Ancient Echoes (16 page)

Jack couldn’t sleep that night following his encounter with Jesus and Joan; the images were so real, the experience had been disorientating and wonderful. The more he thought of the cliffs, the temples, the distorted façade of the cathedral, the more he was drawn back there.

He prowled the house and the garden aware always of the glow of light from Exburgh, sometimes aware of a shadow on the town, the shadow of a city.

He wanted to go to the gate, to the cave, to call Greyface and challenge him to be patient. But a part of him felt that Greyface already knew he was going inwards, and that the encounter would be no more than humiliating, unless it were to be frightening. He was constantly aware of the shade of Natalie, lost in the labyrinth of the suicide gate, hidden below and within the town.

At four in the morning he heard her laugh out loud. She was still in her room and he ran up the stairs from the kitchen, opening the door and watching as the girl jumped up and down on the bed.

‘What’s going on?’

The girl laughed hysterically and flopped over onto her back, bouncing on the covers and then lying still. She was hugely amused, squirming away from her father as he went over and tried to put his arm around her. ‘Have you heard any funny stories this evening?’

She nodded. She was backed against the wall, her hands in front of her mouth, restraining infantile and incomprehensible amusement. From the bed, Jack asked, ‘Is he here? Is he nearby?’

A shake of her head, but then the words, ‘He’ll be watching you.’

‘Will he? That’s nice. How will he be doing that?’

‘Don’t know. He’ll be watching you. And me. Flesh and shadow. He said: flesh and shadow. We’re all in the same dance.’

Giggling.

‘Dancing, dancing,’ she said, and ran to the window, banging on the glass, banging at the night, at the light of the stars, banging on the window and shouting, ‘Dancing! Dancing! All in the same dance!’

Jack eased her away just as Angela appeared in the doorway (‘What’s going on?’) and came over to sit on the girl’s bed, stroking the young brow, the soft hair, murmuring, soothing, calming.

Natalie started to drift into sleep, but as her eyes seemed almost closed for the night they suddenly opened, engaging Jack.

‘All in the same dance, Daddy,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t forget. All in the same dance. Fetch her back to him. That’s what he always says: fetch her back to him.’

Jack kissed her on the brow and she curled up, comfortable.

‘Tell him …’ he whispered. ‘Tell him, if you see him again … Tell him I’m doing my best. I’m doing my best. Tell him to leave us alone.’

Natalie giggled again, then yawned and stuck a thumb firmly in her mouth, curling up below the duvet, feigning sleep as she sought happy dreams.

On the wall above Brightmore’s wide-screen AppleMac were lines from T. S. Eliot:

‘And that’s where you’re going, Jack. Into the Shadow. Although we call it by different names. The Hinterland … the French prefer
lnterland.
In the US they still call it the pre-conscious, but that’s too broad for the Kingdom.’ He glanced round. ‘And thine
is
the Kingdom! It’s a place of your own making, exclusive to you in many ways, but inclusive of much that we all have in common. Look …’

On the screen he had drawn concentric arcs to create three bands, like a rainbow, labelling the outer zone
Conscious,
the inner
Unconscious
and the central
Pre-conscious.

‘This is only a schematic, you understand. The layers don’t really exist …’

‘Thank you.’
Infuriating man! ‘
I’d got the idea …’

‘Nothing gets between conscious and unconscious without passing the pre-conscious. Easy? The pre-conscious is riddled with wormholes, but they’re very selective. So when you dream: images and fears, moods, emotions – and the energetic psychic manifestation Carl Gustav Jung labelled
archetypes,
all of them flow
up
to the pre-conscious, and partly penetrate to awareness,
the more so in lucid dreaming. The important thing to understand – and this is only the beginning of our understanding – is that
as
they transit the pre-conscious, so they create Form! Shape! And Story!’

‘F.S.S., in fact.’

‘Precisely. Form. Shape. Story. But all of a transient nature, quickly decaying. What gets through gets used. What stays in the pre-conscious is fragile and
normally
fades in nanoseconds.’

‘So would this be where writers get their inspiration from? The Deep Well?’

