Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (27 page)

‘I wondered if he was right, and I still wonder. But he knew, as the other disciples did not, that our Master could not continue as an itinerant preacher, collecting crowds wherever he went, leading men and women away from safety. A crisis was sure to come. There would be a moment when he would either defeat the forces that were amassing against him or succumb to them. It was Iscariot's view that to delay that moment would be to risk the greatest defeat of all.

‘It was the night before we entered Jerusalem. We were sleeping in the open as we often did. The disciples, as usual, had taken up the best positions round the fire while we lesser mortals crouched as near to it as we could. I could not see where the Nazarene was. I was angry at having to scramble for a place a little nearer the warmth. Had I not come to him of my own free will? Cold though it was, I decided that I would move out of the glow and sit alone on the edge of the hill that looked over Jerusalem.

‘A few faint lights flickered and moved in the streets. I felt that the time had come to leave the Nazarene and live my own life again. I had followed the Master for that one elusive phrase, “eternal life”. There had been times when, listening to him, I felt myself about to grasp the secret, but it had slipped away. Some quirk of my own intellect perhaps had tricked me, for the simple heard and believed. Presently I was aware of someone beside me, the Master. He sat down on the ground next to me and was silent for a long time as he hugged his knees and his eyes stared at the little lights below us. I wanted to speak and ask him a thousand questions, but I would not disturb him. No. He must break the silence. I would show him that I was free of his fascination.

‘We sat together for nearly an hour without exchanging a word. Occasionally I glanced at him. Still he stared, his look impenetrable and his immobility absolute. He did not show by so much as a flicker that he was aware of my presence, and it made me rage. Every wounded feeling rose up in rebellion against him. What had he that I had not? Why should I give up everything for him and have so little to show for it? There he is, a little man with great round eyes, devouring the darkness with them. I knew his teaching now. I would go elsewhere and learn from others. Then he spoke.

‘ “Why is it that you follow me, Issachar?” he says.

‘I was shocked. It was as if his voice had come out of my private thoughts. “Do you need to ask, Master?” I replied, trying to play with him.

‘ “I do not need to,” he said. “But you do. I ask the question for your sake.”

‘ “Do you have doubts about my reasons?” I replied, still trying to gain an advantage.

‘ “What are your reasons?” he asked. This I was forced to answer.

‘ “You have the secret of eternal life. I want it.”

‘ “Have you not already received it?” he said.

‘ “No, Master.”

‘ “Then what makes you think you ever will?”

‘ “It is yours to give, Master,” I said.

‘ “Only to those who know how to receive it.”

‘ “Then teach me how to.” I was not looking at him but I thought I felt him smile.

‘ “You think wisdom is like a cup of wine or a piece of bread that can be taken and consumed easily and without reflection. But no man can receive unless he knows truly what he desires. And a man cannot know truly unless he knows with the heart and mind together. That is why I say that to him who has it shall be given, but from him that has not it shall be taken away even that which he has.”

‘ “Yes. I understand, Master,” I said. And I thought I did. There was a long silence and the sky grew grey at the edges. Morning approached. The Master spoke again.

‘ “Issachar, when I am dead, will you see that I am buried?”

‘ “But you will never die, Master,” I said.

‘ “The son of man must die in order that he may live,” he said. “Has your family a rock tomb cut in the hillside near here?” I said that was so, astonished at his knowledge. “Bury me there,” he said.

‘ “Show me the secret of eternal life, then.”

‘ “Do you bargain with me? Very well. Eternal life shall be yours and you may come to know its secret. But in time you will see that to possess something without knowing its meaning is the greatest burden. And you shall wait till I come for you again.”

‘All this was madness to me. I left him as he rode triumphantly into Jerusalem and went back to shoemaking. I was scorned on all sides, by some for leaving the Master, and by others for joining him in the first place, but it would have been useless to stay, since from that time onwards the Master was seeing no-one in private but the Twelve.

‘One afternoon Iscariot came to me. Without ceremony he led me to the back of my shop. He was in a curious state of mind: excitement, anger and desperation were alive in every movement of his body.

