by Beech, Mark
She woke in the mouth of Loogy’s Cave, looking down onto her own garden. At first, she thought the white stones, with all their rituals and alignments, were visible again, but realised, with dismay, that they were her guests, sat waiting for her, in the sunlight. She remembered her plans for the day and realised she was late. But her descent would be dramatic and her fame and reputation would soar. She had so many things to tell them, so many secrets to unfold, of Arbeth, Elenid and their grief for Dathyl. And there was a new mural, engraved in the chalk, that seemed poised on the edge of movement, to dance and swirl with the other older images.
Rising to her feet, a wave of nausea almost made her faint and her hands were trembling. Her joints ached and her vision was blurred. And there was something in her throat, grey and flaccid, that brought phlegm to her mouth and a reflux, that tasted sour, as if she had been sick. But she recalled her adventures and the tumble down the bank, and assumed all would be well.
With relief, her lover and friends saw her and waved. They had noticed the recent artwork in the chalk. There was something familiar about one of the figures that puzzled and intrigued them. Ellie seemed to move with difficulty. Perhaps she had strained a muscle, whilst running. From the hill, someone was playing an instrument, that seemed to echo from the cave itself; a wild mocking melody that was disturbing the animals. The shire horse, usually so placid, reared on its hind legs. A dog howled and others, in the neighbouring houses, answered. The photographer, his face white, had zoomed his lens on Ellie and was filming her descent, his concentration rapt and intense. From the wilderness nearby came the sickly smell of roses, festered and tainted, like the muddied dribble from a forgotten vase.
Her lover watched with growing unease. Around the cave, the patterns of light, chalk and the grasses, blown by the wind, seemed to animate one of the figures. It jerked and hobbled with the same limping motion as Elbe’s laboured walk. And the music jinked and tripped in time, to mimic them. Something was deeply awry. The photographer’s expression was caught between disbelief and a secret nasty smile, as he held the camera.
Ellie veered unsteadily towards her friend. She needed to tell her of the glory of the stranger she had seen by the waterfall. But her voice was hoarse and feeble, and she slumped to her knees. Her body seemed weightless in her lover’s arms, as he lifted and carried her into the house. And her clothes hung loosely over the wrinkled shrunken skin of a centenarian, as she babbled ecstatically of moons, stars and the alignments of stone and sky.
The Death of Pan
Lord Dunsany (1915)
When travellers from London entered Arcady they lamented one to another the death of Pan.
And anon they saw him lying stiff and still.
Horned Pan was still and the dew was on his fur; he had not the look of a live animal. And then they said, “It is true that Pan is dead.”
And, standing melancholy by that huge prone body, they looked for long at memorable Pan.
And evening came and a small star appeared.
And presently from a hamlet of some Arcadian valley, with a sound of idle song, Arcadian maidens came.
And, when they saw there, suddenly in the twilight, that old recumbent god, they stopped in their running and whispered among themselves. “How silly he looks,” they said, and thereat they laughed a little.
And at the sound of their laughter Pan leaped up and the gravel flew from his hooves.
And, for as long as the travellers stood and listened, the crags and the hill-tops of Arcady rang with the sounds of pursuit.
From Fifty-one Tales.
Meadow Saffron
Martin Jones
She opened the book from where she had last read, pages waking. It thrilled her to read aloud, and it mattered not that her lover was bemused by such devotion. To her, devotion was sequential, selective. There to be lived in each minute. The lover would soon be discarded in the determined pursuit of another.
“Call Melinoe,” she began. “Saffron-veiled, terrene. Who from infernal Pluto’s sacred queen, mixed with Saturnian Jupiter, arose. Near where Cocytus’ mournful river flows—”
“What is that book again?” The girl on the other side of the bed asked, lighting a cigarette. Emma drank in the sheen of her naked body. The sweat, such armour; the excess of their love-making. A fruit to be devoured, the girl had willingly entered into her games, her tableaus, erotic recreations from another age.
“The Orphic Hymns, my sweet,” she replied, admiring her curves through the veil of smoke. The girl said nothing, merely parted her legs slowly, as if already bored. “When under Pluto’s semblance, Jove divine, deceived with guileful arts dark Prosepine. Hence, partly black thy limbs and partly white. From Pluto dark, from Jove ethereal, bright...”
