by Beech, Mark
“I hear music and desperation, and when they resonate I come. When more people see me and play my music, it helps me travel between worlds. The worst thing is to be trapped.” She shudders, then lifts her instrument to her mouth.
“Come play with us,” the Panisca invites.
Play with us.
The sound coming out of the Panisca’s instrument assaults Suzy’s ears, though it isn’t very loud. She pauses. “You’re a curious girl. Do you want to visit the place I come from?”
Suzy’s first thought is yes. Then she is cautious. You don’t get in a stranger’s car; and you don’t get in a stranger’s time machine or spaceship either.
She scowls. “Maybe.”
But as the Panisca continues her song, Suzy can’t resist a dance. Two left feet, doing their shuffle.
The music intensifies. The warbles of songbirds weave through it. But it also condenses the caw of crows and the deep-throated signal of frogs in each note. It is the slither of snakes and worms, and the cries of mating cats. A rising sun, a dawn and a cacophony of birds.
It brings tears to Suzy’s eyes, and it also makes her want to throw her head back and let her voice rise up to the moon.
The Panisca whirls in a dance, leading Suzy out of the grove, around the pool. She is changing, so is the landscape. At the shallow end of the pool the cracks grow wider and plants flower.
More waterlilies raise heads above the water, which moves as if fed by a new source, deepening and swirling and advancing. It’s no longer stagnant, but vital and inviting.
Suzy sits down on the side of the pool, lays down her flute and rucksack, then pulls off her sneakers and socks. She looks at her feet, the empty space where toes used to be. The exposed skin there begins to itch. It needs the water, she decides. But what’s happening in the pool? “The water looks so different now!”
“Of course it does. This is a world of change,” says the Panisca. “Life is change, as you know. That makes us different the rocks.”
“I think I’ve heard that line before,” says Suzy as she steps in the water, which has filled most of the pool.
The Panisca holds her instrument aloft, waist-deep in the waters of the pool. Frogs leap from the water onto her shoulders.
The water is heavy satin against Suzy’s skin, like a bath with fragrant oil. Its surface ripples, and something emerges from it again.
Nymphs. Three of them.
Is there such a thing as a boy nymph?
This one is smiling at Suzy, and he emerges from the water to extend his hand. He is dark-haired and slender, his green eyes welcome her. The two female nymphs also smile, perhaps shyly. She immediately thinks of them as the best friends she never had.
As Suzy submerges, the water flows and curls around her. She leans back upon it, then extends her legs and arms. The nymphs surround her, their touch an extension of the water. It feels good to be there. Too long she’s avoided swimming for fear of exposure.
Now she swims, and dances in the water. She touches bottom, then floats to the top. No longer is she big and awkward. She’s as graceful as her companions, who embrace her and accept her. She submerges again, holding her breath. The bottom of the pool is gone, and she doesn’t miss it. It has turned into a lake, an ocean. It is another world, far better than the one she lives in. It’s a world of change, of freedom.
The nymphs join her again, cushioning her descent.
She needs to breathe now. She starts a slow kick towards the surface, but her loving new friends don’t realise she has to go there. They want to show her the world below, which is lit by a pearly light. It is full of caves and stunning stone grottos and flowering water plants more opulent the lilies sprouting on the surface. They want to show her everything. She wants to see it too, but after she gets a breath.
Why are they holding her down? She struggles politely, trying to let them know that she’d love to see their abode, but first she must breathe. Now. She can’t hold back any longer, she has to expel the old air in the lungs and take in oxygen.
Then the guy tries to kiss her. Good grief. Sure she liked the look of him and would have happily kissed him back, but not here.
She kicks. Even boy nymphs have balls, and she’s given them a square hit. A string of bubbles eject out of his mouth and his grip loosens. She struggles and opens her mouth and more water gets in... and in. Her chest is burning, an incredible pressure pushes down on it. She flails the water with her hands, and then her arm brushes something wedged into a rock.
A solid square object. She picks it up, thinking to use it as a weapon against the nymphs.
And then she recognises the drawing of a six-toed foot. Her copy of The Chrysalids. Fat lot of good it will do her now.
