Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (9 page)

 
          
Sean
grinned crookedly. “Was God crucified on the cross so that we could have fun?
As the old joke goes ...”

 
          
“Ah,
that
God may have been crucified.
This one never was. This is a fun God.”

 
          
“So
what is Hell doing in the other hemisphere?” asked Muthoni. “Is that
fun?”

 
          
“It’s
instructional,” said Jeremy, sounding hurt. “You don’t like His gardens? You
want to be instructed?” He shook his head. “No, it isn’t a question of being
fried if you don’t want to have fun in His gardens. Don’t you see
,
it’s all part of the alchemy? Well, you don’t see yet. But
you will. Sean sees. Don’t you? And Denise sees a bit too.”

 
          
“And
you?”

 
          
“Oh,
I see lots of things. I’m the witness.
Whether I want to be
or not.”
Jeremy’s mouth drooped. Sadness overwhelmed him
momentarily—the great sadness of the clown.

 
          
Tall
thistles surrounded most of the base of the cromlech, forming a barrier
impenetrable to naked flesh. Robins and sparrows cheeped simple-mindedly among
the thistletops. Pulling out tufts of fluff, they fluttered off with this
gossamer bounty to feather their nests elsewhere. Goldfinches as large as
cassowaries thrust their bulk through the spiky thicket, their beaks probing
for prizes more substantial than fluff— without, however, effectively stamping
out paths.

 
          
As
the travelers approached, a flock of chattering blackbirds streamed out of a
cave in one of the stone legs. The birds swooped around and into the grotto
between the legs, swerving above the one clear route that led through the
thistles as though mapping it out for them: a narrow winding path where
unaccountably no thistles grew. Following this path, the four of them presently
entered the grotto.

 
          
They
found a phosphorescent pool—and saw, on the other side, a second pathway
snaking out through the thistles beyond, by way of more greensward into a
flower-wood of laburnums trailing crocus-yellow tails, walls of white
magnolias, flame trees, tulip trees. A few monkey-puzzle trees towered above
the rest like eerie watchtowers made of thousands of bent knives, many rusty
but mostly patina- green.

 
          
Crystal
tubes grew down like stalactites from the
roof of the grotto into the greenly glowing pool. Most of these tubes entered
the water at a variety of angles, shallow or acute. Some ended above the water
level or over the stone shore, clean-edged and hollow. Some were thin, some
vast; but all were hollow, even though in some cases the hole inside was large
enough to crawl into while in others there was only the thinnest capillary
bore. Most were single tubes, though some bulged into flasks and funnels, or
branched into one another. Up and down all those that touched or entered the
pool, water was pumping. The whole crystalline ensemble looked like a distorted
church organ made from laboratory equipment, an organ which had sprouted out
of the stone roof as an apparatus for recycling the glowing water of the pool.

 
          
A
blackbird was flapping inside one of the larger open tubes. The rest of the
flock must already have swept smoothly up the tube and through the roof to
emerge above the stone table-top; but this one was confused. Its wings battered
the glassy walls. Exhausting itself, it crumpled up and slid back down the tube
with a scrabbling of claws and flapping of feathers and fell into the pool. It
burst free in a shower of spray, offended and bedraggled, and flapped away out
of the grotto by the ordinary route.

 
          
“Hauptwerk,”
said Jeremy proudly. “The
Great Organ— the Chief Work. If only you had wings too!”

 
          
Sean
squinted up the broadest and least sharply inclined of the tubes, which looked
marginally negotiable on all fours. And a face peered down at him from above: a
face with a long, slightly bulbous nose, and a mouth downtumed at the
corners—more meditative than lugubrious, with a widow’s peak of brown hair on
the brow. Sean caught sight of clothes: the neck of a brown tunic.

 
          
“
Knossos
? Is that you?” he shouted up the speaking
tube. “Hey, wait!”

 
          
A
magpie ducked into view beside the man’s head. It perched upon his shoulder: a
second, beady, sleek-feathered head. The bird eyed Sean and cawed, but
Knossos
didn’t say a word—unless the bird was
speaking for him. The man’s face drew back and disappeared.

 
          
“Damn!”
swore Sean. “Well, he’s up there and he can’t get away.”

 
          
“He
could come down through the caves,” said Muthoni. “He’s got clothes on, hasn’t
he? The thistles wouldn’t bother him.”

 
          
“Good
thinking. Denise, back the way we were. Muthoni, out the other side and cover
it. Jeremy, you wait here in case he slides down one of the other tubes. I’m
going up. I’ll find him.”

 
          
Muthoni
and Denise hurried out of opposite ends of the grotto, as instructed, and Sean
crouched his way into the tube. His palms and knees gripped the glass
effectively enough—if it
was
glass,
which he rather doubted. Wedging his back against the upper wall of the tube,
he gained purchase. He moved one palm up, then one knee, inching his back up as
he did so; then he repeated the procedure.
Again and again.
It strained his neck to look ahead; on the other hand it upset his sense of
balance to look back down the tube—besides, his testicles dangled ridiculously,
seeming to have grown inordinately long and vulnerable. So he stared at his
hands.

 
          
The
tube wall darkened for a while: there was stone beyond the crystal, clamping it
in its vice. Then light flooded back; he was through the roof. He hauled
himself over the crystal lip on to the pink stone table.

