The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  There is something else, he thought, there is. Behind the stars there is something else, behind the houses there is something else. Deep in the earth, in the remote depths of the universe, there is something else. And it is laughing at me. It is mocking me. It is saying, Who do you think you are? It is saying, Look at that silly man with his watch, he thinks he understands it all. But I know, I know, the thing was saying, I know differently. Deep in the roots and in space itself I AM.

  And Kant saw a green snake undulating in the sky, a phantasmal shimmering snake.

  And he was suddenly shaken with fear. When he held his hand out one of his fingers was trembling. He gazed at it for a long time but it didn’t stop shaking. It was like a magnetic needle that had gone crazy.

  Once he saw two small children running away after snatching a handbag from an old woman. They disappeared into the darkness as if into a den. The old woman began to weep, and Kant went up to her, put his hand gently on her arm and said, ‘Here’s some money.’

  But the old woman replied, ‘No, indeed, I’ll not take it. I have never owed anyone anything in my whole life.’

  ‘What, who?’ Kant muttered. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’ve never owed a penny,’ said the old woman sniffling yet indomitable. ‘I saw them. They were two girls.’

  ‘A girl and a boy,’ said Kant.

  ‘No, they were two girls,’ said the old woman resolutely. ‘They were about sixteen years old.’

  ‘Not more than eleven,’ said Kant. ‘I’m sure they were not more than eleven.’

  ‘Not at all, sixteen they were,’ said the old woman definitely.

  Suddenly Kant lost his temper and shouted, ‘They were not more than eleven years old and they were both wearing red jackets.’

  ‘Green,’ said the old woman. ‘As sure as I’m standing here it was green they were wearing. I still have my faculties, you know.’ And she glared furiously at Kant.

  ‘Green,’ she said, ‘and you must come and tell the police that.’

  ‘No,’ said Kant, ‘I can’t do that.’

  What a fool the woman was. Of course the children had been wearing red, even allowing for the darkness. They had certainly not been wearing green. On the other hand she was one of the ones he had heard discussing the factory. In fact, she was the woman whom he remembered as saying that such a stink should not be allowed. He turned away from her in case she would force him to go with her to the police station; he had enough to do with his time. It seemed to him that the ground was trembling under his feet, that the universe was quivering like a morass, that perhaps it didn’t exist at all. Why, that old woman might say that it was he who had stolen her money. He looked down at his suit, which was yellow in the light of the lamps. He seemed like a jester, a clown. He took out his watch and consulted it: it gazed back at him, reassuringly golden and round. A tranquil moon.

  ‘A good time,’ he heard the voice saying seductively. And the words, ‘A good time’, echoed in his head. And at that moment he saw her again. It seemed as if she was always there. She was smiling at him, hitching her skirt to show her thighs.

  He walked towards her through the harlequin chequered night. ‘Categorical Imperative,’ said Kant restlessly in his sleep.

  What is he talking about? said the young woman to herself as she examined his jacket. A poor Categorical Imperative he had been indeed. Why, he had fallen asleep like a child in her perfumed room. She stretched herself luxuriously, feeling energy like a strong red pulse in her body. She felt complete inside her envelope of flesh; she was very conscious of her own languorous motions. At that moment she wasn’t aware of age or of time. With money, what could one not do? One didn’t need to bother thinking about a future: the future would take care of itself. As she watched the sleeping philosopher it angered her that he should have money and she none. Or at least he had more than she had. She had such a beautiful body, such taut pointed breasts, and his body was not powerful or muscular at all. Ahead of her through the window she saw a single star winking in the sky. That might be Venus: she wasn’t sure. Her mother had once told her, but she couldn’t remember things like that. She took the golden watch from his pocket. She could sell it and this poor idiot would never notice its loss, or if he did he would not complain. She knew his kind, a respectable bourgeois to the very core.