But its solid square shape reassures her. So does the six-toed footprint on its cover, and the dog-ears at her favourite parts, especially where she discovered the lyrics of “Crown of Creation”. She could probably find the page with the smudge of tomato sauce if she wasn’t about to drown...
But the heaviness of the water around her is clearing, the pressure on her chest lightens. She’s dizzy and her ears pop, as if she’s on a plane descending into a more familiar layer of air.
Suddenly, she’s crouching in three feet of water. She lifts her head up with a great gasp and cough. The water isn’t so nice now, with its usual components of frog spawn and slime. There’s no underground spring making it fresh, no bottomless lake full of marvels. But at least she can sit up and breathe.
And then she is staggering to sprawl at the shallow end near the steps, close to where she left her flute. Maybe she loses consciousness for a moment, but she still feels herself coughing in the dark, water and puke coming out of her mouth.
When Suzy opens her eyes the Panisca is sitting on the side of the pool, hairy legs swinging as she plays another tune. She puts down her instrument and laughs. “What a mess!”
Suzy is still clutching her book. The plastic jacket protected the cover but the pages are gummed up. She’d really love to chuck it at that pointy-eared bitch, but she’s thrown that book around too much already.
“You’re back sooner than I thought...” The Panisca winks.
Though this creature may have once saved her life, Suzy now sees that she could just as easily take it away, or let it slip away while she’s playing that damned thing. Anger makes Suzy want to shout, though she can just about manage an enraged series of croaks.
“No thanks to you. I almost drowned. And your friend... Maybe he should have tried kissing me above the water instead of below it.”
“Kissing you? He only wanted to help you breathe under water. That’s what nymphs do if they’re friendly. And these nymphs—the kind that settle in abandoned places—are friendly. They only want to bring a bit of life to them.”
“Trying to drown me is a funny way to go about it... Well, he should’ve said... you know, about the breathing. And why were you egging them on instead of helping me?”
“But you seemed so happy! I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Happy as fuck!” Suzy’s clothes are plastered to her skin. Though the night had been warm, the dawn is chilly. She shivers. She’ll have to get home and dry off, make herself a hot drink. She hopes no one there has missed her.
And then the birds start their raucous calling and chittering as the sun starts to rise.
The Panisca yawns. “I will retire now.” She picks up her syrinx and walks into the woods.
Suzy picks herself up. The water in the pool is back at its usual level and shows no signs of agitation. But new water lilies are opening their petals to bloom in the day, while the night lilies clench their petals.
One of the new lilies is dark purple, almost black. Things always change in my world.
As Suzy puts on her shoes and socks, she stops. Something else has changed.
Her missing toes have grown back. She touches them, wiggles them. Wee wee wee all the way home. They look so new. So smooth, with perfect nails
. A perfect shape, unbowed by tight shoes, blisters and wear and tear.
I’ll be damned, my near-fatal frolics with pointy-ears and her pals must’ve done some good after all!
She stashes her flute and puts her sneakers in her backpack too. She doesn’t care if she encounters some rough ground. She has to try out her new toes. Her excitement drives that bedraggled half-drowned shock and exhaustion away. She skips and capers.
Let me feel the grass, let me feel the mud between five that is FIVE toes on my right foot.
And just to think she was ‘healed’ by a swim around a pool full of rotting junk with three water nymphs. Let those Jesus creeps put that in their pipe and smoke it!
Then she stops, and thinks.
What will happen when people see that those missing toes have grown back?
People will want to understand this regeneration. They will ask questions, and more questions. Doctors will want to experiment. Kids will make fun again. Mutant Sue, mutant Sue, got anything new? Another head, an extra boob?
Now that she’s whole, she’ll be even more of a freak.
She’ll have to hide her regrown toes from everyone. Even her family, even her parents. Even Bernie. And you’ve got no place to go...
Suzy stops her progress towards the house and plops down on the ground. Sneakers and socks come out of the bag, and go back on her feet.
She ties her laces tight, tighter than ever before.