“You love the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” the girl commented.
“Only as much as you love your own body.” She closed the book and placed it on her bedside table. She would take the Hymns tomorrow night, a talisman to aid in her next, and hopefully greatest, seduction. But first, a final gift for the lustful creature in front of her...
A dirty white thread, like hair unearthed, was wrapped tightly around the hilt of the knife, and from that came the unfamiliar smell: the dust of one long dead; one whose remaining artefacts had been taken and utilised as an insult of decoration, a desecration against memory.
Stroking his bearded chin, Patrick could think of no good reason why the knife had been embedded into one of his gateposts. An unwelcome gift, it literally had the scent of something ancient about it, but curious study won over any obvious questions. Pulling it from the wood, Patrick examined the weapon in the cloudless night: a stunted blade, pure black; curved like a dancer’s bruised foot. He held it up to the moon and gutted the surface with a flourish, cutting pale flesh clean away. Then he turned and marched back up the driveway, throwing the object deep into the nest of withered brambles that kept his home secreted from the road.
The strange scent followed him inside, clinging onto his fingers. Patrick detoured upstairs to the bathroom. It was a peculiar odour, at once plain and exotic: a smog of burning herbs from distant lands, penetrating his nostrils without invitation. Why did the knife carry such a scent? His car’s headlights had momentarily revealed the blade when he returned from work that evening: a gleaming, unfamiliar sentry. After scrubbing and drying his hands, Patrick studied his face in the mirror, satisfied with the handsome grain that ran through the lines of his skin, the well-trimmed beard that underlined his features. For a second he considered masturbating, but then decided that Sylvie might ease his excitement later.
Downstairs, his wife greeted him in the hallway, glass of red wine in hand. “Where did you run off to?” she asked. Patrick could tell she was already tipsy: a plastic straw peaked from her wine glass, a habit she had never discarded.
“I stepped on something outside,” he lied. “Had to peel it off my trainer. Hello, Emma.”
They had a guest. Emma drifted towards them in a vapour of expensive perfume and wine, casually hanging her shoulder bag on a nearby coat hook. “Blessed Patrick,” she began, as some form of greeting. “Whom rural haunts delight. Leaping, agile, wandering, starry light... I love this house.”
He knew why she was here, but Sylvie said nothing, merely smiled at her and drank, blowing a cluster of bubbles through the straw like a flirty teenager. Leaving the women and getting himself a beer from the kitchen, Patrick stared out at the back garden. He had fallen for the derelict house on the first viewing, although Sylvie had not been as keen. Behind the uncut grass there stretched a deep length of rectangular woodland, and on that day the child within him—long considered dead—had broken loose from the estate agent’s platter and ran feral. Reluctantly, Sylvie had agreed to buy the property, but on one condition: “I want something out of this as well, Patrick.”
“What?”
She did not tell him, not there. First, she let her husband become roguish master of the land, leaping
into the wild garden the instant they had transported every possession, treading a fresh path into the trees: the ash and, somewhere further back, a gnarled, lonely oak; the light between burning out as the day faded. Patrick could stare off into the trees for hours. The silence was frightening to his urban ears, but he grew used to it, even began to welcome it. Occasionally wildfowl would fire their calls from somewhere, hidden by the trunks and sunlight. Then, one day, driving home from work, he spotted a buzzard, predatory halo high above branches. A feathered crown for his kingdom.
“A girlfriend,” Sylvie had eventually told him. “I want a girlfriend. A lover. Someone to break the monotony of your dream.” It had seemed like such a tempting offer at the time, but quickly Patrick realised that it was not aimed at him. Sylvie. It was purely Sylvie’s desire, and his wife had never before hinted at such a thing. Not during their courtship, or during the stressful times when Patrick took on more and more hours at work to keep them afloat. At first, he feigned offence at the idea: A perverse form of revisionism, of rejection; almost as if every touch he had laid upon her over the years, every caress and kiss and entanglement, had meant nothing and that, contrary to his euphoria during their lovemaking, she had in fact been biding her time until something else, something he would never be able to view clearly, drifted her way with ready fingers.
