His eyes went all misty and emotional.
‘Why, that’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘You old romantic, you. For that, I’ll try extra hard to shift this Svengali of yours. What’s his name again?
‘Cassini.’
‘Mr Cassini will be mostly motionless by the time I’ve finished with him,’ said Merlin.
‘Another slice of cake?’ I asked.
‘Too bloody right. [He mumbles through a mouthful of crumbs – something about the male brown argus butterfly smelling of chocolate when courting.] What’s the plan then?’
I tell him about the others, and about our rendezvous point.
‘Can you be on top of Pumlumon Arwystli at such-and-such a time?’ I asked him, finally.
‘Can I? Wouldn’t miss it for all the hemp in China. Feels like I’ve spent 1,432 years waiting for this tosser to come along. I’ve got some bad anger in here [he thumps his chest]. Need to get rid. Revenge! [He stands up, brandishing a slice of chocolate cake in the air. Small children run to their parents.]
‘An actor,’ I tell the startled picnickers. ‘He’s an actor, we’re making a promotional video…’
They don’t look convinced. They eye my cake suspiciously.
We depart, quickly, in the direction of Merlin’s Hill so that Merlin can clank his chains, as per brochure. When we get there he waves his limbs around and I hear chains jangling, though there are none in sight. He looks pleased with himself. An almighty squeal comes from his top pocket.
‘Just testing the sound effects for your video,’ he says.
We part on very good terms. ‘By the way – I forgot to ask you something,’ he says. ‘Will you bring a cake to Pumlumon Arwystli?’
He grins, and thrusts his hands out in front of him in a Tommy Cooper pose.
He does a fantastic Tommy Cooper impression.
‘What do you call a wizard from outer space?’ he asks.
Before I can open my mouth he delivers the punch line:
‘A flying sorcerer! [Stupid Tommy Cooper laugh.] Just like that!’
Then he giggles, turns away from us, and slopes off into the trees.
The fourth and last person we turned to for help was the redoubtable Arthur Machen, who’d secured a special place in my heart. He had many claims to fame, and I still chortle, guffaw, and generally make bubbles in the bath when I think of his best scam ever. Working for a national newspaper, he wrote a spoof obituary, which was published. The obituary lamented the death of his employer – who was still very much alive. Arthur was promptly sacked.
Born at Caerleon, Gwent, in the 1860s, Arthur Machen – real name Arthur Llewellyn Jones – wrote gothic horror stories set in the Welsh countryside. It was he who ‘discovered’ the White People – and I wanted his strange, frightening imagination to be my secret weapon in the disposal of Mr Cassini.
Arthur let me know, from the start, that he didn’t mess with the ganja.
‘I’m a man of God and I believe in sanctity,’ he said in a serious, slightly quavering voice when we met on one of his rare visits to Wales. He was a Christian: his father had been an Anglican priest. I was a pagan who had devised my own elaborate pantheon of lesser gods and demons, as pagans do. I tried my best to skirt around the issue. My first impression of Arthur was of a man possessed. Not by anything evil, you understand. I’d say he was possessed by a raw energy, a driving force which had pressed him into a rigorous life: he’d written hundreds of thousands of words and traded many thousands of thoughts. I was rather surprised to see that he’d shaved off his trademark beard, black and bushy, a growth which had given him the demonic appearance of a Rasputin in early manhood. Clean-shaven now, his strong nose and forceful mouth betrayed his strong personality. His thinning hair was straight, lank, and combed forwards, giving him the damp-palmed look of a public school organist – but I do him a disservice.
Arthur spent a solitary childhood playing in the countryside around his home. According to one source he took an unfamiliar path through the hills one afternoon and encountered something that touched his soul – something he struggled to put into words for the rest of his life. He found terrors and wonders in that early landscape – and his fertile mind embellished the wonders he saw and heard: weird pagan sculptures dug up by archaeologists, shady dells, fairy rings, music carried on the wind. His world was haunted and mysterious. A temple dedicated to the Romano-British god of healing, Nodens, was excavated at nearby Lydney Park during his boyhood, and his lush imagination fed on this and other episodes, picking out threads of foreboding and terror. If you ask me, Arthur was more in need of my special chocolate cake than all the rest put together, but he was adamant.
