Clowns At Midnight (16 page)

A fierce face, but desperate too, the face of someone weighed down, beaten somehow. Terrifying yet terrified. Accustomed to despair. Resigned and resolute. Someone had carved this frightening, heavy-featured mask, had painted it a glossy black so it caught the light dramatically, but they had captured a visage of suffering, patience and deflected rage. It terrified me but I pitied it.

And while it kept snatching my attention, it was the gourd bells that drew my gaze too. There were dozens of them fixed to the shoulders and back of the black sheepskin, looming up like—why, for all the world like a carapace of large, tightly clustered gumnuts facing upwards and outwards, largest at the top, four big brass or copper metal gourds the size and almost the shape of teapots, glinting like golden fists, the rest tightly clustered and thrusting out, spilling down the back of the skin, getting smaller and smaller. They were the sort of tonking, clanking bells you saw around the necks of sheep and goats, swollen copper cups with narrow mouths and long slender clappers fitted in them. The sort that would make a
shink-shink, shink-shink
troika sound when you ran through the forest at night. And like gumnuts, yes. Like the clustering of gumnuts on sprigs left in at least two mailboxes on Edenville Road. Or—another fancy was there—like a banksia-man, set with the gaping seed-cases of that always sinister Australian tree, the banksia.

Other glints at the front showed a cluster of smaller bells above the waist strap, not the strange-looking, gourd bells this time but five proper bell shapes fitted to the strapping. And all well worn: the bells, the straps, the skin itself. Only the mask looked new; newly painted at least.

In spite of myself I moved nearer, not consciously, more as a tropism, a fixated attempt to see everything in more detail. I could never have done it consciously. Part of me needed to know, needed to see the matted, pointed tips of the fleece stir in the afternoon breeze that pushed round the tower and stirred the treetops.

From the corner of my vision I saw that the door was shut, and began angling towards it. Aching and hurting, breathing like a wounded thing, with Jack-mantras and Jack-talk rushing through my mind, I headed towards the metal ring on the lock-plate. I had to know if the door was locked. As much as I hated this, as much as I felt I was dying where I stood, I couldn’t stand not knowing.

I fell forward and grabbed at the ring, slammed bodily into the door—not intended, never intended, just inability to do any better. My actions were all coarse and clumsy now, miracles of improvisation.

The impact echoed. The door held. I twisted at the ring, but nothing gave.

Only the cross had been tainted—more correctly, had been used to its full potential. That first visit, that first time up here, I had seen a Scarecrow Cross, had sensed an underlying purpose. Now it was fulfilled.

Leaning against the door, I forced myself to look back at the blackened, bushfire demon the cross had become. It was a three-quarter view from behind.

And I saw the blood.

Down the carapace of bells, smeared over the mouths of the gumnut gourds, big, medium and small, was the brilliant red stickiness of blood. Lit by late summer sunlight through the trees, it seemed to glow there, so dramatic, so melodramatic, almost comic, the sort of Grand Guignol flourish you expected to find in over-the-top Hollywood and Hammer films.

I tried to keep my protections strong and active. Fear of blood: hemophobia or hematophobia. Fear of the bogeyman: bogeyphobia.

This was likely the blood of something routinely slaughtered, I told myself, a sheep or cow, probably not something torn apart with predatory violence. Arterial blood, fresh-looking enough, possibly treated with an anti-coagulant, but not all that much everything considered. The edges of the bells glowed with it, a rich sticky red on dull, sun-burnished gold; the bell openings themselves were like gaping mouths, the long slim clappers so many tongues lolling in blackened throats. I saw the breeze stir the fleece ends, saw flies on the rough sticky rims and long clapper tongues, moving eagerly on the dark matted wool. (Fear of insects: insectophobia, acarophobia, entomophobia.)

It was all I could bear. I flung myself away, fell doing so, scrambled to my feet and ran, stumbled down through the forest. I didn’t look back, never once gave in to the terrible sense of pursuit or stopped to get my breath. I knew I might never have the strength to begin again. I kept thinking of the smooth glossy mask on its pole, brooding and evil, yet desperately trapped and pathetic too, as if betrayed into its villainy. I thought of the hunchback of gumnut bells, imagined the myriad black hungry banksia maws at my back. An old Hollywood movie line brought a ridiculous caw of laughter amid the terror:
Feed me
!
Feed me
!

