The Matrix (8 page)

‘And the Fraternity?’ I asked, for I needed to know whether this was just an offer to improve my reading, or whether that was only the beginning. I had my answer straight away.

‘Oh, forget about them. They are of no importance. You are destined for greatness, Andrew. I can sense it. But you are not ready yet. Read the books I give you. Ask whatever questions you like. And when the time comes, I shall introduce you to some friends of mine who know what those fools in Ainslie Place do not even guess at.’

We talked till late, and when I left to walk home, it had stopped raining. Mylne had asked what sort of work I did, and I had told him I was studying for my doctorate in sociology, writing a thesis on Durkheim. He had no reason to disbelieve me, and the fiction allowed me some latitude. Nevertheless, that night when I got home, the first thing I did was to put all my notebooks and the documentation relating to my research into a cupboard, in case he should pay me another visit and stumble across them. I disliked the need for secrecy, but it seemed essential to me, all the more so in view of Mylne’s promise to introduce me to friends, who, I guessed, would not wish to see their activities brought into the light of day.

In the days and weeks that followed, I began to see more of Mylne and less and less of Iain and Harriet. On more than one occasion, I broke an engagement with Iain in order to hurry back to Duncan’s rooms for tuition. My seminars grew increasingly complex and riddled with obscurities. One by one, both students and staff began to absent themselves. Iain told me there had been mutterings in the corridors after more than one seminar. My material was growing far too esoteric, he said, too much detached from sociological or any other reality. I told him to mind his own business.

Duncan brought heaps of books to his rooms. Together, we read voraciously, almost every night. We began with texts with which I was familiar, before moving to more recondite volumes. They were heavy books bound in thick leather, as daunting to lift as to read. Their pages were stained and curled with age, their heavy type cramped and difficult to understand at first. Most of them dated from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but some were older, and immensely rare.

Mylne’s explanations shed light into the darkest corners, and I began to understand how puerile my grasp of things had been until now. With his help, I mastered the intricacies of the medieval Latin used in magical and alchemical lore, and started to tackle the principal texts of ritual magic. When I first saw them, I was astonished by some of the titles he laid before me. Books of which I had heard no more than the name, incunabula of which only three or four copies had survived.

At the end of each session, he would teach me a little Arabic, and I bought a grammar to study at home. Gradually, we had started to read simple texts. And when we read Latin translations from that language, he would often refer me back to the original, correcting or improving the translator’s version.

He showed me how to build a pentacle and construct talismans for both protection and invocation. I soon saw that my earlier efforts had been of no greater merit than a child’s attempt to build a dwelling with broken twigs and mud. By now, my interest in the occult had passed from the academic to the personal. My earlier researches seemed to me nothing more than arid intellectual games. I wanted real knowledge now, knowledge I could taste, knowledge with which to accomplish something more than the construction of theories. It was as I had said: I wanted mastery.

Under Mylne’s tuition, I became proficient in the rudiments of the craft. Once, unwittingly, I spoke of our mutual interest in the ‘black arts’. He grew angry, and corrected me at once.

‘They are neither black nor white,’ he said. ‘Leave morality to the church. Magic transcends common dichotomy. It has deeper purposes. A spell may be used to kill a saint or overthrow a tyrant, a charm will protect a murderer as soon as a priest.’

He took down a medieval grimoire from the top shelf and opened it at a section dealing with ‘Spelles and Incantaytiones for the Procuring Harme to Thyne Enemie.’

‘There are spells here,’ he said, ‘which, if correctly recited, will kill or injure a man. They are infallible, I assure you. The most that is needed is a lock of the victim’s hair or an article of his clothing to be his representative. The hat or the glove is nothing. The spell is nothing. What counts is the will of the conjuror, his determination that his victim shall fall ill or die. If his intention is pure, what follows, however evil it might seem in the eyes of the multitude, will also be pure.’

‘Even if harm is done to a good man?’

‘You cannot judge that until you possess the knowledge of a master.’

‘Have you ever used spells like these?’

He returned the book to its high place.