‘ “I have seen fear on his face,” said Judas. “I never expected it. When the priests and the scribes are questioning him I see fear. Twice he has withdrawn himself completely from us and on the second occasion I found him myself in a friend’s orchard, not praying, but with his knees up to his chin and shivering like a child before a whipping. He is afraid. And now I am afraid for his fear.”

‘ “But why?”

‘ “Don’t you see? If he runs away everything is lost. I am the only one who understands this.” He told me that he intended to go to the Temple authorities and let them know where they might take him privately without meeting the opposition of a crowd. In this way, Judas said, he would force the Master into the path of his true destiny so that he could not run away.

‘And so it happened, as it is written, that our Master was taken in the moment of his greatest fear and then was crucified. I did not see his death—I too was afraid—and so it came about that the Master was buried in another’s tomb.

‘As for Iscariot, the story was that he hanged himself. He was hanged, it is true, but not by his own hands. The hands that did it belonged to the Rock on which the Master built his church. Do not look so startled. You may disbelieve what I say if it suits you.

‘Not that I blame the Fisherman,’ Issachar went on, ‘for Iscariot had no right to assume that the Master would run away. What drove him to betrayal was vanity, and a taste for controlling events. His fears may not have been groundless, but there is also faith. . . .

‘As for me, I never saw the Master again, nor did I bury him. I felt no longer worthy of his promises of eternal life after I had deserted him. I lived on and my hair grew grey and my skin withered as others did, but I did not fall ill. All round me my friends died and the face of my country changed, but I lived on. I was shunned because of my great age by the young. Those who had known my youth and still survived resented my continuing health, and so, in my ninetieth year, I began to travel. I found I could go for days on end without food or water. Burning deserts and icy mountains caused me pain but did not destroy me. My hair grew long and white. Strangers avoided me. I was in my hundredth year when I came to know that I could not die.

‘Life became a burden and I decided to destroy myself. My body was withered but hard and resilient as steel. I suspected that eternal life was my destiny but was loath to face the horror of it. Finally I took myself up onto a high mountain and hurled myself off it. I felt my body fall and crash against rocks. I kept hoping with each jolt of excruciating pain that I would lose consciousness. When, after an age of agony, I came to rest at the bottom I must have passed into a kind of sleep. Waking, I found myself with a young body again and black hair, much as you see me now. For every hundred years I regain my youth and experience once more the slow deterioration of age.

‘I will not tell you all that I have seen since then. I would still be talking to you on your deathbed. I have been in my time a monk, a soldier, a great scholar, once even the ruler of a small nation, but always my immortality dogged me: I brought bad luck wherever I went and was forced to move on. A thousand times I courted death—on the high seas, in battle, at the hands of executioners or in the torture chamber—but each time mortality eluded me. Once my head was cut off by order of the Sultan in Constantinople. The sensation was more agonising than I can say but, at the same time, liberating and thrilling. The separated members of my body were thrown into the Bosphorus where they became reunited in a most mysterious way. I was picked out of the sea by a passing slave trader bound for Alexandria and thereafter spent ten years in the galleys.’

He pointed to his throat and I could see the faint marks of his decapitation, though more than a century had passed.

‘After all these ages I can only say that, as the prophet says, there is nothing new under the sun. Men are still as ignorant as they ever were. And death, whatever may come after, is the great blessing. I know now what the Master truly meant: eternal life is not found in time but out of time, and I am Time’s prisoner until I am released.’

When he had finished I again offered him refreshment which he refused. He then asked to see my book of the forty-eight Angelic Keys written in the language of Adam and dictated to me by the angel Uriel, and which he himself had called ‘the Secret of Secrets and the Holy of Holies.’ So I brought the book to the Wandering Jew so that he could explain and interpret them to me, but before he did so, he said:

‘Do you truly want me to interpret these signs for you?’

I nodded my assent.

‘What is it you wish for most in this life?’

‘To know and do the will of God,’ I answered.

For a long while he looked at me until I began to doubt the truth of my own words, then he said: ‘Very well.’

