“That was to be expected. Everything is to be expected. The world runs true to form. Remember that.”
He looked thoughtfully down at the streaks that the rock was leaving behind in the sea.
“I must not look at the sea. Or must I? Is it better to be sane or mad? It is better to be sane. I did not see what I thought I saw. I remembered wrongly.”
Then he had an important idea. It set him at once searching the rock, not in a casual way but inch by inch. Only after an eternity of searching, of cracks and bumps and roughnesses did he remember that he was foolish to search for a piece of wood to touch because there was none.
His pants were still trailing from his hand and he had a sudden thought that he could put them on. When he had done this his head cleared of all the mists except the pain. He put his hand up to the pain and found that there was a lump under the hair and the hair was stuck with blood. He examined his legs. The white blotches were smaller and no longer important. He remembered a custom and clambered into the water-hole. When he was in there he noticed a sudden, bright light in the opening over the far end and some deep seat of rationality drove him back to the Look-out; and he knew what the light and the noise that had come after it portended.
The sun was still shining but there was a change over a part of the horizon. He knelt to look at this change and it was divided again by a vertical jab of light. This light left a token in each eye that made seeing a divided business. He peered round the green streak that the light left and saw that the darkness made a definite line on the surface of the sea. It was coming nearer. Instantly he was in his body and knew where he was.
“Rain!”
Of course.
“I said there would be rain!”
Let there be rain and there was rain.
He scrambled down the High Street, got his sou’wester and arranged it in the lay-back under the end of the Claudian. He pulled off what clothes he was wearing and thrust them into the crevice. He was aware of bright lights and noise. He put his oilskin in a trench and ducked the body into a basin. He went almost upright to the Look-out and heard the hiss of the rain as the edge of the curtain fell on the Safety Rock. It hit him in the face sprang in foot-high leaps from the Dwarf and the surface of the look-out. He glistened and streamed from head to foot in a second.
There was a merciless flash-bang from the curtain and then he was stumbling down to the crevice and burrowing in head first while the thunder trampled overhead. Even in the depth of the crevice he saw a livid light that hurt his ears; and then there was the cessation of all noises but a high, singing note. This was so intimate to the head that it took the place of the thunder. His feet were being bastinadoed. His mouth said things but he could not hear them so did not know what they were. There was water running in the crevice, under his face, dripping from the rock, water running round his loins, water. He made his body back out of the crevice and was under a waterfall. He stumbled into a trench and found his sou’wester full and spilling. There was a tap of water running from the end of the Claudian and he took up the heavy sou’wester and poured water into his mouth. He put the sou’wester back and went to his oilskin. There was a bath ready for him but the rain was washing over him like a shower. He went back to the sou’wester, watched it fill and took it to the water-hole. He could hear the running click and trickle under the rock now—water running down, seaping through in unguessed crannies, falling with a multitudinous chattering into the hollow. Already the stretch of red clay was narrower.
“I said it would rain, and it has.”
He waited, shivering in the chilly cave, waited for the satisfaction that ought to come with the fulfilled prediction. But it would not come.
He crouched there, no longer listening to the water but frowning down at his shadow.
“What piece have I lost in my game? I had an attack, I was doing well, and then——” And then, the gap of dark, dividing that brighter time from this. On the other side of the gap was something that had happened. It was something that must not be remembered; but how could you control if you deliberately forgot? It was something about a pattern that was emerging.
“Inimical.”
He considered the word that his mouth had spoken. The word sounded harmless unless the implications were attached. To avoid that, he deliberately bent the process of thought and made his mouth do as he bid.
“How can a rock be inimical?”
He crawled away quickly into a rain that fell more lightly. The storm had hurried away over the three rocks and dulled the motion of the water. The clouds had dulled everything. They had left a grey, drizzly sea over which the air moved, pushed at the rock in a perceptible wind.
“That was a subsidiary thunder-storm on the edge of a cyclone. Cyclones revolve anti-clockwise in the northern hemisphere. The wind is southerly. Therefore we are on the eastern edge of a cyclone that is moving east. Since I can foretell the weather I can be armed against it. The problem will be now to cope with too much water, not too little.”
He paid only half-attention to his mouth. It lectured on reassuring nothing but itself. But the centre of the globe was moving and flinching from isolated outcrops of knowledge. It averted attention from one only to discover another. It attempted to obliterate each separate outcrop when it found that they could not be ignored.
“The whole problem of insanity is so complex that a satisfactory definition, a norm, has never been established.”
Far out from the centre, the mouth quacked on.
“Where, for example, shall we draw the line between the man whom we consider to be moody or excitable, and the genuine psychopathic manic-depressive?”
The centre was thinking, with an eye lifted for the return of the storm of terror, about how difficult it was to distinguish between sleeping and waking when all one experienced was a series of trailers.
“A recurrent dream, a neurosis? But surely the normal child in its cot goes through all the symptoms of the neurotic?”