But Patrick was simply allowing the concept to warm up: in truth it felt as natural as the heat from her own skin. As an idea it captivated him, then obsessed him, to the point where he could no longer see her original request, only his involvement in her wish. He was a double agent who had forgotten who had sent him out on the errand. It followed him into their bed; it followed him to work. He battled visions of it waiting in the playground of the primary school where Sylvie had found employment as a teaching assistant. He cursed himself as his eyes wandered across the soap-fresh young mothers around him and did not focus on Sylvie’s routine summaries of her working day.
The house had induced a fertile imagination in Patrick, and he was determined to pursue his wife down her chosen path. The school was the centre of rural life twice a day, serving the thickwheeled vehicles that arrived and departed, each parent returning to their own splendid isolation and the spoils that numbed the horror of it all. Sylvie had met Emma at the school. A fellow employee, she was experienced in the ways of deflecting the solitude of their surroundings. Patrick had not seen this deadening effect of the countryside when they first moved to the house. But Sylvie must have known from the moment they silently inspected the old rooms together that her soul required a supplement, an enticement that could not be purchased with mere money.
Emma’s hair was a cascade of dark luxury, falling from untroubled forehead to the fruitful curve of her chest. To Patrick she resembled an oblique folk singer whose one album had come and gone like a season, but who knew that her voice would resonate down the years. He often ruminated on his own regret at not being able to peel the snug muslin top from her taut frame, a blundering, attempted seduction on their first meeting. Brushing his eager hand away from her groin with a pitying smile, Emma had whispered to him, “You’ve got your idyll, Patrick. I want something else...”
Emma rose from her chair. “The outside light’s come on,” she announced, ending Patrick’s erotic reverie. He watched the seam of her blue jeans tighten as she moved. From the kitchen, Sylvie answered: “It does that all the time.”
“Pheasants,” Patrick said, by way of explanation. Emma merely stared at him, unimpressed, as she walked to the kitchen. The house’s security light illuminated all. Rusting metal garden furniture left by the previous owners; a patio whose slabs had not curtailed the ascent of nature. And beyond that, beyond the vagrant lawn, a habitat woken, blinking in the light. Awake, but silent. Glittered insects living and dying in their thousands. A rough fence of trunks at the rear of the garden, tended by lewd foxglove and psychopathic nettle.
It was early on, before papers had even been signed, that Patrick realised he was not really buying the house, but what lay behind it. Outside, the light died, allowing nocturnal gears to turn again, regardless of human eyes. Her glass full, plastic straw rolling within, Sylvie entered the room. In another age, Patrick considered, she would have been an ideal muse. Her flesh had always been her greatest asset, a soft map to guide on a journey of pure pleasure. The long strands of her red hair a brazen beacon. Intimate knowledge of Sylvie—her taste, her breasts, her fiery scent—was at least one treasure Patrick kept away from Emma. For now.
“Are there any beers left?” he asked his wife.
“There’s plenty,” Sylvie said, turning back. Then she gave a tiny gasp and dropped her glass. Its shattering on the wooden floor bought Emma out from the kitchen. The security light had blinked on again. Emma moved to say something, but she herself froze at the sight. Sylvie looked at her, then Patrick. But he acknowledged neither of them. Instead, he looked out through the patio doors.
Camouflaged in shadow, far back by the trees where the light found its boundary, stood a figure.
An exquisite creature, the night did not disturb her. A girl. She was a girl. She wore nothing except a ragged fur coat that flowed like dark waters to the ground around her. Unfastened, it revealed a channel of ivory skin, from slender neck to the wink of a navel, and the smooth journey beneath. And her hair was black as the woods that were her backdrop. It travelled to half the length of her body, curtaining her breasts. She did not move. She made no gesture, no sound, towards them. And, just as quickly as she had appeared, she stepped gracefully backwards, taking the light with her. A flashbulb image burnt onto their eyes only. Evidence found then lost.
Typically, Emma spoke first. “What the tuck was that?” she demanded of no one. Sylvie said nothing, but continued to watch the darkness. Whatever the girl was, she had become the night. They both looked back at Patrick. He shook his head in bemusement. “Is she something to do with you, Emma?” he asked, pleased that he had thrown some depravity back in her corner.
