The Matrix (11 page)

‘Come back upstairs,’ he said. ‘You are not ready for this yet.’

Back in the cellar, d’Hervilly shut the trapdoor that led to the temple.

‘You will return here,’ he said. ‘When you are stronger, when you understand more. What you experienced today were the feelings of the victims who died here. The chamber is full of their pain, and if that is what you are attuned to, that is what you will experience. But in time you will see that there are other sensations, and when you are old enough and wise enough, you will be able to share them as well. Feelings of mastery, feelings of deep joy.’

We went upstairs to a room overlooking the sea.

‘What did you feel exactly?’ asked d’Hervilly. ‘It is best to explain, to bring it into the light.’

I told him what I could, finding it hard to put what I had felt into words, however simple.

‘The worst thing was the very beginning,’ I said. ‘I remembered someone I once knew, someone who’s dead, and it was as if I were reliving her death. It was as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.’

‘That is not uncommon,’ he said. ‘The room seeks out our griefs and uses them to construct its own sensations in our minds. The first step in overpowering it is to gain control over our own feelings.’ He paused. ‘The person you told me about was Catriona, is that right?’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘Duncan told me about her, about how badly her death affected you. I am sorry. Duncan says she was very beautiful.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And very kind, and very funny. I miss her very much.’

‘That is natural. Do you have a photograph of her?’

I took one from my pocket and passed it to him. As he took it he smiled. I saw his finger move in the same circular motion that had been described by Duncan’s, as though encircling Catriona’s face; and he too whispered something inaudible beneath his breath.

‘Is this the only one you have?’he asked.

I shook my head.

‘No, I have several. I seldom look at them. But I like to have some with me.’

‘May I keep this? To help me remember your grief.’

I hesitated. I had given the photograph of Catriona’s grave freely to Duncan, since I considered him a friend. But d’Hervilly was a comparative stranger. On the other hand, he had just entertained me lavishly and spoken of further visits. He would not be a man to cross lightly.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘If you would like it.’

‘I would like it very much. Duncan was not mistaken. She was beautiful. At my age, it is good to be reminded of beauty.’

*   *   *

I left him shortly after that, walking back towards the medina in light that was losing its earlier strength. The air was still warm, but I could feel a freshness in the wind coming from the sea. I was too confused and full of thoughts to want to go straight back to Villiers. Instead, I headed into town, wandering past shops and cafés in the hope of distraction. At the end of Boulevard Pasteur, I saw a sign for the main post office, and this reminded me that I had told the secretary of the department back in Edinburgh that, should they need to get in touch with me, I might be contacted at the Poste Restante in Tangier.

I had a long wait in a queue that seemed frozen by the malign magic of Moroccan bureaucratic inertia. In the end, after many spellings and respellings of my name, I was handed a small pack of letters. There were two from the university, with forms I had to sign, one from New College, saying my services would not be required for the seminar course beginning in the autumn, and one from Harriet Gillespie.

There was a bar a few doors away on Mohammed V. When I had ordered a Pastis, I sat down to read Harriet’s letter. It was written in a small, hurried hand, the letters well spaced, but somehow carelessly set down, as though time or anxiety pressed her to write without her usual attentiveness.

Iain is ill,
she wrote.
He’s asked me to write to you, though it isn’t easy. Our last meeting wasn’t very happy, was it? Maybe the next will be better. But I don’t know, I don’t know if we should meet again. And I think, I fear Iain may be dying.

He fell ill a few days after visiting you. It was nothing at first, just a cold that wouldn’t leave him. Some weeks after that, he had a fever that lasted for over ten days. He recovered and went back to work, but early in June he grew frettish and his behaviour changed. He was cold towards me, something he’d never been. The illness returned, worse than before, with frequent headaches.

The doctors say they don’t understand what’s wrong. Iain’s symptoms don’t correspond to anything they’re familiar with, their tests show nothing conclusive, their drugs have no effect. He’s been in and out of hospital several times now, with no result.

