Inner Legacy (2 page)

Morecambe Bay

A couple of days later and having covered my desk with paper and started to work on the notebooks I realised that I was on  a hiding to nothing. My mind would wander, the phone went, I was distracted. I needed to do something. To get away. Isolation of a sort so that I could think and work in peace.

What do you think I asked the cat as she lapped the milk from my cereal bowl. Want a holiday Gina?

A loud purr was as good as a yes.

I went to the phone and called the Walkers at Bay View.

They confirmed they had a lodge free at the moment - I asked for a month with the option to extend. After some pauses there came the confirmation that would be possible and an apology for delay.

Charles Walker laughed and said you'll be bringing the cat as usual?

I agreed. I've moved a few people about who aren't regulars he said and put you in No 47, the one with the best view, is that ok?

I nodded then laughed at myself and said of course that would be lovely.

"The only thing I would ask Adam is if you could let me know a fortnight in advance if you want to stay on."

"Look" I said "I'm not really certain how long I want to stay is it free for two months?"

"It can be for you."

"I'll pay for the two months then and then I don't have to worry about things."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes"

"Fine" he said,”I'll see you on Saturday."

We said the usual goodbyes.

A nice quiet time ought to give me more than enough time to sort out the notebooks. I called them notebooks but wondered if they were in fact diaries. From the little I had managed to decode I thought they weren't exactly what I would call a diary. I wasn't to be honest sure what I was reading. I needed time to think and time to work as I chose and then reflect on the meaning of what I was reading. So far it made no real sense. It was reading like fiction and yet I didn't think it was for one minute.

Gina had been travelling in the car in her basket since she was a kitten. She only protested if the radio was too loud or the  window was opened too far,  a strange cat, if neither of those things happened she curled up and went to sleep in the passenger seat. Over the past ten years I had taken lodges at Bay View on a regular basis. I loved Morecambe Bay and its vast expansive view. The daily changes in tide amazed me, I loved the way the sea vanished from sight and then flooded back in. When it was out it looked almost like a desert but I knew the sands were treacherous and I never ventured beyond the salt marshes. The sunsets over the Lake District could be spectacular but then so could the wind and the rain. I wasn't going on holiday I was going to work and the weather would be of little relevance, in fact the worse it was the more likely I was to stay inside and get on with it. It was a tedious job as I had found but I thought I was beginning to speed up. Until however I had something properly decoded and could then read it as a whole it was going to be a labour with little love attached.

I phoned Richard and cancelled our Friday get together and told him I was off for a couple of months maybe less and that I would phone him when I got back.

"Lucky sod" he said "I wish I could take off like that. Don't forget a stick of rock." he joked.

One of these days I actually would buy one and bring it home with me.

I liked and enjoyed the drive to Bay View as it was an easy journey on the motorway and took just over three hours, long enough for both myself and the cat. The Lodge was well placed and about fifteen minutes away from the old seaside resort of Morecambe. I had become quite fond of this faded old queen of resorts. Lots of work had been done to improve the seafront and it catered well for day trippers but they were a fickle lot only appearing when the weather was good. It was an uphill struggle for many of the retailers and few if any took their fortnight holiday as they would have done in the days of glory.

I wouldn't lock myself in however as I would need a break from the hard slog and I promised myself a time out each day for a coffee. If it was open I would drop by the caught-in-a- time-warp Bruccianis where nothing had changed since the 1930s and I sometimes wondered if the menu had remained the same for all these years, notwithstanding that it had a lovely ambience and served the best espresso or black coffee I had ever tasted.

When I had first started to frequent the area on a regular basis there had been one or two really old fashioned tea/coffee rooms like Harts where the waitresses still wore black dresses with white frilly aprons and I could get a really good custard slice along with an okay coffee. These places were now gone and some had gone over to the coffee chain giants, I avoided them like the plague, the coffee being of a poor quality in any that I tried. I only drink black coffee and I guess the actual awful taste of the coffee was usually disguised under all the foamed milk and syrups. I was and am a coffee snob. I'd rather have an old fashioned instant coffee in a seaside cafe than be assaulted by these industrial machines that produce an undrinkable, rip your stomach lining off, acid apology for coffee.