Almost before I knew it I was at the car, then starting the engine and driving down the hill to the house. I was hardly aware of opening the back door and locking it after me. It was a blur of fright and flight, and it ended with me collapsing on my bed, resolving to take some Diazepam when I’d calmed down, some sort of medication, before phoning Jack or Mick or even Julia. That’s how lost and frantic I was. Julia.

CHAPTER 11

I woke with a start, driven from sleep by a nightmare that was immediately forgotten when faced with the bright morning of a world that contained a bloody, bell-covered fleece and a black demon mask.

I leapt from bed and half-stumbled onto the veranda, needing to lock in that other, more orthodox world as soon as I could.

Again, it was a surprisingly beautiful day, warm rather than hot, cloudless, with a steady northwesterly roaring in the trees behind the house. The only sounds were the rush of that wind blowing across the distances, the soughing of the grass in the fields, and the occasional warbling of magpies.

I savoured each part of that constancy: the wind, the sky, the blowing grass, the crisp, purple-blue ranges, but found myself already trembling with what I knew I had to do. The previous Sunday it had been checking on the wrecked bottle-trees—what was it, already six days ago? Now I had to climb the hill to see the cross in front of the tower. And not driving, walking. I just had to.

The fleece and the mask would be gone, of course. The bells and the blood. And this time, instead of dropping small shards of glass into one of John Rankin’s work gloves, it would be trying to find a leaf, a blade of grass, some part of the cross, anything with a trace of that blood. Though most people say they prefer their horrors
not
to be in the real world, I remain definitely one of those who prove the opposite is ultimately true. I can accept horrors provided they
are
in the real world. The alternative bodes ill indeed.

I’d visit the cross and see what I could keep real.

The day made it easier too, so fresh and golden, so aglow with the pure light of high summer. I dressed, packed my big leather writing bag with leftover barbequed chicken, corn chips and a bottle of mineral water for a makeshift breakfast, packed work gloves and camera, then set off towards the forest, meaning to take a line from where my visitor had stood the previous afternoon.

I locked the back door, then continued up through the bonsai garden to the single white strand of the electric fence, slipped under it and reached the point at the edge of the forest where I was sure my intruder had turned into the bush.

These were the bushes he had pushed aside when he’d finally disappeared, the ones that had confirmed his reality in this world. I went through them as he had, was soon stepping over the fallen strands of the boundary fence and heading up the incline, taking what seemed the shortest route to where the tower would be.

Yesterday, both approaching and leaving the tower, I had resolutely avoided looking about me. Confirming the tower had been everything. Today I carefully checked my surroundings as I went, peering off into the sun-dappled glades, trying to find the crushed bracken and scuffed footprints of someone labouring under a heavy burden, searching for any traces of black ram’s wool caught in the branches and prickles. I was making myself take charge of the landscape again.

Mostly I was successful. Now and then a bushfire-ravaged tree showed its burnt-out heart, and I straightaway imagined my dead-black visitor crouching in the cleft. Once I yelped from such a scare, but pressed on, resolutely striding out, determined to reach my destination.

Jack-mantras were with me all the way.
Be a close observer
.
Turn fear into facts
.

I did pretty well considering and soon became an impromptu expert on burnt-out trees. I saw how most of the fire-ravaged interiors had the smooth, light-devouring black of old mines, burial chambers, velvet linings and neutron stars. Others looked black from a distance but, on closer inspection, often showed cubed mosaic patterns, like diced fruit still on the skin, a glossy textured black sometimes picked out with grey or ghost-white edges. Yes, just like the hints of lines I’d begun to see in the image on Disk 4.

Such facts helped: the diced-fruit mosaics, my visitor sweating under his costume, possibly swearing at the discomfort. I was managing.

Finally I was at the summit. I pushed through the last of the trees and had my first glimpse of the tower.

The cross was empty.

I hurried over to it, even managed to run my hands along the stout horizontal and vertical poles, making myself do so, not thinking about it too much, just needing it to be real.