What follows I have transcribed from his interpretations together with the sigils given to me by the angel Uriel and the words in Enochian, the true language of Adam and the Sons of Heaven.

V

This was where Dee’s narration ended. It was followed by a strange text, some of it consisting of occult symbols and geometrical figures of the kind I have found in old grimoires. Most of the words were in English, but some were in Latin and some in an unknown tongue which I took to be the ‘Enochian’. It looked to me very like the kind of babble you used to hear at charismatic Evangelical services—and still do for all I know; it’s a long time since I’ve been. It had no discernible grammar, but I only gave this a cursory glance. There were forty eight sections, corresponding, I assumed, to the Keys mentioned by Dee and each was headed, by a short title or motto, either in Latin or English, such as the first: ‘To know the virtues of certain plants’, the fifth, ‘To obtaine possessioun of any woman desired’, or the thirteenth, ‘To turne base metalls to uncorrupt gold’.

Against this last section, someone else had written a few notes, mostly indecipherable, but at the bottom of the page was a large scrawled signature:

EDVARDUS KELLEY, EQUES. ‘Edward Kelley, Knight.’

Dee’s scryer had often laid claim to a knighthood, just as he frequently scribbled angrily in Dee’s private diaries and notebooks.

At the end of the forty-eight sections Dee had noted down a series of dates from 1587 to 1607 against which he had written, alternately ‘lost’ and ‘founde’ and in one instance, against a date in 1588, the words ‘recovered from Master Kelley’.

After these dates Dee wrote only one thing more, a quotation from the gospel of Mark: ‘What shall it profit a man if he gaine the whole worlde but lose his own soule’. After that another hand has written the word ‘Amen’.

Then came this in the same handwriting: ‘I, Elias Tremayne of Mortlack did open the 48th key this 20th day of Februarie 1659.’ The title of the forty-eighth key reads as follows: ‘To know the mortall and imortall destinies of men.’

After the date Tremayne has written in a shakier script, the words: ‘Gates of Heavenn and Hell.
Timor mortis conturbat me
. [The fear of Death troubles me.]’

Then, in even more erratic handwriting come the barely decipherable words:

LORD LET THIS CUP PASSE FROM ME.

Finally, in smaller, neater writing Tremayne has penned the following three quatrains. They are not in his high metaphysical manner, and I wonder if they are by him at all. They seem to me to be in an older literary style, what C.S. Lewis calls ‘sixteenth century drab’; but I cannot find their origin.

The search for wisdome is a snare;

The road is long and paved with care.

The truest pathe is darkest night

To finde out pure celestiall light.

And Satann waites in everie briar

To binde the pilgrim with desire.

Oft wise men have been led astray

Where fooles have safelie gone their way.

So, be you wise man, be you foole,

This worlde must be your onlie schoole.

Seek not the angells’ high degree;

Your truth is Christ’s humilitie.

VI

Some experiences leave one temporarily paralysed. I continued for several days going about my normal business, giving tutorials and lectures, but incapable of applying my mind to anything serious, such as the problem of the Manuscript. What must I do about it? Should I prepare a paper on it? Should I consult Enoch; should I tell Francine? For the moment I did none of these things. I did not even examine the Manuscript again. This was the greatest problem of all: I did not know what to make of it. It constituted a comprehensive assault on my intellectual integrity.

Then one evening, after I had dined in Hall, I decided that I must finally make a start on my book,
The Black Metaphysical, a study of Elias Tremayne
. I would write down chapter headings, compose an opening sentence, put my thoughts in order.

I returned to my rooms and switched on the computer. Then I felt restless and walked to the window which looks down onto the Radcliffe Quadrangle. It was a warm summer night. On the opposite side of the quad is a wall behind which are the gardens of the Master’s Lodgings. A full moon shone above, throwing the wall into shadow, but against it I could see the black shape of a cloaked or gowned man, like the one I had seen in the Fellow’s Garden at Latimer. I thought the man was looking up at me. Calmly I contemplated the options. Should I go down to confront him? Should he be ignored? I was calm, as I say, but I felt there was something unnatural about my own calmness.