Sometimes the fever passes and he’s clear-headed for a day or two. Then the headaches start again, and he has hallucinations. They’re very like the ones you told us about, the ones you had last year. Last night, he told me he saw a hooded man in his dreams, in a long, dark street with many voices. Does that mean anything to you?

He wants you to see him. I’ve told him you’re abroad, that you aren’t expected back until the end of the summer, and that you may not be contactable; but he insists I try to reach you. There’s something he wants to tell you, he won’t say what it is. I think he’s afraid for you, I think there’s something he knows about Mylne.

Andrew, I don’t want Iain excited, and I think seeing you would disturb him; but he gets anxious and frets terribly if I try to put off writing. So here’s the letter, if it ever reaches you. Come if you can, and if you can’t, write. A letter from you might help settle his mind. If you’ve broken with Mylne, please tell him so, for I think that’s who he fears above all else. No, that’s not quite right. There’s someone else, an associate of Mylne’s, someone Iain wants to warn you about. He says there are things you have to know before it’s too late.

She had started to write something else here, but had scratched it out and begun over again, perhaps after a little time had passed. Her handwriting was shakier than before.

Last night there was something waiting at the foot of the stairs. I don’t know what it was or when it will come again. But all the time it waited, Iain’s fever was high, and when he regained consciousness he asked if it was still there. I didn’t see it, but I heard it.

Come if you can, but be quick about it. He’s growing weaker every day. I think he cannot have long left if you do not come and reassure him that all is well.

Harriet

We set off for Fez the following morning. I had come too far to turn back now; and, frankly, I was afraid of what Duncan might do were I to tell him that, instead of continuing with him as arranged, I had to rush to a friend’s bedside. I reasoned with myself that Harriet must be exaggerating, that Iain could not be that ill, that Edinburgh had some of the best medical facilities in Europe, that there was plenty of time. The best thing would be to write or phone once I got to Fez.

We arrived by train in the early afternoon, in a different sunshine, beneath another sky. The sea was far behind us now, we were on the foothills of the Middle Atlas, and already my heart was beating differently. I could sense that we had left Europe behind us completely now, even those last remnants that lingered on the streets of Tangier and Casablanca. This was another world entirely, and another century – or, rather, a place where time no longer had any meaning.

Fez, like so many cities in North Africa, is divided into two main sections: the old city or medina to the north and the French-built Ville Nouvelle to the south-west. They are separated by more than geography. One is a world of hotels, cafés and drably smart shops, flat, ordinary, and squalid in its way; the other is darkness and light, a sprawling, dreaming maze of shops and mosques and houses, where the past is everything. And all around, the hills with their vast graveyards rise above the green roofs and the square minarets.

A car was waiting to take us to the old city, a short drive away. We halted in an open area outside the Boujeloud gate; the driver said we would have to get out there, for cars could not hope to negotiate the alleys of the medina itself.

Something strange happened as we waited for the driver to stack our bags on the ground. Taking us for tourists, a rabble of children and young men surrounded us, offering to act as guides. Duncan said nothing, and I followed his example. Moments later, the shouting voices fell silent. A young man dressed in a white jellaba had appeared by our side and taken Duncan’s hand.

The would-be guides fell away like flies, drifting back into the crowd from which they had come. A few continued to watch us from a safe distance, eyeing us with what seemed a mixture of awe and contempt. It was as if word had gone out that we were not to be approached. I saw other tourists, surrounded by small gaggles of tormentors who would not be put off so easily, while we walked like old inhabitants through the gate and into the old city. Behind us, our bags were being strapped on a mule, ready to negotiate the steep, winding lanes between the gate and our destination.

It was the city of my nightmares, that much I knew at once. Tall, windowless buildings crowded in from every side, at every corner, dark, forbidding doorways marked the entrances to a hidden life carried on behind high walls. We soon turned off the thoroughfare of the Talaa Saghira into a maze of progressively narrower and darker alleyways. From time to time, we would pass the open doors of mosques and madrasas, catching tantalizing glimpses of tiles and bands of swirling calligraphy. A veiled woman would come out and hurry past us, a trader leading a heavily packed mule would shout out ‘
balak
,
balak
’, warning us to cram ourselves into the nearest doorway while he passed, a gang of children would fall silent and break off from kicking a ball in order to watch us go by.

