Whistler

by Roger Taylor

  He could see shadows dancing all about him, luring him on. He closed his eyes, but it was to no avail. They were all about him, as they had always been. The alley and the shell of the man that lay huddled there became a vague and distant memory from some other time. Here were the entrances to the worlds he should roam. Here was truth. Here was…

  But he was not alone…

  Someone was watching him!

  ‘Another priest,’ a voice said. The accent was strange and the tones clipped and sharp. Cassraw blinked as if that might clear the shadows from him, but nothing happened. Yet now he could see the figure, although he could not tell whether it was near or far.

  Lean and crooked, it bent forward to examine him, lifting a long bony hand to its eyes as it did so.

  ‘Why would I want another?’ it asked itself. Then a shining black stick swung from behind its back and into its other hand before pointing at Cassraw. ‘Have I givenyou a name, night eyes?’

  But before Cassraw could reply, the figure seemed to be immediately in front of him, peering into his eyes – into the very depths of him.

  ‘Ah,’ it breathed out, a sound full of terrible anger and withering contempt. ‘You again, you abomination. Well, I don’t need you. I know my own soul well enough by now. There’s nothing else to be learned, no depths I’ve not plumbed while I’ve been here. I need no more demon guides such as you.’ The stick was suddenly at its mouth and biting music was ringing in Cassraw’s ears. Then the figure was far away, dancing manically. ‘I won’t have you here again, with your horrors and your blood-letting. I won’t have you. I renounce you, priest.’

  Then close, a high shrieking note, rasping and awful, and the wild-eyed face filling Cassraw’s vision.

  ‘GO!’

  And Cassraw was in the alley again. Breathing heavily and fearfully, but alone in the Troidmallos darkness. Echoes of the frightening images of the last few minutes, if minutes they had been, hung about him and filled his mind with tumbling questions, but relief swept through him as he took in the stale odour of the alley and the cold touch of the flags under his hands. Whatever had just happened to him, it was over. He must get up and get himself home, away from this dreadful place and the awful memories that seemed to be lingering in the stones here. He could ponder all this at his leisure.

  He looked around in an attempt to orientate himself. The dim street lighting marked out the narrow entrance to the alley.

  And close by, black against this feebly-lit background, stood a figure.

  Chapter 16

  Vredech’s pen wilted slowly from his hand. Scarcely aware of what he was doing, he folded his arms on the desk and slowly sagged forward to rest his head on them. Beside his papers stood a plate bearing the congealed remains of a barely touched meal. His housekeeper had left it for him, venturing again the plea, at once anxious and stern. ‘You must eat something, Brother. I’m sure you’re losing weight, and you’re looking far from well.’

  She had known him for a long time and freely took motherly licence with him, though her natural relish for ailments, both her own and others’, and ability to discourse on them at length to any available audience, had caused Vredech to stop listening long ago. Christened ‘House’ by Vredech as a result of some long-forgotten joke, she was an excellent and caring housekeeper, and for the sake of domestic harmony he had gradually developed a knowing nod and a reassuring smile with which to deflect these unwanted concerns. They were by now a reflex response which could be invoked by the sound of a certain in-drawn breath, or the placing of the hands on the hips in a particular manner. She, in turn, had an upward glance to indicate that she had clearly seen through his game and would be undeterred from doing what she took to be her duty.

  Of late, however, this gentle ritual had foundered. Her observations had become at once more earnest and more strident as it seemed that Vredech had set his foot upon a path of self-neglect that could only end in personal disaster for him.

  ‘You should see a physician,’ she had said eventually, rather more vehemently than she had intended. Vredech was shocked at the rage that welled up inside him and he barely managed to stop himself from cursing her for her interference. It was only an anxious movement of her hands that had prevented the outburst. Something about the gesture reminded him that she cared for him a great deal.

  ‘Just church affairs, House,’ he lied. ‘They’re preoccupying me more than usual, that’s all.’

  There was no upward glance in reply, just a bowed head, a troubled brow, and a penetrating look which he had been unable to meet.

  For Vredech knew that no physician could help him. No potions or pills could cure madness, and madness it was that was creeping up on him, surely? You’re not going mad if you think you are, it was said, but what else could explain the things that had happened since the fateful night of his vigil and his disturbing encounter with that figment of his imagination he had called the Whistler? After a lifetime without dreams it seemed now that he could not sleep without finding himself enmeshed in bizarre fantasies. Some were frightening, some gentle and evocative, some quite embarrassingly, not to say disturbingly – for a voluntarily celibate Preaching Brother – of the flesh. The majority were just rambling streams of incoherent nonsense full of distorted fragments of what seemed to be everyday occurrences.

  But they were not his!

  None of them.

  They were other people’s.

  They couldn’t be otherwise. He might not have dreamed before, but he did know that dreams were intensely personal, a deep reflection of the inner character of the dreamer. Almost everything that had ever been related to him had been confirmed by the teller as being such, and where the events of a dream were seemingly obscure or irrelevant, he had learned that a few careful questions would often reveal the presence of some private fear, some desire, that could not otherwise be spoken of.

