Soliloquy for Pan

by Beech, Mark

  “I should think he would be deeply insulted by the suggestion of money.”

  “But he’d take it?”

  “As long as it came with an abject apology.”

  “Oh, God, do I have to?”

  I nodded and handed him a large whisky which he gulped down.

  “I have a further suggestion,” I said. “You ask your wife to come down and stay.”

  Seymour brightened immediately. “Oh, really? Would you mind, Charles? I’m sure Lady Susan would be delighted to come. I’ve told her so much about this place and you.”

  “I’m sure you have. No, it would be a pleasure. I’d like to see old Sue again.”

  Seymour’s features tightened with annoyance. The use of that naked and unadorned “Sue” had irked him, but the moment passed. He started talking happily about the restaurant to which he was taking me that night: two Michelin stars apparently. The man was incorrigible.

  We did ourselves well at the restaurant, and the subject of Paul was avoided until it came up, in an oblique way, at the brandy stage.

  “You know, Charles,” he said, “I’m rather glad we’re not doing any more filming in that maze of yours. Not that it wasn’t a fabulous location, but... I mean, as you know, I’m about as psychic as a smoked salmon canapé—”

  “So you keep telling me.” The simile was beginning to annoy me. He seemed so pleased with himself for coming up with it.

  “But you must admit, Charles, that some rather odd things have happened there. There was that business of the hare. And the camera man told me he couldn’t get the statue of Pan in focus. He said it kept moving somehow. Then there was my little aberration. I don’t know... That place. That statue. I know it’s just an inanimate piece of stone but—”

  “What did I tell you, Seymour? There is no such thing as inanimate matter. The spirit is always there. It lies dormant. All it needs is to be reawakened.”

  “Ah! There speaks the alchemist!” And he gave his hearty laugh to wash away the awkwardness of the moment.

  That night, did I go to the maze, or did I dream it? I wandered its long leafy passageways in what seemed like early dawn, a yellowish grey that promised brilliance. The cold air of morning stung like a knife and everywhere I heard music. It was a queasy, unstable kind of sound, dreamy and irresolute, but it drove me on into the centre where he sat perched on his tree stump with the pipes at his lips. When he saw me, he lowered the pipes and the music stopped. His skin, purged of lichen, was white and slicked as if newly waxed by the sculptor. Little eddies of colour coursed through the white marble as though the body of Pan was illuminated from within, and ichor ran in his veins.

  “I he hare was not enough,” he said. “A greater sacrifice is asked.”

  I bowed my head and felt a chrism of oil fall on my hair, cool and soft. I began to chant the old hymn.

  I am Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan!

  I am thy mate, lam thy man,

  Goat of thy flock, I am gold, I am god,

  Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.

  With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks

  Through solstice stubborn to equinox.

  And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend

  Everlasting, world without end,

  Mannikin, maiden, Maenad, man,

  In the might of Pan.

  Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan!

  Above me, above the dark green ramparts of yew, he spat a stream of blood across the yellowing sky.

  The following day was a Friday. Samuels, who had been with us on and off at Huntsmere, was despatched to London with the Rolls to bring Sue down on the Saturday morning. I gathered from Alison that the Paul situation had been fairly satisfactorily resolved but I didn’t ask how. Seymour, when I eventually saw him, was in an unusually morose and uncommunicative mood. That evening we dined in the kitchen off cottage pie and apple crumble. He ate and drank voraciously. Nearly two bottles of claret were consumed, most of it by Seymour. For once, he did not seem to want company, so, having put the plates and cutlery in the dishwasher, I left him alone in the kitchen with the remains of the Margaux.

  My own mood was light as I had not been infected by Seymour’s taciturnity. I walked out onto the terrace. The sky was clear, the moon approaching fullness. Somewhere in the distance music was playing. It sounded vaguely like Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. I had a CD, several in fact, of the music, but I had not put it on. It may have been an illusion. I decided to do my duty and go back to the kitchen to see if Seymour was all right, but when I got there I found that the kitchen was empty, as was the second bottle of Margaux.

  The following morning Seymour did not turn up for breakfast, but I assumed he was merely sleeping off the effects of too much claret. The film crew came to finish a scene that they had failed to complete the day before. Denton Park was running a little behind schedule.

  At eleven Seymour had still not shown up and Alison needed to consult him on some point in the script, so I went up to the Chinese Bedroom to rouse him. He was not there and the bed had not been slept in. I began to be concerned. He had no car, so wherever he had gone would have been on foot. I rang his mobile, thereby discovering that he had left it in the kitchen, presumably the night before. A rather desultory search began.

  I cannot remember who suggested looking there, but we eventually found him in the maze. He lay on his back under the figure of Pan, the body slightly contorted. His waistcoat was undone and most of the buttons of his Turnbull and Asser striped shirt had burst from their moorings. He looked as if he had been frozen in the act of tearing off his clothes. Beads of dew or sweat glistened on his face which was as white as a statue in Carrara marble.

