You follow. For the first time in months you feel a muted excitement. Something unexpected is going to happen. Soon.
Through the wood you walk, entering into deep shadow. It feels suddenly water-cool beneath the umbrella of horse chestnut trees. The bitter smell of nettle spikes the air. Here the silence is deeper than you have ever known before.
Beyond the wood is a mediaeval church of white limestone; it gleams as bright as a bone in the sunlight. The clock in the square tower chimes half-past twelve. The graveyard is small. At the far end are the modern headstones of polished granite that remind you of dominoes, neatly tended with flowers in pots. But the old man leads you amongst the oldest stones that are almost weathered clean of text. So ancient, they seem to stoop like old men and women who have, beneath the pressure of the centuries, become calcified. There is a wooden bench and he invites you to sit next to him.
He says nothing for a while, content to gaze at the tilting slabs and oblong depressions in the tuff. Suddenly, without knowing why, you’re telling him about a recent dream:
“I went into a church and saw an old school friend I haven’t seen in years. She was lying dead in a coffin. The coffin rested on trestles in the aisle. I was alone. Then the coffin started to fill with blood. I looked around. There was blood all over the walls, just running down as if it had been sprayed from a hose. It was awful. I remember just being so terrified by it. I was shaking and crying. Then I heard a voice screaming ‘Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!’ But I don’t know if the voice shouted at me or my friend, because the blood was starting to cover her face, like she was laying in a bath of blood.”
The old man nods and you know he understands the meaning of the dream even though you do not.
“You were looking at the plaque. Do you know who Richard Rolle is?”
You think he should have said, “Do you know who Richard Rolle was?” but you shrug.
“Odd to think, isn’t it?” he says, both hands holding the end of the scythe handle, then resting his chin upon it, “that an ordinary man, a poor cleric, living in this little out of the way village in Yorkshire, thousands of miles from Rome, was engaged in an astonishing exploration.”
He sees you look round puzzled at eider bushes heavy with fist-sized clumps of white blossom and the wheat fields beyond the graveyard.
The man smiles. “No, not a geographical explorer seeking lost cities. He was a spiritual explorer seeking God. But like an adventuring treasure hunter, he didn’t want to view the lost city from afar. He wanted to enter it and” —the old man clenched his fist as if plucking an invisible apple from a tree— “and actually grab hold of God himself. He sought a mystical union with the Almighty. Which, if you consider, is quite an awesome concept. Even the most devout Christians are content to speak to God and expect no personal dialogue with him. Richard Rolle desired to actually fuse with the flesh of God.”
“And did he?”
“It is a long and exhausting process, but he believes he was eventually successful.”
“What happens when there’s this mystical union?”
“The title of his greatest work is a good enough hint, The Fire Of Love. During unison you feel enormous heat, as if your body is on fire. Mystics achieving this state have had to run out of their cells and roll in the snow or drench themselves with water. They experience states of tremendous exultation, happiness and an almighty sense of love. It’s no dreamy, wishy-washy state of mind. What I’m talking about is a full-blooded and passionate experience after which you are never the same again. It is a transforming encounter. You are left with new knowledge about yourself, about people and about the world you live in. It leaves you transfigured.”
“Sounds pretty cosmic.”
“It is.” He smiled warmly. “Richard would have had many troubling questions before achieving unison with God. Afterwards they were all answered and he felt as if an awful pressure within him had been released.”
“Questions? You mean like mine?”
“Yes. They are so intense you feel as if the muscles in your stomach are permanently tight, your neck is always slightly stiff, your leg muscles ache with tension and you can never properly relax. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“What happens at night?”
“I don’t sleep very well. I lay there… just thinking all the time. It’s like my thoughts are train carriages. You know, you sit and watch them go by, glimpsing them just for a second, then they’re gone before you even see them properly. Only it never ends, it’s just one thing after another, bang, bang, bang, going through my head?”
“It’s exhausting?”
You nod. You look even more pale, even more dolorous.
“How about,” began the man softly, “if we ask some people your questions, and see if they can supply any answers?”
Quickly you look up, eyes glancing around the graveyard. It’s deserted.
“Like who? There’s no-one here.”
“No-one?” He raises white eyebrows. “The place is full of people.”
“Oh, dead people? Yes, but I don’t think they’re going to be that talkative are they?” You sound not only sarcastic, you sound disappointed. You hoped this old man could solve those problems that gnaw at you like ants at a fallen sparrow.
“Look.” He picks up tiny fragments of white material which you think are from a broken pot. “These are from a skull, the ones that are like pieces of clay pipe are long bones from the legs and arms.”
“Bones? These are really bones? How did they come to lie on the surface?” You hold them in your hands, they feel cool and surprisingly heavy even though the fragments are no larger than coins. He gently taps two piece together: they chink like porcelain. Inside the bone are fibrous hollows where the marrow has rendered down to juice in the soil.
The old man takes them back and covers them carefully With the crumbly soil from a molehill.
