by Mike Voyce
At the top I was pulled onto the solid floor of the Great Hall. It was bright but so cold. The brothers wrapped me in a blanket and sat me by a fire; they fed me venison broth and asked me questions.
They told me, after lowering me to the bottom of the well, after a space they called to me. When there was no answer they lowered Brother Gilbert. He told me there was no sign of me in the well. He had felt all around the walls, and used his skill in seeing, but could not find me. On being pulled up, at various stages, he felt around the walls again, all was clean stone and mortar, with no sign of me. All the brothers were together talking, at the top of the well, wondering what they should do, when they heard me calling and pulled me up.
The brothers crowded round me, congratulating me and declaring it high magic; they wanted the conjuration by which I disappeared. They wanted to know the place where I had gone and I told it to them as much as I could.
After, Brother Gilbert told me he had the Bishop’s instructions, I was to take him with me next time I went down the well. For all my reverence for Gilbert and the Bishop, I went down twice more before I consented to his accompanying me, even Gilbert could not see in the Limbo I first entered.”
“And your conjuration, did you use blood sacrifice and a circle?”
Thomas looked at me in a certain way,
“No my lord, but when he came, the Bishop made clear to me there would be a time for these.”
“And the next times you went down the well?”
“It seemed to me, if I wished to go to a place from that Limbo, I would go there. It was fear of not getting back that stopped me the first time.
I knew where the keys to our old school in Cambridge had been left, still in the building. I would go to Cambridge and fetch back the keys.
The next time was easier than the first; my belief in what I knew supported me. As I touched the floor that was not stone I remembered my room in Cambridge and I was there. It was now bare, every stick gone, and so it was as I went through all the house. Yet, when I came to the main door, hanging on a nail at the side of the doorway, where I knew them to be, there were the keys. I put them in a pocket and thought of the floor which was not stone and called for the brothers to pull me up.
They pulled me into the daylight, and there stood Brother Gilbert. I presented the keys to him.
The first time I came back half dead, this time I was alive with success. But it made it harder to resist Brother Gilbert, that he should still not come with me on the next time; for all that, I persuaded him. First I’d gone nowhere, next to a place I knew well; before his safety could be risked I had to go to a new place, one previously unknown to me.
Gilbert told me the Bishop was making arrangements for his pilgrimage to the Chapel of St. John in the Tower of London. The Bishop had drawn sketches but they were hurried and poor and Gilbert had not been able to see the Chapel, which was why the pilgrimage was necessary. If I could get there I could report it to him.
Gilbert said the Chapel was a populous place and I could not go at any time of worship or observance. It would have to be an exact time of night, and I was to take a knife and cut a corner off the alter-cloth; so that when he was there, under warrant, in daylight, he could see from where I had taken it.
I studied the Bishop’s sketches given me by Gilbert and settled my mind the next day. So it was, at dead of the next night, the brothers gathered in the Great Hall and in the dark light of candles lowered me into the well.
Coming to the Limbo at the bottom I put the remembrance of the sketches into my mind and recited, ‘The Chapel of the blessed Saint John in His Grace’s Tower of London.’
The next thing I felt was the coldness of hard, smooth stone against my back.
I was in a vast flagged space retreating into absolute darkness, seeming to have no ceiling. In the distance was light but the way to it was blocked by enormous columns. There was reflected light from the floor and from gold ornament and silver thread in wall hangings. By their aid I picked may way to the great candles burning on the high alter and the white cloth on which they stood.
The knife I held in my hand shook almost out of my control, searching the edges and corners of that cloth for a place from which I could cut some small piece that Gilbert would recognise but others not notice. Eventually it was done but my mind was troubled at the sacrilege of cutting the cloth in that holy chapel. My heart stopped at the moment of return, for in searching the cloth I had forgot my way.
I found it again, by counting the columns and by turning at the exact point, so that I came to my starting point.
The return was troubled only by guilt at what I’d done and I handed the cloth to Gilbert as my first act on coming out of the well.
***
Chapter 18 – Of Thomas’ Comings and Goings
I asked a casual question,
“Were you frightened as you descended into the well?”
Oh no. I was too busy forgetting myself.”
There was a pause. Thomas had told me he would not reveal his conjurations; now he realised he’d let slip a key, and that I understood it. Even so I had to prompt him,
“Go on.”
“The brothers believe you can work any spell in the grimiores by exactly following the instructions written; or an exact correspondence when this is not possible. If it works it does so by the faith and love we bear to Our Lord; and that He, in his infinite mercy, grants our supplication. When this does not work, or if the working is forbidden by Mother Church, the brothers believe they can compel its working by the rules of High Magic, as some in the ancient World declared.
I learned as a student my conjurations worked the better when I forgot my faith in God. When I read the book of Odysseus I forgot myself. In my mind I travelled the Aegean, and pictured the seas and felt the sun and the rain. When I came to the court of Great Circe I was dazzled. When she could see me and I hear her; then began my true learning.