There was no trace of blood as far as I could tell, none of the distinctive blackened spotting on the leaves and grass near the foot of the cross.

Now the Jack-talk worked against me. Was I delusional, a victim of derealisation? What were Jack’s words: was what I was seeing as alloplastic, some external altering of the environment, wholly autoplastic after all, the results of alterations in me? I was terrified of being mad, of slipping away into some accelerating syndrome. Not just the lyssophobia, the fear of being insane, rather that I might
not
know. That worried me more than anything.

I stood looking at the bare cross and made myself recall what I’d seen: the heavy dark fleece, the forbidding, coarse-featured mask, the copper bells with clappers like finger bones poking out, but without joints, just narrow tubes of bone, probably the smaller leg bones of goats or sheep. But in those red-smeared copper throats, finger bones is what they’d seemed.

And the flies. They had been real—or was that some visual equivalent of formication, crawling on the wool instead of my skin?

I took a deep breath and stepped back. Enough. Again, enough.

Apart from the wind, the glade was quiet. I felt I was being watched, of course; it was inevitable, but I made myself keep searching another five minutes. Then, after checking that the door to the tower was still locked, I went out onto the sunny hillside and found a spot close to where the bottle-trees had stood to have my breakfast.

It was so peaceful there. I savoured the view, the scale and sheer expanse. After all that had just happened, it was liberating to have this as the constant: not some job, not work deadlines, not habits and routines, not even relationships. This pried me away from those things, probably would have even without yesterday’s bizarre visitor and the things on the cross.

No cars moved on the few roads I could see. No planes crossed the sky. The trees stirred in the wind. Clouds endlessly remade themselves on their way towards the untroubled ranges. Grass bent and sighed all around.

I lost track of time, and found an hour had passed when I finally did check my watch again.

The spell was broken. A car plunged along Edenville Road, trailing its cloud of dust. A hawk swept across the fields in front of me, seeking prey. Over near Len Catley’s place, an old red pick-up appeared, herding cattle towards a paddock on the opposite side of the road. The workaday world went on.

Just as well. I repacked my bag, walked down to the driveway and returned to the house.

Everything was an anticlimax then. How could it be otherwise? One moment you had a demon figure at the edge of the forest, with its striking costume left draped on the cross at the tower, the next it was a new day with everything back to normal: just sunny, empty views through the windows, the soft ticking of the kitchen clock, and nothing enough.

I went into the study. No sitting at the kitchen table today. No glancing out the windows to see if more dark figures were watching from the edge of the forest. Let them watch. Let them stand there all day, playing their games. I wouldn’t play. There were things to do.

But instead of writing, I went on the Net, that unexpected, endlessly diverting wonder of the late twentieth century. Today I wanted messages, queries from Mick or Jeremy, a note from my parents via Sam, even something from Julia. But there was nothing. That solace was denied.

Instead of logging off, I did a search for Mamoiada, the village Carlo said his family had come from all those years ago. Once again, there was a generous string of listings for the name, many in Italian, but with enough sites in English to give what I needed. Yet again I readied myself for the inevitable masks and costumed figures. Today I felt I could manage it.

Mamoiada was located in the central Barbagia region as Carlo had said, 644 metres above sea-level, below the high rocky plains and oak forests that lay at the foot of the great mountainous massif filling the middle of the island. There was ample information about it.

Too much information. Within moments I was in full-clown again, reeling from the most astonishing facts and photographs.

On a page headed
The Shepherds’ Carnival
was image after image of the figure I’d seen in the forest yesterday: wearing the same black fleece and heavy wooden mask that had been left on the cross.

I could hardly believe it, could barely bring myself to look. But I had to. Fighting back the dread, ignoring the symptoms as best I could, I persevered, made myself keep at it. This gave the answer. This explained it all.

The figure at the forest’s edge had been a
mamuthone
: one of the best-known of the Sardinian carnival figures, though a tragic rather than festive one. As far as I could gather, twelve such masked ‘clowns’ paraded down the streets of Mamoiada on Shrove Tuesday and the Sunday before it, also at the very beginning of Carnival on January 16
^th
and 17
^th
when the town celebrated the feast of Sant’Antonio Abate. For centuries now, the village shepherds traditionally came down from the mountains, took the bells off their sheep and fixed them in tight clusters to dark ram skins, the largest bells—the
binzichino
—at the top, ranging down to the smallest, twenty-five kilos or more of them, most facing outwards like gumnuts or banksia mouths, just as I had seen.