  He was very much dead, but we summoned the medics—and the Police, of course. Foul play was not suspected; it had been a heart attack, but there were a couple of odd things about the death. The post mortem revealed that he had ingested some yew leaves which are poisonous, and therefore may have helped to bring on his seizure. Fragments of yew were found scattered around the body and a few fronds were actually in his mouth. The other thing was that Seymour’s eyes were wide open and the look on his face was one of abject terror. Panic was the word I might have used, but nobody else did. Poor Seymour! Might have been a gentleman if he hadn’t tried so hard to become one.

  It was during the confusion of this discovery that Lady Susan arrived in the Rolls. It was I who broke the shocking news to her. She took it with deep sadness but enormous stoicism. It was not long before she, with my assistance, was quietly dealing with the many duties and difficulties that attend on such a death. She insisted that the filming of Denton Park should proceed, and even hired a writer to finish Seymour’s script.

  Sue was now a somewhat matronly figure, but in much better shape than her husband had been, and by no means beyond the pale of sexual allure. Unsurprisingly she had lost the boisterousness of her youth but she had acquired something more substantial to take its place. She was serene, even in her grief. One could easily surmise that she had become a stalwart of the charity committee and the magistrate’s bench.

  With occasional breaks to visit London Sue stayed on at Huntsmere. Her son and daughter, both in their twenties, came and went, helping to organise the funeral and the vast memorial service there would have to be for such a notable figure. They seemed pleasant enough, if a little lumpish, having inherited their father’s looks. They had very nice manners, but they were neither of them good enough actors to disguise their distrust of me. As I have long outgrown the crippling desire to be liked by everyone it made no odds. Still, I was conscious that they were baffled by Sue’s reluctance to leave Huntsmere, as was I.

  One evening, after dinner, we were sitting on the terrace looking down towards the ash grove and the maze. The westering sun gilded the green hills and the tops of trees with celestial alchemy, turning the view into a landscape by Claude. We were drinking the last a very decent Moulin de Clotte which I had summoned up from
the cellar, that small part of it not occupied by my laboratory. Sue complimented me on the excellence of the dinner which I had just cooked for her. I have become, in my widowered and impoverished maturity, very handy in the kitchen. I asked her if it was my cuisine that kept her here. She laughed.

  “Of course! But it’s other things too. Actually, it sounds strange, but I think I feel closer to Seymour here. He loved this place, you know, as soon as he saw it. If you remember he had a habit of falling in love with things at first sight. He felt in his element. All that old ancestral stuff got his juices going like nothing else. He would talk to me about it endlessly on his mobile every night. It got to be rather a bore. I think dying here was just what he would have wanted.”

  “Good God!”

  “I know. Weird isn’t it, but that was Seymour.”

  “Why on earth did you marry him, Sue?”

  “You thought you were going to marry me, didn’t you, Charles? But I would never have done that. I always knew you were a shit, and I wasn’t going to marry a shit. Seymour was a terrible snob, and not exactly a top flight performer in the bedroom department, and, in later years, a little bit pompous and full of himself, but he was always incredibly sweet and kind to me. He treated me like a lady which I am, remember, and he never sponged off me. And he was adorable with the kids when they came. In fact, I was jolly happy with him, and I don’t regret marrying him for a second.”

  “All the same—”

  “All the same, I never stopped fancying you like crazy.”

  “In spite of my being a shit—”

  “In spite—perhaps because of. Some women are like that unfortunately, and I happen to be one of them.”

  “And do you still—?”

  “Well, aren’t we going to find out...?”

  That night Sue and I were together in the Chinese Bedroom under the gaze of a hundred pigtailed Mandarins. It was a warm summer night and the moon shone in through the open casement, silvering our entwined flesh. Once, from very far away, I thought I heard, faint yet intoxicating, the skirling Pipes of Pan.

  The Secret Woods

  Lynda E. Rucker

  Nothing had changed. The old roads and the old houses and the old woods were just as she remembered them. Uncannily so, for what was more unreliable than memory, and yet here were her memories untouched and real as anything, as her hands before her on the steering wheel, as the bland pop music piped from the speakers of the rental car. Down, then, she went, down into the valley, down into her past. What a terrible thing, to learn that one’s memories were real and true, for that meant that they could be believed, and what had saved her throughout her adult life had been the certainty that everything she could recall was false.

  Pan—oh, yes, she knew Pan, of course she did. She had always known him; he had always belonged to her, and she to him. In her childhood, he had been a child as well, feral and irresistible as are all forbidden things, innocently amoral, full of tricks, fascinated with bodily effluvium—blood, piss, shit—capricious and often cruel. Even when he sent her home in tears she’d forgive him by the following day, racing out into the woods to play with him again—and what play it was! Imagine if you would a god as your favorite playmate, and the things he could show you. Imagine breaking open an ancient and still living tree, imagine breaking into the very heart of it. Imagine what you would inhale at that heart: eons coiled deep inside, summers lost five hundred years or more, traces of the fertile soil that nursed the seed when the land was younger (but still so very old). Her mother scolded her for going off on her own, for avoiding the company of her sister and of other children, but what normal child could compete?

