The Matrix (5 page)

It was already in my mind when I finally woke on Sunday morning: the image of a dark stone doorway, hugely arched and gaping. Beyond it, glistening stone steps led down into the deepest blackness imaginable. That is all. Sometimes I think that I must have stood staring at that vast doorway through all the hours I slept, never moving, never blinking, as though waiting for someone – or something – to emerge. Or was I expected to set foot on those steps, to pass through the doorway and descend into the blackness below?

I was woken shortly after nine on Sunday by the sound of knocking at my door. As I struggled to regain consciousness, I realized that I had lost all track of the day or the time. The knocking came again, and I called out feebly. A voice answered from behind the door.

‘Andrew, are you there? Are you all right?’

It was Iain. I had asked him to call on Sunday morning in order to go over my proposals for the next seminar. Craigie had told him about my missing our appointment on the day before.

With an enormous effort, as if freeing myself from cords tying me to the bed, I pulled myself up. My head ached intolerably, and I felt nauseated. Throwing aside my bedclothes, I struggled to stand, and managed to get to the door. As it opened, I saw Iain’s concerned face, then, unable to stand any longer, I collapsed onto the floor.

I came round later to find Iain hovering anxiously over me. He had dragged me back to the bed and made me as comfortable as possible. I tried to sit up, but he pushed me back firmly, saying I should take it easy until the doctor arrived. He had rung the University Health Service, and they had said someone would be along soon.

Twenty minutes later I saw Dr McLean come through the door. By good fortune, he had been on duty that morning. I was relieved to see him, rather than some indifferent locum who did not know me from Adam.

He examined me briskly but carefully, and at last pronounced himself satisfied. Packing away his stethoscope and blood pressure meter, he snapped shut his little case and turned to me.

‘Well, Andrew, I have to say I’m very disappointed in you. I’d taken you for a man with greater sense. Do your parents know what sort of state you’ve got yourself into?’

‘My parents? I haven’t . . .’ I realized that it had been some time now since I had spoken to either of them.

‘No matter. It’s none of my business if you speak to them or not. But I wish you would. I think you need to talk to someone.’

‘What’s wrong with me?’ I felt wretched, and the tone of his voice suggested something serious.

‘Oh, nothing much,’ he said. ‘Nothing I haven’t seen more often than I like. You’re overworked. Your nervous system’s been taxed to its limit. And you haven’t got over the death of your young woman. I’ll call it nervous fatigue and leave it at that.’

‘Is that all?’ I was relieved. The way I felt, I was sure there was something more serious the matter.

‘All?’ His heavy eyebrows knotted and he looked down at me severely. ‘You’ll wreck your health permanently if you don’t do something about it. I could give you tranquillizers, but they’ll do nothing but mask the symptoms and let you think you can get away with overdoing things. Instead, I’m going to prescribe a herbal tonic and plenty of rest. I want you to stay in bed for the next week. After that, you can take some mild exercise, go for the odd walk, but take it easy. There’s to be absolutely no writing or serious reading, and no intellectual conversation of any description. You can watch television if you like, provided you stick to light programmes.

‘If you allow yourself to relax and take it easy for a few weeks, I guarantee you’ll be right as rain in no time. Once you’re back on your feet, there’s no reason you shouldn’t carry on with your work, provided you get out more and find some distractions.’

He chatted for a while longer. I asked him to contact my parents, and he said he would. Finally, he looked at his watch and said he had another patient waiting. As he reached the door, however, he turned and looked at me.

‘There’s just one wee thing, Andrew,’ he said. ‘Would you mind telling me how you got those marks on your face and hands?’

‘Marks?’ I looked at my hands in puzzlement. To my astonishment, I found several angry red weals, circular in shape, each about the size of a 1p coin.

I shook my head and said that this was the first time I had ever noticed them. He looked strangely at me.

‘Well, they’re very mysterious,’ he said. ‘When I first saw them, I thought they might be a rash of some sort. Then I took a closer look and saw they were all contusions, as if the skin had been pressed or sucked very hard, leaving some bruising. They should heal quickly enough. But surely you have some idea of how you came by them?’