  The Maze

  It was early morning when he entered the maze and there were still tiny globes of dew on the grass across which he walked, leaving ghostly footprints. The old man at the gate, who was reading a newspaper, briefly raised his head and then gave him his ticket. He was quite easy and confident when he entered: the white handkerchief at his breast flickered like a miniature flag. It was going to be an adventure, fresh and uncomplicated really. Though he had heard from somewhere that the maze was a difficult one he hadn’t really believed it: it might be hard for others but not for him. After all wasn’t he quite good at puzzles? It would be like any puzzle, soluble, open to the logical mind.

  The maze was in a big green park in which there was also a café, which hadn’t as yet opened, and on the edge of it there was a cemetery with big steel gates, and beyond the cemetery a river in which he had seen a man in black waterproofs fishing. The river was as yet grey with only a little sparkle of sun here and there.

  At first as he walked along the path he was relaxed and, as it were, lounging: he hadn’t brought the power of his mind to bear on the maze. He was quite happy and confident too of the outcome. But soon he saw, below him on the stone, evidence of former passage, for there were empty cigarette packets, spent matches, empty cartons of orangeade, bits of paper. It almost irritated him to see them there as if he wished the maze to be clean and pure like a mathematical problem. It was a cool fresh morning and his shirt shone below his jacket, white and sparkling. He felt nice and new as if he had just been unpacked from a box.

  When he arrived at the first dead-end he wasn’t at all perturbed. There was plenty of time, he had the whole morning in front of him. So it was with an easy mind that he made his way back to try another path. This was only a temporary setback to be dismissed from his thoughts. Obviously those who had designed the maze wouldn’t make it too easy, if it had been a group of people. Of course it might only have been one person. He let his mind play idly round the origin of the maze: it was more likely to have been designed by one person, someone who in the evening of his days had toyed idly with a puzzle of this nature: an engineer perhaps or a setter of crosswords. Nothing about the designer could be deduced from the maze: it was a purely objective puzzle without pathos.

  The second path too was a dead-end. And this time he became slightly irritated for from somewhere in the maze he heard laughter. When had the people who were laughing come in? He hadn’t noticed them. And then again their laughter was a sign of confidence. One wouldn’t laugh if one were unable to solve the puzzle. The clear happy laughter belonged surely to the solvers. For some reason he didn’t like them; he imagined them as haughty and imperious, negligent, graceful people who had the secret of the maze imprinted on their brains.

  He walked on. As he did so he met two of the inhabitants of the maze for the first time. It was a father and son, at least he assumed that was what they were. They looked weary, and the son was walking a little apart from the father as if he was angry. Before he actually caught sight of them he thought he heard the son say, ‘But you said it wouldn’t take long.’ The father looked guilty and hangdog as if he had failed his son in some way. He winked at the father and son as he passed them as if implying, ‘We are all involved in the same puzzle.’ But at the same time he didn’t feel as if he belonged to the same world as they did. For one thing he was unmarried. For another the father looked unpleasantly flustered and the son discontented. Inside the atmosphere of his own coolness he felt superior to them. There was something inescapably dingy about them, especially about the father. On the other hand they would probably not meet again and he might as well salute them as if
they were ‘ships of the night’. It seemed to him that the father was grey and tired, like a little weary mouse redolent of failure.

  He continued on his way. This too was a dead-end. There was nothing to do but retrace his steps. He took his handkerchief out of his pocket, for he was beginning to sweat. He hadn’t noticed that the sun was so high in the sky, that he had taken so long already. He wiped his face and put his handkerchief back in his pocket. There was more litter here, a fragment of a doll, a torn pair of stockings. What went on in this maze? Did people use it for sexual performance? The idea disgusted him and yet at the same time it argued a casual mastery which bothered him. That people should come into a maze of all places and carry out their practices there! How obscene, how vile, how disrespectful of the mind that had created it! For the first time he began to feel really irritated with the maze as if it had a life of its own, as if it would allow sordid things to happen. Calm down, he told himself, this is ridiculous, it is not worth this harassment.