‘The innovative ones, certainly. Yes. Of course!’ Brightmore was at the keyboard, tapping out a detailed note to himself, intrigued by the thought. Writers,
any
artist prepared to let deep images surface over time rather than forcing ideas to a deadline; writers prepared to touch a little deeper, rather than just scouring conscious memory … Yes. This
is
the well of inspiration.’

He moved the pointer on the screen to the outer band denoting ‘conscious’. The reverse is true of memory passing – for the sake of understanding I’ll say
down – into
the unconscious. As
this
passes the pre-conscious – you’ve already accessed the Hinterland, one skin of the beast, if you like – so it creates Form, Shape, Image. Creature, Story … that persists! And persists for the rest of your life.’

‘So it’s permanent,’ Jack said irritably.

‘Exactly!’

‘Undying.’

‘Undying,’ Brightmore agreed.

‘A land full of unfit heroes.’

‘A kingdom all thine own. How’s your quantum theory?’

‘Always bad,’ Jack said. ‘Sufficient to get a degree, but I’m long out of touch.’

Brightmore wrote the words ‘Fields of potential’ along the narrow band that depicted the Hinterland.

‘Fields of potential?’

‘Fields of potential. Are you familiar with this thinking?’

‘Remind me.’

‘Like the Universe we inhabit – before
it
took on shape, at the Big Bang – the pre-conscious is unstructured, unformed but packed with
potential
; it only hardens into the illusion of Memory! Event! and Story! when it’s observed by the conscious mind. That observation sets up a persistent structure, a fixed image, a fixed world, if you like.

‘Now: where it meets these
fixed
structures on the way up, the normally fast-decaying seepage from the Unconscious can then inhabit the Hinterland on a more permanent basis.’

‘Worlds in collision …’

‘Worlds in collision. Exactly. And that, Jack, is precisely what you are going to encounter when you journey to the Shadow: a world substantially drawn from your conscious experience, which we call Received Image Representation, mixed and made muddlesome by ancient echoes from the Unconscious, the limbic system in particular. The Saurian mind, as some of our American colleagues delight in calling it.’

‘You mean I’ll see
dinosaurs
?’

After an uneasy moment, Brightmore smiled. ‘It’s a sort of joke, you see.’

‘Really? I didn’t get it.’ Jack cast a despairing glance at Angela, who shrugged, amused.
Stop being sarcastic.

‘The reptilian brain …’ Brightmore went on. ‘It’s an old expression for the primitive brain, the primal urges.’

‘Thank you, Steven.’

‘But will you see dinosaurs?’ Brightmore shrugged. ‘Who knows? Depends on your childhood reading. If you do, they’ll be RIRs. From the conscious filtering
down.
Do you see? From your imaginative experience in films, in books, in museums. What was that boy’s name, Angela?’

Angela frowned, shaking her head. Brightmore added:

‘The one who encountered marine monsters from the Jurassic – in a landscape straight out of the End of the World!’

‘Oh … right … Whitlock, I think. Michael Whitlock?’

‘Michael Whitlock!’

Jack was irritated by the feeling of being excluded from this discussion. ‘And he was … what? What was he?’

‘He was a boy who accessed his own Hinterland – in a chalk pit, wasn’t it? – and could make imaginary objects real. Or so it was claimed. He had other things wrong with him, but his own private Hinterland was rich with Received Image Representation. RIRs. He was a lad of twelve. You’ve lived and seen more, of course, Jack, but as an adult your imagination is probably far less effective, so it’s likely to be a more narrowly-focused landscape than that particular boy’s. You probably won’t even recognize your ‘real’ life when you see it; that’s one of the purposes of this trip. Bring back an account of the Deep beyond the Hinterland! The only other thing to warn you about: we have no way of knowing how dangerous your experience will be.’

‘Dangerous? Dreaming, dangerous?’

Brightmore controlled a moment’s exasperation. ‘You won’t be dreaming. This is not dreaming, Jack. You
must
be clear about that before you go. And besides, a shock strong enough to kill doesn’t only have to happen in the waking world. One of the population groups of the Hinterland, we think, are Early-Trauma-Induced Protecting Entities – multiple personalities, as they are commonly known.
E-tipes,
if you want the acronym! They are permanent because they come from the neo-cortical experience of trauma. Others, such as past lives, visions,
myth-imagoes –
or
mythagos
depending on what source you read – are more diffuse, coming from the primal Unconscious. But don’t forget – if they’ve latched onto a landscape in the Hinterland, then they’ll be
functioning –
and you can interact with them.’