‘No,’ I said, in all honesty. I could not imagine anything that could have caused such marks, unless I had somehow injured myself while asleep.

‘Well,’ said Dr McLean, ‘I’ll keep an eye on them. I’ll call in tomorrow. And if I catch you reading, you’ll be in serious trouble.’

He left, and I leaned back against the pillows. I was tired, in spite of having slept for so long. My sleep had been unrefreshing, but I felt afraid to shut my eyes. I avoided looking at my hands, and I knew that, if I went to the bathroom, I would not look in the mirror. All I could think of, when I remembered the marks that had so puzzled Dr McLean, was a group of white-fleshed creatures sucking the bodies of the dead in an old woodcut.

Dr McLean rang my parents later that same morning, and on Monday my mother flew in from Stornoway. I was, I must confess, profoundly glad to have her there. She did not reproach me for having been in touch so little, made no attempt to preach to me about my overworking, and fussed as little as possible under the circumstances. I was grateful for her down-to-earthness, for knowing that the matters which had preoccupied my waking thoughts for so long would have meant less than nothing to her.

Dr McLean visited regularly. His herbal tonic was slow to act, but by the second week I had begun to feel its benefit. By then I had moved from the bedroom to the living room, where I sat in an armchair and did jigsaws or played endless games of backgammon with my mother, who thought it rather sinful, but indulged me so long as we did not gamble. When I read, I restricted myself to detective novels and Wodehouse. Nothing morbid or speculative was allowed to unsettle me.

Iain and Harriet visited me almost every day. Harriet brought me books, and I gave her some simple Gaelic lessons, much to my mother’s amusement. I did not talk of my experiences, nor did anyone ask. The marks on my hands and face healed rapidly and were gone by the end of the second week.

By then I had started to take short walks in my mother’s company. She had never been to Edinburgh before, and I was able to show her the sights, though it was soon apparent that I knew them almost as little as she. We were at first restrained in one another’s company. We had never been close, never talked about things that might have mattered. Our conversations as we walked were brittle, formal exchanges. If our talk led us into dangerous territory, we would both draw back, as though by mutual agreement, and comment on the buildings or the view.

Several times we took a bus to Inverleith, to walk in the Royal Botanical Garden. She had never seen tropical plants before, or cacti, or palm trees as high as a tall house. As we walked through the glasshouses, breathing hot, humid air, utterly unlike that of Lewis, she grew more relaxed. And one day, sitting beside a lily pond, she told me about a man she had loved before my father, who had died in a boating accident off Sula Sgeir. She had never talked about him to my father or to anyone else before. We sat together in a green light, each with a separate grief, sharing a secret for the first time in our lives.

‘Come back home for Christmas, Andrew,’ she said. ‘You’ll only fret here on your own. We missed you last year. It’s not the same, just the two of us.’

I had not even thought of Christmas. A few weeks earlier, I would have turned down the suggestion flat. It was not that I disliked Stornoway or that I was not fond of my parents. It was just that I did not think they were what I needed then. But what did I need? Not myself, certainly, not my loneliness, not Christmas in a city without friends. I said I would go back with her.

We left the following week. Dr McLean had declared me fit to travel and thought Christmas at home would be the best medicine I could have. My father was waiting at the airport, and that evening there were old friends invited for dinner. I had not thought I would welcome company, but by the time the evening ended I had recaptured parts of myself I had thought lost for good.

The weather stayed fine all over the holiday and into the New Year. It was bitterly cold, but every day we woke to clear skies and a calm sea. On Christmas Day I went to church with my mother. My father stayed behind as he always did, though it would have comforted me that year if he had been there. God was not there, hidden in some corner of our little kirk or mysteriously present in the psalms; but the sound of my mother’s voice and the childhood familiarity of those plain surroundings were enough to chase away the shadows that had been gathering round me in the past few months.