  He found himself standing at the edge of the maze, and over the hedge he could see the cemetery which bordered the park. The sun was flashing from its stones and in places he could see bibles of open marble. In others the tombstones were old and covered with lichen. Beyond the cemetery he could see the fisherman still angling in his black shiny waterproofs. The rod flashed back from his shoulder like a snake, but the cord itself was subsumed in bright sunlight.

  And then to his chagrin he saw that there was a group of young people outside the maze and quite near him. It was they who had been the source of the laughter. One of them was saying that he had done the maze five times, and that it was a piece of cake, nothing to it. The others agreed with him. They looked very ordinary young people, not even students, just boys from the town, perhaps six or seven years younger than himself. He couldn’t understand how they had found the maze easy when he himself didn’t and yet he had a better mind, he was sure of that. He felt not exactly envy of them in their assured freedom but rather anger with himself for being so unaccountably stupid. It sounded to him as if they could enter and leave the maze without even thinking about it. They were eating chips from brown paper, and he saw that the café had opened.

  But the café didn’t usually open till twelve o’clock, and he had entered the maze at half past nine. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was quarter past twelve. And then he noticed something else, that the veins on his wrists seemed to stand out more, seemed to glare more, than he had remembered them doing. He studied both wrists carefully. No, no question about it, his eyes had not deceived him. So, in fact, the maze was getting at him. He was more worried than he had thought.

  He turned back down the path. This time something new had happened. He was beginning to feel the pressure of the maze, that was the only way that he could describe it. It was almost as if the maze were exerting a force over him. He stopped again and considered. In the beginning, when he had entered the maze in his white shirt, which now for some reason looked soiled, he had felt both in control of himself and the maze. It would be he who would decide what direction he would take, it would be he who would remain detached from the maze, much as one would remain detached from a crossword puzzle while solving it in front of the fire in the evening. But there had been a profound change which he only now recognised. The maze was in fact compelling him to choose, pushing him, making demands on him. It wasn’t simply an arrangement of paths and hedges. It was as if the maze had a will of its own.

  Now he began to walk more quickly as if feeling that he didn’t have much time left. In fact he had an appointment with Diana at three o’clock and he mustn’t break it. It would be ridiculous if he arrived late and said, ‘I couldn’t come because I was powerless to do so. I was a prisoner.’ She was sure to think such an explanation odd, not to say astonishing. And in any case if he arrived late she wouldn’t be there. Not that deep down he was all that worried, except that his nonappearance would be bad manners. If he was going to give her a pretext for leaving him, then it must be a more considered pretext than that.

  He noticed now that his legs were becoming tired and heavy.

  He supposed that this was quite logical, as the stone would be absorbing some of the energy that he was losing. But what bothered him more than anything was the feeling that it would be a long time before he would get out of the maze, that he was going round in circles. Indeed he recognised some of the empty cigarette packets that he was passing. They were mostly Players and he was sure that he had seen them before. In fact he bent down and marked some of them with a pen to make sure of later identification. This was the sort of thing that he had read of in books, people going round and round deserts in circles. And yet he thought that he was taking a different path each time. He wiped his face again and felt that he was losing control of himself. He must be if he was going round and round in helpless circles all the time. Maybe if he had a thread or something like that he would be able to strike out on fresh paths. But he didn’t have a thread and some remnant of pride determined that he would not use it, rather like his resolve not to use a dictionary except as a last resort when he was doing a crossword puzzle. He must keep calm. After all, the café and the cemetery were quite visible. It wasn’t as if he was in a prison and couldn’t shout for help if the worst came to the worst. It wasn’t as if he was stranded on a desert island. And yet he knew that he wouldn’t shout for help: he would rather die.