An Old God Almost Dead:
Pan in the 1940s
Nick Freeman
Pan pervaded the literature and art of late Victorian and Edwardian England. He was a multi-faceted, highly complex figure and symbol: the bearer of dangerous and destructive sexual knowledge in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), a menacing, leering presence in the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley and his followers, a symbol of personal, perhaps homosexual liberation in E.M. Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’ (1902) and E.F. Benson’s ‘The Man Who Went Too Far’ (1904). He was both the vengeful, misogynistic persecutor of ‘modern’ rationality and secularism in Saki’s ‘The Music on the Hill’ (1911), and the eternal child of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906). Yet, as has often been noted, this fascination with the goat god was short-lived, flaring up in the latter half of the nineteenth century but dying out as the 1920s progressed. D.H. Lawrence was probably the last ‘major’ writer to have been drawn to him. Modernists were just as interested in the uses of mythology as their Victorian forebears, but they tended to focus on different figures and stories: for Joyce the Odyssey, for Yeats, Leda and the Swan. Had T.S. Eliot written of the pagan world with the same enthusiasm as he showed for the grail quest, interwar writing, and the voluminous literary criticism it has inspired, might now look very different.
As it is, literary history has tended to follow the trail of the canonical modernists, consigning Pan to the world before 1914. There is certainly a marked difference between the meaning of Pan to Machen or Saki, and the satyriasis and desperation of Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay (1923), and even if one is bold enough to reject the standard narratives of how English writing developed after the Great War, it has to be acknowledged that supernatural, gothic or weird fiction was markedly out of favour in the years immediately following the conflict. Where once its aficionados had been spoilt for choice, now the magazine culture that had provided such fertile avenues for publication preferred very different subject matter, with crime and adventure knocking the supernatural off its perch. Writers who had made their names before the conflict continued to publish—E.F. Benson offered periodic new collections of ‘spook stories’ until 1934—but few new ‘names’ had emerged since 1918, and those that had, H.R. Wakefield for example, or L.P. Hartley, did not develop the Pan-mythos of their predecessors. Dion Fortune attempted to combine the modes of popular fiction with didactic magical spirituality in The Goat-Foot God (1936), but the reading public preferred the so-called ‘black magic’ served up by Dennis Wheat-ley, and the curious blend of esoterica and populism found in the novels of Charles Williams. Pan may not have been dead by the 1930s, but he was increasingly ignored.
Nevertheless, he did not wholly disappear. As Robert Graves wrote in his poem ‘Outlaws’ (1920), though “almost dead,” “starved of their ancient dues” and “banished to woods and a sickly moon,” the “aged gods of fright and lust” “cling to life yet,” haunting the fringes of civilisation and despairing at their reduced circumstances:
Proud gods, humbled, sunk so low,
Living with ghosts and ghouls,
And ghosts of ghosts and last year’s snow
And dead toadstools.
There would not be a significant revival of paganism (and indeed, the occult) in Britain until the 1960s. Aleister Crowley’s Swinburnean ‘Hymn to Pan’ was read at the magus’s funeral in Brighton in December 1947, but although it received wide press coverage from journalists curious about the final days of ‘the wickedest man in the world’, there were few actual mourners present. The event seemed to symbolise the end of the fin de siècles esoteric revival rather than pointing towards the rebirth that would begin during the 1960s.
In what follows, I look at three works from the 1940s and 1950s which suggest that Graves’s ‘outlaws’ lingered on during seemingly barren decades. Pessimistic rather than joyous, each ends with Pan or his followers passing from the world, and each is an example of the ‘thinning’ that John Clute identifies in his Encyclopedia (sic) of Fantasy (1997) as constituting “a lessening,” “the passing away of a higher and more intense reality” and a “draining” of magic from life and/or the environment. This is however tempered by the fact that Pan stories continued to be written and published in an era that seemed so antipathetic to them. As Graves intimated, the old gods were still a part of Britain’s imaginative world, even if they were no longer at its forefront, and they remained a potent means of reminding modernity about its underlying needs and realities.
