The Whispering Swarm

by Michael Moorcock

  I fell into a light sleep until a couple of happy drunks came aboard. Slowly, a whisper began to sound in my head. The Swarm had returned. For a little while it had left me alone! I sighed. For a moment I had thought my acceptance of God had been rewarded.

  When I got to my stop my legs were weak. I steadied myself on the seats as I got up to go downstairs, gripped the rails from stairs to platform and staggered off onto the pavement. Nobody bothered me. I was just an early drunk going home. It was cold. Even though I had only a few steps to go to my front door, I turned up the collar of my black car coat.

  As I put my key in the lock my lips began to move. I wasn’t sure at first what I was doing. Then I realised what it was.

  I was praying for the safety of my immortal soul.

  BOOK THREE

  Two thousand, three hundred and thirty-six years ago—that was when the light of the great prophet Zoroaster went out and his wisdom committed to the memories of twelve disciples who turned it into writings. Thus twelve sacred books were made which together are called The Raghabesta and it is the secret history of Zoroaster and the story of each of the twelve who are represented second by six, third by three, who are the holy carriers of the thirteenth book—the so-called “lost” Avesta—which tells of the life of Zoroaster and reveals the place where Ahura Mazda created the first Homo sapiens. Much truth and wisdom is revealed in that book.

  —JASON CARTWELL, MY PERSIAN NIGHTS

  34

  THE ABSENCE OF MEMORY

  I felt the Swarm grow louder, almost threatening. I didn’t care. I determined to forget Molly and never revisit the Alsacia, even in my imagination. I was well aware of the ironies of being a writer of fantasy and what I was experiencing now. My misery was real enough. I would continue to be reluctant to face the implications of what had just happened. The emotional impact was almost unbearable. I wanted to talk about my confusion but who was there who might understand? My mum? Helena? Barry, in Telford, was too far away and wasn’t on the phone. I couldn’t think of a single soul I could confide in. Most of my closest friends were out of London. The core members of the Fix were off playing with other bands or doing session work. Besides, I had few male friends with whom I could talk about my confusion, even if they were around.

  I had seen the dead come back to life. I had maintained that a single miracle would go a long way to convince me of the existence of God. If so, then there might be a point to learning His purpose, or at least finding out if He had one. A decision even when no decision could be made. Meanwhile I needed to spend much more time on the important business of my own ego, which was wallowing in abject self-pity, having been deceived by the woman with whom I was deceiving my wife.

  I put a good face on it when I got back. Our daughters were already in bed, so couldn’t contradict anything. I was sure Sally and Kitty wouldn’t remember if they had seen Mrs Melody before or not. Luckily, Helena was still a little euphoric from the trip and didn’t blame me, as she usually did, for having acid-freak friends.

  We went to bed. Helena said something felt odd about my lovemaking.

  The majority of my friends, when I raised the subject of the existence of God, found my new interest disturbing. Their first thought, of course, was that I’d fallen for a line from some guru and found religion in a sugar cube. At least, said Pete Taylor, I wasn’t going off to India or somewhere. He didn’t know, because I’d stopped telling him, that I didn’t have to go to India. I had the Sanctuary only a short ride away on the Number 15 bus.

  Except, of course, I would never set foot in the place again. I remained very shaken. My heart was broken. I felt as if everyone there had conspired in its breaking. In other words, I was still refining my self-pity. At the same time I was suddenly forced to consider the existence of a supernatural world ruled by a Supreme Being. And magic was real? The prospect scared me, plain and simple. Writing that stuff was one thing. It offered great images, metaphors, symbols, narrative devices of all kinds. But in no way did I believe in it. I didn’t even have an interest in ‘world building’ or any of the other associated pleasures. I had read and written it as I’d enjoyed Freud and Jung, during a reading frenzy which included Camus and Vian. Logically, distant worlds, somehow parallel to our own, were fiction. Nothing else. I made my living writing that stuff. I never believed it. I knew how easy it was to invent. Not anymore.