“People weren’t so fussy in days gone by. Graves would get lost, all the relatives dead. New graves would be dug into old ones, accidentally of course. The bones they turned up would be broken up into pieces with spades and then mixed into the soil fill of the new grave.”
You remember why you’re here and you remind him.
“Hundreds of people have been buried here in the last thousand years,” he tells you. “Perhaps one of those can answer your questions.”
“Is Richard Rolle buried here?”
“No. But there are a lot of people who were very wise without reading books or meditating. Most of these people worked the fields or were foresters and the like. But they might be able to help you.”
“And how do you think they’re going to do that?”
He looks at you forcefully all of a sudden. “Do you know what it feels like to die?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? You don’t seem positive?”
He sees you look confused. He smiles. “What don’t you like about the village where you live?”
“The people.” Your cheeks flush red; there’s an angry power you rarely feel in the words. “The people lead pointless lives; they’re interested in trivial things. You hear them talk and it’s about something someone’s said to so and so, about buying a new T-shirt for baby, or about a football match, or half a dozen eggs, or they’ve been to the doctors about a prickly rash on their neck and they go on and on about it as if it’s the most interesting thing in the world.”
“I used to have a dog. You’d give him a bone and, you know, he’d still be chewing at it long after all the meat had gone.”
You look up surprised, pushing back your long black hair. He’s used the perfect metaphor for those conversations you overhear at the shops.
“And they’re so bloody conceited,” you say forcefully. “They lead these empty, boring lives, but they all think they’re better than everyone else. Women think they’re better mothers than their neighhours. One man’s always rubbishing the work of the other even though all he does is cut grass
down at the sewage works. They all think they are right about everything and everyone else is wrong.
“Someone once said, that parents of a newborn baby shouldn’t pray for talent or wealth for their child, they should pray that the child be endowed with a liberal amount of conceit. Then, even if the child grows up to be ugly, it’ll believe it is beautiful. If stupid, it’ll happily celebrate its own genius.”
Thoughtfully, he picks blades of grass from the scythe blade. “Do you wish people would show a little more humility, a little more doubt about themselves. Am I such a wonderful person, should they ask?”
“Yes.”
“Like you do?” He doesn’t wait for you to answer but says gently. “Do really bad things happen to you? Disasters like love affairs breaking up, deaths of loved ones, your car being vandalised, you being punched in the face by a jealous rival, arguments with friends, losing jewellery on some wild night out?”
Again you smile that confused smile.
“Think about it. Do personal disasters befall you?”
“No, nothing bad happens to me.”
“And because nothing spectacularly bad happens to you, I imagine you feel that nothing spectacularly good will happen to you either. As if you have managed to sit on a fence between disaster at one side and miracle on the other, neither stepping into one nor the other, but maintaining a kind of grey equilibrium where nothing ever happens.”
You blush. He’s right.
“Carol, why don’t we endeavour to create a little miracle this afternoon? The sun’s shining and you don’t begin work until three.”
“How do you know that? I’ve never met you before.”
“I’ve seen you at work in the supermarket, and I also know the times of the shifts. It’s three o’clock, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So, if you’ve nothing else planned?”
“I was going to buy some new clothes.”
“Something black?”
“A black shirt, yes. I like black clothes.”
“So I see.”
“Is there a crime in that?”
“No.”
“But what?”
“But black isn’t so fashionable today, is it? Doesn’t it set you apart from other girls of your age?”
“Well, that’s something to be thankful for.”
“And boys. Aren’t they just a little intimidated with you dressed in black and with all that long, black hair?”
“Now you don’t like my hair. Well, I LIKE long black hair; I LIKE black clothes. Who sent you? The anti-black fashion league?”
“Sometimes you have to compromise to become socially acceptable.”
Anger burns inside. “I like long hair. It’s taken me five years to grow it this damn long. I’m never going to cut it short. Never. NEVER.”
You look into his gentle blue eyes and you know you cannot feel angry with him. Any more than you could feel anger at the frightened thrush in the nettles.
“Sorry.” You smile a grey smile. “I get defensive.”
He smiles warmly. “Now, Carol. Humour me,” His voice is soft. “Look at that patch of grass between the two headstones. No, not at the molehill, just at the tuff beyond.”
You do as he says. A big part of you guesses he’s eccentric, but a small, more concrete part of you tells you he knows what he’s doing.
You gaze for a long time, until your eyes slip out of focus, and you see a blurred green rug patterned with yellow grass stalks.
“Tell me when you can see the faces,” he says.
You’re startled but keep your eyes on the grass. “How did you know I could see faces?”
“So you see them? Good. What are they like?”
“A boy and a girl kissing. They have classical looks as if they come from one of those old Roman murals.”
“Does a story suggest itself as to why they are kissing?”
“No, they’re just—no, wait a minute. It’s because they’ve been parted for a long time. He has a wound in one eye. Maybe he’s been away to war, but now they’re re-united.”
“When you see the faces, tell me in one word how you feel?”
“Happy.”
“What causes the faces to appear in the grass?”