‘Wild Forgotten Things’: The Little Grey Men
The central challenge for those writing stories about Pan involves confronting the body of Pan fiction produced during the 1890s and 1900s. Put simply, the likes of Machen established several plotlines which have remained influential ever since. These can be summarised as a) the ecstatic (or terrifying) encounter with nature that overturns conventions and allows some form of liberation, usually sexual and at some cost; b) Pan is defied or dismissed by a Christian or secularist, and enacts a terrible revenge; and c) modern-day men either encounter survivals of ancient rites or, as in John Buchan’s ‘The Wind in the Portico’ (1928), attempt to re-establish them. The consequences of both are typically disastrous. These storylines have become staples of more general encounters with the occult in fiction (and film), but they can be stifling or worse, they can tempt writers to recycle them in unimaginative or formulaic ways. The most fruitful approach is to synthesise a couple of these narrative structures, or else to transplant them into different contexts. It was this latter option that was preferred by Denys Watkins-Pitchford, the art master at Rugby School, in his 1942 children’s novel, The Little Grey Men. His story uses elements of a) and c), fusing the two to make for a dramatic and quietly moving episode.
The Little Grey Men, subtitled ‘a story for the young in heart’, is a fascinating mixture of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and the harder edged ‘new’ nature fiction pioneered by Richard Jefferies and perfected by Henry Williamson in Tarka the Otter (1927). As a children’s book, it remains given to sentiment and anthropomorphism, but combines these with higher levels of ecological realism than are often found in juvenile fiction of this period. Watkins-Pitchford wrote many books about the countryside as well as children’s fiction under his pseudonym ‘B.B’ (despite its Wiccan overtones, this term was taken from the gauge of shot he used when shooting geese), and he brought an obvious reverence for the natural world to his quirky characterisations. His introduction to the first edition of the novel explained his approach:
This is a story about the last gnomes in Britain. They are honest-to-goodness gnomes, none of your baby, fairy-book tinsel stuff, and they live by hunting and fishing, like the animals and birds, which is only proper and right. You may not believe in the Little People, but that is because most fairy books portray miniature men and women with ridiculous tinsel wings, doing all sorts of impossible things with flowers and cobwebs. That sort of make-believe is all right for some people, but it won’t do for you and me.
In telling this story I must ask the reader’s indulgence for one flight of fancy. I have found it necessary to allow my gnomes and animals the power of speech. As this book is for young people no doubt they will forgive me, for it makes the story easier to follow. In other respects it does not often go beyond the realms of possibility.
The book follows the journey of Baldmoney, Dodder, and Sneezewort as they search for their lost brother, Cloudberry, who has rashly left their home beside a Warwickshire stream in search of adventure. As the trio sail down the Folly Brook and beyond, they meet a succession of riverside creatures before coming to Crow Wood, a once wild place now used for the raising of pheasants. It is ruled by Purkis, a gamekeeper known to the woodland folk as Giant Grum, who shoots and traps animals and birds in the single-minded defence of his master’s prize game. After Grum kills the gnomes’ friend, Otter, they vow vengeance, resisting both the keeper’s tyranny and the impositions of human ownership: “There’s no such thing as private property in nature,” the gnomes tell the pheasants. Realising that they are powerless to overthrow the man unaided, they call upon Pan who attends a gathering of the woodlanders in the dark shadow of the keeper’s gibbet on Midsummer’s Eve.
Pan has many of his expected attributes—he is “the god of all wild things”, his feet are cloven hoofs, he plays the pipes, appears at the solstice and has been absent from the world for many years. “We thought you must have gone, so long have we called upon you and had no answer,” says Dodder, the oldest of the gnomes. “[I] thought you had gone with the Others,” he adds, in the familiar allusion to the death or at least departure of the pagan gods. Pan is indeed a figure from the past, who promises to help the woodland folk but will then disappear, “until that day when we shall all return, yes, all, gnomes and wild forgotten things alike, to the land where once we lived.” He tells the gathering that “The woods were here before man walked the earth,” and gives Dodder six oak leaves which will, he says, banish Grum forever. “How can so frail a thing as a leaf avail us against the giant,” asks Sneezewort, pointing out “there is no magic in England now!” Pan tells him to have “courage and faith”, before dissolving into mist accompanied by the sweet music of his pipes. Emboldened by the god’s blessing, Dodder seeks out the gamekeeper and stuffs the leaves into the barrel of his gun. He then taunts the man into firing the “club that roars”, whereupon the blocked barrels cause it to explode and “[blow] him out like a candle.”