‘My dear friend,’ he addressed me as we sat on a grassy bank in the splendid Roman amphitheatre at Caerleon, ‘there is naught you can say to persuade me. Marijuana, dope, grass, weed, hash, pot, puff, blow, call it what you will, I have no intention of touching it. I may, however, suffer one of your highly regarded sandwiches to pass my lips in due course. First, we have a matter in hand.’
He lay back on the grass, studying a flock of puffy white meringue-clouds far above us in the sky.
‘We are beset by huge changes,’ he said. ‘All is not well with the world. Mr Darwin preaches strange heresies, yet his arguments are powerful and seductive. Like me he is plagued by digestive disorders. But instead of praying to the great God above for good health, he worships the humble earthworm. Did you know that?’
‘No,’ I replied truthfully.
He pulled out a well-thumbed book and opened it at a marked page. It was by Charles Darwin, and its title was Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms.
When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms. It is a marvellous reflection that the whole of the superficial mould over any such expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms…
‘Well! What do you think of that,’ said Arthur in an extra-quivery voice.
I rolled over onto my stomach, and traced my right forefinger around a worm cast in the soil.
‘So the little fellow at the end of this hole, living and dying in absolute obscurity, has had a big say in the story of humanity,’ I ventured. ‘Incidentally, did you know that earthworms cap their burrows to prevent water seeping in?’
He looked astonished. ‘These little animals have won my respect and admiration today,’ he said with great feeling.
It was Arthur who told me the story of Bladud. He thought it might be relevant.
Bladud was a Celtic prince – legendary founder of Bath – who was disowned and banished by his father when he contracted leprosy. His mother gave him a gold ring before he left, as a means of identification. Shunned and despised, Bladud became a pig-keeper but some of his pigs caught leprosy too and one of them, crazed by the disease, rushed into a bog. In his struggle to free the animal, Bladud was covered in mud – which cured him, and the pig too. Returning to court, he was recognised by his ring and ruled wisely for twenty years, creating the temple of Aqua Sullis. But he died tragically when a magical experiment went wrong. In the manner of Icarus he made a fantastical pair of wings, but they gave way and he crashed to his death.
Arthur warned me about my quest.
‘Duxie, we’re all bubbles in the breaking wave of time – no more than that. Be careful at the end of your story. Please don’t try to fly.’
Arthur, the London journalist, had tasted poverty at first hand. He got to know the city intimately and fell in love with her nooks and crannies. His first book, The Anatomy of Tobacco, was followed by three French translations. And then, married to Amy Hogg, he turned to ‘decadent’ fantasy fiction laced with sexuality and horror. The Great God Pan – which features a pagan demoness – caused a scandal.
Arthur propped himself up on his right elbow and regarded me in the brittle li
ght of a February afternoon in Caerleon.
‘Let me tell you something,’ he said, flopping onto his back again. ‘A man like you, searching for something in his past, is in mourning. Did you realise that?’
I murmured something to bide time.
‘Mourning your childhood probably,’ he said. ‘Or mourning a suitable explanation for your existence… or mourning your own impending death, perhaps.’
I countered him swiftly. ‘How about you then. You’re in perpetual mourning for a man who died two thousand years ago, and in perpetual mourning for an unknown date in the future when you’ll get to see him again. That’s a whole lifetime in mourning. Am I right, or am I right?’
He seemed rather shocked.
‘How can you talk about God like that,’ he said in a hushed tone. ‘These modern notions of yours…’
I placated him.
‘Yes, you’re quite right.’
I explained, in a soothing voice, that there had been a great crisis in faith – of any kind – since his death. People were looking for other ways to feel happy and optimistic. Like shopping and eating chocolate.