I packed on Friday afternoon and gathered together all that I needed. I stood by my old typewriter and thought about taking it with me but decided not to clutter myself with belongings. I phoned to cancel the papers and apologised for the short notice.

By dinnertime I was all ready for the morning.

I spent the evening listening to music and reading and trying my best to relax my muscles as I knew they would soon be sore as I crouched over the notebooks and worked on endless scraps of paper. It really was like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw.

As the evening drew on to night I put the book down and let my thoughts wander. I could hear my Grandfather's voice in my head. He was left handed and often got annoyed sometimes to the point of anger at the lack of consideration by those who were right handed, especially the way the whole world was geared to the right hander. Books, he said repeatedly, are written backwards! You should be able to read the books from back cover to the front and the writing should go from right to left and not left to right. He always read magazines backwards.

It was this repeated complaint of his that was the clue he had given me to the notebooks. I had to start at the back and work from right to left to draw the text from the numbers. It was a good plan. I still didn't understand why it was so encrypted there was no clue in the opening few sentences. I hoped this would be revealed in time.

I fell asleep thinking of him and awoke at 6am still slouched on the couch.

Idiot I thought as I wiped drool from my mouth.

I headed for the shower.

I decode

The work on decoding the books took longer than my stay in Morecambe. It occupied me for the best part of the year. It was as you will gather time consuming and frustrating work. What was worse was that what I was decoding made little sense to me, it wasn't a memoir, it wasn't  a secret reservoir of a dying man's thoughts. At first I thought it was some kind of novel but that idea didn't fit either. To be honest I had no idea what I was reading.

Reading it word by word of course didn't help. It was better viewed at a distance and read as a whole.

It has lain in my desk drawer now for close to two years and every time I look at my translation of these words I can make no real sense of them, that is why I have decided to sit down and commit all this to paper and leave it all to be read and understood by others.

Are these the words of a madman? Had the cancer spread to his brain? If not the work of a crazy person is it a novella? If so why in code? Why directed at me? Why left for me? Why the secrecy? I certainly at the moment of writing have no idea. Either it is a puzzle never to be solved or else I need to take a different tack altogether on what I have found. Perhaps I am missing a key that would unlock the mystery of these notebooks, after all he left me a key to unlock the books in the first place would it not be reasonable to assume that since the document was not clear that there would be key elsewhere to explain? A commentary of some kind?

Was there meant to be but he had died before he had had time to give me the final clue?

With these thoughts I left my writing and took time away not only to think but also to go through all the old papers and to examine again the suitcase. I found nothing. I was frustrated yet again. So frustrated I needed to take my mind off everything and I put on my coat and went for a walk in the park. I took in little of what was around me as I was lost inside myself. I heard the burn rippling and wind in the trees and the texture of the ground beneath my feet. I was aware on one level of my surroundings but my real self was locked inside rolling it all over in my head. What on earth did it all mean?

I wished or at least part of me wished I had never found the notebooks, never found the key to unlock them. Part of me decided to throw it all out and get on with my life and then I was reminded of my Grandfather the close bond we had formed and the fact that in his dying days he had taken such time and given over such precious time in writing this for me.

I kicked absent mindedly at a stone and watched it arc into the burn.

I stopped and watched it fall in to the water, watched its ripples disturbed and confused by the flow and I thought of his memoir again and his writings on time and space and his limited understanding of string theory. Was there a clue to be found there? Why had he been so interested in these matters? They were outside what I would have called his field. I had tried to read up on string theory and other ideas that he had but my brain wasn't up to the arguments I had read about, the words made sense but not the whole. Much I mused like these notebooks, the words made sense not the whole? If I could make sense of the whole I would understand what lay behind the words.

I had thought perhaps it was an allegorical novella, but that not only seemed unlikely but didn't address the issues of secrecy surrounding the writing.

My thoughts were narrowing down now to two possible answers to the notebooks.

The first they were the ramblings of an ill man and were encoded simply because he was no longer quite sane and his brain was deeply affected by cancer.