‘I have done all manner of things,’ he said. ‘When you are ready, we will study these spells together. And now, it’s time for supper.’

One afternoon in spring, I was at home reading when there was a knock on my door. I opened it to find Harriet standing on the landing. She did not ask if she could come in, but pushed past me and headed straight for the living room. I closed the door and followed her.

‘Harriet, I don’t know what you think you’re . . .’

She spun round, facing me.

‘I won’t waste your precious time, Andrew, don’t worry. I can see you have plenty of reading to catch up on.’

The room was cluttered with books, items from the university library, a few from my own small collection, and one or two modern volumes lent me by Duncan.

‘The fact is, Iain and I are very worried about you,’ she went on, not giving me a chance to interrupt. ‘We were frightened by what happened to you before Christmas. You were very ill, I don’t think you know how much. Dr McLean told us you were heading for a complete breakdown. He warned you about overworking, but here you are a few months later, pushing yourself harder than ever. You’ve got no time for your friends, you’ve given up on Iain’s seminars, all you seem to do is sit with your nose stuck in books that were consigned to the bin centuries ago. It might not be so bad if you were doing serious academic work; but this . . .’

She gestured at the books all round her. Her arm seemed weary, her face pitying.

‘I understand this better than any academic,’ I retorted. I’m not just scraping the surface now, I’m underneath, I’m learning how to connect with the essence of what I read about. Can Iain or his colleagues say that much? Can you?’

‘I doubt we can. But I doubt any of us would want to connect with the world you’re letting yourself get sucked into. Andrew, we are concerned. We want to help you, Iain and I. This man Mylne – for heaven’s sake, Andrew, he has the worst reputation. Iain has asked around – people in the church, people in the law, people at the university. Mylne’s notorious. If he weren’t so damned clever, he’d have been in jail years ago.’

‘I’d take care, Harriet. Duncan Mylne is a friend of mine. A good friend. I’ve learned things from him you’d scarcely imagine.’

‘He’s a dangerous man, Andrew. Look at you. You’re half in a daze. You can’t do your job, you’re losing weight, you’re heading for another collapse. He’s destroyed people before this, and he’ll destroy you, if you let him.’

‘Is this all you’ve come for, Harriet? What about Iain? Hasn’t he got the courage to say all this to my face?’

‘Iain doesn’t know I’m here. He’d never have agreed to my coming, he doesn’t want me mixed up in this. But we’re both worried sick. Why don’t you come and stay with us for a few days, just to talk things over? Iain can introduce you to some of his friends who know about Mylne. They can . . .’

‘I think you’d better leave, Harriet.’ I took her elbow, started propelling her towards the door. ‘If this is all you have to say, you’ve been wasting your time.’

There were tears in her eyes, but they were thrown away on me. I was like someone watching himself from a distance, quite uninvolved, quite untouched. Duncan had taught me how to master my emotions, how to stop them from interfering with my main enterprise, my quest for arcane knowledge.

Harriet left, pleading with me to reconsider. I scarcely noticed. By the time I had shut the door and gone back to the book I had been reading, she had all but been forgotten.

I dreamed of Catriona that night, a strange dream, without beginning or end. She stood in a long, dark street, weeping and calling my name. It was a foreign place, full of high buildings made of mud. Shuttered windows patched the walls on all sides. From time to time, a door opened and closed. The doorway was black. I could hear feet walking on stones nearby. I wanted to run to Catriona, to hold and kiss her and tell her all was well, but I could not move. That is all I remember.

I very nearly betrayed myself to Mylne, through sheer carelessness, a few days after Harriet’s visit. He came, as he often did in those days, to see me at my flat. It had become his custom to call out of the blue, as though to surprise me or, as I now believe, spy on me. I would usually offer him a drink, grateful for the relief of his company after a day’s solitary reading. Quite often we would listen together to a piece of classical music, and sometimes he would stay and I would prepare a light meal. It was his means of getting to know me better, to observe me in my own environment – I had almost said, my natural habitat.