  Then there were the inhabitants of the Sanctuary: people with plans, hopes, ambitions, schemes. Real people who smelled and felt and sounded and had the inner lives of all real people. Real people who ate and drank, belched, farted, shouted and laughed and told you jokes, shared a common frustration and gesticulated around you, oblivious of your mental world as you were of theirs. Real enough, I was bound to accept. Though they didn’t appear to be defeated by death. And then I had to believe that the abbey, which I had assumed to be full of decent old gents belonging to a benevolent Christian order, was nothing of the sort. Instead it contained a bunch of magi or even magicians who protected the Sanctuary by spectacular supernatural spells and might or might not be benign. Whatever their identity, it was obvious they were capable of astonishing powers while possibly controlling the lives and destinies of hundreds, even thousands in the Alsacia. And they protected a living cup I had called the Fish Chalice, as well as a mysterious ‘Treasure’ that the bad guys, the Puritans, were after! And that was my simplified version of where I stood intellectually at that moment.

  I really wish I had never spoken to Friar Isidore. This blurring of the borders between reality and fantasy was beginning to make my head ache and the Whispering Swarm had become the soundtrack to my bafflement. I knew a lot of writers would have been envious of my discovery of the Alsacia. They couldn’t imagine anything like it.

  It was pretty weird. I could really only talk about it with Helena and Helena didn’t accept that the Alsacia and its inhabitants were real. Barry was stuck forever in Telford, a miserable monochrome town insulting the name of a great Victorian engineer and rationalist! Barry was about the only man on the planet who would take me seriously. He was very spiritual. He had been meditating long before the coming of the Age of Aquarius. He just sat there and thought. But Barry was hours away and busy with his dying mother, so I wrote him a letter and asked when he was coming to London next. Meanwhile, I was on my own.

  I wasn’t happy about the situation. I had seen Alsacia as a kind of physical phenomenon; something science could explain. I was ready for any argument that would convince me I was delusional, but somehow I could only believe what the monks believed, even if I put the arguments in more modern terms.

  I did a lot of reading about miracles and faith and those who had believed in God. I read books which discussed the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, as Huxley called it. He thought all religions had beliefs and myths in common and one system borrowed from or lent to another. I really hoped to find a rational argument to explain the Alsacia and everything I had witnessed. After a few weeks of extended discussions with Barry at long distance and great expense I was still little the wiser.

  Helena could tell there was something on my mind but I don’t think she wanted to ask what was wrong. The more sympathetic she was, the more guilt I felt, and the guiltier I got, the more uncharacteristic my behaviour. She was genuinely worried by what she considered my delusions. However, when I tried to tell her the problem, her response was that I should seek professional help.

  I tried a different strategy. One afternoon, I said I was trying to think through some theological ideas for a story about life after death. If the dead could rise living from their graves, did that prove the existence of a higher being? Not necessarily, I supposed, but the question was a complex one. Beneath this, of course, I grieved for Moll and what we had enjoyed together. ‘What do you think?’

  Helena looked up from her desk. ‘I suppose, if you make it complex.’ She pursed her lips. ‘You should really not be doing all that pot, Mike. Either that or stop agonising about those old que
stions. I thought you’d written one of the definitive stories on the subject! Aren’t you a person of rare goodness and sanity?’ She was mocking me, quoting some newspaper review of Behold the Man. In it a character went back in time looking for faith and found it in an unusual way. I cringed. Maybe I was just getting simpleminded?

  Perhaps the good thing was that my metaphysical dark night of the soul obscured my continuing obsession with Molly and her betrayal. Though everything in me longed to confront her, I refused to go back to the Alsacia. From time to time, I’d worked for Bible Story Weekly. Every man jack on the paper, including the vicar who was our titular editor, was an atheist. In researching articles, talking to clerics and discussing Christian sects, I’d developed a healthy wariness of religions which characteristically broke down into warring subsects. Visionary politics. Primitive power stuff. Leader of the pack.

  I tried talking to Barmy Felicity. That beautiful, acid-burned woman had once studied religion in Spain. I understood she was raised a Catholic. She told me that ‘everything is connected’ and half the time seemed to be quoting ideas I’d made up for stories that had somehow filtered into popular mythology. She told me about Other Worlds and astral projections and advised me, ‘Stay true to yourself, Mike.’ I told her I’d do my best. I couldn’t stop obsessing about Moll. Not just her betrayal but everything she had told me. Some of what she said had never really added up. Sometimes she seemed to have been in two places at once.

