The Night Lies Bleeding, page 14
part #5 of Craw Series
Again the women did not.
‘It’s self-knowledge. It will enable you to see what is real and what is temporary in your life. We say that it puts you at one with the universe.’
‘What does that mean?’ said Gertie.
This question rather stumped Devya, who had never been asked it before.
‘It will harmonise you, my dear.’
This sounded good to Gertie, who thought she could have done with a bit of harmonising.
‘When we are relaxed I shall call forth my Gandharva.’
‘We don’t know what that is either, before you ask,’ said Mrs Reiter.
‘It is a spirit of a sort, very benign and pleasant. Somewhat sexy.’
She said the ‘somewhat sexy’ in a self-conscious cod-Indian accent, hoping to impart a little exoticism to the two women. She had expected a polite laugh from the women but only got one from Mrs Reiter.
‘Have you any questions before we begin?’
‘Will my husband be successful in his experiments?’ said Gertie.
Mrs Reiter looked at her in a well, well sort of way. So there was some doubt as to their outcome. She had no idea that experiments could fail and thought that, if they could, then they couldn’t be very good ones.
‘It will be revealed,’ said Devya, ‘although I am sure that a doctor of your husband’s standing could not help but be a success. He strikes me as one of those men to whom everything is easy.’
Gertie relaxed a little when she heard this. That was the sort of thing she’d gone to a fortune-teller to hear, not this silly stuff about spirits.
Devya laid out two padded mats and invited the women to lie down upon them. They did as instructed, both women carefully inspecting the mats for dust before they did so. Gertie looked up to the ceiling where another swastika was drawn in pencil in an arty, eastern-looking way.
‘You are looking up at the holy symbol of the sun,’ said Devya, ‘life-giver of the universe. Let that be the symbol, too, of your true self, your soul. Close your eyes if you wish but concentrate upon your breathing, your inner self. Think only of the breathing. Practise the technique of Neti Neti – that is, if a thought that is not the true soul comes to your mind simply say “Neti, Neti” or, in your language, “Not this, not this”, and dismiss it. Concentrate on the breathing. Bring every thought back to the breath.’
Devya continued to intone these words of calm for a long time; how long, Gertie could not tell. The incense filled up her mind. The woman’s voice seemed curiously in accord with it, as if the scent was a vibration and the voice a colour and the pigment on the walls was a sound. No one sense seemed distinct from any other.
‘To facilitate the meditation process,’ said Devya, who was quite determined to get some results to come to the attention of Himmler, ‘I am going to anoint your lips with a special preparation of the lotus flower.’
She took out a small clay pot, within which was a slimy ichorous blue substance. She undid the stopper and dipped in a brush, intoning softly to herself as she did.
‘Aum, Aum, Aum, Aum,’ she said; the word was as strange as the many-headed icons and the pink and yellow powders to Gertie and Mrs Reiter. Devya spread the substance over the women’s lips. Someone interrupting the proceedings would have thought they were taking part in a beauty treatment.
The lotus preparation was remarkable, in that the essence of the crushed blue lotus was just about the only hallucinogenic substance available throughout Asia that it didn’t contain. The basis was cannabis and two or three nightshade varieties, along with a pot-pourri of other herbs, but the real horseshoe in the glove was a generous sprinkling of fly agaric mushroom and the merest smidgen of cobra venom. Gertie, who occasionally allowed herself to be persuaded to a dry sherry at Christmas, was in for something of a shock.
Already, under Devya’s hypnotic voice, she was floating down and down in her consciousness, to a place she hadn’t even been in her dreams. Had she been attached to the EEG machine her husband had ordered, it would have shown that her brain waves were descending from the fast vibrating beta level, to alpha, to the creative level of delta – where she had a sudden vision of how she would like the curtains in her room – to theta, and the slow cycles of deep sleep. There, the needle would have fallen to a zone for which there is no name, other than death. Though not quite death.
Dr Voller had thought he was at the edge of science when he’d ordered his machine. His idea of where the edge of science was might have been radically different had he actually been at that edge, but that is by the by. However, the brain levels were treated as a discovery when Professor Berger published his first EEG results. They were not.
An examination of the Hindu Aum symbol, that weird curly three with its strange bobbing hat next to it, shows that this knowledge vastly predated the invention of the EEG machine. The symbol is made up of three curves and a dot. The big lower curve represents the waking state. The upper curve represents sleep and the unconscious, and the smaller lower curve represents the area between them – that of dreams. It attempts to symbolise how these are indivisible, and play into each other from sleep to dreams to creativity to wakefulness.
The Hindu metaphor fits roughly over that of the EEG scientists, but it contains an extra level which cannot be detected by any machine. This is symbolised by the dot separated from the main body of the symbol by a curve like a crescent.
The crescent represents the illusion of reality, and the dot symbolises the state of absolute consciousness. Devya would call this Turiya. The symbol shows how this level, sometimes called the sun of the soul, illuminates the others but is kept separate from them by the illusion of reality.
The Aum glyph, however, works at a much deeper level than the scientific description. It is more than the sum of its parts. It reflects the belief that the universe, and all in it, is the expression of a vibration of that one sound, Aum, reverberating in an infinity of subtle shades. And who’s to say that, as Gertie’s brain activity fell, it wasn’t to this universal note that it descended?