‘And Greenface? Greyface? The bull-runners?’

‘They don’t fit at all with what we understand. The whole of your
shimmering
experience is an externalizing of the Memory, Event and Story activity inside your skull, but we can’t know
from which zone they have surfaced. Always assuming, of course, that they haven’t lodged in you from outside–’

‘Like parasites …’

‘Like parasites. Assuming that isn’t the case, then the only way to locate their origin is by questioning them. You have one of those entities outside and one inside. Since I can’t comprehend on any level how an escapee from your preconscious mind can be living in a ghost city, I’d prefer to concentrate on the science and send you inwards. The supernatural I’ll leave to Angela and Ghostbusters.’

Angela made a derisory sound from across the room. They’re connected, Steve. The potential field
inside
has
everted
and inhabits external space. What’s so hard to conceive in that?’

He said nothing, and Angela added, ‘You’re so uncomfortable with anything that isn’t encased in bone. I’m criticizing you, Steve.’

‘I’m aware of it.’

‘Inside skull: This good! Outside skull: This not good. Am I right?’

Ignoring her, Brightmore swung round from the screen, thoughtfully watching Jack. ‘The
shimmering
on your body … it did actually stink, didn’t it?’

‘It did. Of marshes on one occasion, desert on another, woodlands, forest a lot of the time.’

‘And a glow, a real glow, real light–’

‘And sound,’ Angela reminded him. ‘I could hear distant sound.’

‘But nothing recorded, nothing on the video.’

‘Not the sound,’ she said. ‘The light, yes. The organic chemicals, yes. But the voices … only perceptible by one or two of us.’

‘Only you, actually,’ Jack said with a quick glance at her.

‘Only me, of course,’ she responded with a frown.

Brightmore said: ‘Conclusion: that the presence in the conscious mind of the entities and their baggage of landscape and emotion affects the body’s metabolism. This produces a
reflection of the complex carbon chain chemicals in their environment, includes a more obvious visual aura than those many people can already detect, and all this is biologically possible. But the
sounds
Angela heard – voices, panic, whatever – those were illusory. Either that, or you’re part of the
shimmering
game as well.

‘He
does
treat it like a game. I can’t deny it,’ Angela said as they lay close together in bed, turning the pages of Jack’s notebook. ‘Christ, your handwriting’s awful. I’d never realized how awful. I can hardly read it.’

‘A sign of brilliance, according to my mother.’

‘But not of illumination. What does
that
say, for example?’

‘Swamp, Interland, Savima.’

‘Oh, right. Steve’s been laying that on you, has he? It’s part of Jandrok’s work. You remember Jandrok?’

‘I don’t remember Jandrok. No.’

‘He’s the French psychologist who gave me a hard time when I was writing my paper on archaeo-stories. Ten, eleven years ago? You were away on the moors, feeling horny. We’d only just started to
do it.
You were
missing it.’
She nipped his ear and squeezed him affectionately, stroking him gently. ‘Remember now?’

‘Please!
I’m trying to concentrate.’ He turned pages deliberately. ‘I’m looking for the bit about Dinosaurs. If I’m going to meet T. Rawhead Rex in this Shadowland, I want to be prepared.’

He had meant it light-heartedly, anticipating a smile, but Angela turned sharply away and picked up her own book.

‘I’ve done something wrong?’ he asked carefully, staring at her naked shoulders.

‘A little less of the Rex,’ she said angrily. ‘A little more of the …’

‘A little more of the …?’

‘Shit! Forget it!’

‘A little more of the “shit, forget it”?’

She let her book drop to the floor, exasperated, but stayed turned away from her husband. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. I’m concerned about you, that’s all. I don’t know how dangerous the trip’s going to be. And I don’t like being left alone with Natalie. I don’t like this
Glanum
place. You see it, you seem to take it for granted. But I can feel it too. It’s like being in an icy, stone alleyway, a cold wind blowing, just stone walls and a feeling of desertion. Steve is probably right. I
am
a part of it.’