  He didn’t see the father and son again but he saw other people. Once he passed a big heavy man with large black-rimmed spectacles who had a briefcase in his hand, which he thought rather odd. The man, who seemed to be in a hurry, seemed to know exactly where he was going. When they passed each other the man didn’t even glance at him, and didn’t smile. Perhaps he looked contemptible to him. It was exactly as if the man was going to his office and the path of the maze was an ordinary high road.

  Then again he saw a tall ghostly-looking man passing, and he turned and stared after him. The man was quite tall, not at all squat like the previous one. He looked scholarly, abstracted and grave. He seemed to drift along, inside an atmosphere of his own, and he himself knew as if by instinct that the first man would have no difficulty in solving the riddle of the maze but that the second would. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he was convinced just the same. The maze he now realised was infested with people, men, women and children, young people, old people, middle-aged people. Confident people and ghostly people. It was like a warren and he felt his bones shiver as the thought came to him. How easy it had been to think at the beginning that there was only himself: and now there were so many other people. People who looked straight ahead of them and others who looked down at the ground.

  One in particular, with the same brisk air as the black-spectacled man, he had an irresistible desire to follow. The man was grey-haired and soldierly. He, like the first one, didn’t look at him or even nod to him as he passed, and he knew that this was another one who would succeed and that he should follow him. But at the same time it came to him that this would be a failure of pride in himself, that he didn’t want to be like a dog following its master as if he were on a string. The analogy disgusted him. He must not lose control of his will, he must not surrender it to someone else. That would be nauseating and revolting.

  He noticed that he was no longer sweating and this bothered him too. He should be sweating, he should be more frightened. Then to his amazement he saw that the sun had sunk quite far in the direction of the west. He came to a dead halt almost in shock. Why was time passing so rapidly? It must be four o’clock at least and when he glanced at his watch he saw that it was actually half past four. And therefore he had missed Diana. What a ludicrous thing. This maze, inert and yet malevolent, was preventing him from doing what he ought to have done and forcing him to do other things instead. Probably he would never see Diana again. And then the thought came to him, threatening in its bareness, what if he had chosen to walk into this maze in order to avoid her? No, that was idi
otic. Such an idea had never come into his head. Not for one moment.

  He looked down at his shoes and saw that they were white with dust. His trousers were stained. He felt smelly and dirty. And what was even more odd when he happened to see the backs of his hands he noticed that the hair on them was grey. That surely couldn’t be. But it was true, the backs of his hands had grey hair on them. Again he stood stock-still trying to take account of what had happened. But then he found that he couldn’t even stand still. It was as if the maze had accelerated. It was as if it could no longer permit him to think objectively and apart from himself. Whenever a thought came into his head it was immediately followed by another thought which devoured it. He had the most extraordinary vision which hit him with stunning force. It was as if the pathways in his brain duplicated the pathways of the maze. It was as if he was walking through his own brain. He couldn’t get out of the maze any more than he could get out of his own head. He couldn’t quite focus on what he sensed, but he knew that what he sensed or thought was the truth. Even as he looked he could see young people outside the café. They seemed amazingly young, much younger than he had expected. They were not the same ones as the early laughers, they were different altogether, they were young children. Even their clothes were different. Some of them were sitting eating ice-cream at a table which stood outside the café and had an awning over it. He couldn’t remember that awning at all. Nor even the table. The fisherman had disappeared from the stream. The cemetery seemed to have spawned more tombstones.

  His mind felt slow and dull and he didn’t know where to go next. It came to him that he should sit down where he was and make no more effort. It was ludicrous that he should be so stupid as not to get out of the maze which others had negotiated so easily. So he couldn’t be as intelligent as he thought he was. But it was surely the maze that was to blame, not himself. It quite simply set unfair problems, and those who had solved them had done so by instinct like animals. He remembered someone who had been cool and young and audacious and who had had a white handkerchief in his pocket like a flag. But the memory was vaguer than he had expected, and when he found the handkerchief it was only a small crumpled ball which was now in his trouser pocket. He turned and looked at the flag which marked the centre of the maze. It seemed that he would never reach it.