“It’s an illusion. Your mind won’t accept formless images for long and makes identifiable pictures out of them. The same happens with randomly patterned carpets if you look at them for long enough, and clouds, and ink stains. The man in the moon is the best example.”
“That’s a good answer, Carol. Now imagine the grass is merely green glass. You see through it. Beyond the grass, the soil has become a thin mist of the palest gold. Let your eyes enter into this golden mist. You feel good, you feel relaxed, this is the most relaxing thing you’ve ever done. Imagine you can melt, you become softer and softer and softer, until you simply melt into the soil. That’s it.” His voice is slow, gentle, relaxing. “Allow yourself to become liquid and soak away through the blades of grass, seep into the soil, just flowing down, down into that soft, golden mist. What do you see?”
“I can see the shapes of coffins beneath me. It’s as if they’re lying at the bottom of a pool. But they’re all misshapen.”
“They’re very old. Look, some have rotted, you see the shadows of men and women lying there with pennies on their eyes and their arms folded across their chests.”
“And I can see children.”
“Too many died young in those days.”
“I want to come out.”
“Why?”
“There’s something down there I don’t like.”
“What does it look like?”
“It’s like a black sack or… or a bag buried alongside one of the coffins. There’s something in the sack… a… a dead dog or something. But I… I don’t want to see it.”
“Perhaps whatever it is inside the sack holds the answers to the questions that torment you. Go down and have a look.”
“No. I can’t. It’s frightening me.”
“It’s the only way, Carol. Come on, take me with you.”
You swim forward, the old man at your side. You’re swimming beneath six feet of soil which is as transparent as a golden mist. You’re like a scuba diver, moving rhythmically and slowly through this tranquil, post-mortem world. At either side of you there are three hundred year old coffins, looking like black oblong shapes hanging in lemon jelly. Here and there are potato sized lumps of sandstone. You move on through the graveyard, passing through tree roots that hang down in forking strands like seaweed. Above you are the thin oblong shapes that are the headstone bases, set into the earth.
You’re very, very frightened, your eyes are wide. You want to return to the sunlight, but you know if you do not see what’s in that buried sack your life will be a stunted and useless thing. That’s the gamble. Will the thing in the sack be so bad it destroys you? Or, unpleasant though it must surely be, will you recover from the experience and enter a richer and happier phase of your life?
“Here is the grave of Ruth Holmroyd. She was born in 1620 and she lived until she was over a hundred,” says the old man. “Most of her life she looked after the landowner’s cows. She knows you’re here and she knows you’re in pain. Now you’ve got the opportunity, why don’t you ask her a question?”
You’re afraid. “I don’t know what to ask.”
In the clutch of soil and rotted coffin wood, bones turn. She waits for you to speak.
You look to the old man who glides beside you, behind him float tight formations of yet more coffins stretching away into the distance.
Suddenly, to your surprise, the words pop out one after another. “Ruth. What will I find in the sack?”
With the sound of clicking bones, the reply: “Danger.”
You can’t stand it any more, you’re rushing away through the squadrons of coffins, finger bones touch you. No. No. They don’t want to hurt you, girl, just to hold something close that is warm and alive. Careful, girl, now yo
u’re trapped in a rib cage. You’re so clumsy. No need to punch your way through old Benjamin Harker. You’re panicking. You shouldn’t, you know, you’re among your brothers and sisters. These are good people who only want to help you.
Don’t go that way. Don’t go beneath the church. Churches are built on pagan temples. They are heavy lids on the animal that still dwells within the pit.
It’s like you’re swimming beneath an ocean liner; the church floats darkly above you, an enormous stone hulk. Beneath, is something like an egg full of fire. You dive deep, down, down, down through three thousand years of fallen leaves and dead grass and roots of long gone trees to the head sized stones and bad teeth row of posts that form the pagan temple. Within that is the egg that contains the fire. The size of a football, its shell is smooth; it’s opaque, allowing the seep of light from whatever lies inside.
You are overcome by a passionate need to crack the shell and release what’s inside. You feel its transforming power.
As you reach out your hands the old man is suddenly at your side.
“It’s in your power to break the shell,” he says. “Then you will set the pagan free.”
“What will happen?”
“He will transform the way people think and act. Society will change. People will become strong individuals. Drunken tramps will become warriors. All women will become enchantresses. Meek men who work behind desks will not fear. They will become adventurers.”
You feel a rush of joy. You can do all that by breaking the shell? “That’s a good thing. I’ll do it, I’ll set people free.”
“I can’t stop you,” he says, “perhaps it is the right thing to do now. Perhaps society needs radical change. But think about this first. Outdated Christianity might be, even though people no longer believe in the supernatural element; God, angels and the like. Fifteen hundred years of Christianity has instilled in people a specific pattern of thinking and behaviour. Basically, Christianity left all adults immature. It retarded our mental development so emotionally we are children. That means we are all dependent on one another, civilisation has become a parent to us. We obey it’s rules and we surrender our maturity to it. We have far more power as individuals than we realise but we’ve all agreed to pretend it doesn’t exist and we hide it away deep down inside us.”