I flew back on the Tuesday after New Year, ready to return to work in a more positive spirit. My father had exacted a promise from me that I would not brood on the past, and that I would keep away from the morbid themes of my earlier research. I came back to my rooms in Canongate brimming with good resolutions, my head clear, and my nerves at rest. I slept well that night, and all my dreams were of Catriona. In the morning I woke, rested and ready to get back to work. There was winter sunshine in my bedroom, and the only sounds I could hear came from the early traffic on the Royal Mile.

I spent the morning catching up on things at the department. James Fergusson was as unpleasant as ever; but he had heard of my illness and said he hoped I had made a good recovery. He even admitted that he had had good reports from New College on my research. I thanked him and escaped, vowing to keep out of his way until the end of term at least.

I had lunch with Iain in a pub in the High Street.

‘I’m glad to see you on your feet again,’ he said. ‘I was worried that Sunday. You looked dreadful.’

‘I didn’t feel too good. But I am a lot better. There’s nothing like a spell on the islands to set a man on his feet again.’

He shivered.

‘Not for me,’ he said. ‘I’m a city man. The thought of a winter on Lewis puts the fear of God in me. I like people around me, some sort of life. It would drive me mad up there. Nothing but storms and nowhere to go.’

I sipped my whisky and shook my head.

‘I’d sooner risk the islands than here. Edinburgh hasn’t exactly lifted my spirits.’

‘You haven’t given it a chance.’

‘No doubt. But you’ve not been fair on the islands either. Have you never been there?’

He shook his head.

‘Well, then,’ I said. ‘If I try to love Edinburgh, maybe you’ll come with me to Stornoway for a week or two in the summer.’

We drank to our agreement, and then talked about how best to go on with my seminars. I told Iain I needed a couple of weeks to get back into the swing of things and to catch up on my notes. I still had not found the answers to all the questions Craigie had put to me before my illness.

‘Take all the time you like,’ he said. ‘None of us is going anywhere.’

‘Two weeks,’ I said. ‘Give me two weeks to get everything in order.’

‘Fair enough. I’ll fix it up for the seventeenth, that should give you enough time.’

On returning to my rooms, I decided it was time to pick up my work where I had left off. My books and papers had been put away by Iain, and I had not so much as looked at them since the night of the disturbance in Ainslie Place.

The papers I had been working on then had been stuffed into my briefcase, and it in turn had been shoved to the back of a wardrobe in my bedroom. I brought it to the little room I used as a study and set it on my desk. From it I took the books and papers I had rammed inside in my panic over a month earlier. The papers were crumpled and torn, and I set to work flattening and straightening them.

As I reached the end, I glanced inside the briefcase and saw a sheet of crumpled paper. Lifting it out, I noticed a book underneath. It seemed disturbingly familiar. I reached into the case and lifted it out. It was bound in brown leather, very dusty, obviously old – the very same volume that had woken that flapping, creeping thing in the darkness and left an image in my brain that nothing could wipe out.

I do not know how long I sat there, staring at the title page of that horrid little book, unable to move, unable to order my thoughts. The book itself I would not open further, for fear of what I might see in it. My rational mind, so newly hardened by my stay at home and the conversations I had had with my father, insisted that no harm could come from something so trivial. Yet the thought of seeing again those pages of incantations, of catching sight of that grotesque woodcut, filled me with the deepest loathing.

Finally I stood, picked the book from the desk, and hurled it into my open briefcase. I knew there could be no other course of action for me but to return the book to the library from which it had come. Thinking of the carelessness that had allowed it to slip to the back of a bookcase and lie forgotten there for who could say how long, I imagined that no one would yet have noticed its disappearance. Nevertheless, it was important to me that no one should suspect me of theft. And I wanted rid of the thing, wanted it locked up where no one might find it again.

The thought of returning to that room alone was most uncomfortable. I knew that Jurczyk spent three afternoons a week there – Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from one to four. Today was a Wednesday, but to make doubly sure of having company, I telephoned. Jurczyk answered and expressed surprise at not having seen me for some weeks.

‘I’ve been ill,’ I said. ‘But I’ve just come across something belonging to you. Would you mind if I came over now?’