Gertie, who could sense the colour of the air between people, who could hear personalities like musical notes, heard Devya’s voice falling upon her soul like a silver rain. Then the potion hit her and something fell away. The Hindu occultists would call it Maya, the curve in front of the dot that tells us that the physical world we see is the only reality. The doctors would call it sanity.
It was jettisoned from her like ballast from a balloon. She hummed with the universe, was simply a note in a symphony, a molecule among the surging surfs of the infinite. Then, in a blink, she was herself again.
‘Not this, not this,’ she said.
‘Just concentrate on the breathing,’ said Devya, pleased to see Gertie was following her instructions.
‘Not this! Not this!’ said Gertie, with more animation than Devya had expected. She almost leapt off the floor. Mrs Reiter just lay still and rigid.
Gertie was standing in a grey half-light on a blackened shore. The sea was a field of crumpled lead and the beach a mound of glistening coal. Above her loomed a hall, of sorts, the one she’d seen in her dreams, but much clearer. What she’d taken for snakes writhing around it could now be seen to be pipes. The bones of snakes and the scales that had covered the roof were only tiles and coping. It was clearly a factory of some sort, because it had a large chimney and was belching smoke. The normality of the scene comforted her.
An old man was standing next to her, tall with a white beard, illuminated by a dirty grey sun. Perhaps this was the spirit of which Devya had spoken. In his hands he held a pebble, marked with an inscription. She took the pebble and looked at it. It was small and triangular, etched with a horrible design – the jaws of a great wolf clasped around a severed hand. She gave it back to the man and began to sing to herself.
A hall I saw, far from the sun,
On the corpse shore it stands, and the doors face north,
Venom drops through the smoke-vent down,
For around the walls do serpents wind.
I saw there wading through rivers wild
Treacherous men and murderers too,
And workers of ill with the wives of men;
There the snake sucked the blood of the slain,
And the wolf tore men; would you know yet more?
‘I would know more,’ she said. Then the strangeness of that remark struck her. How could she ask herself for more information? The man took a pace backwards. He appeared surprised that she had spoken to him.
‘She can see us,’ he said.
‘She can see everything,’ said a voice from somewhere. The voice was wrong. She couldn’t see everything. She couldn’t see where it was coming from, for a start.
Gertie trembled and she spoke, and she did not know the meaning of the words she spoke.
‘You need to pay, Fenrisulfr, wergild for all your murders.’
‘You are the delight of evil women everywhere,’ the voice replied.
The man with the stone in his hands just stood looking amazed, almost trance-stricken in that odd metalled light. Something was happening to his face too. It was peeling away, revealing the livid pink flesh beneath.
‘Murderer,’ said Gertie, ‘kinslayer. You killed your brother who I loved, Fenrisulfr. I will have my gold!’
The man with the stone continued to gaze into it, his face a mask of blood.
‘This,’ he said. ‘This or something like it can control the wolf. Such was revealed at Gévaudan.’
Gévaudan. That name. She recognised it. From where?
‘You are the seer,’ said the voice, which had descended to a low growl, ‘you are the seer whose greatest power is her blindness. Your blindness stretches out over your country like a fog, sorceress. See, seer.’
And the hall burst open its doors and from within a raging tide of corpses swept down the hill, the dead running and howling and falling and clawing their way towards her in a surge: children, men, women, the old, but all tattered and grey and putrefying. At the head of this wasted, piss-stained, shit-encrusted, rotting army was something more terrible still. A great wolf, its maw the size of a man, came sputtering and snuffling and grizzling and growling at her.
‘I will have my gold,’ said Gertie. But the wolf was upon her.
14 Destiny in Tea Leaves
Craw awoke, human. His clothes were soaked and muddy and his head ached comfortingly. It wasn’t the ache of his wolf nature trying to break free but just a cosy, familiar hangover caused by drinking half a bottle of whisky at a gulp. He guessed Balby must have tried to find him but, in the rain-soaked woods, given him up as a stupid drunk.
He was thirsty. The storm had passed, but the woods were wet and he was lying in a large puddle. It occurred to him for a second to drink from it, but he didn’t. While he was a man, he would drink like a man.
He shivered and looked around. He was still in the same clothes that he’d been in in the police car, in the same place in the woods where he had fallen asleep. There had been no transformation, he was sure. When that happened he would wake years later, under unrecognisable horizons, changed and strange to himself. The transformation was still coming, but the bursting feeling he had experienced in the car was gone.
He stood up, his suit wet and heavy. He had only one aim now – to disappear. He would head back to his hotel, take his money and his house keys, send word to Jacques to put his affairs in order and where to store the Gaddi, and then he would be gone. His time in the Midlands was over, his pursuit of his wife suspended for another lifetime. What would be the point of finding her if the transformation took him?
It was early morning and, though he had no idea which way he needed to go, he decided on downhill. It was a lucky guess and in seconds he was at a road. The clothes were almost painful to wear, the sodden tweed rough against his skin.