  And there was none of this in the dreams that he had been having. There were familiar sights and places, sometimes familiar people – even himself on a couple of occasions – but the associations and memories that went with those sights and places were not his, the people were not as he knew them, and even the images of himself had been so different from the way he imagined himself that on each occasion it was only the thoughts of the dreamer that had told him who it was.

  The dreamer…

  All the time, it was the dreamer who was creating these visions, not him.

  But such a thing couldn’t be. He could not enter someone else’s dream, could he? And the only people he had ever known who imagined they were someone other than who they actually were, had been insane – sometimes dangerously so.

  The thought terrified him. What was happening to him? What was going to happen to him?

  He had scanned the Santyth for guidance, but there was nothing in the Dominant Texts and only a passing mention in the Lesser Books – those texts generally regarded as being uncertain in origin, myths almost, and of symbolic value only. Here were a few colourful and unannotated tales about heroes who moved in worlds beyond this one – Dream Warriors, Masters and Adepts of the White Way and other such fanciful names. Once, such tales might well have entertained him, or perhaps given him an idea on which to base a sermon, but now they simply left him frustrated and angry and then, inevitably, full of self-reproach for thus condemning his holy book.

  And prayer, too, had given him neither solace nor guidance. Not that that was any great surprise. That kind of solace was given only to those who for various reasons were beyond helping themselves. Obviously he must not be. Somewhere a solution lay within him and he must struggle to find it if he was to be helped by his god.

  Now, however, he was afraid to go to sleep for fear of what would happen. Not because of the incidents in which he might find himself involved – he was curiously unaffected by these – but that very detachment, that sense of being an intruder, frightened him desperately, confirming as it seemed to do, his failing reason. Not eating, not tending to
his duties, or indeed at times even himself, came as a consequence of his nightly resistance to sleep. He would walk the streets endlessly, often having no recollection of where he had been when he found himself returning home, mentally and physically drained.

  That had started on the night of his attempted vigil. He had set out full of determination, hoping to use the night air, the silence, and the steady rhythm of his steps to order his thoughts and to put himself at least on the way to some kind of an explanation. But it had not happened. The encounter with the Whistler seemed to have unleashed something within him that was restless and quite beyond his control. For all its strangeness, the incident had been so vivid, so intense, that at the time he could not bring himself to doubt its reality. Nor did he even now, when he thought back to it. But what did that mean?

  And the haunting sound of the flute echoed constantly through his head.

  Repeatedly he would set his thoughts on one track, only to find shortly afterwards that he had deviated from it and returned to the Whistler and his poem and his insistence that it was he who was real and Vredech a mere image that he had created. It was a chillingly awful recollection. At times he felt that if he closed his eyes, the buildings about him might silently fade into nothingness, and the people, too, and the hills, and the mountains – everything – even his own memories.

  Round and round the ideas had gone, always bringing him back to the Whistler.

  Since he had returned that night, exhausted yet too agitated to sleep, and having no idea where he had been, his moods had swung wildly from elation into depression, with no prior warning of either. For the most part, however, he fancied that, apart from his housekeeper, he was managing to keep his agitation from the members of his flock, though he kept having to find excuses for avoiding people, and his pastoral work was definitely suffering.

  By chance he had discovered that if he slept during the day, he was less troubled, though in reasoning that this was because fewer people were dreaming at that time, he knew he was confirming his own diagnosis. Nevertheless it was all he could do to cope with the demands of his body for rest.

  He jerked upright violently, catching the plate with his arm and sending it skidding towards the edge of the desk. The plate was stopped by a book, but the knife and fork on top of it continued on their journey and clattered to the floor. Vredech, already tense, stiffened further at the noise. Everything about him was aching – his neck, shoulders and back – and he seemed to be permanently groggy. There was no mystery to this. If he continued sleeping fitfully and in chairs, this must be the inevitable consequence. Rubbing his temples he looked around at the chaos on his desk. Papers, pens and books were strewn everywhere, and the plate with its now greasy burden reproached him. That had been his favourite meal. House didn’t make it for him very often, being a regular churchgoer and having the natural Madren uncertainty about anything that gave enjoyment. It had been there a long time, by the look of it. He couldn’t even remember her bringing it in, and yet she must have made some fuss about it, doubtless trying to persuade him to eat.

  He stood up. The room swayed alarmingly and he took hold of the desk for support. Whatever was happening to him was getting worse. He was still sufficiently lucid to see that he was physically destroying himself and on the verge of wrecking his career, but his ability to remedy this situation seemed to be slipping away from him.

  Yet something had to be done; he could not continue like this. No matter how ill he felt, how fearful, how tormented, still he must strive. He must seek out and face the cause of his pain.

  Vredech clenched his fists and ground his teeth together then forced himself to set about the task of tidying his desk. He was an orderly person. He did not work like this. He must re-establish the steady rhythm of his life, beat back this demon that was pursuing him, by… by what means? By application to his work. By logic. By reason.

  The confusion on his desk seemed to grow as he stared at it however, and his hands dithered vaguely, moving hither and thither but accomplishing nothing. His spirit wavered. There was so much to do. Where could he start? He wanted to lie down and rest. Find oblivion in the darkness…

  ‘Move it one piece at a time,’ he muttered grimly to himself. ‘One piece at a time. I have a place for everything. Move, damn you.’