The second and I had to not only take a deep external breath but also one inside and make a leap, into the dark, an uncomfortable leap, they could be true. Having acknowledged that as a possibility for the first time I felt a shiver go through my body and tingling, like a moment of revelation. Was that the key to understand them? Read them as the truth?

I hung over the bridge crossing the burn and stared down into the water, my eyes out of focus and my thoughts turned inwards.

I examined the first proposition which was easier but more painful to believe than the second. I thought back to the last six months of my Grandfather's life. I went over every memory. Was there any sign of unusual behaviour? No matter how I looked at it I could recall none apart from the  writings of these notebooks, but perhaps that was sufficient indication?

The second proposition seems preposterous to consider the notebooks as being true in any real sense of the word. Truth of course is a difficult concept to pin down. Even Pilate asked What is Truth? A reasonable enough question I had always thought. Perhaps truth was in fact the wrong word. Perhaps I was looking for reality rather that truth. But then what is reality, and can it ever be more than subjective in any meaningful sense?

I pondered.

I am no great thinker of course and as you read this you can fire holes through it all I am sure  my only concern is to share with you what was going on in my mind before I ask you to judge for yourself the contents of the notebooks.

If they were a form of  truth or reality, subjective or not would they make better sense or would that raise more questions than answers again.

I wandered home deep in thought and little wiser for my musings. While I made coffee I had time to reflect again. Should I start typing up my translation of the notebooks or not? Would it be better to read them all again and this time accept them as being true at a face value level, true that is or a description of some kind of reality beyond my knowledge.

I took my coffee through to the study and sat in my armchair and pondered long into the evening.

The Diary Begins : Blackness

I don't know if you have ever experienced the absence of light but it is a strange thing darkness that is total, darkness that will not go away, darkness your eyes cannot adjust to no matter how long you wait. It is like a presence, a towering all powerful  suffocating presence. As you panic it pushes into you seeming to close your lungs.

Darkness can be total.

And yet even when it is so and the panic subsides and your breathing returns to normal there are other senses that have not departed. It is possible to sense space to know whether you  are confined or in a larger area. There is the smell and taste of air and the odours that reach your nose. There are your ears and above all else perhaps you sense of touch and self being.

In some ways the absence of light and the totality of darkness places you almost in another world. I cannot say if it is like blindness or not.

I open my eyes to this darkness. I don't panic as I thought I might. I try to take stock of what I can make out.

Largeness, dampness, foetid silence, total silence apart from breathing and noises I make. A shattering sense of unworthiness but that's on the inside, or is it? I mention it because I am uncertain, confused. I feel height and breadth. This is large. Is it a cave? That would explain the smells and the dampness, or is it simply underground?

Awareness dawns slowly that although I am here yet I am not here and have no motivation. I am just a being - a being in stillness. Something must be expected and yet I can sense nothing inside our out that would suggest a movement forward physically or mentally.

My fingers touch the familiar bedclothes, my head rests on the pillow. I am aware of that. I am in bed but not anywhere else I know. I close my eyes and open them again. Still darkness. And yet the darkness is more than a lack of light it is a tangible presence in my mind. It is a self defined state not defined by an absence of light. It is itself. Even although I feel myself to be enclosed within a large place there is no sense that light exists or has ever existed or ever will exist again. Everything I thought has been vacuumed out of my mind and reality no longer exists as I understood it.

My ears ring with silence, faint hums and bells are all I imagine. I speak out loud to test where I am, to echo locate and yet I fail to hear my voice. Did I speak? My breathing is audible. I can make noises with the bedclothes. I can hear but I appear to be dumb.  Not only is my sense of reality removed but also my voice.

Should I get up and explore?

Ah - a purpose in the the little void of stillness. I go to sit up and realise that although I am in bed and therefore assume I am on a floor that may be an unsafe assumption. I lie back and let my arm fall out of the the bed and feel for the ground. I get no sense of solidity. Exploring further I realise that there is no headboard on my bed and yet this feels like my bed. I reach further but find nothing. I get up and crawl to the bottom of the bed and hang off as far as I dare. I feel nothing below. I realise there is no base to the bed, I am just on a mattress. I crawl back up to the pillow end and think and plan to reach out over the pillows to see what I can find.