Then I learned the remembrance of where and what I am blocks all magic but that which is proper to who I am, and then I realised the proper need to forget myself.
The Great Circe schooled me in forgetting. I learned from her that I can be nothing; that my being can disappear in a great cloud of pleasure. Then I learned that who I am can disappear as an act of my own will. But this act of will is not easy!
Circe taught me through all the stumbling and difficulty of forgetting myself. She taught me though all the pleasure of becoming someone else, or all the will to be nothing at all; there is still a corner that remains as it was, to call me back to the World. Yet she taught being nothing is awareness of everything; an awareness so keen that all things become knowable and all things become possible. She taught me that those who can keep the littlest awareness of themselves and the greatest awareness of Nothing are the gods; that Great Zeus weakens himself by his passions and even so, has more of Nothing in him than any mortal man.
It is so, and yet I am frightened of divine judgement for knowing such a heresy.”
“It is not heresy, it is but truth bishops and popes do not know.”
I smiled at him, but gave no voice to my thoughts, “Awareness of Nothing is the ‘Emptiness’ Buddhists seek, few will find it, for it is the most terrifying state a human being can know. Pure awareness is the nature of God, and if you achieve it you cease to be.”
“My lord, I fear great danger in Circe’s teaching, for in it lies the danger that even my soul will be lost for all Eternity. It was my fear in being cast into this place by the Bishop, here is the antechamber to final damnation, beyond all the levels of Hell. Are you, in truth, an angel here to examine me?”
“I’m not here to examine you, nor to judge. Be at ease Thomas, I told you before, I’m not here to hurt you.”
Slowly the fear which had come into his face faded away.
“Circe told me I was not yet close enough to the gods. She gave me conjurations to bring me back to this World. When I beseeched her for them she gave me the co
njurations you saw the Bishop work against the King: and yet, as I worked in the Bishop’s palace, my nothingness increased so I felt, in my journeys down the well, I no longer have need of conjuration.”
I waited with an eyebrow raised. I thought of the modern mediumship, “The mental medium believes the living can hold conversation with the dead, and anything can be made known and none of it affects physical reality. The physical medium believes that manifestations can be brought into reality by spirit; it is not done by the medium. In all this all that is needed is the mind of the medium should ‘stand back,’ an outside spirit does everything else. The personality of the medium is at all times intact and ‘comes back’ as it was before. Anything communicated or done comes from spirit; all of it is made possible by allowing awareness of spirit, and any block or error comes from the intrusion of the medium’s mind.”
“You come to me without conjuration. You already know what Circe taught.”
Thomas made it a statement, not a question, and I thought it better to distract him.
“And as you went down the well, and as you came back again, you held the wish of where you wanted to be?”
“Yes, as Circe taught me, but still full of fear that my wish must be exact.”
“And is this not proof the mind of Thomas Nandyke was still present?”
This time it was Thomas’ turn to give a wordless smile.
“I shall leave you again for a space. There is that which I must do. Yet I shall return.”
That which I must do was because, knowing it or not, Thomas had shot an arrow true enough to give me pause for thought. It wasn’t that I was unaware of it, I’d simply shelved it. Now I had to ask questions about my own comings and goings.
***
Chapter 19 – Of my Mind and Thomas’ Situation
The Spiritualists’ National Union aims to ‘prove’ the survival of death, but very little more. I put prove in parenthesis because proof, as I know from forensic work, is a belief state, not a matter of fact; in the Middle Ages the authority of the Church ‘proved’ the World was flat.
I’ve enjoyed some sort of relationship with the Spiritualist movement for very many years, without all that much commitment. For me the survival of death, together with certain mental powers and the existence of non-physical beings, has been an obvious fact for as long as I’ve ever thought about it – or experienced it. But you grow to form a working relationship with other people’s beliefs and operate within the limits you’re given. One of those limits comes from mental mediumship; you can know and you can communicate but you can’t change reality. What nonsense, communication changes reality.
What was troubling was that I had brought physical things into Thomas’ reality. True, I’d started with direct physical correspondences, but I hadn’t troubled to buy the last barrel of beer, I created it. What is said about apports earlier in this book is true, despite Wikipedia, but they’re also very rare. Had I developed the power to cause apports, casually and at will? The answer, in our normal world, is obviously not. I could no more put a barrel of beer in your living room, psychically, than you could in mine. If I could do it in Thomas’ world there were two possible explanations: first it was all a dream and you can do anything you want in a dream, second that Thomas’ world was real but separate from ours and the rules of this world did not apply to his; at least, not for me.
A dream world could be dismissed straight away; dreams do not alter reality outside themselves, nor are they stable.
In fact Thomas inhabited more than one world: there was the world of Cambridge and Hatfield in our distant past; there was the world of Odysseus’ Odyssey in which he found the great witch Circe; and there was the world in which, of late, I’d been talking to him. The terms and qualities of each were different.
If habit convention and belief stopped me bringing apports into the normal world, but allowed it in Thomas’ world, what did this tell me about these worlds?