‘I’ll give you a quote from a book I’m reading at the moment,’ I said. ‘It’s by a man called Adam Phillips. He’s Welsh, actually, like us.’
I rummaged in my rucksack and brought out a paperback with a dark blue cover.
‘This line comes from Darwin’s Worms,’ I told him.
It is the consequence, if not always the intention, of both Darwin’s and Freud’s writing to make our lives hospitable to the passing of time and the inevitability of death, and yet to sustain an image of the world as a place of interest, a place to love.
‘So you don’t believe in anything any more,’ he said.
‘Belief is a commodity sold by people who want you to buy their story and nobody else’s,’ I replied. ‘And it’s a very dangerous commodity. If you don’t keep it in a safe place it’s likely to blow up in your face any moment.’
Arthur chuckled over my homespun philosophy. As I repacked my bag he questioned me about modern science. Had Richard Dawkins really described our DNA codes as islands of sense separated by seas of nonsense, and what did he mean by that?
I lay back on the grass, trying to summon up some courage. Would he join my gang on Pumlumon Arwystli? Would he reactivate the White People? I went over the reasons in my head, my plan of action.
When war broke out in 1914, Arthur had gained a new and freakish notoriety. Soon after the Battle of Mons he wrote a story called The Bowmen, describing how celestial archers from the age of Agincourt appeared in the sky above the battle and fired arrows at the Germans, saving the British from defeat. The story took on a life of its own and soon the public believed in The Angels of Mons – a real life version of Arthur’s story. He became famous despite his repeated avowals that The Bowmen was a work of fiction.
I wanted to use his novella The White People, in my bid to exorcise Mr Cassini. The story features one of Arthur’s favourite themes – the ‘little people’ of folklore: the children of Danu, who ‘disappeared’ into the Welsh hills many years ago but who live on in another dimension or otherworld; he believed they still exert an obscure and menacing force on humanity. In The White People, a girl on the cusp of puberty is fatally sucked into this fairytale world.
‘I have an idea,’ I said to Arthur. ‘Does the name Ti Bossa mean anything to you?’
A faint negation reached my ears.
‘A voodoo priest who lived in Haiti… he had forty wives,’ I said. ‘Did a trick with white powder.’
His response was immediate, as I’d anticipated. He jerked to life, rolling onto his side and putting his face close to mine; so close that I could smell peppermint, which explained the regular, furtive movements of his hand between a pocket and his mouth.
‘White powder?’ he rasped excitedly.
‘Yes – apparently he could make people invisible merely by sprinkling a small pinch of this powder over them.’
His eyes burned into me, two black coals set in the embers of his bloodshot eyes.
‘My God! You do realise, of course, that I myself have used a white powder in one of my own stories?’
‘The Novel of the White Powder,’ I replied cunningly. My ruse had worked perfectly.
‘You’ve read it?’ he asked, with that strange mixture of disbelief and pride which rises like a dove from the author’s fragile breast.
‘Of course,’ I answered.
A brief silence fell over us as we contemplated the conversation which had passed between us. There was no doubt in my mind that we had formed a friendship, based largely on white powder. I was glad I hadn’t brought any cocaine (not that I had any, you understand). Arthur was an aesthete in such matters, and I might have scuppered my project in its infancy.
‘Let me get this right,’ he said. ‘You want me to meet you on the top of Pumlumon Arwystli, together with Merlin, Huw Llwyd of Cynfael, the Rev Griffiths and the singing policeman. There, we will encounter a teardrop vampire or animagus called Mr Cassini, a man who siphons life from other people, and together we will banish him from this earth by utilising a number of tricks and wiles, my white powder being among them. Is that right?’
‘Perfectly correct, though I also want you to bring the White People along, since I have a part for them to play also.’
‘I hope you don’t mind my saying this,’ he said in carefully considered tones, ‘but the whole thing sounds rather childish.’
Now it was my turn to roll over onto my side and regard him.