If one went step by step—ignoring the gap of dark and the terror on the lip—back from the rock, through the Navy, the stage, the writing, the university, the school, back to bed under the silent eaves, one went down to the cellar. And the path led back from the cellar to the rock.
“The solution lies in intelligence. That is what distinguishes us from the helpless animals that are caught in their patterns of behaviour, both mental and physical.”
But the dark centre was examining a thought like a monument that had replaced the other in the dreary park.
Guano is insoluble.
If guano is insoluble, then the water in the upper trench could not be a slimy wetness, the touch of which made a flaming needle nag at the corner of an eye.
His tongue felt along the barrier of his teeth—round to the side where the big ones were and the gap. He brought his hands together and held his breath. He stared at the sea and saw nothing. His tongue was remembering. It pried into the gap between the teeth and re-created the old, aching shape. It touched the rough edge of the cliff, traced the slope down, trench after aching trench, down towards the smooth surface where the Red Lion was, just above the gum—understood what was so hauntingly familiar and painful about an isolated and decaying rock in the middle of the sea.
12
Now there was nothing to do but protect normality. There was the centre wielding the exterior body as by strings. He made the body go down from the Look-out to the crevice. He found damp clothes and put them on until he could see extensions of clothing and seaboot stockings like piles of waste. The body and the clothing were ungainly as a diving dress. He went to Food Cliff and gathered mussels, made his mouth receive them. He did not look outwards but down where the water danced alongside the rock. The sea was ruffled and there were wavelets each carrying smaller wavelets on its back so that the depth was obscured and the water grave and chilly. As his jaws worked he sat still with two lobsters lying on the rock beside him. The meal went on under pricking rain, a stirring
of wind and scuds of dimples across the surface of the water. He took morsels of food with one lobster and brought them to his face. The lobsters wore armour to protect them from the enormous pressure of the sky.
Between mouthfuls his voice quacked, veering in towards reason and truth and then skating away.
“I have no armour and that is why I am being squeezed thin. It has marred my profile too. My mouth sticks out such a long way and I have two noses.”
But the centre thought of other things.
“I must be careful when I look round at the wind. I don’t want to die again.”
Meanwhile there were many mussels and one could make the mouth perform and obliterate the other possibilities.
“I was always two things, mind and body. Nothing has altered. Only I did not realize it before so clearly.”
The centre thought of the next move. The world could be held together by rivets driven in. Flesh could be mended by the claws of ants as in Africa. The will could resist.
And then there were no more mussels within reach. He made the lobster mime eating but the sensations in the mouth were not the same.
“Have to do it.”
He turned himself on all fours. He held his breath and looked up and there was the old woman from the corner of the cellar standing on the skyline.
“She is the Dwarf. I gave her a silver head.”
Wind pushed in his face and a touch of rain. The old woman nodded with her face of dulled silver.
“It is lucky I put a silver mask over the other face. She is the Dwarf. That is not the next move.”
He worked his way back towards the Look-out, carried his body near the Dwarf and made it kneel down. Above him the Dwarf nodded gently with a face of dulled silver.
There was something in the topmost trench that was different. Immediately he flinched back and looked warily. The white stuff in the bottom was broken up and scattered because a chunk of rockleaf had fallen from the side of the trench. He crept forward and examined the chunk. On one edge the leaves were worn and ancient but on the other three they were white as muck and freshly broken. The chunk was about a yard each way and six inches thick. It was a considerable book and there was a strange engraving in the white cover. For a while his eye liked the engraving because it made a pattern and was not words, which would have killed him immediately. His eye followed the indented and gouged lines again and again as his mouth had eaten mussels. By the edge of the book was the recess from which it had come.
There was an engraving in the recess too. It was like a tree upside down and growing down from the old edge where the leaves were weathered by wind and rain. The trunk was a deep, perpendicular groove with flaky edges. Lower down, the trunk divided into three branches and these again into a complication of twigs like the ramifications of bookworm. The trunk and the branches and the twigs were terrible black. Round the twigs was an apple blossom of grey and silver stain. As he watched, drops of water dulled the stain and lay in the branches like tasteless fruit.
His mouth quacked.
“Lightning!”
But the dark centre was shrunk and dreadful and knowing. The knowing was so dreadful that the centre made the mouth work deliberately.
“Black lightning.”
*
There was still a part that could be played—there was the Bedlamite, Poor Tom, protected from knowledge of the sign of the black lightning.
He grabbed the old woman with her nodding silver head.
“Help me, my sweet, I must have your help!”
The mouth took over.
“If you let him go on doing that, my sweet, he’ll knock the whole bloody rock apart and we shall be left swimming.”
Swimming in what?
The mouth went frantic.
“There was that rock round by Prospect Cliff, my sweet, that one moved, the water moved it. I wouldn’t ask anyone but you because the rock is fixed and if he’ll only let it alone it’ll last for ever. After all, my sweet, you’re his wife.”