Wearing homespun shirts, dark corduroy pants, sometimes leggings, and heavy black shoes, these mamuthones would fit these black or brown sheepskins over their shoulders and down their backs. Then they would don the grim black wooden masks they had carved for themselves out of fig or chestnut wood while tending their flocks, and set their caps on their heads with their dark scarves tied over them and knotted beneath their chins to complete the transformation into sad but powerful demonic forms. Twelve of them—one for each month of the year—would then do an eerie, shuffling dance along the streets of the town, shaking their bells as they went, acting out an ancient atavistic ritual very much at odds with the usual joyfulness of Carnival.

A mamuthone had paid me a visit!

It was both an incredible relief and utter agony to see the images on the screen, but
this
was what I had seen.
This
explained it.

There was another shock too, buried in the first: one that plunged me straight into the ever-compelling hell of the Commedia. From all accounts, the parade through the streets of Mamoiada represented the expulsion of the Moors from Sardinia in 732 I’d read about on my previous search. It explained the glossy black masks they wore, and why twelve mamuthones doing what was called ‘their distinctive, sway-shuffle-and-jump, synchronised dance’ were always accompanied—supposedly driven—by six red-coated
issohadores
brandishing lassoes. These soldier figures in their red tops, white masks and breeches, sashes, dark boots or leggings and wide black hats dated from the seventeenth century, and had been added to the procession to reinforce the popular, officially sanctioned idea of the expulsion of the Moors.

For me, their blank white masks were as chilling as the grim black masks of the mamuthones, though supposedly the faces of the victors who had triumphed over the invaders being herded along. The beaten, downcast mamuthones were meant to be
imbrovati
—tied like animals—and the lassoes, now used to catch female spectators in the crowd, leading to kisses in return for freedom, were a symbol of this ancient Sardinian triumph.

Yes, it was the stark white masks of the issohadores that stunned me most. They were the Neutra Sarda masks of the Commedia dell’Arte, the most basic mask there was.

How could I have missed it? Neutra Sarda. Years of tolerance testing and I hadn’t made the connection. I’d read the words hundreds of times: Neutra Sarda and Neutra Sarda Half, had seen them in books and in the online and hard-copy catalogues, just as I’d seen Bauta Venezia and Pulcinella Venezia, but simply as identifying labels under masks, nothing more. I’d downloaded images, stored them in disk files, stuck them in scrapbooks when I could bear to—having one of my Brave Days—but it just hadn’t registered. I could hardly believe it. Someone who knew that ‘sardonic’ came from a Sardinian plant that was supposed to make you die laughing, that ‘sardine’ was named for the fish from the waters around the island, had missed this. Sarda.

The Neutra Sarda was, comparatively, an easy one too, had been a control in so many of my earliest TT progressions, almost like an old friend. I hadn’t even included it in recent TT line-ups. It was the mask without expression, marble white, porcelain smooth, devoid of emotion, the one used to teach acting because posture and gesture became everything.

And here it was: worn by the smartly dressed issohadores who led and chivvied their lines of harrowed mamuthones.

Another time I might have logged off, left it for another day, another Brave Day. But the figure had been in the forest. This figure, a mamuthone, was
here
, unchecked and real, intruding in my world. I had to do it while I could.

In a frenzy of cold sweats and manic calm I made myself continue. I snatched image after image, saving them to a USB stick. It was like imprisoning them, bringing them within borders
I
had built. I was on the David Leeton flight deck, fully in control, herding these creatures too.

I learned that the popular Expulsion of the Moors interpretation concealed a darker, pre-Christian origin. The mamuthones were also meant to represent a pagan combination of man, god and animal all in one, a figure closely related to the ancient worship of Dionysos. The public parade, like the Greek tragedies of old, was originally an act of profound reverence, an allegory of the shepherds’ lives, celebrating both their struggle on the land and their days lived in the rich constancy of nature.