  Was time travel part of this new equation? I had refused to look at the Alsacia with that in mind because I could see no way it was possible, given the constants. I was a lazy thinker, preferring to enjoy life and not brood about it any more than I had to. I had never much cared where we were from or where we were going. Instinctively I always avoided listening to preachers, teachers, evangelists.

  Beyond Alsacia, the constant presence of the Whispering Swarm made serious thinking rather difficult. Maybe I should have spent more time learning better mental discipline. Could the noises be a wholly psychological phenomenon? Would I have been better off simply giving in to the Swarm and letting it call me back? Should I have settled down and learned all I could about the place?

  But how well was my own memory working? Was I actually experiencing psychotic episodes? I had to test myself somehow. I would start writing everything down. I could check on myself. I remembered the first big fight in the square and how Jemmy had appeared badly wounded. And Moll, too. I had gone crazy when I saw her hurt. But, by the time I got her out of danger, the wound was nearly gone. I began to wonder if they all weren’t some sort of time travellers. It might have been easier for me to believe if they were zooming around in time machines! Or that I was barmy.

  That was the irony of course. I made a decent living writing quite convincingly about all kinds of supernatural beings. Gods and devils, immortals and the living dead were familiar grist for my mill. I could easily imagine a dozen different kinds of time travel in an hour. As far as imagined psychic powers went, I wasn’t just handy with a tarot deck: I had seen all those visions as a kid, including Jesus and the Virgin Mary when I had a fever. I pretty much took the odd saint for granted. I had always had perfectly good rational reasons for their visitations. The Jesus and Mary had been classic versions, straight out of their steel engravings in Victorian Bibles. Mary, in an elaborate crown and brocade robes, had topped, on one occasion, an entire choir of angels soaring up from the end of my bed into a scintillating sky where the ceiling should have been.

  I had seen Sir Francis Drake or Sir Walter Raleigh or both, I wasn’t entirely sure. I was fairly familiar with a few other miscellaneous famous figures from history who had hovered over my bed when I was ill. They arrived mostly in glorious technicolour. I had read the tarot and predicted the future. But when it came to it, I could not suspend disbelief for a moment, even when I was seven. I just didn’t think I was experiencing anything more than an hallucination. I knew they were projections of my own imagination. I had never had a problem with them. I thought everyone could do it. My imagination was just a bit more elaborate than most. Possibly the surprises and the stress of recent times were getting to me. I knew without a shade of doubt that my ‘visions’ were projections of my own psyche.

  Almost every SF or fantasy writer I knew was a total sceptic and embarrassed by people’s assumptions that we were into flying saucers and all that stuff. People in pubs would try to share their barmy beliefs but it was hard for me to be polite. I was only likely to be persuaded by a huge amount of sustaining evidence.

  Unfortunately, I now had that evidence and I was doing everything I could to understand it. The dead had been brought back to life, all their material possessions, animals, and buildings restored. The monks had expected it. That was why they hadn’t cared. Maybe I should accept that if there were, for instance, people who could receive mortal blows and recover from them more or less immediately, then other miracles had to be true.

  But I wasn’t happy about it! I had spent years developing a personal morality influenced as much as anything by contemporary existentialists. When it came to thinking things through, Sartre and Camus were my models. My own mantra had gone ‘I was not, I am, I will not be’. It had suited me to accept the fact that when we died, we died and that was that. To some it was a rather bleak way of seeing the world. To me it meant I lived knowing I only had one crack at existing. Obeying certain moral and emotional imperatives, I was determined to make the most of my one crack! That was the rock I’d given myself to stand on. But now there was a strong chance I possessed a soul and had misunderstood the fundamental nature of the world. I might be the subject of a higher power and if so it was probably my moral duty (or even a matter of survival) to determine what that power wanted from me and live accordingly. I was only a free agent in a limited sense. I felt I was being dragged back into the Middle Ages!