 
          
Knossos
had disappeared. Various other crystal
tubes jutted out around him, but Jeremy would be covering those. A number of
vents led down into the caves in the legs. Alternatively, a rock-slab doorway
in the blue-veined base of the onion-domed spire stood open like Ali Baba’s
cave. Was
Knossos
inside the spire, climbing up? Sean stared
aloft.

 
          
A movement high up
the other erection—the great stone agave
leaf—caught his attention. This stone leaf was as broad as an oak tree at its
base where it grew, like a mineral-plant, out of the table-top. Right up at its
zenith where it curved over in the air, tapering
narrowly,
climbed the naked figure they had seen earlier. He was balancing one-legged,
with his arms above his head, high on a thin bridge to nowhere: a Blondin of
the sky, swaying slightly. He might have seen where
Knossos
went! Abruptly the naked climber
cart-wheeled along the leaf and stood upon one hand in perfect balance, looking
down at Sean. Incredibly, he held the pose.

 
          
Sean
cupped his hands. “Which way did
Knossos
go?” he bellowed.
“Which way?”

 
          
The
naked climber pivoted onward, continuing his cartwheel along the
ever-narrowing down-curve of that toothed stone frond—which was only inches
wide toward the tip. He couldn’t possibly recover himself! Nor did he try to.
High over Sean’s head he converted his somersault into a dive, as though the
stone table-top far beneath him was a pool of water. Down he plummeted
silently, without a cry, his hands flush with his body.

 
          
Briefly,
Sean imagined that he could catch him or at least break his fall, but realized
he would be injured or killed if he got in the diver’s way. He ran helplessly
aside, instead. The diver smashed head first into the stone. His head broke
open, in a bloody porridge.

 
          
Lazily,
as though it had been waiting for this moment, a white heron flapped up over
the rim of the table. Landing, it stalked long-leggedly towards the corpse,
dipping its head and tossing it up into the air as though gulping down a fish.
Greedy to fish among the dead man’s brains?
Sean ran at the
tall bird. He waved his arms to ward it off. Instead of flapping away in panic
the heron slashed at him, drawing blood from his thigh with its beak, narrowly
missing his genitals. As Sean retreated, the bird mounted the man’s chest. It
continued to toss its head up and down, but it scavenged nothing. It was
bowing
to the dead man. What had Jeremy
said?
That the heron is
sent
to people.
It was a living bird, but it was also a message . . . And the
heron is the bird of . . . natural death? Then this death was natural?
Appropriate? Not an aberration or a fit of lunacy or an act of suicide? Perhaps
the naked climber had gone so far out on a limb that he no longer inhabited the
same reality as ordinary men and women . . . The same could be said of the
hermaphrodite! Nursing his wounded thigh, Sean turned away in confusion.

 
          
A
movement inside the tower attracted him. Its walls were almost translucent in
some places, or perhaps simply thinner. About half-way up, a blurred face was
pressed to the inside of its skin.

 
          
Sean
sprinted to the open slab door.

 
          
Inside,
slanted unrailed steps corkscrewed up around the blue-veined walls—which became
a pink marble higher up. A hundred meters above his head he saw a swirl of
brown in the rays of light that streamed down from the opening in the swollen
bulb tip of the tower. He ran up the steps. As they circled the walls, however,
the steps slanted more and more obliquely till they ran into one another,
becoming a spiraling ramp, bumpy at first then as smooth as a funfair helter-
skelter; though anyone trying to slide all the way down from the top would have
his spine shaken to pieces on the lower stretch. Making suckers of the soles of
his feet, Sean climbed more cautiously.

 
          
“
Knossos
!” he cried. “Will you bloody well
wait!
”

 
          
The
face looked down again. This time
Knossos
called out—teasingly, it seemed. “If you
reach the top in time, I’ll take you with me!”

 
          
The
blue-veined sides became rose-red. Sean’s feet ached. How many steps? No,
not steps; that was
earlier, lower down. ‘A hundred thousand
spermatozoa, each one of them alive,’ he thought grimly. Mixed in God’s test
tubes, and scattered over the land. He became obsessed with the vision of an
uprush of milky, salty, musky liquid from the depths of this tower—and from the
tubes beneath it—which would transform it into a slippery fountain, a gusher
spraying him, too, out across the land till he hit the ground as dead as any
sky diver. It
is
a phallus, he
thought, and I’m climbing it. Like the sperm I once was, recapitulating my
origin! Here’s the tumescent shaft. Up there is the rosy glans and the hole in
it is the meatus. This is one better than a birth trauma! It’s a conception
trauma . . .

 
          
He
felt far from orgasm, though. His legs and loins cried out in no song of joy,
only with aches and pains, and his thigh throbbed painfully where the heron had
slashed him.

 
          
The
magpie—the familiar of
Knossos
—flapped free through the meatus into the sky. Momentarily the fans of
descending light were blotted out as the clothed man pulled
himself
up through the meatus of this vast mineral penis, and stood astride it on its
swollen bulb.

 
          
What
did
Knossos
mean? Take me with him? There was nowhere
else for him to go—unless he meant to do the dive of death.

 
          
Increasingly
the rosy glans of the tower was becoming translucent. As he climbed Sean could
see: pink clouds, pink sky. From outside it might look like solid stone—one
couldn’t see into one’s own body, after all!—but an internal organ could ‘see’
out of the body, albeit vaguely.