When I try to hang over the top of the bed I hit my head on what I assume is a wall. Touching it feels not so much as a wall but feels damp and uneven. The word cave pops in to my mind. I explore as far as I can reach on either side of the bed head. Little shapes and crevices and textures convince me this is the wall of a cave. I stand up a lean forward and think I can detect a curvature to the wall.

Now I have to decide because there is movement in this place and in my mind the stillness has gone I have to move but I know not where or why. I am surprised by lack of concern and emotional response. I have a very clear picture of where I am in my mind's eye that has no reason to exist and I wonder what it is in our brains that produces such a reaction to see where we cannot see to imagine what we think is around us.

I sit cross legged on the bed and ponder the nature of reality. Great deep thoughts fall through my body as though I was sitting under a waterfall. What is reality? How do we experience it? What is real? Is this real? Is this truth? The thoughts that flood through me are far far greater than these and I cannot retell them now because then they made sense but now they are memories that are round a corner just out of reach like a name being searched for in vain.

Everything I assumed has faded to black.

Everything has gone, faded to black to no colour because darkness has no colour it is a state of being in its own right rather than a lack of sight. I have no sight. I describe it as blackness only so you will understand just a little of what I write to you. This is not darkness. It is not a colour. I have no sight. This place could be filled with light for all I know. I am alone. I sense this to be utterly true beyond doubt.

If this sense has gone will others also go? Somehow I think not.

Or do I have sight? Why the images in my brain? I know I have sight, I can in my mind's eye see a rose.

There is confusion.

A soft whispering thought is wrapping itself around my mind. A snake creeping in and slithering over every crevice of my brain.

Get up.

Get up.

There is no floor but I must get up.

Up. I mean get down from this bed.

Standing still I am lost inside and must find more.

Up and into the darkness.

I sit on the edge of the bed.

Pausing.

I stand up and the floor is there. Smooth and even to my bare feet. Slightly cold but comfortable. I am not cold. I am not warm

I simply am and I step forward.

I reach for the edge of the bed and walk up it to the wall. Once there I stand with my back to it. I know I am in striped pyjamas.

I do have eyes I feel them looking. I am not blind. But this is not darkness as I have experienced it before?

Before? I am stopped again by that thought but can find no dislocation between the remembered and the now.

It seems like an eternal present. Although I am now out of bed it does not feel as though that happened before now but is happening now. Like the great flood of thoughts I cannot fully explain. In fact I can't even begin to explain.

The only way I can make sense of this is to remove time. I seem to exist against the wall in only three dimensions and not four. Is such a thing possible. Yet knowing I need to move forward suggests a sense of time or is that only a memory a way to put down in words the need to explore my surroundings, to gain knowledge?

Such thoughts are beyond me, but this is my reality, if I ever have a chance I would like to spend hours pondering this subject, and as I think these thoughts I realise that without a sense of time I may have stood here pondering these thoughts for how long - for how long is long when the measuring stick no longer exists.

I am out with time. My brain fails to comprehend.

*****

I decide to move.

I stay close to the wall.

I am standing and moving.

I walk into a pipe of some kind. It is small I can almost get my two hands round it. I follow it upwards and it bends at right angles going into a small hole larger than its own diameter about six feet I reckon on my right hand side. I follow it downwards and it slips apparently seamlessly into the the smooth floor.

While I am on my knees feeling its exit or entrance into this place I feel around and realise I appear to be on some kind of flat ledge about three feet wide. At the end it falls away not steeply but gently downwards as though I am on the lip of something. The idea of a soup plate arises in my mind and I am unsure why.

This revelation somewhat shakes my confidence and I realise that I cannot assume such  an arrangement will be constant, the ledge I am on could give way or stop abruptly narrow, the sloping away might be only here and the pipe while apparently harmless might indicate that other less benign objects lie ahead.

I decide to process on all fours. I have gone a few metres when I decide to head back to the pipe to try and learn what I can from it. I clasp it and explore it carefully. It is made of metal or so it seems and has normal connecting joints similar to outside plumbing on houses. I tap it with my knuckles and it sounds hollow. I hold it and it is neither warm or cold but at the same ambient temperature, there is no feeling of anything flowing. I would have hazarded a guess that it was some kind of water pipe. I am none the wiser in reality and process on my journey. I come to another pipe and then another and I begin to wonder if they are at regular intervals. After several more encounters I begin to wonder if my sense of vastness is mistaken and I am going in a circle.