  Admittedly, I also picked up the occasional work by a well-known sceptic. I hoped to discover an argument to shore up my failing atheism. The fact was, I was having to decide which modern thinker best suited me. The atheists, after all, hadn’t experienced an authentic miracle. As an ex-rationalist Huxley had most to say to me. I had not yet found a Jesuit, as Helena joked. She was amused by my research. Whenever she walked along Victoria Street she half expected to see me strolling out of Westminster Cathedral arm in arm with some red-hatted cardinal. My own mum’s profound thought on the matter that there ‘had to be something’ didn’t help me much. I’d talked to every believer I could find, but the truth was I didn’t know too many. For a while I had corresponded with a nun in Pennsylvania. She had read Behold the Man and liked it. She had insisted that it was not anti-religious, which it wasn’t intended to be. She then added that I was the most ‘spiritual’ layman she knew. I didn’t like to tell her my intention was to write about demagogues and how they were created by public desire. A number of people, mostly in Texas, didn’t share Sister Marie-Louise’s judgment. They offered to send me to meet my maker with help from Mr Smith and Mr Wesson.

  There was no doubt about it, I had to get back to the Alsacia as soon as I could and try to talk to the abbot. Maybe the old man would answer any direct questions. I put this in a letter to Barry.

  Barry wasn’t sure.

  ‘You don’t want to open a healing wound,’ he wrote.

  ‘Is that what you think?’ I asked.

  He was clearly distracted by his mother’s problems. ‘I’ve got a feeling it’s just not a good idea now.’

  I thought I understood. ‘I have to go back,’ I said, ‘I’m having dreams. All kinds of crazy anxiety dreams. And the Swarm—?’

  ‘Please yourself,’ wrote Barry. ‘I’m sorry I can’t go with you.’

  And so, after debating this for some time, and not that long after I had sworn never to return, I decided to go to the abbey, avoid the rest of the town, and ask questions for myself. It was stupid. I had never felt sicker.

  The sharp air smelled so good as I left the fl
at that I almost abandoned my plan and went, instead, into the gardens to smoke a joint, sit on a bench and think it all through. But I had thought about it as much as I could. I liked to work out ideas through action and writing. I needed more information. I needed to get down to the Alsacia and confront Father Grammaticus. I know I should have told Helena, but I couldn’t stand another argument. I thought it important to preserve the domestic harmony we had taken so long to achieve. I shouldn’t have even considered visiting the abbot. I should have just strolled into the gardens and enjoy the season. But I didn’t go into the square and sit on a bench and take pleasure in the autumn trees. I turned right and I headed for the 15 bus stop. I was still looking back and wondering about the square when the Routemaster turned up, shivering and purring. I collected myself and made a decision. I set foot on the platform and swung myself aboard the bus full of cool determination and a ridiculous sense of destiny.

  I got off in Fleet Street at the Law Courts, still enjoying the mellow fruitfulness, if not the gathering mist no doubt coming off the river. I wasn’t sure how I would feel, especially if they denied anything had happened, as I feared Moll would. But my intention wasn’t to see Moll. I needed the abbot’s advice.

  The mist was at its thickest in Whitefriars Yard as I cut through into Carmelite Inn. That orderly square of railed Georgian buildings of uniform size and design held in the heavy fog which the yellow gaslight scarcely penetrated. I headed for where I knew the gate should be. For a moment I thought I heard my name being called. The Whispering Swarm grew suddenly agitated. I slowed. I thought I caught words. Screams. Warnings. Should I continue or go back? Then, at last, I found the entrance. The Swarm’s voice had dwindled. Turning the old iron handle, I pushed the left-hand gate slowly open until, with a low note of protest, it gaped wide enough to admit me. As I slipped through I heard a voice I recognised. A low, delighted chuckle. Colonel Clitch, I was sure. Cursing myself for an idiot, I stepped backwards. I knew I should have gone home. Only now did I think clearly of the children and how they would feel if I died and never returned. I felt the flat of a sword on my back, restraining me. I saw a face leering out of the thickening fog and my heart sank. I thought I heard the Swarm falling away on a distant jeering note.