  His hands obeyed, though they were shaking.

  He released a breath that he seemed to have been holding all his life.

  Then he saw that his hand was screwing up a piece of paper. Screwing it tighter and tighter, as if to crush it out of existence. The hand looked like someone else’s. Why was it doing that? What was on the paper? He’d made no decision that it wasn’t wanted. It took a deliberate effort to stop the hand and retrieve the paper, and a further one to flatten it out and read it.

  It was nothing – just the opening sentences to a sermon, written in a spidery scrawl that was like a caricature of his own. He allowed the hand to finish the work it had started, while the other began to riffle aimlessly through the rest of the papers on the desk. There were so many.

  ‘Can’t go on,’ he heard himself say. ‘Too much. Too much.’

  He was so tired. And so afraid. His insides felt both empty and full. A leaden core of a stomach to an empty shell of a man.

  Then the room lurched violently, and something hit him very hard.

  * * * *

  ‘Welcome back, night eyes,’ the Whistler said. He played a short, mocking phrase on his flute.

  ‘Where is this place?’ Vredech asked. All about was a dull greyness, like a mountain mist, though without the dampness and the piercing cold. Mysteriously, all his turmoil had gone. He was relaxed and completely at ease, almost as if he had come home in some way.

  ‘Better ask whereyou are, than that,’ the Whistler replied.

  ‘Where am I then?’ Vredech obliged.

  ‘Where you were before. If it was before, and not after – I don’t know. It’s difficult.’

  ‘Where am I?’ Vredech persisted.

  ‘In my dream – what did I have you call yourself? – Vredech, wasn’t it? Allyn Vredech. Funny foreign-sounding sort of a name – where could I have got it from? You’re in my dream, Allyn Vredech. All things where I am are in my dream. I create them.’ He gave a massive shrug. ‘I don’t know how. Still less, why. But I create them, then…’ His voice tailed off and the flute was at his mouth. Low sombre notes came from it.

  ‘You’re troubled,’ Vredech said.

  ‘Indeed, indeed, indeed.’ The Whistler executed a jigging dance step to each word, angular elbows flying. ‘Why else should I bring me a priest but to debate dark matters of the soul?’

  Vredech wondered why he felt so easy in himself. Had he slipped finally into madness? The question did not trouble him. He was content to feel whole again – no matter where, or under what circumstances. What he was now was what he wanted to be. The shaking wraith of a man haunting his Meeting House was of no value and little interest. When – if – he returned there – or was expelled from here again, he mused with some humour – he would take this feeling back with him and be whole again there as well.

  And for all its strangeness, this place had a solidity that had been lacking in all the dreams he had had… or had ‘visited’. If what was happening was not a fantasy conjured out of the depths of his own fevered imaginings, but indeed the true reality, while Gyronlandt and all that went with it were mere dreams, then so it would have to be. It was probably as well he’d awakened eventually.

  He was only mildly puzzled by the fact that he was accepting these disturbing conclusions so readily.

  I will not oppose. I will not resist. I will be. And I will be content. All things are Ishryth’s gift. I ask forgiveness for my doubts, Lord.

  The Whistler leaned forward wide-eyed and flicked his fingers teasingly in Vredech’s face. ‘But if I’m troubled, you seem easier, Priest. You were quite agitated when we met last.’

  Vredech smiled. ‘I am easier,’ he said. �
��Perhaps I’ve come to like the way you’ve made me.’

  The Whistler’s head cocked on one side. ‘Ah-ah,’ he said, waving a long forefinger warningly. ‘No tricks now. You lost the argument last time, remember? Knew the poem. Knew my name. And I was obliged to dismiss you.’ The bony fingers emitted four great cracks as he snapped them at Vredech. ‘Now behave yourself and do what you have to do. Talk – debate – teach me something about myself.’

  Vredech gave a conceding nod. The Whistler trapped the flute under his arm like a soldier’s baton and looked at Vredech suspiciously.

  ‘What do you want to debate?’ Vredech asked.

  The Whistler turned away and slumped a little. The low, mournful notes came again. ‘You know, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Just as I must know. Why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s the way you do it,’ Vredech replied. The Whistler turned back to him, his head bent massively to one side, and his face puckered up with puzzlement. ‘Youare different, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I must be getting quite perceptive or…’ He twitched his head upright, and left the comment unfinished. ‘Very well. I’ve seen Him, you know?’ he said.

  Vredech shook his head. ‘You have to tell me, remember?’

  The Whistler scuttled over to him and crouched down on his haunches, his flute wedged between his legs and his body and his arms wrapped tightly around his knees. ‘Came to me like you, He did. Night-eyed and black-bearded and in your priestly robe.’ He looked Vredech up and down disparagingly, then flounced up the lace that was decorating his own broad collar. Vredech realized that it was the first time he had noticed how the man was dressed. ‘Though it’s a poor garb for a priest that I’ve given you, I must admit,’ the Whistler continued. ‘I’ve done better in the past…’ He frowned.