Out of bed on the carpet with no shoes. Creep through the dark room not because you want to but because you’ve got to. Pass the door. The landing, huge, the grandfather clock. No safety behind me. Round the corner now to the stairs. Down, pad. Down, pad. The hall, but grown. Darkness sitting in every corner. The banisters high up, can just reach them with my hand. Not for sliding down now. Different banisters, everything different, a pattern emerging, forced to go down to meet the thing I turned my back on. Tick, tock, shadows pressing. Past the kitchen door. Draw back the bolt of the vault. Well of darkness. Down pad, down. Coffin ends crushed in the wall. Under the churchyard back through the death door to meet the master. Down, pad, down. Black lumps piled, smell damp. Shavings from coffins.
“A man must be mad when he sees a red lobster swimming in the sea. And guano is insoluble. A madman would see the gulls as flying lizards, he would connect the two things out of a book and it would come back to him when his brain turned no matter how long ago and forgotten the time when he read that—wouldn’t he, my sweet? Say he would! Say he would!”
The silver face nodded on gently and the rain spattered.
Kindling from coffins, coal dust, black as black lightning. Block with the axe by it, not worn for firewood but by executions.
“Seals aren’t inimical and a madman wouldn’t sleep properly. He would feel the rock was too hard, too real; he would superimpose a reality, especially if he had too much imagination. He would be capable of seeing the engraving as a split into the whole nature of things—wouldn’t he?”
And then fettered in the darkness by the feet, trying to lift one and finding a glue, finding a weakness where there should be strength now needed because by nature there was nothing to do but scream and try to escape. Darkness in the corner doubly dark, thing looming, feet tied, near, an unknown looming, an opening darkness, the heart and being of all imaginable terror. Pattern repeated from the beginning of time, approach of the unknown thing, a dark centre that turned its back on the thing that created it and struggled to escape.
“Wouldn’t he? Say he would!”
There was a noise by his left arm and water scattered across the look-out. He made the exterior face turn into the wind and the air pushed against the cheeks. The water on the dwarf now was not rain but spray. He crept to the edge of the cliff and looked down the funnel. The water was white round Safety Rock and as he looked a dull sound in the funnel was followed by a plume of spray.
“This weather has been investigated before but from a lower level. He climbed there and the limpets held on.”
There was a gathering rhythm in the sea. The Safety Rock tripped the waves and shot them at the cleft below the funnel. Nine times out of ten these waves would meet a reflection coming back and spurt up a line of spray like a fuse burning—a fast fuse that whipped over the water. But the tenth time the wave would find the way clear because the ninth wave had been a very small one. So the tenth wave would come wheeling in, the cleft would squeeze the water so that it speeded up and hit the back of the angle—bung! and a feather of spray would flicker in the funnel. If the tenth wave was big the feather would become a plume and the wind would catch a handful from the top and sling shot across the Dwarf to go scattering down the High Street.
To watch the waves was like eating mussels. The sea was a point of an attention that could be prolonged even more than eating. The centre concentrated and left the mouth to itself.
“Of course a storm has to come after a time. That was to be expected. And who could invent all that complication of water, running true to form, obeying the laws of nature to the last drop? And of course a human brain must turn in time and the universe be muddled. But beyond the muddle there will still be actuality and a poor mad creature clinging to a rock in the middle of the sea.”
There is no centre of sanity in madness. Nothing like this “I” sitting in here, staving off the time that must come. The last repeat of the pattern. Then the black lightning.
The centre cried out.
“I’m so alone! Christ! I’m so alone!”
Black. A familiar feeling, a heaviness round the heart, a reservoir which any moment might flood the eyes now and for so long, strangers to weeping. Black, like the winter evening through which the centre made its body walk—a young body. The window was diversified only by a perspective of lighted lamps on the top of the street lamp-posts. The centre was thinking—I am alone; so alone! The reservoir overflowed, the lights all the way along to Carfax under Big Tom broke up, put out rainbow wings. The centre felt the gulping of its throat, sent eyesight on ahead to cling desperately to the next light and then the next—anything to fasten the attention away from the interior blackness.
Because of what I did I am an outsider and alone.
The centre endured a progress through an alley, across another road, a quadrangle, climbed bare wooden stairs. It sat by a fire and all the bells of Oxford tolled for the reservoir that overflowed and the sea roared in the room.
The centre twisted the unmanliness out of its face but the ungovernable water ran and dripped down the cheeks.
“I am so alone. I am so alone!”
Slowly, the water dried. Time stretched out, like the passage of time on a rock in the middle of the sea.
The centre formulated a thought.
Now there is no hope. There is nothing. If they would only look at me, or speak—if I could only be a part of something——
Time stretched on, indifferently.
There was the sound of feet on the stairs, two stories down. The centre waited without hope, to hear which room they would visit. But they came on, they climbed, were louder, almost as loud as the heart-beats so that when they stopped outside the door he was standing up and his hands were by his chest. The door opened a few inches and a shock of black curls poked round by the very top.
“Nathaniel!”