I wish I had something to mark one of the pipes with as this would allow me to know for certain. I  decide to take off my pyjama top and tie it loosely round the next pipe.

How long I travelled and how much time would have passed I have no idea but I kept coming across pipes and as I kept going I was not coming to my pyjama top. I began to count the pipes as I crawled along but lost the place somewhere in the mid seventies. There seemed to be at least thirty metres at a rough guess between each pipe. My sense that this was vast began to seem like a reality.

I do not find my pyjama top.

I find my bed.

I am in a circular cave, vault, construction, it makes no sense. I found only pipes. None of this makes sense and there appears to be no way out at all for me.

I sit on my bed and reflect. I think I sleep but I am uncertain as I sense no time no passage of anything. It as  though I have never left my bed.

At last though the urge to move become strong and I decide if this is a circle of some sort or if not circular at least an enclosed space that brings me back to myself no matter where I go. I decide to travel again but this time below the lip and on the sloping side. I need however a reference point so that I know when I get back to my bed. I grab a pillow and slipping off the end of the bed place the pillow on the edge of the lip. I am reluctant to place it on the slope in case it should slide away and I would lose all sense of knowing where I am.

And so I begin. I move with one hand, right on the edge of the lip and move my way around the structure.  I sense as I move that the slope is downwards and gets steeper and I wonder what lies at the bottom, if there is a bottom to this structure. Again I note the floor seems smooth, man made while the walls appear cave-like. I progress. Every so often I come across a little hole on the edge of the lip as my hands sweep everywhere trying to make sense of my surroundings. The holes are no bigger than my index finger. They are irregularly placed as far as I can gather and bear no relation to the placing of the pipes. At one point they appear every hands breadth for many metres and then slip away again into irregularity.

I arrive back at my bed having picked up my pyjama top on the way. Although there is no sense of warmth or cold I feel better for being clothed after a fashion as nakedness makes me feel far more vulnerable than is reasonable. Somehow I can hide from this reality in my pyjamas as though they not only gave me smidgeon of dignity but also provided a sense of security, as though they were body armour.

I sit on the bed again and try to speak but still nothing comes forth from my mouth although I can feel my mouth moving and my vocal chords vibrating. I try shouting and this leads to a violent coughing fit and yet I hear nothing coming from my body at all. I snap my finger. I hear that without problem.

I am confused.

I'm not sure what to do next. I am beginning to feel a sense of fear arising as I think of trying the trip again a level lower. I can't work out though how I will know whether or not I am back at my bed. I consider simply going down the slope to find whatever lies at the bottom although I worry that I may not be able to find my way back up. I am beginning to feel the panic of being lost.

Feelings I note are returning and I begin to feel thirst and hunger.

With a sudden lurch I feel time start again and I am no longer outside it and with it comes my voice and emotions and bodily functions. I am back - somewhere.

I sense I am being watched.

I call out, how lovely it feels to hear my voice, it sweeps away the sense of isolated loneliness that has begun to envelop me.

Is someone there? I get no reply and here of course my ability to relate this fails with language. How can I describe being watched when there is no light? Where do I even begin to tell you what it was like? There was a presence, for want of a better word, in this chamber.

I am sitting on the edge of the lip, my legs sloping downwards. It is most uncomfortable. It is as though I am being examined from the outside in. I have a sense of nakedness. No that is an inadequate word, yes physically naked but more than that mentally naked, everything exposed and examined, every word and thought and emotion. That old cliché about life flashing before your eyes is inadequate but will serve a certain purpose in trying explain what I experience in the hours that follow, at last it feels like hours and my internal clock is usually pretty accurate. Nothing flashed before my eyes but everything was laid bare and was examined by something other than myself. It was painful, not physically but emotionally and stressful and that in turn brought on physical symptoms. I knew eventually something far worse than nakedness or fear, for the first time in my life I felt absolute terror.