  Then everything had changed in the space of a season, after a winter that had seemed filled with bad dreams and arguments, but at the end of it she was older, and she did not need imaginary playmates and made-up secrets. She sensed a different kind of power now, a power that rose like musk off the palms of her hands. She’d turned thirteen, after all. She liked a boy at school. She didn’t need to run like something savage through the woods and braid pieces of kudzu through her hair and pretend to be queen of something wild and invisible and secret. She had been a little girl before and now she was a woman. Her legs grew long and her feet mashed up inside too-small shoes and her chest that had been flat in the fall grew breasts sometime in the months between. Where did all that flesh and bone and skin come from, to make all the parts of her body longer and bigger so quickly? It seemed monstrous, making new flesh where before there had been none at all.

  Spring was coming. She was older now; her body proved it. Spring would be different this time.

  Home. Home. Home.

  The word had held no allure for her for so very long, and suddenly she was here and suddenly she wanted never again to leave. It was all in a rush, just like that, like twenty years of unfelt emotions surging to the surface.

  Twenty years. She would know exactly how long even if she was not being asked over and over: how long is it since we’ve seen you, Diana? Really? How can it be that long? How could it not be? How could it not be a lifetime? How could she be back here? How could any of it be?

  Her childhood home, the house itself, was one thing that bore little resemblance to her recollections of it, but that made sense: her sister and her sister’s husband had thoroughly remodeled the place. Inside, the layout had changed so much that it might be any house, not the one from her memory, and they had done the outside as well: trimmed back the forest and landscaped the front and back yards. She sensed the lingering ghosts of felled trees behind her as she stood at the edge of the yard and gazed into the forest.

  She felt grimly glad about the trees that had been cut down.

  Behind her, in the house but audible from out here, her sister’s anniversary party was in full swing. Ten years together, Kristen said it hardly seemed long enough to throw a party about but they’d had a courthouse wedding, neither of them having any family to attend, and wanted a real celebration. And with Diana coming home, that was reason enough also.

  A door slammed, and behind her, her nephew cried, “Aunt Diana! Aunt Diana, Mama says you need to come on in! Daddy’s talking now!”

  To her sister’s three children, two nieces and a nephew, who had only seen her on Skype at the Christmases when she bothered at all, she might have been a celebrity, an alien, an almost-unreal being dropped in from unknown parts. Unlike the adults, they stared at her openly: at the tattoos, at the piercings in her face and the way she was dressed and at her hair and all the ways she didn’t belong. To everyone else, she was the prodigal. Behind their smiles and their greetings she wondered what they must think of her. Perhaps they did not think of her at all. Perhaps they thought her dreadful. If only they knew. If only.

  Inside, a dining room table was laden with appetizers from Costco, little quiches and chicken tenders and egg rolls and vegetable trays with dips. Her sister’s husband Marc was raising his glass and saying some words about his beloved wife, words she forgot as soon as she heard them, but then what did she know? She didn’t love anyone. Everyone was drinking a little too much champagne and laughing a little too loudly, but no, really, those were just the judgments of a snotty teenage Diana, the last role she’d played as part of a family unit (well—not the very last—but that was not to be thought of). She had to learn how to be adult Diana in the space of a single afternoon among people she had only ever been a child around.

  Everyone was having a perfectly nice time. This was nice, and her sister was nice, and her sister’s family was nice, and the house, what they’d done with it, was nice, and she, too, was going to be nice and then she was going to excuse herself from this nice but ill-advised trip back down memory lane and take herself back home, back to her real home, not here, to the din and the smells and the energy of the city where everything was man-made and nothing was real. She could not actually say when she had last been in the countryside. Never. She never went.

  Then, in the forest, she ha
d been Diana the huntress. As a child, she had read about the goddess she liked to think of as her namesake, and when she was with Pan, she had almost believed it—when you were friends with a god, why not be a god yourself?—and afterwards she was only ordinary Diana, just a girl, just a woman, the moon and the forest and the whole of creation lost to her. And why should it not be?

  After all, it had all been make-believe. It must have been. She was grateful for a childhood of benign neglect, that she had managed to not be attended by an army of concerned parents and psychologists and teachers, that she was allowed an imaginary friend rather than being shunted off to a therapist and medicated into compliance. Oh, just imagine how angry that would have made Pan. What he might have done.

  Because what he did was bad enough.

  She had told herself she was not going to smoke while she was there, but that was before she had actually arrived, before she was able to take the true measure of what she was up against. As she stepped outside again, this time into the front yard where she would not face the forest but the road and thus felt a bit safer, she confessed it to her sister shamefacedly—wasn’t smoking something normal decent people no longer did? It was only when Marc joined that it occurred to her that very possibly, she had not the faintest ideas about how normal decent people behaved, or anything at all really.

  “It must feel weird for you being back here,” Marc said, after first getting a light off her.

  She shrugged, then remembered that teenage Diana was not allowed to make any more appearances and found her voice. “Yeah, it really is.” It was a little bit easier to talk to Marc because he was someone entirely new, someone she had not known from before. “I didn’t think it would be this weird, really. Or maybe I did. I kind of don’t know what I thought.”

  “I really appreciate you coming here,” Marc said. “Kristen appreciates it. She was so happy you said you would. I know it’s not your kind of thing.”