The city folded its withered arms about us, very dark and very old, its walls crumbling, its paving stones cracked and misplaced, its noises and smells unutterably alien to me. Alien, yet in a horrible sense, deeply familiar. I kept close to Duncan, who walked along with the nonchalant gait of someone who has returned to a place he knows well.

The old city is shaped like an elongated basin, sloping inwards from the edges towards the centre, where the Kairouyine Mosque lies, hidden behind high walls. Our steps were always downwards, taking us deeper and deeper towards the city’s ancient heart. At last we came to a plain doorway at the end of a
derb
, one of the innumerable short culs-de-sac that branch off the main alleys. I do not think it had a name, or needed one. Our guide knocked at the heavy door, and moments later it was opened and we were shown inside. A short, unlit passageway led into the sudden sunlight of a tiled courtyard, its stuccoed walls blackened with age, its intricately carved archways faded and crumbling in places. Passing through a second doorway, we entered another courtyard, larger and more gracious than the first, yet in an even greater state of disrepair. Ivy hung from the high wooden latticework, weeds pushed aside the tiles about the central fountain.

I later learned that the house had been in the same family as far back as the twelfth century, since when it had undergone numerous changes. In the fifteenth century it had served as a palace for a succession of governors, in the sixteenth it had been the home of the celebrated
qadi
, Bu Slimane ibn Yacoub al-Fasi, and in the eighteenth it had enjoyed a reputation for sanctity as the
zawiya
of a dervish order. All this I learned later from Duncan, who knew the house’s history intimately.

A curtained doorway led to a flight of unlit wooden stairs, at whose top we found a long, wood-panelled room. I could see very little at first. The only light came through the tall latticed windows that looked out onto the courtyard from which we had just come. It lay in puzzling geometrical shapes on all manner of unguessable objects, on faded carpets and brass lamps hanging by long chains from a ceiling lost in shadow, on tall candlesticks and ebony Qur’an stands, on low tables inlaid with ivory writing, on books and reed pens and inkstands.

The young man who had led us here vanished, leaving Duncan and myself alone in this silent room. I felt suddenly afraid. Of the unknown, certainly, for everything familiar had been snatched away from me. Of my own ability to cope with the curious demands now being made on me. Of an irrational voice in my head that trotted out rubbish about the white slave trade, and murders of foreigners in North Africa.

But there was more than that, and I knew it, even if I could not articulate it. The room reminded me of d’Hervilly’s cold temple, there was an identical sensation of dread seeping through the carpeted walls, the same realization that I was in the presence of a very old and very powerful force of evil.

A voice came from the far end of the room, a thin, cold voice that I almost thought I recognized.

‘
Taqarrabu
,
ya rufaqa’i.
’ Come close, my friends.

Duncan went ahead of me, confident as ever. He had been here before, he knew what to expect. And whom. I followed a couple of steps behind him, straining to see more clearly in the muted light. Slowly, my eyes were growing used to the dimness.

On a low divan at the head of the room sat an old man. When I say that he was old, you must not think I mean seventy or eighty years old. He was visibly much, much more ancient than that. Later, Duncan told me he thought he might be as much as two hundred years old. I refused to believe it at the time. Now, I am not so sure.

He wore traditional dress, and at first I thought he might almost have been a mummy wrapped in the robes of an eighteenth-century sheikh. Long desiccated fingers lay like claws on his lap. A thin white beard straggled down towards a narrow chest. The cheeks were hollow, the mouth devoid of teeth. But the eyes were as full of life as any I had ever seen. I flinched as they caught me and held me. They had more strength in them than a young man’s hands.

‘
Tfeddlu, glesu
,’ he said, falling into the colloquial. ‘Please sit down.’