floor, as if the stone itself had melted.

  The next day, John Harris was admitted to a private Psychiatric Hospital in the West Coast resort of Ayr. Researchers have been unable to find out who paid his bills. Also on the next day, the Ur tablets were found to be missing from the Hunterian Museum after a visit from two men dressed in black. Maes Howe was closed for ‘renovations’ after which the five-pointed depressions were no longer visible. The UFO reports were dismissed as sightings of Air Force flares, and the cover- up began.

  John Harris remains in the hospital. He apparently still loves music, with a particular penchant for light opera, and Gilbert and Sullivan in particular.

  The investigation continues. Were the Men in Black from the Government? Or are our little alien buddies interested in inter-dimensional physics? Why was there so much activity in Montauk on the night the Maes Howe deal went down? Who was the mystery benefactor of John Harris? Did John Harris fall into the clutches of the notorious ‘Starry Wisdom’ sect? And what actually happened down in the depths of that burial chamber that was grim enough to turn a renowned Doctor of Physics into a physical and emotional wreck.

  The truth is waiting to be found.

  Postscript:

  Since the above was written, in March 1996, John Harris has been released from the hospital. No trace of him has been found, although there have been reported sightings in Orkney, around his old haunts in Glasgow, and on the Giza plateau. Most disturbingly, someone closely fitting his description has recently been photographed near Dulce Air Force base (see http://www.moonlichtnicht.co.uk/ harrisatdulce.jpg), just before a major UFO flap in Phoenix.

  The truth is still waiting to be found.

  I turned the page and found the referenced photograph. Whoever had been photographed at Dulce, it wasn’t John Harris. The guy in the picture was six inches too tall and thirty or forty pounds too heavy.

  There were more pictures, and more pages of speculation, but I put them down as Doug looked up from the paper.

  “Good stuff, eh?” he said. “The usual mixture of truth, fiction and paranoia.”

  “So “ I said. “How much can I believe?”

  “Well “ he began, lapsing into his teaching voice, “there was a doctor of physics called John Harris, and he was interested in acoustics, but only on an amateur level—there are no recorded papers in any of the journals. I can’t find anything about any shenanigans at the Hunterian or about any untranslated tablets from Ur. And I don’t remember any world-wide reports about singing Neolithic sites and massive UFO flaps in spring ‘88--do you?”

  “Maybe the government covered it up?” I said. “Along with Roswell, Area 51, the stargate, HAARP, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all?”

  “You forgot about the Hale-Bopp saucer, the Face on Mars, the Masonic conspiracy in NASA, alien bases underground at Dulce, chemicals in contrails, the third secret of Fatima, the Philadelphia Experiment, Majestic 12 and MK Ultra “ Doug said.

  “God, they must be busy, these Men in Black “ I said. “They’ve been so successful I’ve never heard of half of those things.”

  We both laughed.
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br />   I reached over the pile of papers to get another cigarette, and I dislodged the top paper. Underneath there were more pictures, and one of them caught my eye.

  The caption read “Mystery man and woman leave the psychiatric hospital in Ayr after visiting John Harris”. I didn’t recognize the man, but the woman was unmistakable—it was my client, Mrs. Dunlop.

  “So. Does any of it help?” Doug asked.

  I sucked my cigarette and flipped through the rest of the photographs. The man— I assumed it was Arthur Dunlop—was in a few more, but she wasn’t.

  “Oh oh “ Doug said, “I know that look. This one’s got you going, hasn’t it?”

  “You don’t know the half of it “ I said, then I told him about Wee Jimmy, then about my meeting with John Harris. Doug did something I’d never seen him do before. He reached over to the whisky bottle, poured a large measure into the remnants of his coffee, and downed it in one gulp.

  He shivered.

  “Somebody just walked over my grave “ he said. “Do you think it’s got something to do with the amulet?”

  “I think it’s got everything to do with the amulet.” I said. “And I’m going to find it, take it to Mrs. Dunlop, and find out just what the fuck is going on.”

  “Watch your back. I’ve got a bad feeling about this one “ Doug replied.

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “That makes me feel soooo much better “ he said sarcastically. “Anyway, I can’t sit around here all day. I’ve got the contents of a Bronze Age midden to catalogue.”

  “Time and shit wait for no man “ I said.

  That only got a small smile—he really did seem spooked.

  “Thanks for the stuff “ I said, waving the wad of paper at him as he stood up.

  “No problem. I’ll run some more searches tonight on John Harris, just to see if there’s any more weirdness in your case.”

  “Please. No more “ I said.