“I wish,” she muttered. Her ice-cool was breaking. Patrick knew it. A hazy night spent attempting to seduce his wife was now off the agenda. Her grooming fingers, active for most of the evening, suddenly had ghostly splinters under their perfect nails.
“Em going out,” she said, walking towards the patio doors.
“No, Emma...” Sylvie put out a hand to stop her.
“I’m not scared,” Emma said.
“Stay indoors,” Sylvie ordered, softly. “For now. We don’t know who she is.”
Outside, a small bat tormented their indecision by whirring freely off into the woods.
“But who is she, Patrick? You don’t know her. None of us know her.”
“What does it matter? We think nothing of having sex with strangers we meet in a pub or club. So what’s the difference if a beautiful girl appears from nowhere, from out of the woods? Why should her motivations be any different? Some horny teenager high on drugs, drifting away from her party...”
“I can’t believe you’d even begin to think like that.”
“I’m just drinking from the same source that allows Emma to grope you, to try to steal a kiss.” Despite the intruder, Patrick had already seen Emma attempt such a move. But if he knew anything, it was that his wife was not won over so easily. Perhaps not at all now.
“Is she a girl?” Sylvie asked no one.
“A nymph,” Emma offered, glass chiming on an empty wine bottle as if in celebration of the fact.
“A what?”
“A wood nymph. A mythical creature from out of the wild.” No one responded to her words. If anything, their meaning was lost under the surface of a simpler confusion.
“Patrick, you should call the police.”
“Why? Sylvie, she was barely there.”
“She was still there, though. In our garden.”
“The doors are locked. It’s not a fairy tale. She’s not the Ice Queen, or whatever Emma thinks she is.”
Patrick’s inter
action with the women soon became limited to observing the amount of alcohol they had shared between them since the girl had made her first appearance. Sylvie had drunk up more wine through her straw, obviously hoping to reach some plateau of calm. Emma had started on the vodka and now seemed like an animal caged behind double-glazing. To Patrick she appeared to be one step away from stripping her clothes off, her lust for his intoxicated wife now hardened towards another. Whoever that person was out there—girl, nymph—she had divided the people in this house: they were reluctant to acknowledge each other’s physical heat, reluctant to revisit the tension that had come before. Patrick could not speak for his wife and would-never-be lover, he did not care for what they thought of the intruder, trespasser of his beloved woodland. Why was she here? Increasingly, as the minutes were drained like the women’s glasses, he cared less and less to look for answers: throw them into the brambles with that filthy knife. What was certain was this: he was transfixed. To Patrick, the nymph was a strange exit from the existing depravity he had been excluded from on this night; a new dance towards unknown hedonism, with all the experiences ready to be written down in warm blood on the white flesh of this creature—
“She’s come back,” Emma said, staring out the window.
Patrick looked beyond them, to the cathode-lit canvas outside.
“Christ, she’s stunning,” Sylvie commented, finishing her drink.
She did not move towards them. No fair hand was raised, no modesty invoked. The nymph seemed oblivious to the night, the people who watched her. Patrick divided his attention between all three women. Sylvie now appeared unconcerned. She merely drank her wine and watched. Emma, too, had quietened. Although Patrick noted that she occasionally bit her bottom lip, as if in agitation, or indecision. Subjects all, favourites none, the nymph gave no indication of her own cravings. Patrick broke away and walked into the kitchen to observe her alone, as if those other eyes were cheapening his experience. It seemed to him that the nymph’s ragged coat had opened more, the hair had been drawn further apart, to reveal the curve of small, perfect breasts; obscene against her black mane. The cold had no effect: her breath did not mist up into the air but instead slowly cascaded down her torso, past the hairless ridge of her groin. Sweet hill of flesh. The nymph was everything Patrick now desired: a strange prize for any brave enough to greet her, this creature wandering in from nowhere; from a wood that by day had boundaries, but by night was seemingly limitless. The flow of that skin, held in by the coat, was all that Patrick wished to dive towards. He would prove his decadent worth to Emma, redirect Sylvie’s lust back to him again. His arousal could not be contained within the house.