Even on the road, he had no idea where to go. He took a right. It seemed an unlucky guess. He walked a mile, and then another, and then a third, without seeing a soul. Then, at the bend of a road, he saw a farmhouse. The sun was up, it was a glorious morning, and the wet slates of the building’s roof seemed to have their own halo of steam as he approached.
Craw needed help – a lift into town so he could change his clothes, pick up his money, and be gone. However, if you’ve formed your outlook on life during the heroic age, if you’ve been a king in such an age, then asking for help from a peasant, as he still viewed the people who worked the farm, doesn’t come easy.
He descended to the farmhouse and knocked at the door. It was answered by one of that species of English women who resemble a pinafored bulldog. At first Craw almost thought she was wearing some sort of warpaint until he realised, with a suppressed laugh, that she was covered in flour.
‘Yes?’ she said.
Craw put on his most correct English. ‘I wonder if you can help me, I find myself in a spot of bother and was rather wondering if there would be anyone here who could offer me a lift to Stratford. I can pay.’
‘Yow what?’ said the woman.
Craw recognised her vowels as from the Black Country of the English Midlands, a voice that seemed to have been created by heavy industry, it being incomprehensible that something so thick should have grown naturally. The vowels had been steam-hammered, the consonants electroplated. He could hardly understand a word she said.
‘My what?’
‘Ar yow half cut?’ she said.
‘I am not cut, just wet.’
‘Half cut, kaylied, drunk, yow soft ’apputh. Caan’ yow unnerstan English?’
‘I understand standard English but I have difficulty with some of the regional dialects. Stratford. I will pay. I have money. You will take me?’
It was meant to be a question but sounded more like an order. He had never been particularly good with the lower ranks and really did not know how to ask for things. For ten centuries he had only known how to command.
The woman’s eyes widened and Craw noticed her grip on her rolling pin became tighter.
‘Ooh my God!’ she said. ‘Ahh, yes, we’ll take yow, right enough. Come in.’
Craw did so. The kitchen was warm and had the comforting smell of baking. He was glad to get inside in his wet clothes. The woman told him to sit down and then called up the stairs.
‘Johnny, ge’down here now!’
There was a clumping and a bumping and a thickset boy of around seven came down the stairs. The woman whispered to him and sent him away.
‘He’s gone down the field to get my husband,’ she said, slowly, deliberately and loudly, as if to an idiot. ‘He will be back with the lorry in a minute.’
‘Thank you,’ said Craw.
‘Do you drink tea?’ she said, very deliberately.
‘No, I—’
‘Coffee, I expect.’
‘No, tea. I prefer tea.’
‘Have a cup then. Don’t worry, I got plenty swapping some sausages last week.’ Again she spoke very slowly, enunciating her words. Then she said in an underbreath, ‘I expect you like sausages.’
‘You are kind,’ said Craw, wondering if he was overdoing the formal politeness. ‘And I shall see to it that you are rewarded.’
‘I don’t want your sort of reward,’ she said, gripping the rolling pin again.
Craw drifted off rather, relaxing into his hangover and breathing in the smell of the baking bread. The woman left her pastry half-rolled and sat between him and the door, saying nothing but watching him carefully, hand on the rolling pin.
‘Sie haben eine rauhe Nacht gehabt?’ said a voice.
‘Ich erinnere mich nicht viel von an ihm,’ said Craw.
‘He is a Jerry!’
Craw came to his senses. There were three soldiers in front of him. One had a Thompson sub-machine gun aimed at his head. Behind them stood an officer. All wore red caps. Military police.
‘I clocked him for one straight away!’ said the woman. ‘Look at the state of him, he must have parachuted in last night. Give me that tea back, yow squarehead bugga, I only give it you so yow wouldn’t run away.’
Craw felt his heart sink. Did this woman really think to bind him with tea? Well, she sort of had, hadn’t she? He had to give her that. A fat farmer and the boy came into the room, looking at him as if he were something in a freak show.
‘I am an English academic helping the police with their enquiries,’ he said.
‘Well, you got the second half of that right, you dirty German bastard,’ said the man with the sub-machine gun.
‘That will be enough, Davies, there are ladies and children present,’ said the officer. ‘We’re here to hand this man over to the correct authorities. There’s no need to abuse him. That way it will come as more of a surprise when they shoot the blighter. On your feet, Fritz.’
Craw looked to the heavens. ‘Call Inspector Balby at Little Park Street Police Station. He will identify me.’
‘Never heard of him, you’re going straight over to Military Intelligence,’ said the officer. Of course they hadn’t heard of Balby. They were military police, not civilian.
‘Call the Home Office. I am Professor Craw.’
‘MI can do all that. You’re theirs now.’
‘On your feet!’ said a soldier.
Craw stood. Things could not be going worse. He had hoped never to see Balby again. Now he needed to contact him if he was to go free. Either that, or he had to run from the men with the guns. It had been so long since he had been in a battle that he was no longer sure if the bullets would hurt him. He had been injured by weapons before when in his human form, he was sure. How badly, he could not recall. Not so badly, maybe; he was here, wasn’t he? But would the stress of being shot hurry along his transformation? It wasn’t a risk he was prepared to take.