That evening, we ate and drank and talked until quite late. The subject of our conversation was the islands, which he told me he had never visited. For a man of his urbanity, he seemed unduly interested in Lewis and the life we led there. My home seemed unbelievably remote to me now, like a place I had read about, yet never gone to.

I had, as I have mentioned, hidden away any books or papers that might inadvertently reveal the true nature of my research, and I was accustomed to letting Duncan go where he wanted in the flat. As he was leaving, however, his eye fell on an envelope I had left lying on the hall table. He picked it up.

‘This is addressed to “Dr Andrew Macleod”,’ he said. ‘I thought you said you were still working on your thesis.’

I felt a chill go through me. There was something in his tone that warned me the wrong answer would cause trouble, though I could not guess quite how. I realized for the first time that, much as I admired Duncan Mylne, I also feared him. If he knew that I had concealed the true nature of my original research from him, he might very well vent his anger on me.

‘I am,’ I said. ‘This happens all the time. I’ve had letters addressed to me as “professor” before now. Not everyone understands the system. They think that, if you’re studying for a doctorate, you’re already a doctor.’

He laughed and put the envelope down.

‘I know the problem,’ he said. ‘The common herd has little enough understanding of anything outside their limited horizons. I’m often called a solicitor, once I was made a judge.’

He went away, though I could not be sure how reassured he had been by my explanation. I went through everything after that, removing all traces of my other life for fear he should stumble on them. And yet, in a sense, it mattered little now. My thirst for the knowledge whose promise Mylne held out to me so alluringly was no longer a pretence to mask an academic’s enquiries, but wholly genuine, a self-engendered passion that would allow no hindrance. I feared not so much exposure as the loss of the opportunity to carry my new investigations to their proper conclusion.

In the weeks that followed, my apprehensions were gradually laid to rest. Duncan proved no less attentive than before, there were no awkward questions, life continued much as ever. He never invited me to his home, never let our relationship become an ordinary friendship. I quickly learned that I was his apprentice, and that he possessed authority over me. He never stated this in words, never presumed upon it; but as time passed it became the core around which our comings and goings circled.

Iain came to see me on a blustery day at the end of April. A cold wind had come in from the Firth, turning an otherwise pleasant spring day into something better suited to the tail end of autumn.

‘I have to speak with you, Andrew,’ he said as I opened the door. ‘Please don’t shut me out.’

I let him in and said I would put on a pot of tea. I could guess what lay ahead: a tirade against Duncan Mylne, dire warnings about the company I was keeping, advice about my health.

He was in the living room when I returned with the tea. His coat and scarf lay across the back of a chair, about the only free space available. He was in clerical dress. I gave him his mug, plain tea with milk and sugar. Duncan had introduced me to China teas, and I had prepared a pot of choice Formosa Oolong for myself. I passed Iain a plate of biscuits.

‘Chocolate Olivers?’ he said, raising his eyebrows. ‘You didn’t pick these off a shelf in Tesco.’

‘I was given them,’ I said. ‘Look, Iain . . .’

He got there before me.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. I’m not here to preach. Harriet’s already spoken to me about her visit. I could have told her it would be a waste of time. I’m sorry we don’t see as much of you as we did, but you know we’re always there if you’d like to visit us. I can’t promise you Chocolate Olivers, but . . .’

‘I’ve been busy,’ I said, making a pointless apology.

‘There’s no need,’ said Iain. ‘I can see that. And I won’t pretend I’m not deeply worried about it all. But I haven’t called on my own behalf, or Harriet’s. James Fergusson asked me to drop by. He needs to see you, but he doesn’t think you’d take to his calling in out of the blue.’

He paused and sipped his tea.

‘I haven’t seen Fergusson in a little while,’ I said. ‘He’s written to me a few times, but the truth is, I have no time for the man.’

‘That’s fair enough, I don’t like him either. But the fact is, he’s your boss, and he has a right to know what you’ve been up to. The university pays your salary, and it expects results. Look, Andrew, you may as well know – Fergusson is not going to recommend the renewal of your contract after July. And I don’t think he’s prepared to write a favourable report either. I don’t think you’re going to find it easy to get a new post, not unless you do something drastic between now and the summer.’