‘That’s the whole point,’ I said. ‘I am seeking to return to my childhood – to be specific, to the first ten years, in the hope that I will be able to recall some of my earliest memories. As Dylan Thomas once said, I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is to their working. Surely you can appreciate what I’m trying to do, since you yourself have based most of your fiction on the fragments you’ve retained from your youth. Childhood, after all, is the supreme fiction. Am I speaking truthfully?’
Again, he waved his hand languorously and murmured assent.
And so our pact was made; my plan of action was completely in place and, as I bade him farewell and watched his black shadow receding into a Caerleon dusk, I put together the last few pieces of my jigsaw – the gambit with which I would entice Mr Cassini to the summit of Pumlumon Arwystli on an insipid day in mid-February.
That night I dreamt the next development in my story, or should I say our story, since Olly had helped me gestate the malevolent incubus whom I now sought (as a ghostwriter) to extinguish in my own private auto-da-fe. In my dream, PC 66 felt a frisson of magnetism one morning, and it drew him towards the shore; he walked to the edge of the pounding surf and trembled with cold and shame by the side of the turbulent sea. He took off his huge police issue boots, and then his socks, which he crammed into the still-warm leather interiors. He stepped into the sea and walked steadily into the briny, until the super-cooled waves encased his legs and shackled him, numb, to the rocky seabed. He wanted to swim out to the island. He wanted to escape from the pointing fingers, the knowing looks, the shaking heads. The people were demanding action. For years they had turned a blind eye to Mr Cassini’s familial cruelties, but now, with the arrival of Little Michael, they’d been pricked into action. Tales of the supernatural sped from shop to shop; the aldermen held agitated meetings behind closed doors; superstitious townspeople talked of vengeance and supernal intervention. PC 66 turned back. He went for his boots, but one of them had already been carried away by the tide; he put the other on his left foot and limped away from the scene. A magnetic force dragged him back to the police station, wet-legged and miserable, to face his destiny. When the sun sank below the liverish waves a large crowd, silent except for the crackle of their torches, laid violent hands on Mr Cassini and interned him in the police station. As he sat in his cell, unmoved, an inquisitorial court was convened to try him, and while it deliberated, the
crowd enacted a macabre and sinister practice which takes place during the carnival at Villanueva de la Vera, in the high and lonely sierra south of Madrid, every year. At the height of the jollifications a man-sized doll – Pero Palo – dressed in seventeenth-century clothing, is delivered to the crowd to be torn to pieces. At one period this act of light-hearted destruction was preceded by a semblance of castration, now omitted from the festivities, but there is still fierce competition for the possession of the carved, wooden head. Differences of opinion exist in Villanueva as to who the effigy represents, a common view being that in real life Pero Palo was an inquisitor, finally lynched by the populace in retribution for intolerable abuses…
But even then Mr Cassini displayed no fear. A traditional sin-eater was summoned and the mob witnessed his vicarious act of contrition; presented with a small loaf of salted bread, a mazer full of beer, and a small denomination coin, he symbolically consumed the sins of the man inside the police station. Mr Cassini laughed.
Now, as the seven rainbow messengers arrived simultaneously at the door of the cell, PC 66 executed his coup de main: he arranged for the seventh rainbow messenger to enter the cell and foretell Mr Cassini’s death. The omens had to be right.
The seventh rainbow messenger said to Mr Cassini in his cell: ‘Beware the snow: when the windows of heaven are opened a white host will come – the snowflakes will arrive as a swarm of remembrance. The taste of snow is the taste of violence. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes.’
‘The mannequins in your room will come to life, they will hunt you down. I can see that room very clearly. There are many people sitting in that room and they are thawing.’
Mr Cassini hung his head, he made no response.
Moving towards the door, the seventh rainbow messenger said: ‘Go to Pumlumon Arwystli without delay, take yourself to the centre cairn, the middle of the three, and look to all points of the compass, as the sun rises. Your future will become known to you. Do you understand me?’
Mr Cassini lumbered to his feet and nodded.
‘Come then, leave this place. Your fate awaits you.’