The problem is there are very good reasons why apports, miracles and wish fulfilment are rare; the very first is more than sufficient, such interference with Causality would play havoc with our sense of reality, and with Time itself.
I saw this, at last, when Thomas reported bringing the keys from Cambridge to Hatfield. This is a short move in the same reality and in the same moment of time. A quantum physicist might declare this possible but very few others would. And could you or I do it? Of course not. Neither had Thomas, he’d taken the keys from Cambridge into Limbo; then he’d taken them from Limbo into Hatfield.
Could I psychically introduce a barrel of beer into the Bishop’s palace at Hatfield? The answer is almost certainly not, any more than I could put one in your living room, at least I couldn’t unless I’d first taken it into Limbo, as Thomas did with keys. Why so? Hatfield is subject to the same causality which affects us here and now. Its reality in the time of Morton and the brothers was as certain as yours and mine is today, but not the place where Thomas now found himself. I realised, if it was so easy to change, its instability would make it very like a bomb ready to go off, and I had been merrily shaking that reality with my apports. Not only that, this Limbo, this ‘other’ place, could easily translate into our reality, past or present.
I went back to Thomas quicker than intended.
He looked at me in surprise.
“I have reason to think it may be unsafe for you to remain here too long. But before I can assist you to move elsewhere it is necessary for me to hear the whole of your story.”
“Right gladly will I leave this place; what more must I tell you?”
“All of it.
But first, if anything should happen...”
I searched for words,
“If you should doubt this place or anything happen here to cause you surprise; if you cannot go back to Hatfield, you must straight away return to Circe. Do you understand?”
“But nothing could have surprised me more than you my lord.”
Thomas looked at me and gradually his expression changed. Finally he nodded.
“You should not have been able to give me the gifts you brought me. I was amazed and I wondered.”
“No Thomas, I should not have been able to do that. Nor should you have been able to bring the keys to Hatfield; you did what I did, then you did the same in reverse.”
And now there was fear once more in Thomas’ eyes.
“Ah!”
We both held a silence for a very long time.
To break it I sat down in a chair, ready to hear the next chapter.
***
Chapter 20 – The Second Part of Thomas’ Confession
“My lord Bishop sent urgent word to Hatfield. Brother Gilbert was to attend him in Holborn as quickly as horse could carry him. The viewing of St John’s Chapel had to be accomplished before 13th June. Some of the brothers laughed at his discomfort, for Gilbert is a poor horseman. Brother Matthew reported Gilbert’s ride left him sore in places which made it difficult for him to sit down.
Yet Gilbert was given to ride to the Tower of London in the Bishop’s carriage, and a written warrant to enter the White Tower. A warden guarded him all the time he was in the Chapel, yet he was able to kneel at the altar, and inspect the place I cut. After praying he was allowed to leave the castle. It took him so long to return that we had news of the Bishop’s arrest before he did.
From the Bishop’s own hand, Gilbert carried a sealed letter to be read to the brethren on his return. Dinner being over, Gilbert broke the seal and read to us.
‘Be not alarmed brethren.
It shall be the will of the Great Council that I depart from you for a space. It is my fancy I shall sojourn with His Grace the Duke of Buckingham for several months before my return.
I appoint our good brothers John and Bartholomew to guide our workings, and I bid you all obey their instructions as you would my own.
To brothers Gilbert and Thomas fall particular duties that I doubt not they shall fulfil.
&nbs
p; To you all, blessings and quiet observance of our great purpose.’
We all sat in amazement.
Gilbert rose from his chair at the head of the table and went to where Brother John sat,
‘My place is now yours.’
But Brother John waved him back,
‘Are we not all brothers? The charge given me by the Bishop will cause Bartholomew and myself to be away, and we are all to continue in the hands of you Brother Gilbert, but when we call for you to follow the will of the Bishop it must be done quickly and without question.’
I saw Gilbert nodding and he resumed his seat.
The next morning Gilbert came to me, the Bishop had written other letters and one was to me,
‘…It will be necessary for you to take others with you on your travels.
Your first task is to take Brother Gilbert to the Chapel you visited before. You are to arrange it so he returns with a token of the visit.’
I had been troubled by the thought of taking Gilbert ever since it was first mentioned. I explained all to him which the Great Circe taught me and which I explained to you. It seemed to me that if I took hold of Gilbert and he cleared his mind, it could work. If he believed in the power of certain rituals which I made up for him it would comfort and distract him.
We tried at the same hour of night as my visit before. The brothers at the top of the well lowering Gilbert and I down into it.
We came to the not stone bottom and I told Gilbert to imagine the place at the side of the nave in the Chapel of Saint John where I had entered. Still holding tight to him I went … and he came with me. We stood in the darkness, amazed at what we’d done.
It came only now to debating what we should bring away with us as a token of our visit. We wandered round in the dark, taking elaborate care to make no noise, and coming together to discuss in whispers. We settled on taking an unlit candle from a pile of candles which stood on a table by the alter.
Our coming back was as it had been for me before, this time, again, making sure to keep tight hold of Brother Gilbert.